One Transit Is All You Need: Detecting Exoplanets Through Learned Stellar Behaviour with EXOVEIL

arXiv:2606.02778 · astro-ph.EP, astro-ph.IM, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-06-01 · Read on arXiv

Pratik Priyanshu

astro-ph.EP, astro-ph.IM, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-06-01

Comments: v3: appendix gallery of confirmed-planet recoveries added; Section 6 candidate catalogue reframed as transit-like anomalies for follow-up; TLS comparison table expanded

Code: https://github.com/Pratik25priyanshu20/ExoVeil

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: I present EXOVEIL, a transit detection system that learns what a star's brightness should look like and flags when reality disagrees.

Terminology

Abstract

I present EXOVEIL, a transit detection system that learns what a star's brightness should look like and flags when reality disagrees. Unlike existing systems that require phase-folded input, EXOVEIL operates on raw flux time series and can detect planets that transit only once.A Transformer world model, trained on 16,499 Kepler light curves with transit-masked self-supervised learning, predicts expected stellar flux. A matched-filter detector with variance weighting extracts transit signals from the prediction residuals. A learned classifier (XGBoost) separates planets from false positives, achieving AUC 0.938 on Kepler DR25. Applied to single-transit injection-recovery, EXOVEIL recovers 32% of transits at 1000 ppm depth a task where all classification-based systems score 0% by construction. A blind search of 3,737 Kepler stars yields 179 new transit-like signals not present in the DR25 TCE catalogue, including 46 monotransit candidates. Applied withoutretraining to 47 confirmed TESS planets in the PLATO LOPS2 field, EXOVEIL achieves 100% recovery, demonstrating zero-shot cross-mission transfer. At PLATO's 25-second cadence, detection reaches 100 ppm -- approaching the Earth-analog regime. I provide the first application of conformal prediction to transit detection (95.9% empirical coverage) and release the system as pip install exoveil with pretrained weights and a candidate catalogue.

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