Graph Neural Network-Based Pipeline for Track Finding in the Velo at LHCb

Abstract: Over the next decade, increases in instantaneous luminosity and detector granularity will amplify the amount of data that has to be analysed by high-energy physics experiments, whether in real time or offline, by an order of magnitude. The reconstruction of charged particle tracks, which has always been a crucial element of offline data processing pipelines, must increasingly be deployed from the very first stages of the real time processing to enable experiments to achieve their physics goals. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received a great deal of attention in the community because their computational complexity scales nearly linearly with the number of hits in the detector, unlike conventional algorithms which often scale quadratically or worse. This paper presents ETX4VELO, a GNN-based track-finding pipeline tailored for the Run 3 LHCb experiment's Vertex Locator, in the context of LHCb's fully GPU-based first-level trigger system, Allen. Currently implemented in Python, ETX4VELO offers the ability to reconstruct tracks with shared hits using a novel triplet-based method. When benchmarked against the traditional track-finding algorithm in Allen, this GNN-based approach not only matches but occasionally surpasses its physics performance. In particular, the fraction of fake tracks is reduced from over 2% to below 1% and the efficiency to reconstruct electrons is improved. While achieving comparable physics performance is a milestone, the immediate priority remains implementing ETX4VELO in Allen in order to determine and optimise its throughput, to meet the demands of this high-rate environment.