Decay-aware neural network for event classification in collider physics

The goal of event classification in collider physics is to distinguish signal events of interest from background events to the extent possible to search for new phenomena in nature. We propose a decay-aware neural network based on a multi-task learning technique to effectively address this event classification. The proposed model is designed to learn the domain knowledge of particle decays as an auxiliary task, which is a novel approach to improving learning efficiency in the event classification. Our experiments using simulation data confirmed that an inductive bias was successfully introduced by adding the auxiliary task, and significant improvements in the event classification were achieved compared with boosted decision tree and simple multi-layer perceptron models.