Exoplanet science is not physics, it's chemistry or planetary science. By your logic prizes to teams who send probes to the outer solar system planets could also be given prizes.
What's "exoplanet science"? The above are applications of knowledge of physics to astrophysics, as far as I understand it. Certainly they sound more relevant to physics than neural networks.
I would argue that the first measurements of exoplanets' existence is definitely physics. This was a leap in our understanding of the makeup of the universe.
