# Fast 2D Bicephalous Convolutional Autoencoder for Compressing 3D Time Projection Chamber Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15026 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15026/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [LHC analysis-specific datasets with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05282/) (2019)
- [Simulation of electron-proton scattering events by a Feature-Augmented and Transformed Generative Adversarial Network (FAT-GAN)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11103/) (2020)
- [cuSZ: An Efficient GPU-Based Error-Bounded Lossy Compression Framework for Scientific Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09625/) (2020)
- [Efficient Data Compression for 3D Sparse TPC via Bicephalous Convolutional Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05423/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Deep Generative Models for Detector Signature Simulation: A Taxonomic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09597/) (2023)
- [Variable Rate Neural Compression for Sparse Detector Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11942/) (2024)
- [Efficient Compression of Sparse Accelerator Data Using Implicit Neural Representations and Importance Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01754/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-energy large-scale particle colliders produce data at high speed in the order of 1 terabytes per second in nuclear physics and petabytes per second in high-energy physics. Developing real-time data compression algorithms to reduce such data at high throughput to fit permanent storage has drawn increasing attention. Specifically, at the newly constructed sPHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a time projection chamber is used as the main tracking detector, which records particle trajectories in a volume of a three-dimensional (3D) cylinder. The resulting data are usually very sparse with occupancy around 10.8%. Such sparsity presents a challenge to conventional learning-free lossy compression algorithms, such as SZ, ZFP, and MGARD. The 3D convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach, Bicephalous Convolutional Autoencoder (BCAE), outperforms traditional methods both in compression rate and reconstruction accuracy. BCAE can also utilize the computation power of graphical processing units suitable for deployment in a modern heterogeneous high-performance computing environment. This work introduces two BCAE variants: BCAE++ and BCAE-2D. BCAE++ achieves a 15% better compression ratio and a 77% better reconstruction accuracy measured in mean absolute error compared with BCAE. BCAE-2D treats the radial direction as the channel dimension of an image, resulting in a 3x speedup in compression throughput. In addition, we demonstrate an unbalanced autoencoder with a larger decoder can improve reconstruction accuracy without significantly sacrificing throughput. Lastly, we observe both the BCAE++ and BCAE-2D can benefit more from using half-precision mode in throughput (76-79% increase) without loss in reconstruction accuracy. The source code and links to data and pretrained models can be found at https://github.com/BNL-DAQ-LDRD/NeuralCompression_v2.