SYMBA: Symbolic Computation of Squared Amplitudes in High Energy Physics with Machine ALearning

The cross section is one of the most important physical quantities in high-energy physics and the most time consuming to compute. While machine learning has proven to be highly successful in numerical calculations in high-energy physics, analytical calculations using machine learning are still in their infancy. In this work, we use a sequence-to-sequence transformer model to compute a key element of the cross section calculation, namely, the squared amplitude of an interaction. We show that a transformer model is able to predict correctly 89.0% and 99.4% of squared amplitudes of QCD and QED processes, respectively. We discuss the performance of the current model, its limitations and possible future directions for this work.