Several techniques for domain adaptation have been proposed to account for differences in the distribution of the data used for training and testing. The majority of this work focuses on a binary domain label. Similar problems occur in a scientific context where there may be a continuous family of plausible data generation processes associated to the presence of systematic uncertainties. Robust inference is possible if it is based on a pivot -- a quantity whose distribution does not depend on the unknown values of the nuisance parameters that parametrize this family of data generation processes. In this work, we introduce and derive theoretical results for a training procedure based on adversarial networks for enforcing the pivotal property (or, equivalently, fairness with respect to continuous attributes) on a predictive model. The method includes a hyperparameter to control the trade-off between accuracy and robustness. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach with a toy example and examples from particle physics.

Several techniques for domain adaptation have been proposed to account for differences in the distribution of the data used for training and testing. The majority of this work focuses on a binary domain label. Similar problems occur in a scientific context where there may be a continuous family of plausible data generation processes associated to the presence of systematic uncertainties. Robust inference is possible if it is based on a pivot -- a quantity whose distribution does not depend on the unknown values of the nuisance parameters that parametrize this family of data generation processes. In this work, we introduce and derive theoretical results for a training procedure based on adversarial networks for enforcing the pivotal property (or, equivalently, fairness with respect to continuous attributes) on a predictive model. The method includes a hyperparameter to control the trade-off between accuracy and robustness. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach with a toy example and examples from particle physics.

Recent progress in applying machine learning for jet physics has been built upon an analogy between calorimeters and images. In this work, we present a novel class of recursive neural networks built instead upon an analogy between QCD and natural languages. In the analogy, four-momenta are like words and the clustering history of sequential recombination jet algorithms is like the parsing of a sentence. Our approach works directly with the four-momenta of a variable-length set of particles, and the jet-based tree structure varies on an event-by-event basis. Our experiments highlight the flexibility of our method for building task-specific jet embeddings and show that recursive architectures are significantly more accurate and data efficient than previous image-based networks. We extend the analogy from individual jets (sentences) to full events (paragraphs), and show for the first time an event-level classifier operating on all the stable particles produced in an LHC event.