17–23 Aug 2025
California Institute of Technology
US/Pacific timezone

Stay Positive: Neural Refinement of Simulated Event Weights

18 Aug 2025, 14:20
20m
Broad 100

Broad 100

Chen Neuroscience Research Building

Speaker

Dennis Daniel Nick Noll (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (US))

Description

Monte Carlo simulations are an essential tool for data analysis in particle physics. Simulated events are typically produced alongside weights, that redistribute the production rate of a simulated process across the phase space. The presence of latent degrees of freedom can lead to a distribution of weights with negative values, often complicating analyses, especially if they involve machine learning methods. Traditional post-hoc reweighting methods aim to approximate the average weight as a function of phase space. In contrast, we propose a novel approach that refines the initial weights to eliminate negative values through a scaling transformation, utilizing a phase space dependent factor. Our method uses neural networks to process high-dimensional and unbinned phase spaces. We will show that our neural weight refinement method achieves comparable or superior accuracy to existing reweighting schemes, and demonstrate its behavior on realistic and synthetic examples.

Authors

Benjamin Nachman (Stanford University) Dennis Daniel Nick Noll (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (US))

Presentation materials