Catching Disguised Transients with ASTRANet: Anomaly-Aware Spectroscopic Classification and Conformal Calibration

Time-domain surveys discover thousands of transients per year, but the spectroscopic identification of rare and physically peculiar objects remains rate-limited by closed-set classifiers that confidently assign every input to a known class – including spectra that genuinely belong to no known class. We present the $\mathtt{\text{ASTRANet}}$ framework, a confidence-aware infrastructure for spectroscopic transient classification built around three coupled modules: a hierarchical spectral classifier that operates directly on observer-frame spectra without requiring host-galaxy redshift or spectral phase as inputs; an anomaly detection layer ($\mathtt{\text{ASTRANet-Sentinel}}$) that non-linearly combines $16$ embedding-space anomaly scores spanning four physically motivated families; and a conformal uncertainty quantification layer ($\mathtt{\text{ASTRANet-CP}}$). We validate the framework on a held-out evaluation set of $289$ rare and out-of-taxonomy transients spanning $11$ classes deliberately excluded from training, chosen to span the full physical diversity of the rare-anomaly population: AGN-related outliers, GRB-related events, gap transients, novae, and peculiar supernovae. Through five astrophysically distinct failure modes of closed-set classifiers, we show that classifier-internal uncertainty and embedding-based anomaly detection are structurally complementary axes of confidence rather than alternative implementations of the same estimator. We further introduce AD-stratified Mondrian conformal prediction (AD-MCP) within $\mathtt{\text{ASTRANet-CP}}$, achieving uniform conditional coverage across anomaly-score strata where vanilla Mondrian under-covers in the operational regime. This establishes the methodological infrastructure for confidence-aware spectroscopic discovery in the Vera C.\ Rubin Observatory era.