Sep 21 – 24, 2026
Europe/Berlin timezone

Kitchen Sink Anomaly Detection

Sep 23, 2026, 12:00 PM
30m

Speaker

Lukas Lang (RWTH Aachen University)

Description

Recent years have seen rapid progress in resonant anomaly detection for collider searches, but existing studies often rely on a limited set of signal benchmarks and face a trade-off between sensitive but model-dependent high-level observables and fully agnostic but less performant low-level representations. We address both limitations by introducing new simulated signal benchmarks, publicly released in a format compatible with the LHCO R&D benchmark, and by studying a broad high-level, yet highly agnostic, observable set combining Energy Flow Polynomials with subjettiness variables.
We evaluate this combined “kitchen sink” representation against several baseline observable sets in both an idealized anomaly-detection setting and the CWoLa hunting task. Across a broad range of signal types, the combined observable set achieves the best overall sensitivity.

Authors

Alexander Mück (RWTH Aachen University) David Shih (Rutgers University) Gregor Kasieczka (Universität Hamburg) Louis Moureaux (Universität Hamburg) Lukas Lang (RWTH Aachen University) Marie Hein (RWTH Aachen University) Michael Krämer (RWTH Aachen University) Radha Mastandrea (The University of Chicago) Ranit Das (Universität Heidelberg)

Presentation materials