The physics behind ML-based quark-gluon taggers

Jet taggers provide an ideal testbed for applying explainability techniques to powerful ML tools. For theoretically and experimentally challenging quark-gluon tagging, we first identify the leading latent features that correlate strongly with physics observables, both in a linear and a non-linear approach. Next, we show how Shapley values can assess feature importance, although the standard implementation assumes independent inputs and can lead to distorted attributions in the presence of correlations. Finally, we use symbolic regression to derive compact formulas to approximate the tagger output.