Missed Detections and False Alarms in a CNN Technosignature Detector on Breakthrough Listen Data

Abstract

Radio technosignature searches rely on machine learning detectors to shrink the candidate pool before a human looks at it. They are validated on held-out data from the training distribution, which excludes the cases where they are most likely to fail: a technosignature has unknown morphology, and terrestrial interference is unbounded in variety. I trained a standard competition detector once, froze it, and probed it with 15,000 injections across ten morphologies and five amplitudes, placed into real Green Bank backgrounds. Two directions were tested: genuine signals with morphologies other than a straight narrowband line, and interference resembling the training data. Recall did not follow the predicted ordering, and it fell as signals brightened, even for a needle of the kind the detector was trained on (from 0.590 to 0.090). One interference morphology reached a false positive rate of 0.627, comparable to the detector's own baseline recall of 0.5525 on genuine signals. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) showed attention along the injected path in one missed family by a pre-specified test, and visually in a second. A pre-specified, time-averaged ON-OFF filter removed false alarms and genuine detections at the same rate. The detector reads only the ON panels. Since the only evidence distinguishing a genuine candidate from terrestrial interference lies in the discarded OFF panels, it cannot tell if a signal originates from the target star; it can only tell if it resembles the training data. This explains the false alarm directly; the missed signals reflect what the detector learned to recognise, which reading the OFF panels would not by itself change.