# A Deep Neural Network Based Reverse Radio Spectrogram Search Algorithm

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning-based algorithm using a variational autoencoder and Transformer-inspired embeddings to efficiently identify similar signals in radio spectrogram data, aiding in the detection of signals of interest in radio astronomy.

## Contribution

The authors develop a modular deep neural network approach that leverages a variational autoencoder and positional embeddings to search for lookalike signals in large radio spectrogram datasets, improving vetting efficiency.

## Key findings

- Successfully retrieves signals with similar features from spectrogram data.
- Demonstrates potential to automate and accelerate signal vetting in radio astronomy.
- Applicable to broader searches for similar signals in large datasets.

## Abstract

Modern radio astronomy instruments generate vast amounts of data, and the increasingly challenging radio frequency interference (RFI) environment necessitates ever-more sophisticated RFI rejection algorithms. The "needle in a haystack" nature of searches for transients and technosignatures requires us to develop methods that can determine whether a signal of interest has unique properties, or is a part of some larger set of pernicious RFI. In the past, this vetting has required onerous manual inspection of very large numbers of signals. In this paper we present a fast and modular deep learning algorithm to search for lookalike signals of interest in radio spectrogram data. First, we trained a B-Variational Autoencoder on signals returned by an energy detection algorithm. We then adapted a positional embedding layer from classical Transformer architecture to a embed additional metadata, which we demonstrate using a frequency-based embedding. Next we used the encoder component of the B-Variational Autoencoder to extract features from small (~ 715,Hz, with a resolution of 2.79Hz per frequency bin) windows in the radio spectrogram. We used our algorithm to conduct a search for a given query (encoded signal of interest) on a set of signals (encoded features of searched items) to produce the top candidates with similar features. We successfully demonstrate that the algorithm retrieves signals with similar appearance, given only the original radio spectrogram data. This algorithm can be used to improve the efficiency of vetting signals of interest in technosignature searches, but could also be applied to a wider variety of searches for "lookalike" signals in large astronomical datasets.