Cross-Domain Transfer with Particle Physics Foundation Models: From Jets to Neutrino Interactions
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →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.
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