Reporting Results in High Energy Physics Publications: a Manifesto

The complexity of collider data analyses has dramatically increased from early colliders to the CERN LHC. Reconstruction of the collision products in the particle detectors has reached a point that requires dedicated publications documenting the techniques, and periodic retuning of the algorithms themselves. Analysis methods evolved to account for the increased complexity of the combination of particles required in each collision event (final states) and for the need of squeezing every last bit of sensitivity from the data; physicists often seek to fully reconstruct the final state, a process that is mostly relatively easy at lepton colliders but sometimes exceedingly difficult at hadron colliders to the point of requiring sometimes using advanced statistical techniques such as machine learning. The need for keeping the publications documenting results to a reasonable size implies a greater level of compression or even omission of information with respect to publications from twenty years ago. The need for compression should however not prevent sharing a reasonable amount of information that is essential to understanding a given analysis. Infrastructures like Rivet or HepData have been developed to host additional material, but physicists in the experimental Collaborations often still send an insufficient amount of material to these databases. In this manuscript I advocate for an increase in the information shared by the Collaborations, and try to define a minimum standard for acceptable level of information when reporting the results of statistical procedures in High Energy Physics publications.Comment: 26 pages, 3 tables, 7 figures. Accepted by Reviews in Physics on July 3rd, 2020. Preproof at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240542832030009

A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval

In recent years, deep neural networks have led to exciting breakthroughs in speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, there have been few positive results of deep models on ad-hoc retrieval tasks. This is partially due to the fact that many important characteristics of the ad-hoc retrieval task have not been well addressed in deep models yet. Typically, the ad-hoc retrieval task is formalized as a matching problem between two pieces of text in existing work using deep models, and treated equivalent to many NLP tasks such as paraphrase identification, question answering and automatic conversation. However, we argue that the ad-hoc retrieval task is mainly about relevance matching while most NLP matching tasks concern semantic matching, and there are some fundamental differences between these two matching tasks. Successful relevance matching requires proper handling of the exact matching signals, query term importance, and diverse matching requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel deep relevance matching model (DRMM) for ad-hoc retrieval. Specifically, our model employs a joint deep architecture at the query term level for relevance matching. By using matching histogram mapping, a feed forward matching network, and a term gating network, we can effectively deal with the three relevance matching factors mentioned above. Experimental results on two representative benchmark collections show that our model can significantly outperform some well-known retrieval models as well as state-of-the-art deep matching models.Comment: CIKM 2016, long pape

MorphIC: A 65-nm 738k-Synapse/mm2^2 Quad-Core Binary-Weight Digital Neuromorphic Processor with Stochastic Spike-Driven Online Learning

Recent trends in the field of neural network accelerators investigate weight quantization as a means to increase the resource- and power-efficiency of hardware devices. As full on-chip weight storage is necessary to avoid the high energy cost of off-chip memory accesses, memory reduction requirements for weight storage pushed toward the use of binary weights, which were demonstrated to have a limited accuracy reduction on many applications when quantization-aware training techniques are used. In parallel, spiking neural network (SNN) architectures are explored to further reduce power when processing sparse event-based data streams, while on-chip spike-based online learning appears as a key feature for applications constrained in power and resources during the training phase. However, designing power- and area-efficient spiking neural networks still requires the development of specific techniques in order to leverage on-chip online learning on binary weights without compromising the synapse density. In this work, we demonstrate MorphIC, a quad-core binary-weight digital neuromorphic processor embedding a stochastic version of the spike-driven synaptic plasticity (S-SDSP) learning rule and a hierarchical routing fabric for large-scale chip interconnection. The MorphIC SNN processor embeds a total of 2k leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons and more than two million plastic synapses for an active silicon area of 2.86mm$^2$ in 65nm CMOS, achieving a high density of 738k synapses/mm$^2$. MorphIC demonstrates an order-of-magnitude improvement in the area-accuracy tradeoff on the MNIST classification task compared to previously-proposed SNNs, while having no penalty in the energy-accuracy tradeoff.Comment: This document is the paper as accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems journal (2019), the fully-edited paper is available at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/876400