Profile Likelihoods on ML-Steroids

Abstract

Profile likelihoods, for instance, describing global SMEFT analyses at the LHC are numerically expensive to construct and evaluate. Especially profiled likelihoods are notoriously unstable and noisy. We show how modern numerical tools, similar to neural importance sampling, lead to a huge numerical improvement and allow us to evaluate the complete SFitter SMEFT likelihood in five hours on a single GPU.