Speaker
Description
Improving interpretability is essential for building robust
and trustworthy machine learning tools in collider physics. To address this challenge, we systematically investigate equivariant and IRC-safe graph neural networks for jet classification. Using simulated jet datasets, we compare IRC-safe architectures with inbuilt E(2) and O(2) equivariance in the rapidity-azimuth plane against IRC-safe and -unsafe baselines in terms of classification performance, robustness to soft emissions, and latent representation structures. Our analysis shows that IRC-safe and symmetry-aware networks are more stable across training instances and distribute their latent variance across multiple interpretable directions. By regressing Energy Flow Polynomials onto the leading principal components, we establish a direct correspondence between learned representations and established IRC-safe jet observables. These results demonstrate that embedding symmetry and safety constraints not only improves robustness but also grounds network representations in known QCD structures.