Scaling Collider Event Generation with Residual-Quantized Tokens
Full detector simulation and reconstruction of collider events are projected to become major bottlenecks at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, motivating the development of fast, ML-based surrogates. At the same time, LLMs have driven fast progress in generative discrete modeling: autoregressive transformers trained on tokenized data now represent the state of the art across a range of generative tasks. We extend the discrete modeling paradigm by introducing a particle-level generative model trained on residual-quantized full-event data. We demonstrate the ability of this model family to perform conditional generation from detector-stable particles; we study its scaling behavior across a range of dataset and model sizes, characterize the effects of repeated data exposure and demonstrate that token-level loss systematically predicts downstream physical fidelity. These results provide an empirical framework for scalable collider full-event generation based on residual-quantized representations.