The paper presents a measurement of the Standard Model Higgs Boson decaying to $b$-quark pairs in the vector boson fusion (VBF) production mode. A sample corresponding to 126 fb$^{-1}$ of $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV proton-proton collision data, collected with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, is analyzed utilizing an adversarial neural network for event classification. The results are combined with an analysis of Higgs bosons decaying to $b$-quarks, produced via VBF in association with a photon. The signal strength, defined as the ratio of the measured signal yield to that predicted by the Standard Model, is measured to be $0.99^{+0.35}_{-0.33}$ for Higgs boson production or $0.99^{+0.36}_{-0.34}$ for VBF production only, corresponding to an observed (expected) significance of 3.0 (3.0) or 2.9 (2.9) standard deviations, respectively, from the background only hypothesis. The sensitivity of the measurement is dominated by the analysis presented in this paper.

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