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The article says they use the neural net to find lenses which match the model the astronomers develop:

To train the neural networks in what to look for, the researchers showed them about half a million simulated images of gravitational lenses for about a day.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "real models" in any case.

Things like NN based generative models combined with model selection certainly can build models which discover real-world behavior. There's a long history of this in the disease epidemiology field. In these cases it isn't usually neural network based, but that is mostly about the most appropriate learning algorithm for the data available.