arXiv Computer Vision

Panda Diplomacy: Foundation Model Pre-training across Particle Imaging Detectors for High Energy and Nuclear Physics

Panda Diplomacy introduces a point‑cloud self‑distillation framework that enables a single foundation‑model architecture and objective to be pre‑trained across three distinct particle‑detector modalities—liquid argon time‑projection chambers, collider TPCs, and water Cherenkov detectors—without extensive modification. Using only 1,000 labeled images for downstream adaptation, the resulting Panda V2 model matches or surpasses specialized baselines that require orders of magnitude more supervision, achieving state‑of‑the‑art particle‑clustering performance with 70× fewer labeled events on sPHENIX and up to 1,000× fewer labels on LArTPC data. Linear probes further demonstrate that the model’s latent space captures physically meaningful structures such as particle causality and track curvature.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Track finding and particle identification performance with particle physics foundation models

The paper evaluates a Foundation Model for track finding and particle identification in high-energy physics. Using a dataset of spacepoints from a Time Projection Chamber, the model reconstructs charged particles in a magnetic field and outperforms traditional methods. It also demonstrates adaptability to additional tasks beyond its initial training objective.

By Shuhang Li, Haiwang Yu, Gabor Galgoczi, Yeonju Go, Yi Huang, David Park, Michael Peters, Christof Roland, Jin Huang, Yihui Ren, Joseph D. Osborn
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

A Lightweight Foundation Model for Collider Physics with Multi-Domain Adaptation

arXiv:2607. 27501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a lightweight approach to foundation modeling (\textbf{NEXUS}) that leverages pre-trained learning from collider physics data towards out-of-domain tasks in other scientific datasets, using a fully connected autoencoder model with approximately 3 million parameters.

By Liangyu Wu, Qibin Liu, Alexander Yue, Julia Gonski
arXiv AI
Jun 16

JetParticle-JEPA: An Efficient Self-Supervised Representation Learning method for Jet Tagging in High-Energy Physics

arXiv:2606. 14813v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jet tagging at the Large Hadron Collider increasingly relies on deep learning models trained on massive simulated datasets, leading to high computational costs and limited robustness to detector mismodeling.

By Guillaume Letellier (LPCC), Antonin Vacheret (LPCC), Fr\'ed\'eric Jurie
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

HEPTv2: End-to-End Efficient Point Transformer for Charged Particle Reconstruction

arXiv:2606. 20437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Charged-particle tracking -- reconstructing trajectories from sparse detector measurements -- is a fundamental high-energy-physics inference problem and a canonical example of learning under extreme combinatorial ambiguity.

By Siqi Miao, Shitij Govil, Jack P. Rodgers, Mia Liu, Javier Duarte, Shih-Chieh Hsu, Yuan-Tang Chou, Pan Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Similarity Pairing with Energy Mover's Distance for Self-Supervised Pre-Training at the LHC

The paper introduces a data‑driven method for pairing events at the Large Hadron Collider using the energy mover's distance (EMD) to measure similarity, thereby creating augmentation‑free views for self‑supervised pre‑training. By matching distinct events based on EMD, the approach preserves the physics content of each event without handcrafted distortions. Experiments on QCD jets demonstrate that this pairing technique yields semantic jet embeddings with downstream discrimination power comparable to or better than traditional augmentation‑based baselines.

By Ho Fung Tsoi, Dylan Rankin
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

How Architecture and Training Affect TPC Representations Across Experiments

arXiv:2608.21756v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep-learning efforts have increasingly shifted toward foundation model approaches. In experimental physics, this allows models and learned represent...

By Tyler Wheeler, Michelle P. Kuchera, Raghuram Ramanujan, William Sieland, Ryan Krupp, Daniel Bazin, Connor L. Cross, Hoi Yan Ian Heung, Andrew J. Jones, Ruchi Mahajan, Saiprasad Ravishankar, Pranjal Singh, Benjamin Votaw, Chris Wrede
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Cross-Domain Transfer with Particle Physics Foundation Models: From Jets to Neutrino Interactions

The paper investigates whether two particle physics foundation models, OmniLearned and ParticleViT, pretrained on high‑energy proton–proton and electron–proton collisions can transfer knowledge to a low‑energy neutrino experiment. Using MINERvA neutrino–nucleus scattering data, the authors evaluate the models on energy regression and charged‑current pion classification tasks, finding that the pretrained models outperform similarly sized models trained from scratch, with OmniLearned excelling in regression and ParticleViT in classification. When the same transformer architecture is initialized from unrelated text pretraining (BERT), the performance advantage is minimal for classification and absent for regression, indicating that particle‑level foundation models capture inductive biases that generalize across energy scales, detector technologies, and physics processes.

By Gregor Krzmanc, Vinicius Mikuni, Benjamin Nachman, Callum Wilkinson