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

TL;DR

This paper presents HEPT, a locality-sensitive hashing-based point transformer optimized for large-scale scientific point cloud data, achieving high accuracy and efficiency in high-energy physics applications.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel LSH-based transformer model with a detailed analysis of sparsification techniques, demonstrating superior performance in scientific large-scale point cloud processing.

Findings

LSH, especially OR & AND-construction, effectively approximates kernels for large point clouds.

HEPT outperforms existing GNNs and transformers in accuracy and speed on HEP tasks.

The model achieves near-linear complexity with hardware-friendly operations.

Abstract

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 (HEPT), which combines E$^2$LSH with OR & AND constructions and is built upon regular computations. HEPT demonstrates remarkable performance on 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 https://github.com/Graph-COM/HEPT.