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63 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Comparing Classical and Quantum Machine Learning for Regression in High Energy Physics Collision Data

The classification and regression of particle collision events constitute a persistent computational challenge in experimental high energy physics, where large volumes of simulated data must be processed with both speed and precision. This work carries out a systematic comparison of four classical machine learning architectures, support vector machines (SVM), artificial neural networks (ANN), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks against their quantum counterparts: quantum SVM (QSVM), quantum neural networks (QNN), quantum CNN (QCNN), and quantum LSTM (QLSTM). All models are trained on simulated proton-proton collision events with electron-positron and muon-antimuon final states from the CERN Open Data portal, using transverse-momentum components as input features and transverse-momentum magnitude as the regression target. Classical architectures, and in particular the CNN and LSTM, achieve marginally better quantitative performance under current hardware and dataset constraints. Quantum models, however, reach competitive accuracy with substantially fewer trainable parameters: the QCNN reproduces the performance of the deep classical CNN using only four qubits and a circuit of depth three, pointing to a genuine parameter-efficiency advantage on near-term quantum devices. A baseline analysis confirms that the regression problem is non-trivial for shallow polynomial fits, supporting the relevance of the architectural comparison. These results characterize the trade-offs between classical and quantum approaches under realistic, resource-constrained conditions and provide a benchmark for future studies on actual quantum hardware.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

What Neural Network Field Theory Can and Cannot Realise on a Computer

One aim of neural network field theory is to put a quantum or effective field theory on a computer, with the network ensemble itself as the theory. We ask how far that aim can be pushed for a function class regular enough to be computed with. Our main result is a no-go theorem with assumptions that hold for standard network architectures. We use it to separate four versions of neural network field theory, according to whether the defining object is the finite width ensemble or its infinite width limit, and whether the target we want to compute is a quantum or an effective field theory. Neither finite width interpretation is straightforwardly consistent. For finite width ensembles with finite variance at each point, the QFT interpretation fails reflection positivity, while the EFT interpretation establishes no scale separation by which the positivity violation can be placed outside its domain of validity. Of the two limit versions, one can be simulated in full and the other only in part, as only its smeared correlators are computable with a controlled error. As such, at the level of a controlled numerical computation, the QFT and EFT versions cannot be distinguished. One dimension escapes the obstruction, yet reflection positivity is shown to still fail there at every finite width for the cosine network. Two escapes from the theorem remain, giving up either finite variance at a point or exact rotation invariance, and we discuss both of these possibilities.

hep-th↗

arXiv2026

Learning to Trace Seiberg Dualities

Dualities play an important role in establishing both microscopic and emergent phenomena in a wide range of physical systems. In practice, though, it can often be computationally challenging to establish when two systems are dual, even when all of the "rules of the game" are well-known. Said differently, when confronted with two systems, how can one efficiently establish that they are in fact dual? In this paper we use machine learning methods to address this question for Seiberg dualities of supersymmetric quiver gauge theories. Mathematically, this involves establishing mutations of quivers, which is in turn a variation on the theme of "learning to unknot". On the one hand, this leads us to a practical tool for establishing the computational complexity of different dualities. On the other hand, it also allows us to study how different network architectures learn how to trace Seiberg dualities. We find that for quivers with a modest number of quiver nodes (of order $10$), different network architectures consisting of transformers and multi-layer perceptrons tend to outperform deterministic algorithms. Supplementing the network by well-established pathfinder algorithms (essentially "Google Maps for quivers") leads to an additional improvement in the efficiency and accuracy of the search strategy. We anticipate that this class of questions can serve as a useful benchmark for frontier AI models applied to theoretical physics.

hep-th↗

arXiv2026

Operator-Guided Model Reduction for Generative Sampling in Lattice Field Theory

Neural generative samplers for lattice field theory can be costly to train and evaluate. When they miss modes or assign them incorrect relative weights, biased observables do not reveal which collective variables are responsible. We project a trained flow-matching velocity onto vector fields built from lattice operators and Fourier modes. In two-dimensional lattice $ϕ^4$ theory, the projection separates changes in the overall magnetization from the lowest nonzero-momentum fluctuations and guides an explicit invertible proposal that treats them separately. Allowing the amplitude of the lowest nonzero-momentum fluctuations to depend on the magnetization improves the overlap between the proposal and target distributions, while the same two-parameter modification at higher momenta gives smaller improvements. The Metropolis--Hastings correction defines a Markov chain with the target Boltzmann distribution as its stationary law, and the normalized proposal density yields finite-volume partition-function estimates consistent with an independent HMC calculation. At the larger tested volume, the overlap between the proposal and target distributions deteriorates substantially, limiting the range over which the same parameterization remains effective.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2026

Panda Diplomacy: Foundation Model Pre-training across Particle Imaging Detectors for High Energy and Nuclear Physics

Foundation models are increasingly being pursued in particle and nuclear physics, but existing approaches remain strongly tied to individual experiments through detector-specific architectures or pre-training objectives, limiting their reuse across sensing modalities. We show that a point cloud self-distillation framework yields a substantially more general sensor-level pre-training recipe. We show that the same refined architecture and objective can be independently pre-trained with minimal changes on three qualitatively different detector modalities: liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC), collider TPC, and water Cherenkov. Using 1,000 labeled images for downstream task adaptation, Panda V2 matches or exceeds specialized foundation-model baselines trained with orders of magnitude more supervision, matching state-of-the-art particle-clustering performance with 70x fewer labeled events on sPHENIX while substantially improving particle identification, and on LArTPC data matching Panda (arXiv:2512.01324) particle reconstruction with up to 1,000x fewer labels. Beyond reconstruction, simple linear probes reveal physically meaningful latent structure associated with particle causality and track curvature.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

ConCA: Concentration-Aware Channel Attention for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition

Lightweight channel attention mechanisms are widely used in image classification, yet their effectiveness in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) remains limited. Most modules summarize each channel by global average pooling (GAP), which captures activation magnitude but ignores spatial concentration, so channels with different spatial distributions but identical means receive the same descriptor. We propose Concentration-Aware Channel Attention (ConCA), which pairs the mean with a shift-invariant negative-input entropy (NegEnt), computed via a softmax over the negated activations, forming a dual descriptor that jointly encodes magnitude and concentration. A depthwise 1-D convolutional multi-layer perceptron (MLP), whose parameter count is linear in the number of channels, maps the pair to a per-channel weight. On six fine-grained benchmarks, ConCA improves over attention-free, SE-Net, and ECA-Net baselines as well as four richer descriptor-based modules under a controlled from-scratch protocol, and it generalizes across eight backbones on iNat2021-mini. These results indicate that the channel descriptor, together with the per-channel gating that maps it to attention weights, is an important but underexplored aspect of lightweight channel attention in FGVR.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

Client-side transparent caching for remote ROOT data analysis

High-energy physics analyses often process the same data as physicists refine algorithms and test new ideas. With data increasingly read from remote storage, each iteration is subject to network latency and depends on network bandwidth and shared-storage throughput, which can vary substantially under load. We present uCache (xrd-ucache), a transparent client-side cache implemented as an XRootD client plugin that requires neither server-side deployment nor changes to analysis code. It uses local storage on the analysis machine as a cache layer between the network and memory. The cache stores only the data actually read by an analysis. It can also rebuild cached data into a branch-aligned, recompressed form, eliminating most of the input/output and decompression costs of subsequent passes. We benchmark the cache using the Analysis Grand Challenge top quark pair analysis on public CMS Open Data compressed with zlib and LZMA. Filling the cache adds essentially no overhead compared with a direct read. Subsequent passes are 1.6-8.8 times faster from the byte cache and 2.1-15.7 times faster from the recompressed cache. For a typical analysis, a 1 TB cache suffices for datasets of 10-20 TB. The largest improvements occur when the remote data source is heavily loaded or geographically distant.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Reliable LLM-Generated Programs for High-Energy Physics Experiments through Graph-Grounded Software Knowledge

Extracting physics information from modern particle-physics experiments requires multistage analyses implemented on top of large and highly interconnected software ecosystems. General-purpose large language models (LLMs) often produce unreliable programs for such tasks because a user request alone rarely specifies the required APIs, dependencies, and usage conventions. We organize these software relations before generation and retrieve task-relevant knowledge at inference time. Using the open-source ROOT framework as a representative and reproducible testbed, we evaluate a complete grounding system that combines hybrid retrieval over a heterogeneous software knowledge graph, skill-selected workflow examples, and execution-guided repair. On a benchmark of 275 ROOT tasks, grounding improves first-attempt execution from 58.5% to 76.0% under Claude Code orchestration and from 51.3% to 64.0% under standalone orchestration. Final success increases from 90.5% to 96.0% and from 78.9% to 90.9%, respectively, while the average generation cost per successful task increases by only 1.3% and 3.2%. The gains persist under a strong coding agent, indicating that explicit software knowledge remains valuable even when agentic scaffolding is already in place. Because the method captures software relations common to large codebases rather than facts specific to ROOT or a particular model, it should transfer to other experiment frameworks and proprietary software, especially where documentation is sparse or internal dependencies are complex.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

A simple derivation of the Kalman filter

In this lecture note, we present a concise and self-contained derivation of the discrete-time Kalman filter equations that requires only a basic understanding of least squares estimation. The treatment is designed to minimize mathematical overhead while preserving both rigor and generality.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

On the Complexity of Bayesian Signal Processing

We develop a computational framework for Bayesian decision-making. We show that as long as no action is optimal in every state, Bayes-optimal choice is intractable. This hardness need not arise from large action, state, or signal spaces, nor from a complicated represented utility function: extracting enough information from a hard-to-interpret signal to act optimally can itself be computationally hard. We also characterize tractability across approximation notions and identify their sources of difficulty. Under the probably approximately correct criterion, sample-based Bayesian learning is tractable if and only if the signal support is bounded. Our results provide justifications for bounded rationality, costly Bayesian inference, and sample-based Bayesian learning.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Sharp mean-field analysis of permutation mixtures and permutation-invariant decisions

We develop sharp bounds on the statistical distance between high-dimensional permutation mixtures and their i.i.d. counterparts. Our approach establishes a new geometric link between the spectrum of a complex channel overlap matrix and the information geometry of the channel, yielding tight dimension-independent bounds that close gaps left by previous work. Within this geometric framework, we also derive dimension-dependent bounds that uncover phase transitions in dimensionality for Gaussian and Poisson families. Applied to compound decision problems, this refined control of permutation mixtures enables sharper mean-field analyses of permutation-invariant decision rules, yielding strong non-asymptotic equivalence results between two notions of compound regret in Gaussian and Poisson models.

math.ST↗

arXiv2026

A Complete Characterization of Tensorizable $f$-divergences

Csiszar's formulation of the $f$-divergence introduced a vast family of functionals for quantifying dissimilarity between probability distributions. However, many applications in statistics and information theory rely only on a few $f$-divergences, such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the $χ^2$-divergence, and the squared Hellinger distance. These divergences are especially useful because they admit simple compositional formulas under product measures, a property sometimes referred to as tensorization. In this work, we refine a formalism of tensorization previously introduced in the literature. Then, we show that any possible tensorization formula has a multi-affine form characterized by a single parameter, and identify all tensorizable $f$-divergences under our adopted notion of tensorization.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

From the Social Choice Problem to a Collusion-Proof Tendering Mechanism for Dynamic Stochastic Projects

The VCG family and the AGV mechanism are two classical approaches to efficient implementation in the static social choice problem. In 2024, Csóka et al. showed that AGV has critical weaknesses. In contrast, the transferable-utility Guaranteed Utility Mechanism (TU-GUM) retains all the standard desirable properties of AGV while adding further ones, including collusion-proofness, because it implements efficiency in Guaranteed Utility Equilibrium. TU-GUM also applies to a more general dynamic setting with multiple extensions. Moreover, TU-GUM is a special case of an even more general and robust mechanism that combines contingent first-price tendering with the coordinated execution of dynamic stochastic multi-agent projects through a surprisingly simple rule. This paper summarizes and connects existing results from a different perspective, with some minor new observations.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Mechanism Design for Alignment and Control

We develop a framework for mechanism design with AI agents whose alignment (preferences) and capabilities (feasible actions and information) are unknown. We want such agents to act on our behalf so mechanisms must incentivize both honesty and obedience. A one-sided imitation structure---capabilities can be concealed but not counterfeited---yields a revelation principle, a characterization of implementable policies via nested cyclical monotonicity, and conditions under which eliciting higher-order beliefs can discipline multiple agents. We apply our framework to stylized examples of (i) sandbagging in which a more capable agent pretends to be less capable; (ii) an alignment--interpretability trade-off, where the two are substitutes in the instrument but complements in value; (iii) discipline via peer scoring; (iv) coupling rewards to induce competition among multiple agents; and (v) scalable oversight and reward shaping.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Branch Scaling Manifests as Implicit Architectural Regularization for Improving Generalization in Overparameterized ResNets

Scaling factors in residual branches have emerged as a prevalent method for boosting neural network performance, especially in normalization-free architectures. While prior work has primarily examined scaling effects from an optimization perspective, this paper investigates their role in residual architectures through the lens of generalization theory. Specifically, we establish that wide residual networks (ResNets) with constant scaling factors become asymptotically unlearnable as depth increases. In contrast, when the scaling factor exhibits rapid depth-wise decay combined with early stopping, over-parameterized ResNets achieve minimax-optimal generalization rates. To establish this, we demonstrate that the generalization capability of wide ResNets can be approximated by kernel regression associated with the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). Our theoretical findings are validated through experiments on synthetic data and real-world classification tasks, including MNIST and CIFAR-100.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Scale-robust Auctions

We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximation of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We first show that it is without loss of optimality to restrict attention to scale-invariant mechanisms whenever the family of possible distributions is closed under every positive rescaling. This conclusion uses no regularity or other distributional shape restriction. We then solve the two-agent, single-item problem with values drawn i.i.d. from an unknown regular distribution when only a high value bidder can receive a positive allocation. The robustly optimal mechanism in this class randomizes between the second-price auction, with probability approximately 0.806, and a markup auction that offers the item to the highest-valued bidder at a price equal to 2.447 times the second-highest value. Its worst-case approximation ratio is approximately 1.907.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2026

Categorical algebra of conditional probability

In the field of categorical probability, one uses concepts and techniques from category theory, such as monads and monoidal categories, to study the structures of probability and statistics. In this paper, we connect some ideas from categorical algebra, namely weakly cartesian functors and natural transformations, to the idea of conditioning in probability theory, using Markov categories and probability monads. First of all, we show that under some conditions, the monad associated to a Markov category with conditionals has a weakly cartesian functor and weakly cartesian multiplication. In particular, we show that this is the case for the Giry monad on standard Borel spaces. We then connect this theory to existing results on statistical experiments. We show that for deterministic statistical experiments, the so-called standard measure construction (which can be seen as a generalization of the ``hypernormalizations'' introduced by Jacobs) satisfies a universal property, allowing an equivalent definition which does not rely on the existence of conditionals.

math.CT↗

arXiv2026

Sub-Gaussian Concentration and Entropic Normality of the Maximum Likelihood Estimator

It is well known that, under standard regularity conditions, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) satisfies a central limit theorem and converges in distribution to a Gaussian random variable as the sample size grows. This paper strengthens this classical result by developing several stronger forms of asymptotic normality for the normalized MLE. With additional assumptions on the score, we first establish sub-Gaussian tail bounds and convergence of all moments for the normalized estimation error. We then prove an entropic central limit theorem for a smoothed version of the estimator, showing convergence in relative entropy to the limiting Gaussian law. When the Fisher information of the normalized estimate is bounded, or its density has bounded first derivative, we further show that the smoothing can be removed, yielding entropic normality of the MLE itself. The proofs develop auxiliary tools that may be of independent interest, including exponential consistency bounds, high-moment estimates, and entropy-control arguments for the estimator.

cs.IT↗