# Spatially Aware Linear Transformer (SAL-T) for Particle Jet Tagging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23641/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [Interaction Networks for Learning about Objects, Relations and Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00222/) (2016)
- [Fast inference of deep neural networks in FPGAs for particle physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06913/) (2018)
- [Particle Transformer for Jet Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03772/) (2022)
- [Energy Flow Networks: Deep Sets for Particle Jets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05165/) (2018)
- [Transformers without Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10622/) (2025)
- [Evaluating generative models in high energy physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10295/) (2022)
- [Locality-Sensitive Hashing-Based Efficient Point Transformer with Applications in High-Energy Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12535/) (2024)
- [Real-time Anomaly Detection at the L1 Trigger of CMS Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19506/) (2024)
- [Induced Generative Adversarial Particle Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04757/) (2023)

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

- [JetFormer: A Scalable and Efficient Transformer for Jet Tagging from Offline Analysis to FPGA Triggers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17215/) (2026)
- [KIGNet: Physics-Motivated Multi-Graph Representation Learning for Explainable Jet Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07420/) (2025)
- [Patch Hierarchical Attention Transformer for Efficient Particle Jet Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21789/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformers are very effective in capturing both global and local correlations within high-energy particle collisions, but they present deployment challenges in high-data-throughput environments, such as the CERN LHC. The quadratic complexity of transformer models demands substantial resources and increases latency during inference. In order to address these issues, we introduce the Spatially Aware Linear Transformer (SAL-T), a physics-inspired enhancement of the linformer architecture that maintains linear attention. Our method incorporates spatially aware partitioning of particles based on kinematic features, thereby computing attention between regions of physical significance. Additionally, we employ convolutional layers to capture local correlations, informed by insights from jet physics. In addition to outperforming the standard linformer in jet classification tasks, SAL-T also achieves classification results comparable to full-attention transformers, while using considerably fewer resources with lower latency during inference. Experiments on a generic point cloud classification dataset (ModelNet10) further confirm this trend. Our code is available at https://github.com/aaronw5/SAL-T4HEP.