Towards foundation-style models for energy-frontier heterogeneous neutrino detectors via self-supervised pre-training

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised learning framework using sparse ViT models to improve interpretation of complex, heterogeneous neutrino detector data at the energy frontier, enhancing performance and data efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel self-supervised pre-training approach for heterogeneous detector data, enabling better representation learning and transferability in neutrino physics analysis.

Findings

Pre-training improves neutrino flavor and charm-quark identification.

Relational objectives enhance performance in complex topologies.

Pre-trained models match or surpass baselines on various benchmarks.

Abstract

Accelerator-based neutrino physics is entering an energy-frontier regime in which interactions reach the TeV scale and produce exceptionally dense, overlapping detector signatures. In this regime, event interpretation becomes impractical for conventional reconstruction approaches, particularly when labelled data are scarce and the analysis spans diverse downstream objectives. We present a sparse ViT framework for learning reusable representations from heterogeneous detector data. Self-supervised pre-training combines masked autoencoder reconstruction with relational voxel-level objectives for hierarchy, ghost and particle identification, and the resulting shared encoder is then jointly fine-tuned across classification and regression tasks. Evaluated on simulated events from the proposed FASERCal concept at the LHC, we find that pre-training consistently improves neutrino flavour and charm-quark identification, momentum regression, and vertex reconstruction over training from scratch, with the addition of relational objectives yielding further gains in the most topologically complex channels. Interpretability analyses further show that pre-training yields a more structured latent space, while detector-subsystem ablations recover physically plausible channel-dependent roles for the heterogeneous inputs. A data-efficiency study shows that, with roughly $10^3$ labelled events, the pre-trained encoder already matches the flavour-classification performance of a randomly initialised model trained on an order of magnitude more data. The learned representations also transfer effectively to publicly available benchmarks spanning different detector technologies and energy scales, matching or exceeding published baselines. These results support self-supervised pre-training on multimodal detector data as a scalable route towards reusable representations for neutrino and particle-detector analysis.