Brown University

Learning the Geometry of Collider Events with Metric-Aware Deep Sets

Description

Abstract:
Optimal transport gives structured data a geometry, but exact evaluation is costly in large pairwise analyses that exploit relationships among distances. Learned surrogates are faster, but need not preserve this metric structure. We develop a Deep Sets surrogate for OT between variable-size weighted point clouds that enforces non-negativity, exchange symmetry, and zero self-distance, leaving the triangle inequality unconstrained. Applied to the Energy Mover’s Distance between collider events in a particle physics application, the Metric-Aware Particle Flow Network achieves percent-level mean absolute percentage error while significantly improving inference throughput over other exact and approximate methods surveyed. The architectural constraints are found to improve properties that are not explicitly enforced: across 10^6 held-out event triplets, triangle-inequality violations fall from 199 for a matched unconstrained network to 2, and the maximum from 149.5 to 5.8 GeV. These results demonstrate that targeted inductive biases can yield fast neural surrogates with substantially improved geometric fidelity.

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Use and Reproduction
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Rights
In Copyright

Citation

Lauren Hay, Rishabh Jain, Matt LeBlanc, et al., "Learning the Geometry of Collider Events with Metric-Aware Deep Sets" (2026). Open Publications at Brown. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/1f5r-bs32

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