Autoencoder-based Anomaly Detection System for Online Data Quality Monitoring of the CMS Electromagnetic Calorimeter

The CMS detector is a general-purpose apparatus that detects high-energy collisions produced at the LHC. Online Data Quality Monitoring of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter is a vital operational tool that allows detector experts to quickly identify, localize, and diagnose a broad range of detector issues that could affect the quality of physics data. A real-time autoencoder-based anomaly detection system using semi-supervised machine learning is presented enabling the detection of anomalies in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter data. A novel method is introduced which maximizes the anomaly detection performance by exploiting the time-dependent evolution of anomalies as well as spatial variations in the detector response. The autoencoder-based system is able to efficiently detect anomalies, while maintaining a very low false discovery rate. The performance of the system is validated with anomalies found in 2018 and 2022 LHC collision data. Additionally, the first results from deploying the autoencoder-based system in the CMS online Data Quality Monitoring workflow during the beginning of Run 3 of the LHC are presented, showing its ability to detect issues missed by the existing system.