
RESEARCH PAPER
Spectral Shortcut Learning and Generalization Degradation in 2D-CNN Spectrogram Classifiers Trained on Physics-Agnostic Procedural Synthetic Data
10-seed benchmark on held-out physical validation (N=61): at 20% procedural synthetic contamination, Recall falls from 97.95% to 85.13% while missed leaks surge 7.25-fold; Grad-CAM and spectral sweep confirm 2–3 kHz shortcut learning.


















