Abstract:Recently observed empirical scaling laws describe the performance of foundation-type models as three independent key quantities -- dataset size, compute, and model parameters -- are modified. Extracting these scaling laws informs the training of large complex models for which the tuning of hyperparameters in traditional ways is not feasible. This work for the first time explores if scaling laws can also be observed for the task of particle jet generation -- both relevant as a pre-training objective for foundation models and as in-situ simulation by itself. We indeed replicate the key logarithmic scaling law behavior for model-size scaling. Beyond studying the next token prediction validation loss of the generative model, we also study the sliced Wasserstein distance of five physical quantities that are not immediately available to the model during training. Our study shows that this quantity is monotonically related to the next token prediction validation loss, meaning that this loss is indeed a good proxy for the physics performance. For the scaling with dataset size and compute, we observe substantially weaker scaling behavior of both the loss and the sliced Wasserstein distance. We analyze this behavior by introducing the concept of a learnable window, and argue that autoregressive next token prediction on jet constituents exhibits comparatively rapid saturation relative to language-model studies. We discuss possible origins of this behavior, including the stochastic nature of QCD radiation and differences between generative and supervised learning tasks in collider physics.
Abstract:Autonomous language-model agents are increasingly evaluated on long-horizon tool-use tasks, but existing benchmarks rarely capture the complexity and nuance of real scientific work. To address this gap, we introduce Collider-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating whether LLM agents can reproduce experimental analyses from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using only public papers and open scientific software. Such analyses are often difficult to reproduce because the public toolchain only approximates the software used internally by the experimental collaborations, while the published papers inevitably omit implementation details needed for a faithful reconstruction. Agents must therefore rely on physical reasoning, domain knowledge, and trial-and-error to fill these gaps. Each task requires the agent to turn a published analysis into an executable simulation-and-selection pipeline and submit predicted collision event yields in specified signal regions. These predictions are evaluated with standard histogram metrics that provide continuous fidelity scores without a hand-written rubric. We also report the computational cost incurred by each agent per task. Finally, we evaluate the codebase and full session trace using an LLM judge to catch qualitative failure modes such as fabrications, hallucinations and duplications. We release an initial set of tasks drawn from LHC searches, together with a containerized sandbox and event simulation tools. We evaluate across a capability ladder of general purpose coding agents. Our results show that on average no agent reliably beats the physicist-in-the-loop solution.
Abstract:We introduce Prior-Fitted Functional Flows, a generative foundation model for pharmacokinetics that enables zero-shot population synthesis and individual forecasting without manual parameter tuning. We learn functional vector fields, explicitly conditioned on the sparse, irregular data of an entire study population. This enables the generation of coherent virtual cohorts as well as forecasting of partially observed patient trajectories with calibrated uncertainty. We construct a new open-access literature corpus to inform our priors, and demonstrate state-of-the-art predictive accuracy on extensive real-world datasets.
Abstract:Foundation models are deep learning models pre-trained on large amounts of data which are capable of generalizing to multiple datasets and/or downstream tasks. This work demonstrates how data collected by the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider can be useful in pre-training foundation models for HEP. Specifically, we introduce the AspenOpenJets dataset, consisting of approximately 180M high $p_T$ jets derived from CMS 2016 Open Data. We show how pre-training the OmniJet-$\alpha$ foundation model on AspenOpenJets improves performance on generative tasks with significant domain shift: generating boosted top and QCD jets from the simulated JetClass dataset. In addition to demonstrating the power of pre-training of a jet-based foundation model on actual proton-proton collision data, we provide the ML-ready derived AspenOpenJets dataset for further public use.




Abstract:Jets at the LHC, typically consisting of a large number of highly correlated particles, are a fascinating laboratory for deep generative modeling. In this paper, we present two novel methods that generate LHC jets as point clouds efficiently and accurately. We introduce \epcjedi, which combines score-matching diffusion models with the Equivariant Point Cloud (EPiC) architecture based on the deep sets framework. This model offers a much faster alternative to previous transformer-based diffusion models without reducing the quality of the generated jets. In addition, we introduce \epcfm, the first permutation equivariant continuous normalizing flow (CNF) for particle cloud generation. This model is trained with {\it flow-matching}, a scalable and easy-to-train objective based on optimal transport that directly regresses the vector fields connecting the Gaussian noise prior to the data distribution. Our experiments demonstrate that \epcjedi and \epcfm both achieve state-of-the-art performance on the top-quark JetNet datasets whilst maintaining fast generation speed. Most notably, we find that the \epcfm model consistently outperforms all the other generative models considered here across every metric. Finally, we also introduce two new particle cloud performance metrics: the first based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence between feature distributions, the second is the negative log-posterior of a multi-model ParticleNet classifier.