Abstract Characterizing protostellar outflows is fundamental to understanding star formation feedback, yet traditional methods are often hindered by projection effects and complex morphologies. We present a multimodal deep learning framework that jointly leverages spatial and spectral information from CO observations to infer protostellar mass, inclination, and position angle (PA). Our model, trained on synthetic Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations generated from 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations, utilizes a cross-attention fusion mechanism to integrate morphological and kinematic features with probabilistic uncertainty estimation. Our results demonstrate that Vision Transformer architectures significantly outperform convolutional networks, showing remarkable robustness to reduced spatial resolution. Interpretability analysis reveals a physically consistent hierarchy: spatial features dominate across all parameters, whereas spectral profiles provide secondary constraints for mass and inclination. Applied to observational ALMA data, the framework delivers stable mass and PA estimates with exceptionally tightly constrained inclination angles. This study establishes multimodal deep learning as a powerful, interpretable tool for overcoming projection biases in high-mass star formation studies.
Xu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.