Likelihood-Based Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in CMS Dijet Events

Abstract

We present an unsupervised search for anomalous dijet events in proton--proton collision data using neural spline flow density estimation. A normalizing flow model is trained on a high-dimensional feature space comprising jet, dijet, and event-level observables to learn the dominant Standard Model background directly from data, without assuming a specific signal hypothesis. Events assigned low likelihood under the learned density are identified as potential anomalous events. Using this approach on a CMS Open Data dijet sample, we investigate extreme events in the tail of the anomaly-score distribution and perform an extensive validation and robustness study. This study includes feature-level statistical comparisons, mass decorrelation tests, permutation-based null tests, and evaluations of training stability. The selected anomalous events exhibit notable departures from the background-only expectation, primarily in jet-substructure observables, while remaining stable under several known sources of bias in unsupervised learning. The identified anomalies are distributed across the kinematic phase space and do not exhibit a narrow structure in the dijet invariant-mass spectrum. Instead, they show correlated deviations across multiple observables, consistent with a multivariate difference in jet substructure and event topology rather than a localized resonance. While no claim of new physics is made, this study demonstrates that neural spline flow-based density estimation can be sensitive to rare, structured deviations in collider data and may provide a model-independent exploratory tool for searches for physics beyond the Standard Model at the LHC.