24–28 Aug 2026
Kirchhoff Institute for Physics (KIP)
Europe/Berlin timezone

Gauge equivariant transformer for lattice gauge theories

27 Aug 2026, 11:30
8m
3.404

3.404

Patterns & Anomalies 🔀 Patterns & Anomalies

Speaker

Fracesco Passante (Sapienza Università di Roma and INFN)

Description

Gauge equivariant convolutional neural networks have shown that enforcing exact lattice gauge symmetry in a neural network significantly improves regression accuracy on gauge invariant observables. However, their convolutional kernels stay fixed after training and cannot adapt to configuration-dependent features. We introduce GELT (Gauge Equivariant Lattice Transformer), a gauge equivariant attention-based encoder network for lattice gauge theories that exploits the configuration-dependent attention mechanism to focus on the most physically relevant input features.
GELT employs gauge invariant attention scores together with a gauge equivariant matrix bilinear value path. Keys and values are parallel transported from neighboring lattice sites within a L1-ball along shortest lattice paths. We inject a geometrical prior in the attention weights with rotary positional encoding (RoPE).
We test GELT on various regression targets involving physical observables and compare its performance against existing gauge-equivariant architectures. We also investigate the interpretability of the attention filters, studying whether attention localizes in topologically rich regions and whether the attention range correlates with physical correlation length.

Authors

Fracesco Passante (Sapienza Università di Roma and INFN) Stefano Giagu (Sapienza Università di Roma and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Presentation materials