Neural physical engines for inferring the halo mass distribution
  function
  An ambitious goal in cosmology is to forward-model the observed distribution
of galaxies in the nearby Universe today from the initial conditions of
large-scale structures. For practical reasons, the spatial resolution at which
this can be done is necessarily limited. Consequently, one needs a mapping
between the density of dark matter averaged over ~Mpc scales, and the
distribution of dark matter halos (used as a proxy for galaxies) in the same
region. Here we demonstrate a method for determining the halo mass distribution
function by learning the tracer bias between density fields and halo catalogues
using a neural bias model. The method is based on the Bayesian analysis of
simple, physically motivated, neural network-like architectures, which we
denote as neural physical engines, and neural density estimation. As a result,
we are able to sample the initial phases of the dark matter density field
whilst inferring the parameters describing the halo mass distribution function,
providing a fully Bayesian interpretation of both the initial dark matter
density distribution and the neural bias model. We successfully run an upgraded
BORG inference using our new likelihood and neural bias model with halo
catalogues derived from full N-body simulations. We notice orders of magnitude
improvement in modelling compared to classical biasing techniques.
