arXiv:2605.29428v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We present DEtection in phase-folded Light curves with cOntrastive Scoring (DELOS), a deep-learning framework that uses contrastive scoring to perform blind searches for shallow transits in Kepler photometry. DELOS combines GPU-accelerated phase folding, optimized phase binning, and a custom one-dimensional convolutional encoder to assign a transit-likeness score to each folded light curve, thereby producing a score periodogram over trial periods without relying on pre-detected threshold-crossing events. Focusing on intermediate-to-long-period signals with orbital periods of 100-150 days, DELOS was trained on 20 million synthetic light curves generated with realistic transit models and Kepler-like noise properties, achieving a validation accuracy of 99.3% on the synthetic validation set. In controlled injection-recovery experiments, DELOS improves the combined precision-recall performance by 15.5% relative to Box-fitting Least Squares (BLS) and 11.25% relative to Transit Least Squares (TLS) in the low Signal-to-Noise Ratios (low-SNR) regime. It also accelerates the search by factors of approximately 3-5 and 74-80 compared with BLS and TLS, respectively. Applied to a selected Kepler validation sample, DELOS recovered all known shallow intermediate-to-long-period transit signals in the tested period range. These results demonstrate that DELOS provides an efficient and sensitive framework for low-SNR transit searches and represents a practical step toward future searches for longer-period terrestrial planets in Kepler, K2, TESS, PLATO, and Earth 2.0 data. Accordingly, this work is intended as a methodological development and validation study, with the detailed astrophysical validation of newly identified candidates deferred to future work.
Abstract: We present DEtection in phase-folded Light curves with cOntrastive Scoring (DELOS), a deep-learning framework that uses contrastive scoring to perform blind searches for shallow transits in Kepler photometry. DELOS combines GPU-accelerated phase folding, optimized phase binning, and a custom one-dimensional convolutional encoder to assign a transit-likeness score to each folded light curve, thereby producing a score periodogram over trial periods without relying on pre-detected threshold-crossing events. Focusing on intermediate-to-long-period signals with orbital periods of 100-150 days, DELOS was trained on 20 million synthetic light curves generated with realistic transit models and Kepler-like noise properties, achieving a validation accuracy of 99.3% on the synthetic validation set. In controlled injection-recovery experiments, DELOS improves the combined precision-recall performance by 15.5% relative to Box-fitting Least Squares (BLS) and 11.25% relative to Transit Least Squares (TLS) in the low Signal-to-Noise Ratios (low-SNR) regime. It also accelerates the search by factors of approximately 3-5 and 74-80 compared with BLS and TLS, respectively. Applied to a selected Kepler validation sample, DELOS recovered all known shallow intermediate-to-long-period transit signals in the tested period range. These results demonstrate that DELOS provides an efficient and sensitive framework for low-SNR transit searches and represents a practical step toward future searches for longer-period terrestrial planets in Kepler, K2, TESS, PLATO, and Earth 2.0 data. Accordingly, this work is intended as a methodological development and validation study, with the detailed astrophysical validation of newly identified candidates deferred to future work.
This article has been indexed from cs.AI updates on arXiv.org
Read the original article: