Contrastive Metric Learning for Point Cloud Segmentation in Highly Granular Detectors

We propose a novel clustering approach for point-cloud segmentation based on supervised contrastive metric learning (CML). Rather than predicting cluster assignments or object-centric variables, the method learns a latent representation in which points belonging to the same object are embedded nearby while unrelated points are separated. Clusters are then reconstructed using a density-based readout in the learned metric space, decoupling representation learning from cluster formation and enabling flexible inference. The approach is evaluated on simulated data from a highly granular calorimeter, where the task is to separate highly overlapping particle showers represented as sets of calorimeter hits. A direct comparison with object condensation (OC) is performed using identical graph neural network backbones and equal latent dimensionality, isolating the effect of the learning objective. The CML method produces a more stable and separable embedding geometry for both electromagnetic and hadronic particle showers, leading to improved local neighbourhood consistency, a more reliable separation of overlapping showers, and better generalization when extrapolating to unseen multiplicities and energies. This translates directly into higher reconstruction efficiency and purity, particularly in high-multiplicity regimes, as well as improved energy resolution. In mixed-particle environments, CML maintains strong performance, suggesting robust learning of the shower topology, while OC exhibits significant degradation. These results demonstrate that similarity-based representation learning combined with density-based aggregation is a promising alternative to object-centric approaches for point cloud segmentation in highly granular detectors.

Machine Learning on Heterogeneous, Edge, and Quantum Hardware for Particle Physics (ML-HEQUPP)

The next generation of particle physics experiments will face a new era of challenges in data acquisition, due to unprecedented data rates and volumes along with extreme environments and operational constraints. Harnessing this data for scientific discovery demands real-time inference and decision-making, intelligent data reduction, and efficient processing architectures beyond current capabilities. Crucial to the success of this experimental paradigm are several emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) and silicon microelectronics, and the advent of quantum algorithms and processing. Their intersection includes areas of research such as low-power and low-latency devices for edge computing, heterogeneous accelerator systems, reconfigurable hardware, novel codesign and synthesis strategies, readout for cryogenic or high-radiation environments, and analog computing. This white paper presents a community-driven vision to identify and prioritize research and development opportunities in hardware-based ML systems and corresponding physics applications, contributing towards a successful transition to the new data frontier of fundamental science.

ParticleNet: Jet Tagging via Particle Clouds

How to represent a jet is at the core of machine learning on jet physics. Inspired by the notion of point cloud, we propose a new approach that considers a jet as an unordered set of its constituent particles, effectively a "particle cloud". Such particle cloud representation of jets is efficient in incorporating raw information of jets and also explicitly respects the permutation symmetry. Based on the particle cloud representation, we propose ParticleNet, a customized neural network architecture using Dynamic Graph CNN for jet tagging problems. The ParticleNet architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two representative jet tagging benchmarks and improves significantly over existing methods.