Even Faster Simulations with Flow Matching: A Study of Zero Degree Calorimeter Responses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flow matching-based surrogate model for fast, high-fidelity simulations of zero degree calorimeters in high-energy physics, significantly reducing computational costs while maintaining accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a novel training strategy for flow matching models that achieves state-of-the-art simulation fidelity with very low parameter count and high speed in HEP calorimeter simulations.

Findings

Achieves Wasserstein distance of 1.27 for neutron detector simulation.

Reduces inference time to 0.46 ms per sample, much faster than previous methods.

Latent FM model further reduces sampling time to 0.026 ms per sample.

Abstract

Recent advances in generative neural networks, particularly flow matching (FM), have enabled the generation of high-fidelity samples while significantly reducing computational costs. A promising application of these models is accelerating simulations in high-energy physics (HEP), helping research institutions meet their increasing computational demands. In this work, we leverage FM to develop surrogate models for fast simulations of zero degree calorimeters in the ALICE experiment. We present an effective training strategy that enables the training of fast generative models with an exceptionally low number of parameters. This approach achieves state-of-the-art simulation fidelity for both neutron (ZN) and proton (ZP) detectors, while offering substantial reductions in computational costs compared to existing methods. Our FM model achieves a Wasserstein distance of 1.27 for the ZN simulation with an inference time of 0.46 ms per sample, compared to the current best of 1.20 with an inference time of approximately 109 ms. The latent FM model further improves the inference speed, reducing the sampling time to 0.026 ms per sample, with a minimal trade-off in accuracy. Similarly, our approach achieves a Wasserstein distance of 1.30 for the ZP simulation, outperforming the current best of 2.08. The source code is available at https://github.com/m-wojnar/faster_zdc.