Multiscale Flow for robust and optimal cosmological analysis.

We propose Multiscale Flow, a generative Normalizing Flow that creates samples and models the field-level likelihood of two-dimensional cosmological data such as weak lensing. Multiscale Flow uses hierarchical decomposition of cosmological fields via a wavelet basis and then models different wavelet components separately as Normalizing Flows. The log-likelihood of the original cosmological field can be recovered by summing over the log-likelihood of each wavelet term. This decomposition allows us to separate the information from different scales and identify distribution shifts in the data such as unknown scale-dependent systematics. The resulting likelihood analysis can not only identify these types of systematics, but can also be made optimal, in the sense that the Multiscale Flow can learn the full likelihood at the field without any dimensionality reduction. We apply Multiscale Flow to weak lensing mock datasets for cosmological inference and show that it significantly outperforms traditional summary statistics such as power spectrum and peak counts, as well as machine learning-based summary statistics such as scattering transform and convolutional neural networks. We further show that Multiscale Flow is able to identify distribution shifts not in the training data such as baryonic effects. Finally, we demonstrate that Multiscale Flow can be used to generate realistic samples of weak lensing data.

Learning effective physical laws for generating cosmological hydrodynamics with Lagrangian deep learning.

The goal of generative models is to learn the intricate relations between the data to create new simulated data, but current approaches fail in very high dimensions. When the true data-generating process is based on physical processes, these impose symmetries and constraints, and the generative model can be created by learning an effective description of the underlying physics, which enables scaling of the generative model to very high dimensions. In this work, we propose Lagrangian deep learning (LDL) for this purpose, applying it to learn outputs of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. The model uses layers of Lagrangian displacements of particles describing the observables to learn the effective physical laws. The displacements are modeled as the gradient of an effective potential, which explicitly satisfies the translational and rotational invariance. The total number of learned parameters is only of order 10, and they can be viewed as effective theory parameters. We combine N-body solver fast particle mesh (FastPM) with LDL and apply it to a wide range of cosmological outputs, from the dark matter to the stellar maps, gas density, and temperature. The computational cost of LDL is nearly four orders of magnitude lower than that of the full hydrodynamical simulations, yet it outperforms them at the same resolution. We achieve this with only of order 10 layers from the initial conditions to the final output, in contrast to typical cosmological simulations with thousands of time steps. This opens up the possibility of analyzing cosmological observations entirely within this framework, without the need for large dark-matter simulations.

The LHC Olympics 2020 a community challenge for anomaly detection in high energy physics.

A new paradigm for data-driven, model-agnostic new physics searches at colliders is emerging, and aims to leverage recent breakthroughs in anomaly detection and machine learning. In order to develop and benchmark new anomaly detection methods within this framework, it is essential to have standard datasets. To this end, we have created the LHC Olympics 2020, a community challenge accompanied by a set of simulated collider events. Participants in these Olympics have developed their methods using an R&D dataset and then tested them on black boxes: datasets with an unknown anomaly (or not). Methods made use of modern machine learning tools and were based on unsupervised learning (autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, normalizing flows), weakly supervised learning, and semi-supervised learning. This paper will review the LHC Olympics 2020 challenge, including an overview of the competition, a description of methods deployed in the competition, lessons learned from the experience, and implications for data analyses with future datasets as well as future colliders.