Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions
Researchers developed AION-Search, an AI-powered semantic search engine that catalogs over 100 million galaxy images using Vision-Language Models to generate captions and create searchable embeddings without manual labeling. The system achieved state-of-the-art performance in discovering rare astronomical phenomena and identified 36 new extragalactic stellar stream candidates, while offering a generalizable approach for making large unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable.