Interpretability Study on Deep Learning for Jet Physics at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

Using deep neural networks for identifying physics objects at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has become a powerful alternative approach in recent years. After successful training of deep neural networks, examining the trained networks not only helps us understand the behaviour of neural networks, but also helps improve the performance of deep learning models through proper interpretation. We take jet tagging problem at the LHC as an example, using recursive neural networks as a starting point, aim at a thorough understanding of the behaviour of the physics-oriented DNNs and the information encoded in the embedding space. We make a comparative study on a series of different jet tagging tasks dominated by different underlying physics. Interesting observations on the latent space are obtained.