Semi-Equivariant GNN Architectures for Jet Tagging

Composing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) of operations that respect physical symmetries has been suggested to give better model performance with a smaller number of learnable parameters. However, real-world applications, such as in high energy physics have not born this out. We present the novel architecture VecNet that combines both symmetry-respecting and unconstrained operations to study and tune the degree of physics-informed GNNs. We introduce a novel metric, the textitant factor, to quantify the resource-efficiency of each configuration in the search-space. We find that a generalized architecture such as ours can deliver optimal performance in resource-constrained applications.