Reliable edge machine learning hardware for scientific applications

Extreme data rate scientific experiments create massive amounts of data that require efficient ML edge processing. This leads to unique validation challenges for VLSI implementations of ML algorithms: enabling bit-accurate functional simulations for performance validation in experimental software frameworks, verifying those ML models are robust under extreme quantization and pruning, and enabling ultra-fine-grained model inspection for efficient fault tolerance. We discuss approaches to developing and validating reliable algorithms at the scientific edge under such strict latency, resource, power, and area requirements in extreme experimental environments. We study metrics for developing robust algorithms, present preliminary results and mitigation strategies, and conclude with an outlook of these and future directions of research towards the longer-term goal of developing autonomous scientific experimentation methods for accelerated scientific discovery.

Locality-Sensitive Hashing-Based Efficient Point Transformer with Applications in High-Energy Physics

This study introduces a novel transformer model optimized for large-scale point cloud processing in scientific domains such as high-energy physics (HEP) and astrophysics. Addressing the limitations of graph neural networks and standard transformers, our model integrates local inductive bias and achieves near-linear complexity with hardware-friendly regular operations. One contribution of this work is the quantitative analysis of the error-complexity tradeoff of various sparsification techniques for building efficient transformers. Our findings highlight the superiority of using locality-sensitive hashing (LSH), especially OR \& AND-construction LSH, in kernel approximation for large-scale point cloud data with local inductive bias. Based on this finding, we propose LSH-based Efficient Point Transformer (\textbf{HEPT}), which combines E$^2$LSH with OR \& AND constructions and is built upon regular computations. HEPT demonstrates remarkable performance in two critical yet time-consuming HEP tasks, significantly outperforming existing GNNs and transformers in accuracy and computational speed, marking a significant advancement in geometric deep learning and large-scale scientific data processing. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Graph-COM/HEPT}.

Sets are all you need: Ultrafast jet classification on FPGAs for HL-LHC

We study various machine learning based algorithms for performing accurate jet flavor classification on field-programmable gate arrays and demonstrate how latency and resource consumption scale with the input size and choice of algorithm. These architectures provide an initial design for models that could be used for tagging at the CERN LHC during its high-luminosity phase. The high-luminosity upgrade will lead to a five-fold increase in its instantaneous luminosity for proton-proton collisions and, in turn, higher data volume and complexity, such as the availability of jet constituents. Through quantization-aware training and efficient hardware implementations, we show that O(100) ns inference of complex architectures such as deep sets and interaction networks is feasible at a low computational resource cost.

Neural Architecture Codesign for Fast Bragg Peak Analysis

We develop an automated pipeline to streamline neural architecture codesign for fast, real-time Bragg peak analysis in high-energy diffraction microscopy. Traditional approaches, notably pseudo-Voigt fitting, demand significant computational resources, prompting interest in deep learning models for more efficient solutions. Our method employs neural architecture search and AutoML to enhance these models, including hardware costs, leading to the discovery of more hardware-efficient neural architectures. Our results match the performance, while achieving a 13$\times$ reduction in bit operations compared to the previous state-of-the-art. We show further speedup through model compression techniques such as quantization-aware-training and neural network pruning. Additionally, our hierarchical search space provides greater flexibility in optimization, which can easily extend to other tasks and domains.

Induced Generative Adversarial Particle Transformers

In high energy physics (HEP), machine learning methods have emerged as an effective way to accurately simulate particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The message-passing generative adversarial network (MPGAN) was the first model to simulate collisions as point, or ``particle'', clouds, with state-of-the-art results, but suffered from quadratic time complexity. Recently, generative adversarial particle transformers (GAPTs) were introduced to address this drawback; however, results did not surpass MPGAN. We introduce induced GAPT (iGAPT) which, by integrating ``induced particle-attention blocks'' and conditioning on global jet attributes, not only offers linear time complexity but is also able to capture intricate jet substructure, surpassing MPGAN in many metrics. Our experiments demonstrate the potential of iGAPT to simulate complex HEP data accurately and efficiently.

Scalable neural network models and terascale datasets for particle-flow reconstruction

We study scalable machine learning models for full event reconstruction in high-energy electron-positron collisions based on a highly granular detector simulation. Particle-flow (PF) reconstruction can be formulated as a supervised learning task using tracks and calorimeter clusters or hits. We compare a graph neural network and kernel-based transformer and demonstrate that both avoid quadratic memory allocation and computational cost while achieving realistic PF reconstruction. We show that hyperparameter tuning on a supercomputer significantly improves the physics performance of the models. We also demonstrate that the resulting model is highly portable across hardware processors, supporting Nvidia, AMD, and Intel Habana cards. Finally, we demonstrate that the model can be trained on highly granular inputs consisting of tracks and calorimeter hits, resulting in a competitive physics performance with the baseline. Datasets and software to reproduce the studies are published following the findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) principles.

Low Latency Edge Classification GNN for Particle Trajectory Tracking on FPGAs

In-time particle trajectory reconstruction in the Large Hadron Collider is challenging due to the high collision rate and numerous particle hits. Using GNN (Graph Neural Network) on FPGA has enabled superior accuracy with flexible trajectory classification. However, existing GNN architectures have inefficient resource usage and insufficient parallelism for edge classification. This paper introduces a resource-efficient GNN architecture on FPGAs for low latency particle tracking. The modular architecture facilitates design scalability to support large graphs. Leveraging the geometric properties of hit detectors further reduces graph complexity and resource usage. Our results on Xilinx UltraScale+ VU9P demonstrate 1625x and 1574x performance improvement over CPU and GPU respectively.

Differentiable Earth Mover's Distance for Data Compression at the High-Luminosity LHC

The Earth mover's distance (EMD) is a useful metric for image recognition and classification, but its usual implementations are not differentiable or too slow to be used as a loss function for training other algorithms via gradient descent. In this paper, we train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn a differentiable, fast approximation of the EMD and demonstrate that it can be used as a substitute for computing-intensive EMD implementations. We apply this differentiable approximation in the training of an autoencoder-inspired neural network (encoder NN) for data compression at the high-luminosity LHC at CERN. The goal of this encoder NN is to compress the data while preserving the information related to the distribution of energy deposits in particle detectors. We demonstrate that the performance of our encoder NN trained using the differentiable EMD CNN surpasses that of training with loss functions based on mean squared error.

End-to-end codesign of Hessian-aware quantized neural networks for FPGAs and ASICs

We develop an end-to-end workflow for the training and implementation of co-designed neural networks (NNs) for efficient field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) hardware. Our approach leverages Hessian-aware quantization (HAWQ) of NNs, the Quantized Open Neural Network Exchange (QONNX) intermediate representation, and the hls4ml tool flow for transpiling NNs into FPGA and ASIC firmware. This makes efficient NN implementations in hardware accessible to nonexperts, in a single open-sourced workflow that can be deployed for real-time machine learning applications in a wide range of scientific and industrial settings. We demonstrate the workflow in a particle physics application involving trigger decisions that must operate at the 40 MHz collision rate of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Given the high collision rate, all data processing must be implemented on custom ASIC and FPGA hardware within a strict area and latency. Based on these constraints, we implement an optimized mixed-precision NN classifier for high-momentum particle jets in simulated LHC proton-proton collisions.

Progress towards an improved particle flow algorithm at CMS with machine learning

The particle-flow (PF) algorithm, which infers particles based on tracks and calorimeter clusters, is of central importance to event reconstruction in the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, and has been a focus of development in light of planned Phase-2 running conditions with an increased pileup and detector granularity. In recent years, the machine learned particle-flow (MLPF) algorithm, a graph neural network that performs PF reconstruction, has been explored in CMS, with the possible advantages of directly optimizing for the physical quantities of interest, being highly reconfigurable to new conditions, and being a natural fit for deployment to heterogeneous accelerators. We discuss progress in CMS towards an improved implementation of the MLPF reconstruction, now optimized using generator/simulation-level particle information as the target for the first time. This paves the way to potentially improving the detector response in terms of physical quantities of interest. We describe the simulation-based training target, progress and studies on event-based loss terms, details on the model hyperparameter tuning, as well as physics validation with respect to the current PF algorithm in terms of high-level physical quantities such as the jet and missing transverse momentum resolutions. We find that the MLPF algorithm, trained on a generator/simulator level particle information for the first time, results in broadly compatible particle and jet reconstruction performance with the baseline PF, setting the stage for improving the physics performance by additional training statistics and model tuning.