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Incorporating Physical Priors into Weakly-Supervised Anomaly Detection

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arxiv 2405.08889 v3 pith:OQ5SXYU5 submitted 2024-05-14 hep-ph hep-ex

classification hep-phhep-ex
keywords sensitivityanomalydetectionpawssignalsupervisedapproachesclass
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We propose a new machine-learning-based anomaly detection strategy for comparing data with a background-only reference (a form of weak supervision). The sensitivity of previous strategies degrades significantly when the signal is too rare or there are many unhelpful features. Our Prior-Assisted Weak Supervision (PAWS) method incorporates information from a class of signal models to significantly enhance the search sensitivity of weakly supervised approaches. As long as the true signal is in the pre-specified class, PAWS matches the sensitivity of a dedicated, fully supervised method without specifying the exact parameters ahead of time. On the benchmark LHC Olympics anomaly detection dataset, our mix of semi-supervised and weakly supervised learning is able to extend the sensitivity over previous methods by a factor of 10 in cross section. Furthermore, if we add irrelevant (noise) dimensions to the inputs, classical methods degrade by another factor of 10 in cross section while PAWS remains insensitive to noise. This new approach could be applied in a number of scenarios and pushes the frontier of sensitivity between completely model-agnostic approaches and fully model-specific searches.

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Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Enhancing anomaly detection with topology-aware autoencoders

    hep-ph 2025-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Autoencoders with latent spaces shaped like S^2, S^2×S^2, or RP^2, matched to the phase-space topology of the background, reduce spurious reconstruction errors and give a small but consistent anomaly-detection gain ov...

  2. Look everywhere effects in anomaly detection

    hep-ph 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Weakly supervised anomaly detectors that train and test on the same data produce badly miscalibrated p-values; independent test sets are calibrated but insensitive, while k-fold cross-validation is a workable middle ground.

  3. FlexCAST: Enabling Flexible Scientific Data Analyses

    hep-ex 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    FlexCAST preserves the design of a scientific analysis as a reusable functional, enabling reinterpretation with changed input data and parameters, demonstrated on a machine-learning anomaly detection analysis.

  4. Generator Based Inference (GBI)

    hep-ph 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Generator Based Inference uses data-derived background generators to turn resonant anomaly detection into parameter estimation, reaching 0.1 sigma signal sensitivity on the LHCO benchmark.

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