Contributor info: Prof. Tobias Golling

Debajyoti Sengupta, Sam Klein, John Andrew Raine, Tobias Golling

SciPost Phys. 17, 046 (2024) · published 12 August 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Model independent techniques for constructing background data templates using generative models have shown great promise for use in searches for new physics processes at the LHC. We introduce \FfF, a major improvement to the CURTAINs method by training the conditional normalizing flow between two side-band regions using maximum likelihood estimation instead of an optimal transport loss. The new training objective improves the robustness and fidelity of the transformed data and is much faster and easier to train. We compare the performance against the previous approach and the current state of the art using the LHC Olympics anomaly detection dataset, where we see a significant improvement in sensitivity over the original CURTAINs method. Furthermore, CURTAINsF4F requires substantially less computational resources to cover a large number of signal regions than other fully data driven approaches. When using an efficient configuration, an order of magnitude more models can be trained in the same time required for ten signal regions, without a significant drop in performance.

Matthew Leigh, Debajyoti Sengupta, Guillaume Quétant, John Andrew Raine, Knut Zoch, Tobias Golling

SciPost Phys. 16, 018 (2024) · published 19 January 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

In this paper, we present a new method to efficiently generate jets in High Energy Physics called PC-JeDi. This method utilises score-based diffusion models in conjunction with transformers which are well suited to the task of generating jets as particle clouds due to their permutation equivariance. PC-JeDi achieves competitive performance with current state-of-the-art methods across several metrics that evaluate the quality of the generated jets. Although slower than other models, due to the large number of forward passes required by diffusion models, it is still substantially faster than traditional detailed simulation. Furthermore, PC-JeDi uses conditional generation to produce jets with a desired mass and transverse momentum for two different particles, top quarks and gluons.

Matthew Leigh, John Andrew Raine, Knut Zoch, Tobias Golling

SciPost Phys. 14, 159 (2023) · published 16 June 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We present $\nu$-Flows, a novel method for restricting the likelihood space of neutrino kinematics in high-energy collider experiments using conditional normalising flows and deep invertible neural networks. This method allows the recovery of the full neutrino momentum which is usually left as a free parameter and permits one to sample neutrino values under a learned conditional likelihood given event observations. We demonstrate the success of $\nu$-Flows in a case study by applying it to simulated semileptonic $t\bar{t}$ events and show that it can lead to more accurate momentum reconstruction, particularly of the longitudinal coordinate. We also show that this has direct benefits in a downstream task of jet association, leading to an improvement of up to a factor of 1.41 compared to conventional methods.