Higher Order Component Attribution via Learned Surrogates in High Energy Physics

arXiv:2611.08656v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Experimental High Energy Physics (HEP) has adopted the transformer architecture for identification of jets, particularly the state-of-the-art Particle Transformer (ParT) which injects explicit information about particle correlations into the attention mechanism. While able to achieve state-of-the-art results in accuracy, interpretability to its effectiveness has been limited. In this paper we propose component attribution methods using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) that directly tie back to the physical descriptors of jets, to probe whether mechanisms such as Multi-Head Attention (MHA), or the ParT architecture, are able to learn these as discriminating features.