RINO: Renormalization Group Distillation with No Labels
Organizations: Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 · Physics Division, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL 60510
Abstract
Supervised machine learning in high-energy physics (HEP) requires training on labeled simulations of particle collisions, which are known to be unfaithful to the underlying physics. This leads to significant inaccuracies and biases in the transfer of trained models to real data, limiting the power of deep learning methods. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising alternative for pretraining directly on real, unlabeled data. However, existing techniques largely operate with inductive biases inspired by domains such as images and natural language. We propose RINO (Renormalization Group DIstillation with NO Labels), which, for the first time, exploits the fundamentally multi-scale renormalization group structure of high-energy jet formation as a physically grounded source of SSL views. We define teacher-student representations across energy scales using different levels of hierarchical clustering, aligned via DINO-style self-distillation. To mirror the background-dominated nature of real collider data, RINO pretrains exclusively on jets from quantum chromodynamics (QCD) processes and is evaluated on out-of-distribution (OOD) transfer to rare signal classes. In our controlled data-efficiency study, RINO matches fully supervised training on JetNet after finetuning on only 1% of the labeled data. With the full labeled dataset, RINO improves OOD classification accuracy on top-quark jets by 5.9% and, without retraining, improves AUC on the unseen Higgs boson decay channel by 4.1% over the strongest SSL baseline. Scale-structure diagnostics reveal that DINO-style self-distillation permits our backbone to retain scale-dependent structure. Ablation studies show that this accounts for an 8.6% OOD accuracy gap with respect to alternative SSL paradigms such as SimCLR. Code is available at https://github.com/zichunhao/RINO.
Figures & tables
| Method | -NN | Linear probe | Linear head | MLP head |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supervised | ||||
| SSL baselines | ||||
| JetCLR ( Dillon et al., 2022 ) | ||||
| OmniJet- ( Birk et al., 2024 ) | ||||
| MPMv1 ( Golling et al., 2024 ) | ||||
| MPMv2 ( Leigh et al., 2025 ) | ||||
| Method | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACC | AUC | ACC | AUC | |
| Supervised | ||||
| SSL baselines | ||||
| JetCLR ( Dillon et al., 2022 ) | ||||
| MPMv1 ( Golling et al., 2024 ) | ||||
| MPMv2 ( Leigh et al., 2025 ) | ||||
| Configuration | OOD top ACC |
|---|---|
| iBOT only | |
| + Cross-scale self-distillation | |
| + Teacher HP tuning |
| Method | (QCD) | (top) | MMD 2 (QCD) | MMD 2 (top) | OOD ACC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supervised | |||||
| JetCLR | |||||
| MPMv1 | |||||
| MPMv2 | |||||
| OmniJet- | |||||
| JetCLR-scale |
Appendix figures & tables21 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Group | Hyperparameter | Value |
| Optimization | Optimizer | AdamW ( , ) |
| Peak learning rate | ||
| Weight decay | ||
| Gradient clipping (max norm) | ||
| Schedule | Total epochs | |
| LR warmup | epochs – , (cosine) |
| Feature | Definition | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| , constituent transverse momentum | |||
| , constituent energy | |||
| , relative | |||
| , relative energy | |||
| , rapidity offset | |||
| (wrapped to ), azimuthal offset |
| Scheme | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (patches) | 400 | 2,500 | 6,400 | 10,000 | 14,400 |
| Per-particle collision rate (%) | |||||
| Cartesian | 64.76 | 35.98 | 22.19 | 16.82 | 13.13 |
| Log-Cartesian | 42.70 | 13.61 | 6.27 | 4.19 | 3.00 |
| Polar | 32.96 | 9.87 | 4.52 | 3.03 | 2.16 |
| Per-jet collision rate (%) | |||||
| [GeV] | ||
|---|---|---|
| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Optimizer | AdamW ( , ) |
| Head learning rate | |
| Backbone learning-rate factor (after unfreeze) | ( i.e. , same as head) |
| Weight decay | |
| LP-FT: backbone freeze epochs | |
| LR warmup epochs |
| Method | Default | Worst | Best (target-selected) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supervised | |||
| MPMv1 ( Golling et al., 2024 ) | |||
| MPMv2 ( Leigh et al., 2025 ) | |||
| RINO |
| Step | Configuration | -NN | LP | OOD ACC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DINO only, mixed views, no PE | ||||
| + iBOT | ||||
| + multi-scale views, -rank PE | ||||
| + Polar-binned PE | ||||
| + Teacher HP tuning (production) |
| Axis | Configuration | -NN | LP | OOD ACC |
| PE choice mixed views, DINO+iBOT | ||||
| No PE | ||||
| -rank | ||||
| Polar-binned | ||||
| PE choice multi-scale views, DINO+iBOT | ||||
| -rank | ||||
| Method | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Supervised | |||
| SSL baselines | |||
| JetCLR | |||
| MPMv1 | |||
| MPMv2 | |||
| OmniJet- | |||
| Method | MLP head | Linear head |
|---|---|---|
| Supervised | ||
| SSL baselines | ||
| JetCLR ( Dillon et al., 2022 ) | ||
| MPMv1 ( Golling et al., 2024 ) | ||
| MPMv2 ( Leigh et al., 2025 ) | ||
| OmniJet- ( Birk et al., 2024 ) | ||
| Method | ||
|---|---|---|
| MPMv2 | ||
| RINO | ||
| MPMv1 | ||
| JetCLR |
| Method | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supervised | |||||||
| SSL baselines | |||||||
| JetCLR | |||||||
| MPMv1 | |||||||
| MPMv2 | |||||||
| OmniJet- | |||||||
| Method | MLP | Linear | |
|---|---|---|---|
| RINO | |||
| Supervised | |||
| MPMv1 | |||
| MPMv2 | |||
| JetCLR | |||
| JetCLR-scale |
| Method | (QCD) | (top) | MMD 2 (QCD) | MMD 2 (top) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetCLR | ||||
| OmniJet- | ||||
| MPMv1 | ||||
| MPMv2 | ||||
| JetCLR-scale | ||||
| RINO |
| Method | Backbone | Attention | Input | Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RINO | JTE enc. | Bidir. | Continuous | DINO+iBOT |
| Supervised | JTE enc. | Bidir. | Continuous | Cross-ent. |
| MPMv1 | JTE enc. | Bidir. | Continuous | Masked VQ pred. |
| MPMv2 | JTE enc. | Bidir. | Continuous | Masked K-means + L1 + flow |
| JetCLR | JTE enc. | Bidir. | Continuous | NT-Xent |
| JetCLR-scale | JTE enc. | Bidir. | Continuous | NT-Xent+MAE |
| Method | Time/epoch (min) | Total (h) |
|---|---|---|
| JetCLR | ||
| JetCLR-scale | ||
| MPMv1 † | ||
| MPMv2 | ||
| OmniJet- † | ||
| iBOT-only |