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arXiv:2410.22870 · npj Quantum Information

Conditioned quantum-assisted deep generative surrogate for particle-calorimeter interactions

J. Quetzalcóatl Toledo-Marín, Sebastian Gonzalez, Hao Jia, Ian Lu, Deniz Sogutlu, Abhishek Singh, C. Gay, Eric Paquet, Roger G. Melko, Geoffrey Fox, M. Swiatlowski, Wojciech T. Fedorko

Published Jul 7, 2025• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Particle collisions at accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), recorded by experiments such as ATLAS and CMS, enable precise standard model measurements and searches for new phenomena. Simulating these collisions significantly influences experiment design and analysis but incurs immense computational costs, projected at millions of CPU-years annually during the high luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) phase. Currently, simulating a single event with Geant4 consumes around 1000 CPU seconds, with calorimeter simulations especially demanding. To address this, we propose a conditioned quantum-assisted generative model, integrating a conditioned variational autoencoder (VAE) and a conditioned restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). Our RBM architecture is tailored for D-Wave's Pegasus-structured advantage quantum annealer for sampling, leveraging the flux bias for conditioning. This approach combines classical RBMs as universal approximators for discrete distributions with quantum annealing's speed and scalability. We also introduce an adaptive method for efficiently estimating effective inverse temperature, and validate our framework on Dataset 2 of CaloChallenge.

DOI
10.1038/s41534-025-01040-x

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As CERN approaches the launch of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) by the decade’s end, the computational demands of traditional simulations have become untenably high. Projections show millions of CPU-years required to create simulated datasets - with a substantial fraction of CPU time devoted to calorimetric simulations. This presents unique opportunities for breakthroughs in computational physics. We show how Quantumassisted Generative AI can be used for the purpose of creating synthetic, realistically scaled calorimetry dataset. The model is constructed by combining D-Wave’s Quantum Annealer processor with a Deep Learning architecture, increasing the timing performance with respect to first principles simulations and Deep Learning models alone, while maintaining current state-of-the-art data quality
Quantum Computing has emerged as a viable alternative to classical computing for a number of different tasks, with the idea of a potential speedup in mind. One of the most promising fields of research in quantum computing is Quantum Machine Learning. An interesting area of application for Quantum Machine Learning can be found in High Energy Physics: one key component of creating experiments in a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider is the simulation of those experiments beforehand, in order to gain a better understanding of the results actually measured. Those types of simulations, typically based on Monte-Carlo methods, require significant computing resources and, as we approach CERN's High Luminosity Phase, there is a strong need for more efficient and cost controlled simulations. In this thesis a model based on Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs) is implemented, with the intention of exploring potential quantum computing advantages within a hybrid machine learning model that is tasked with the generation of calorimeter samples. The model is initially trained on an ideal simulator to ensure that the results are comparable to those of a similar classical model. Finally, the model is modified in order to effectively run on a real quantum device and the training is executed in its entirety on a 54-qubit quantum processor.
Energy-based models provide a natural bridge between statistical physics and machine learning by representing data through structured energy landscapes. Boltzmann machines are a particularly compelling class of such models for capturing complex interactions among latent variables, but their use in modern generative learning has been limited by the classical intractability of sampling from general (non-restricted) Boltzmann distributions. Here we develop a quantum-annealing-based framework that enables variational autoencoders with general Boltzmann priors. The framework employs three complementary annealing modes tailored to different stages of learning and deployment: diabatic quantum annealing provides unbiased Boltzmann samples for efficient training, slower annealing concentrates samples near low-energy configurations of the learned prior for unconditional generation, and conditional annealing with external fields steers the learned energy landscape toward attribute-specific regions for conditional generation and semantic editing. Using up to 2000 qubits on a D-Wave Advantage2 processor, we demonstrate stable training and high-quality generation on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CelebA, achieving faster convergence and lower reconstruction loss than a Gaussian-prior VAE with the same encoder-decoder architecture. Beyond generation, the learned energy function provides out-of-distribution detection signals that add discriminative power beyond reconstruction loss. We demonstrate that these scores separate in-distribution samples from held-out digit classes in one-class MNIST experiments and improve the detection of market regime shifts in financial data. These results establish quantum annealing as a practical and controllable physical mechanism for energy-based representation learning and generative modeling beyond the reach of tractable classical approaches.