Differentiable Surrogate for Detector Simulation and Design with Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nguyen, Xuan Tung, Chen, Long, Dorigo, Tommaso, Gauger, Nicolas R., Vischia, Pietro, Nardi, Federico, Awais, Muhammad, Hanif, Hamza, Abbas, Shahzaib, Kapoor, Rukshak
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Nguyen, Xuan Tung
Chen, Long
Dorigo, Tommaso
Gauger, Nicolas R.
Vischia, Pietro
Nardi, Federico
Awais, Muhammad
Hanif, Hamza
Abbas, Shahzaib
Kapoor, Rukshak
author_facet Nguyen, Xuan Tung
Chen, Long
Dorigo, Tommaso
Gauger, Nicolas R.
Vischia, Pietro
Nardi, Federico
Awais, Muhammad
Hanif, Hamza
Abbas, Shahzaib
Kapoor, Rukshak
contents In this work, we present a conditional denoising-diffusion surrogate for electromagnetic calorimeter showers that is trained to generate high-fidelity energy-deposition maps conditioned on key detector and beam parameters. The model employs efficient inference using Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model sampling and is pre-trained on GEANT4 simulations before being adapted to a new calorimeter geometry through Low-Rank Adaptation, requiring only a small post-training dataset. We evaluate physically meaningful observables, including total deposited energy, energy-weighted radius, and shower dispersion, obtaining relative root mean square error values below 2% for representative high-energy cases. This is in line with state-of-the-art calorimeter surrogates which report comparable fidelity on high-level observables. Furthermore, we compare gradients of a reconstruction-based utility function with respect to design parameters between the surrogate and finite-difference references. The diffusion surrogate reproduces the qualitative structure and directional trends of the true utility landscape, providing usable sensitivities for gradient-based optimization. These results show that diffusion-based surrogates can accelerate simulation-driven detector design while enabling differentiable, gradient-informed analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_07859
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differentiable Surrogate for Detector Simulation and Design with Diffusion Models
Nguyen, Xuan Tung
Chen, Long
Dorigo, Tommaso
Gauger, Nicolas R.
Vischia, Pietro
Nardi, Federico
Awais, Muhammad
Hanif, Hamza
Abbas, Shahzaib
Kapoor, Rukshak
Instrumentation and Detectors
High Energy Physics - Experiment
In this work, we present a conditional denoising-diffusion surrogate for electromagnetic calorimeter showers that is trained to generate high-fidelity energy-deposition maps conditioned on key detector and beam parameters. The model employs efficient inference using Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model sampling and is pre-trained on GEANT4 simulations before being adapted to a new calorimeter geometry through Low-Rank Adaptation, requiring only a small post-training dataset. We evaluate physically meaningful observables, including total deposited energy, energy-weighted radius, and shower dispersion, obtaining relative root mean square error values below 2% for representative high-energy cases. This is in line with state-of-the-art calorimeter surrogates which report comparable fidelity on high-level observables. Furthermore, we compare gradients of a reconstruction-based utility function with respect to design parameters between the surrogate and finite-difference references. The diffusion surrogate reproduces the qualitative structure and directional trends of the true utility landscape, providing usable sensitivities for gradient-based optimization. These results show that diffusion-based surrogates can accelerate simulation-driven detector design while enabling differentiable, gradient-informed analysis.
title Differentiable Surrogate for Detector Simulation and Design with Diffusion Models
topic Instrumentation and Detectors
High Energy Physics - Experiment
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07859