A search for the electroweak VBS production of a WV pair plus two jets, in the semi-leptonic channel, at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV is reported. The data sample corresponds to the full Run-II CMS dataset of proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV including an integrated luminosity of 137.1 fb −1 . Events are analyzed in two energy regimes: either the hadronically decaying W/Z boson is reconstructed as one large-radius jet, or it is identified as a pair of jets with dijet mass near the W/Z

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... . Machine learning models are optimized for the signal extraction and the classifiers are interpreted using tools from the explainable machine learning field. The overwhelming background contribution from the single W production plus jets is measured in dedicated control regions implementing a data-driven strategy.