Physics

Event structure

Event (particle physics)

Mathematics

Large Hadron Collider

Particle physics

Algorithm

Jet (fluid)

Statistics

Machine learning

Philosophy

Artificial intelligence

Parsing

Computer science

Linguistics

Quantum mechanics

Cluster analysis

Artificial neural network

Analogy

Thermodynamics

Journal of High Energy Physics

A bstract Recent progress in applying machine learning for jet physics has been built upon an analogy between calorimeters and images. In this work, we present a novel class of recursive neural networks built instead upon an analogy between QCD and natural languages. In the analogy, four-momenta are like words and the clustering history of sequential recombination jet algorithms is like the parsing of a sentence. Our approach works directly with the four-momenta of a variable-length set of particles, and the jet-based tree structure varies on an event-by-event basis. Our experiments highlight the flexibility of our method for building task-specific jet embeddings and show that recursive architectures are significantly more accurate and data efficient than previous image-based networks. We extend the analogy from individual jets (sentences) to full events (paragraphs), and show for the first time an event-level classifier operating on all the stable particles produced in an LHC event.

QCD-aware recursive neural networks for jet physics