DELOS: Detecting Shallow Transits in Kepler Photometry Using a Contrastive-Learning Framework

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Qingtian, Ge, Jian, Yan, XingChen, Willis, Kevin, Yao, Xinyu, Hu, QuanQuan, Zhu, Jiapeng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Liu, Qingtian
Ge, Jian
Yan, XingChen
Willis, Kevin
Yao, Xinyu
Hu, QuanQuan
Zhu, Jiapeng
author_facet Liu, Qingtian
Ge, Jian
Yan, XingChen
Willis, Kevin
Yao, Xinyu
Hu, QuanQuan
Zhu, Jiapeng
contents We present DEtection in phase-folded Light curves with cOntrastive Scoring (DELOS), a contrastive-learning-based framework designed to search 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 percent on the synthetic validation set. In controlled injection-recovery experiments, DELOS improves the combined precision-recall performance by 15.5 percent relative to Box-fitting Least Squares (BLS) and 11.25 percent 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_29428
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DELOS: Detecting Shallow Transits in Kepler Photometry Using a Contrastive-Learning Framework
Liu, Qingtian
Ge, Jian
Yan, XingChen
Willis, Kevin
Yao, Xinyu
Hu, QuanQuan
Zhu, Jiapeng
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Artificial Intelligence
We present DEtection in phase-folded Light curves with cOntrastive Scoring (DELOS), a contrastive-learning-based framework designed to search 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 percent on the synthetic validation set. In controlled injection-recovery experiments, DELOS improves the combined precision-recall performance by 15.5 percent relative to Box-fitting Least Squares (BLS) and 11.25 percent 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.
title DELOS: Detecting Shallow Transits in Kepler Photometry Using a Contrastive-Learning Framework
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29428