Fast Inference Using Automatic Differentiation and Neural Transport in Astroparticle Physics

Dorian W. P. Amaral, Shixiao Liang, Juehang Qin, Christopher Tunnell

Published 2024-05-23Version 1

Multi-dimensional parameter spaces are commonly encountered in astroparticle physics theories that attempt to capture novel phenomena. However, they often possess complicated posterior geometries that are expensive to traverse using techniques traditional to this community. Effectively sampling these spaces is crucial to bridge the gap between experiment and theory. Several recent innovations, which are only beginning to make their way into this field, have made navigating such complex posteriors possible. These include GPU acceleration, automatic differentiation, and neural-network-guided reparameterization. We apply these advancements to astroparticle physics experimental results in the context of novel neutrino physics and benchmark their performances against traditional nested sampling techniques. Compared to nested sampling alone, we find that these techniques increase performance for both nested sampling and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, accelerating inference by factors of $\sim 100$ and $\sim 60$, respectively. As nested sampling also evaluates the Bayesian evidence, these advancements can be exploited to improve model comparison performance while retaining compatibility with existing implementations that are widely used in the natural sciences.