Semi-supervised Graph Neural Network for Particle-level Noise Removal

The high instantaneous luminosity of the CERN Large Hadron Collider leads to multiple proton-proton interactions in the same or nearby bunch crossings (pileup). Advanced pileup mitigation algorithms are designed to remove this pileup particle noise and improve the performance of physics observables crucial to the science goals. This study applies the semi-supervised graph neural network to particle-level pileup noise removal, by identifying the particles produced from pileup. The graph neural network is trained on charged particles with well-known labels, which can be obtained from simulation truth information or measurements from data, and inferred on neutral particles of which such labeling is missing. This semi-supervised approach does not depend on the ground truth information from simulation and thus allows us to perform training directly on real data. The performance with this approach is found to be consistently better than widely-used domain algorithms and comparable to a fully supervised training approach. The study serves as the first attempt at applying semi-supervised learning on pileup mitigation, and opens up a new direction of fully data-driven pileup mitigation techniques.