The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer high-energy neutrino detector deployed
in the Antarctic ice. Two major event classes are charged-current electron and muon neutrino
interactions. In this contribution, we discuss the inference of direction and energy for these
classes using conditional normalizing flows. They allow to derive a posterior distribution for each
individual event based on the raw data that can include systematic uncertainties, which makes
them very promising for next-generation reconstructions.
For each normalizing flow we use the differential entropy and the KL-divergence to its maximum
entropy approximation to interpret the results. The normalizing flows correctly incorporate
complex optical properties of the Antarctic ice and their relation to the embedded detector. For
showers, the differential entropy increases in regions of high photon absorption and decreases in
clear ice. For muons, the differential entropy strongly correlates with the contained track length.
Coverage is maintained, even for low photon counts and highly asymmetrical contour shapes. For
high-photon counts, the distributions get narrower and become more symmetrical, as expected
from the asymptotic theorem of Bernstein-von-Mises. For shower directional reconstruction, we
find the region between 1 TeV and 100 TeV to potentially benefit the most from normalizing
flows because of azimuth-zenith asymmetries which have been neglected in previous analyses
by assuming symmetrical contours. Events in this energy range play a vital role in the recent
discovery of the galactic plane diffuse neutrino emission.