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Recently, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have been proposed as an alternative to multilayer perceptrons, suggesting advantages in performance and interpretability. We study a typical binary event classification task in high-energy physics including high-level features and comment on the performance and interpretability of KANs in this context. We find that the learned activation functions of a one-layer KAN resemble the log-likelihood ratio of the input features. In deeper KANs, the activations in the first KAN layer differ from those in the one-layer KAN, which indicates that the deeper KANs learn more complex representations of the data. We study KANs with different depths and widths and we compare them to multilayer perceptrons in terms of performance and number of trainable parameters. For the chosen classification task, we do not find that KANs are more parameter efficient. However, small KANs may offer advantages in terms of interpretability that come at the cost of only a moderate loss in performance., Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures

Simulated events are key ingredients in almost all high-energy physics analyses. However, imperfections in the simulation can lead to sizeable differences between the observed data and simulated events. The effects of such mismodelling on relevant observables must be corrected either effectively via scale factors, with weights or by modifying the distributions of the observables and their correlations. We introduce a correction method that transforms one multidimensional distribution (simulation) into another one (data) using a simple architecture based on a single normalising flow with a boolean condition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on a physics-inspired toy dataset with non-trivial mismodelling of several observables and their correlations., Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures, Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13305706

Flavour-changing-neutral currents (FCNCs) involving the top quark are highly suppressed within the Standard Model (SM). Hence, any signal in current or planned future collider experiments would constitute a clear manifestation of physics beyond the SM. We propose a novel, interference-based strategy to search for top-quark FCNCs involving the $Z$ boson that has the potential to complement traditional search strategies due to a more favourable luminosity scaling. The strategy leverages on-shell interference between the FCNC and SM decay of the top quark into hadronic final states. We estimate the feasibility of the most promising case of anomalous $tZc$ couplings using Monte Carlo simulations and a simplified detector simulation. We consider the main background processes and discriminate the signal from the background with a deep neural network that is parametrised in the value of the anomalous $tZc$ coupling. We present sensitivity projections for the HL-LHC and the FCC-hh. We find an expected $95\%$ CL upper limit of $\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{excl}}(t\rightarrow Zc) = 6.4 \times 10^{-5}$ for the HL-LHC. In general, we conclude that the interference-based approach has the potential to provide both competitive and complementary constraints to traditional multi-lepton searches and other strategies that have been proposed to search for $tZc$ FCNCs., Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables