Efficient many-jet event generation with Flow Matching

Abstract: We apply for the first time the Flow Matching method to the problem of phase-space sampling for event generation in high-energy collider physics. By training the model to remap the random numbers used to generate the momenta and helicities of the scattering matrix elements as implemented in the portable partonic event generator Pepper, we find substantial efficiency improvements in the studied processes. We focus our study on the highest final-state multiplicities in Drell--Yan and top--antitop pair production used in simulated samples for the Large Hadron Collider, which computationally are the most relevant ones. We find that the unweighting efficiencies improve by factors of 150 and 17, respectively, when compared to the standard approach of using a Vegas-based optimisation. We also compare Continuous Normalizing Flows trained with Flow Matching against the previously studied Normalizing Flows based on Coupling Layers and find that the former leads to better results, faster training and a better scaling behaviour across the studied multiplicity range.