Signal-agnostic Optimization of Normalized Autoencoders for Model Independent Searches

A particularly interesting application of autoencoders (AE) for HEP is their use as anomaly detection (AD) algorithms to perform a signal-agnostic search for new physics. This is achieved by training the AE on Standard Model physics and tagging potential signal events as anomalies. The use of an AE as an AD algorithm relies on the assumption that the network better reconstructs examples it was trained on than ones drawn from a different probability distribution i.e., anomalies. In this note, using the search for semivisible jets as a benchmark, we demonstrate the tendency of AEs to generalize beyond the dataset they are trained on, hindering their performance. We show how normalized AEs (NAE), specifically designed to suppress this effect, give a sizable boost in performance. We further propose a different loss function and signal-agnostic training stopping condition to reach the optimal performance.