A survey detection channel overrides the pixels in an astronomical foundation model, and biases tomographic mean redshifts

Abstract

Foundation models for astronomy are trained on survey pixels together with the catalogue products derived from those pixels. Those catalogues are incomplete at a measurable rate, and a model trained on both inherits that incompleteness as a systematic. We audit AION-1, a 39-modality transformer trained on more than 200 million objects, using causal interventions on its inputs. Holding the image tokens byte-identical and editing only the survey segmentation map changes every quantity the model reports -- flux, size, ellipticity, redshift -- by 110-4400 times a matched placebo. The mechanism is detection gating, presence at the field centre (r = 0.47), not the light the mask encloses (r = 0.30); across 322 real blends the model ignores how the pipeline partitioned the light (R = -0.006). Nor is the preference specific to that channel: contradicted catalogue photometry leaves the model nine times worse than supplying no metadata at all. The Legacy Survey pipeline leaves 3.68% of targets with no segment covering their position. Propagating that rate, with a miss represented by the fields the pipeline actually returns, shifts tomographic mean redshifts by a median 0.71 times the LSST DESC requirement over 40 assignments and exceeds it in 12; observed positional errors take the worst bin to 8.3 times. Drawing the misses by their measured magnitude dependence rather than uniformly does not change it. Spectroscopy removes the effect, withholding the detection channel removes it at no measurable cost, and the effect grows with model scale. Two further limits lie in the tokeniser: its image codec resolves 28 effective states on source patches against 934 for the spectrum codec, and the redshift readout is quantisation-limited. Sparse dictionaries are unreliable causal handles: across 15, recovery spans 26-75% and moves up to 18 points on the seed alone.