arXiv Machine Learning

A Differentiable Neural Surrogate for Photon Propagation in Neutrino Telescopes

The paper presents candela, a differentiable SIREN neural field that learns the photon Green's function for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. It predicts photon yield and full arrival-time distribution for point-like energy deposits, enabling complete event simulation by superposing responses from multiple deposits. Trained on Monte‑Carlo data, candela produces events 50–100× faster than existing methods while maintaining median yields within 2% of MC expectations and timing distributions at the MC statistical floor across six photon‑count decades.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Finding and using interpretable latents in a neutrino foundation model with sparse autoencoders

The paper applies sparse autoencoders to a neutrino foundation model trained on IceCube data, uncovering a validated atlas of physical concepts within the model’s internal representation. Causal analysis shows the direction reconstruction head largely ignores this atlas, whereas an uncertainty head trained on the same representation effectively uses quality and brightness features, improving angular resolution from 20.2° to 3.2° at 20% efficiency. These findings demonstrate that mechanistic interpretability can expose latent physics and guide the design of downstream tasks.

By Rapha\"el Bonnet-Guerrini, Johann Ioannou-Nikolaides, Inar Timiryasov, Vincenzo Piuri
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

GPT-Based Fast Simulation of CLAS12 Detector Hits via Conditional Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2606. 16035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources.

By Cole Granger, James Giroux, Richard Tyson, Maurizio Ungaro, Cristiano Fanelli
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

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.

By Samuel Young, C\'esar Jes\'us-Valls, Kazuhiro Terao
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Deep-learning-based low-energy trigger algorithms for the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment

The paper presents deep‑learning trigger algorithms for the Hyper‑Kamiokande water Cherenkov detector, targeting low‑energy neutrino events below 7 MeV. It compares a supervised neural‑network classifier with two anomaly‑detection methods—an autoencoder and a Manifold Projection‑Diffusion Recovery model—showing the supervised model achieves a 76.7 % signal efficiency for 3 MeV electrons, far surpassing the 26.4 % efficiency of a traditional hit‑count trigger. GPU‑based runtime tests indicate per‑window inference latencies well below one millisecond.

By Katharina Lachner, Sa\'ul Alonso-Monsalve, Benjamin Richards, Davide Sgalaberna
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Cross-simulator transfer with foundation model summaries: Towards robust SKA-era reionization inference

The paper demonstrates that a self‑supervised Vision Transformer (ViT) pretrained on a fast, low‑cost semi‑numerical simulator can produce data summaries that transfer across different simulators without retraining. In 21cm cosmology, the ViT—named SKATR—pretrained on 67,000 21cmFAST lightcones is applied unchanged to hydrodynamical Loreli II lightcones, enabling accurate inference of five astrophysical parameters with fewer radiative‑transfer simulations than a fully‑supervised baseline. SKATR remains accurate, informative, and calibrated even under realistic SKA antenna array noise, outperforming supervised models retrained on noisy data.

By Yannic Pietschke, Caroline Heneka, Ayodele Ore, Romain Meriot
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Generative Monte Carlo Sampling for Constant-Cost Particle Transport

Generative Monte Carlo (GMC) is a new particle transport simulation method that embeds generative AI into solving the linear Boltzmann equation. By treating cell transmission as a conditional generation task, neural networks trained with conditional flow matching produce particle exit states—position, direction, and path length—without simulating scattering histories. GMC generalizes across materials using optical coordinate scaling, matches standard Monte Carlo’s statistical accuracy and convergence, and achieves constant‑cost per cell transmission, offering significant speedups in optically thick regimes.

By Joseph A. Farmer, Aidan Murray, Johannes Krotz, Ryan G. McClarren