Towards Foundation Models for Experimental Readout Systems Combining Discrete and Continuous Data

Abstract: We present a (proto) Foundation Model for Nuclear Physics, capable of operating on low-level detector inputs from Imaging Cherenkov Detectors at the future Electron Ion Collider. To address limitations in existing next-token prediction approaches-namely resolution loss from VQ-VAE tokenization and lack of conditional generation-we propose three key innovations: (i) separate vocabularies for discrete spatial features and continuous variates, combined via Causal Multi-Head Cross-Attention (CMHCA), (ii) continuous kinematic conditioning through prepended context embeddings, and (iii) scalable and simple, high-resolution continuous variate tokenization without joint vocabulary inflation. Our model enables fast, high-fidelity generation of pixel and time sequences for Cherenkov photons, validated through closure tests in the High Performance DIRC. We also show our model generalizes to reconstruction tasks such as pion and kaon identification, in which we show its ability to leverage fine-tuning.