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arXiv:2109.12636 · Quantum Machine Intelligence

Hybrid quantum classical graph neural networks for particle track reconstruction

Cenk Tüysüz, Carla Rieger, Kristiane Novotny, Bilge Melahat Demirköz, D. Dobos, Karolos Jozef Potamianos, Sofia Vallecorsa, Jean-Roch Vlimant, Richárd Forster

Published Nov 28, 2021• 57 citations
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Abstract

Abstract The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be upgraded to further increase the instantaneous rate of particle collisions (luminosity) and become the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). This increase in luminosity will significantly increase the number of particles interacting with the detector. The interaction of particles with a detector is referred to as “hit”. The HL-LHC will yield many more detector hits, which will pose a combinatorial challenge by using reconstruction algorithms to determine particle trajectories from those hits. This work explores the possibility of converting a novel graph neural network model, that can optimally take into account the sparse nature of the tracking detector data and their complex geometry, to a hybrid quantum-classical graph neural network that benefits from using variational quantum layers. We show that this hybrid model can perform similar to the classical approach. Also, we explore parametrized quantum circuits (PQC) with different expressibility and entangling capacities, and compare their training performance in order to quantify the expected benefits. These results can be used to build a future road map to further develop circuit-based hybrid quantum-classical graph neural networks.

DOI
10.1007/s42484-021-00055-9

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Abstract The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be upgraded to further increase the instantaneous rate of particle collisions (luminosity) and become the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). This increase in luminosity will significantly increase the number of particles interacting with the detector. The interaction of particles with a detector is referred to as “hit”. The HL-LHC will yield many more detector hits, which will pose a combinatorial challenge by using reconstruction algorithms to determine particle trajectories from those hits. This work explores the possibility of converting a novel graph neural network model, that can optimally take into account the sparse nature of the tracking detector data and their complex geometry, to a hybrid quantum-classical graph neural network that benefits from using variational quantum layers. We show that this hybrid model can perform similar to the classical approach. Also, we explore parametrized quantum circuits (PQC) with different expressibility and entangling capacities, and compare their training performance in order to quantify the expected benefits. These results can be used to build a future road map to further develop circuit-based hybrid quantum-classical graph neural networks.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be upgraded to further increase the instantaneous rate of particle collisions (luminosity) and become the High Luminosity LHC. This increase in luminosity, will yield many more detector hits (occupancy), and thus measurements will pose a challenge to track reconstruction algorithms being responsible to determine particle trajectories from those hits. This work explores the possibility of converting a novel Graph Neural Network model, that proven itself for the track reconstruction task, to a Hybrid Graph Neural Network in order to benefit the exponentially growing Hilbert Space. Several Parametrized Quantum Circuits (PQC) are tested and their performance against the classical approach is compared. We show that the hybrid model can perform similar to the classical approach. We also present a future road map to further increase the performance of the current hybrid model.
The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) at CERN will involve a significant increase in complexity and sheer size of data with respect to the current LHC experimental complex. Hence, the task of reconstructing the particle trajectories will become more involved due to the number of simultaneous collisions and the resulting increased detector occupancy. Aiming to identify the particle paths, machine learning techniques such as graph neural networks are being explored in the HEP.TrkX project and its successor, the Exa.TrkX project. Both show promising results and reduce the combinatorial nature of the problem. Previous results of our team have demonstrated the successful attempt of applying quantum graph neural networks to reconstruct the particle track based on the hits of the detector. A higher overall accuracy is gained by representing the training data in a meaningful way within an embedded space. That has been included in the Exa.TrkX project by applying a classical MLP. Consequently, pairs of hits belonging to different trajectories are pushed apart while those belonging to the same ones stay close together. We explore the applicability of variational quantum circuits that include a relatively low number of qubits applicable to NISQ devices within the task of embedding and show preliminary results.
In the forthcoming years the LHC experiments are going to be upgraded to benefit from the substantial increase of the LHC instantaneous luminosity, which will lead to larger, denser events, and, consequently, greater complexity in reconstructing charged particle tracks, motivating frontier research in new technologies. Quantum machine learning models are being investigated as potential new approaches to high energy physics (HEP) tasks. We characterize and upgrade a quantum graph neural network (QGNN) architecture for charged particle track reconstruction on a simulated high luminosity dataset. The model operates on a set of event graphs, each built from the hits generated in tracking detector layers by particles produced in proton collisions, performing a classification of the possible hit connections between adjacent layers. In this approach the QGNN is designed as a hybrid architecture, interleaving classical feedforward networks with parametrized quantum circuits. We characterize the interplay between the classical and quantum components. We report on the principal upgrades to the original design, and present new evidence of improved training behavior, specifically in terms of convergence toward the final trained configuration.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will undergo an upgrade to further increase the instantaneous rate of particle collisions (luminosity) and become the High Luminosity LHC. This increase in luminosity, will yield many more detector hits (occupancy), and thus measurements will pose a challenge to track reconstruction algorithms being responsible to determine particle trajectories from those hits. Similar challenges exist in non-high energy physics (HEP) trajectory reconstruction use-cases. High occupancy, track density, complexity and fast growth exponentially increase the demand of algorithms in terms of time, memory and computing resources.
The unprecedented increase of complexity and scale of data is expected in the necessary computation for tracking detectors of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) experiments. While currently used Kalman filter based algorithms are reaching their limits in terms of ambiguities from increasing number of simultaneous collisions, occupancy, and scalability (worse than quadratic), a variety of machine learning approaches to particle track reconstruction are explored. It has been demonstrated previously by HEP.TrkX using TrackML datasets, that graph neural networks, processing events as a graph connecting track measurements, are a promising solution and can reduce the combinatorial background to a manageable amount and are scaling to a computationally reasonable size. In previous work, we have shown a first attempt of Quantum Computing to Graph Neural Networks for track reconstruction of particles. We aim to leverage the capability of quantum computing to evaluate a very large number of states simultaneously and thus to effectively search in a large parameter space. As the next step in this paper, we present an improved model with an iterative approach to overcome the low accuracy convergence of the initial oversimplified Tree Tensor Network (TTN) model.
Tracking charged particles in high-energy physics experiments is a computationally intensive task. With the advent of the High Luminosity LHC era, which is expected to significantly increase the number of proton-proton interactions per beam collision, the amount of data to be analysed will increase dramatically. Traditional algorithms suffer from scaling problems. We are investigating the possibility of using machine learning techniques in combination with quantum computing. In our research, we represent particle trajectories as a graph data structure and train a hybrid graph neural network with classical and quantum layers. We present recent results on the application of these methods, focusing on the computational aspects of code development in different programming frameworks such as Jax, Pennylane and IBM Qiskit. We also provide insights into expected performance and explore the role of GPUs as computational accelerators in the simulation of quantum computing resources.