arXiv Machine Learning

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Towards a Physics Foundation Model

arXiv:2509. 13805v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing through a ``train once, deploy anywhere'' paradigm, where a single pre-trained model adapts to countless downstream tasks without retraining.

By Florian Wiesner, Zo\"e J. Gray, Matthias Wessling, Stephen Baek
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 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
Sep 10

Mind the Gap: Navigating Inference with Optimal Transport Maps

The paper introduces a model calibration method using optimal transport to address discrepancies between simulation and experimental data in high-dimensional machine learning applications. Applied to jet tagging in particle physics, the technique calibrates a 128‑dimensional latent representation from a general‑purpose classifier, ensuring downstream derived quantities are properly calibrated. This enables more reliable use of foundation models for jet flavor analysis in LHC experiments and offers a general framework for correcting high‑dimensional simulations across scientific fields.

By Malte Algren, Tobias Golling, Francesco Armando Di Bello, Christopher Pollard
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
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