Investigating the Effects of Point Source Injection Strategies on KMTNet Real/Bogus Classification

Abstract: Recently, machine learning-based real/bogus (RB) classifiers have demonstrated effectiveness in filtering out artifacts and identifying genuine transients in real-time astronomical surveys. However, the rarity of transient events and the extensive human labeling required for a large number of samples pose significant challenges in constructing training datasets for RB classification. Given these challenges, point source injection techniques, which inject simulated point sources into optical images, provide a promising solution. This paper presents the first detailed comparison of different point source injection strategies and their effects on classification performance within a simulation-to-reality framework. To this end, we first construct various training datasets based on Random Injection (RI), Near Galaxy Injection (NGI), and a combined approach by using the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network datasets. Subsequently, we train convolutional neural networks on simulated cutout samples and evaluate them on real, imbalanced datasets from gravitational wave follow-up observations for GW190814 and S230518h. Extensive experimental results show that RI excels at asteroid detection and bogus filtering but underperforms on transients occurring near galaxies (e.g., supernovae). In contrast, NGI is effective for detecting transients near galaxies but tends to misclassify variable stars as transients, resulting in a high false positive rate. The combined approach effectively handles these trade-offs, thereby balancing between detection rate and false positive rate. Our results emphasize the importance of point source injection strategy in developing robust RB classifiers for transient (or multi-messenger) follow-up campaigns.