DisCo Fever: Robust Networks Through Distance Correlation

While deep learning has proven to be extremely successful at supervised classification tasks at the LHC and beyond, for practical applications, raw classification accuracy is often not the only consideration. One crucial issue is the stability of network predictions, either versus changes of individual features of the input data, or against systematic perturbations. We present a new method based on a novel application of "distance correlation" (DisCo), a measure quantifying non-linear correlations, that achieves equal performance to state-of-the-art adversarial decorrelation networks but is much simpler and more stable to train. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we carefully recast a recent ATLAS study of decorrelation methods as applied to boosted, hadronic W-tagging. We also show the feasibility of DisCo regularization for more powerful convolutional neural networks, as well as for the problem of hadronic top tagging.