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

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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References (8)

02, et al. 2022ApJ
032025, arXiv e-prints [ arXiv:2509.17645 ], submitted to MNRAS
04Zero-shot transfer to TESS recovers 47/47 confirmed planets in the PLATO LOPS2 field without retraining, including long-period ( P > 100 d) and shallow ( < 250 ppm ) transits
05Single-transit injection-recovery yields 32% recovery at 1000 ppm depth, a task that classification-based systems cannot attempt by construction
06At PLATO’s 25-second cadence, detection sensitivity reaches 100 ppm , approaching the Earth-analog regime
07A blind search of 3 737 Kepler stars identifies 179 transit-like anomalies not in the DR25 TCE catalogue.Gap-proximity vetting flags 45% as potentially affected by light-curve stitching. Visual inspection of the top-SNR gap-clean events reveals four recurrent false-positive classes (post-flare model overshoot, rotation tracking error, edge-of-data effects, and stitching-boundary residuals); the catalog
08M. J.ApJ

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