Performance versus resilience in modern quark-gluon tagging

Abstract

Discriminating quark-like from gluon-like jets is, in many ways, a key challenge for many LHC analyses. First, we use a known difference in PYTHIA and HERWIG simulations to show how decorrelated taggers would break down when the most distinctive feature is aligned with theory uncertainties. We propose conditional training on interpolated samples, combined with a controlled Bayesian network, as a more resilient framework. The interpolation parameter can be used to optimize the training evaluated on a calibration dataset, and to test the stability of this optimization. The interpolated training might also be useful to track generalization errors when training networks on simulations.