In this study, the effects of adding independent noise to observations of a suboptimal detector are studied for M-ary hypothesis-testing problems according to the minimax criterion. It is shown that the optimal additional noise can be represented by a randomization of at most M signal values under certain conditions. In addition, a convex relaxation approach is proposed to obtain an accurate approximation to the noise probability distribution in polynomial time. Furthermore, sufficient conditions are presented to determine when additional noise can or cannot improve the performance of a given detector. Finally, a numerical example is presented. © 2009 IEEE.