CaloScore v2: Single-shot Calorimeter Shower Simulation with Diffusion Models

Abstract

Diffusion generative models are promising alternatives for fast surrogate models, producing high-fidelity physics simulations. However, the generation time often requires an expensive denoising process with hundreds of function evaluations, restricting the current applicability of these models in a realistic setting. In this work, we report updates on the CaloScore architecture, detailing the changes in the diffusion process, which produces higher quality samples, and the use of progressive distillation, resulting in a diffusion model capable of generating new samples with a single function evaluation. We demonstrate these improvements using the Calorimeter Simulation Challenge 2022 dataset.