The paper investigates anomaly detection in high-energy physics by learning low-dimensional representations of collision events. Using supervised and self-supervised neural embeddings on a large simulated dataset, the authors find that supervised objectives generally outperform self-supervised ones and improve signal efficiency compared to traditional kinematic-feature autoencoders. They also propose a local diagnostic pipeline that models the Standard Model latent space with a Gaussian Mixture Model, profiles components via high-level observables, and ranks these observables by their local discriminating power, thereby linking anomaly scores to specific kinematic features.
arXiv:2608. 13652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generic event-level anomaly detection for collider physics has two recurring problems: anomaly scores are hard to interpret, and they correlate strongly with energy scale and object multiplicity.
arXiv:2609.06686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an unsupervised search for anomalous dijet events in proton--proton collision data using neural spline flow density estimation. A normaliz...
DIFFINT is a reconstruction‑based anomaly detector that uses a differentiable autoencoder with a latent bottleneck composed of soft, axis‑aligned interval memberships. Each latent unit represents a human‑readable hyper‑rectangle in feature space, allowing the model to encode how strongly an instance falls inside each interval and to compute reconstruction error as the anomaly score. The method provides a certified lower bound on reconstruction error for points outside all active intervals, a suppression mechanism for sparse abnormalities, and a closed‑form, label‑free importance ranking for each (unit, feature) pair, achieving top performance on 48 ADBench benchmarks against 22 baselines.
arXiv:2608.28375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Global goodness-of-fit and discrepancy statistics can establish that a sample departs from a reference distribution without identifying which observa...
arXiv:2606. 14373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The workflow from particle collision to physics analysis passes through a series of reconstruction steps that are traditionally modular and disconnected, with no shared representation linking low-level detector data to high-level analysis tasks.
DIFFINT is a reconstruction‑based anomaly detector that replaces the opaque latent bottleneck of a standard autoencoder with a set of soft, axis‑aligned interval memberships learned directly from raw numerical data. Each latent unit represents a human‑readable hyper‑rectangle, and an instance’s anomaly score is its reconstruction error weighted by how strongly it falls inside these intervals. The method provides a certified lower bound on reconstruction error for points outside all active intervals, a graded suppression mechanism for sparse anomalies, and a closed‑form, label‑free importance ranking for each (unit, feature) pair, achieving top performance on 48 ADBench benchmarks against 22 baselines. whyItMatters":"DIFFINT offers the first interpretable anomaly detector that maintains competitive performance while revealing which feature ranges drive each anomaly score, enabling practitioners to audit and understand model decisions without requiring anomaly labels."
The paper investigates whether the performance of anomaly detection systems can be predicted without labeled anomalies. For kNN-based detectors, it derives a lower bound on AUC that links detection performance to the separation and variance of inlier and outlier scores, and uses this to analyze how density variation, intrinsic dimensionality, and domain mismatch affect score variability. The authors introduce pseudo‑anomaly probes that provide a reference for estimating relative score separation, and demonstrate through experiments on DCASE benchmarks that these probes enable anomaly‑free model selection to outperform conventional development‑set selection, especially under domain shift.
arXiv:2606. 13780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learned anomaly detection is reshaping searches for new physics, but it has outrun the statistics used to interpret it.
The paper introduces a data‑driven method for pairing events at the Large Hadron Collider using the energy mover's distance (EMD) to measure similarity, thereby creating augmentation‑free views for self‑supervised pre‑training. By matching distinct events based on EMD, the approach preserves the physics content of each event without handcrafted distortions. Experiments on QCD jets demonstrate that this pairing technique yields semantic jet embeddings with downstream discrimination power comparable to or better than traditional augmentation‑based baselines.
arXiv:2607. 03558v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continuous video anomaly detection is dominated by reactive Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) that collapses spatiotemporal features into scalar scores.
arXiv:2606. 28970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised tabular anomaly detection requires methods that are accurate, robust across heterogeneous datasets, and computationally efficient.
arXiv:2608. 05685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most public benchmarks for machine-condition monitoring come from test rigs, where faults are induced on purpose and every event is known.