Prospects for novel track reconstruction algorithms based on Graph Neural Network models using telescope detector testbed

¹ Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, AGH University of Krakow, al. Mickiewicza 30, 30-059 Krakow, Poland
² Center of Excellence in Artifical Intelligence, AGH University of Krakow al. Adama Mickiewicza 30, 30-059 Krakow, Poland
³ Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences ul. Newelska 6, 01-447 Warsaw, Poland

^* e-mail: wgomulka@agh.edu.pl
^** e-mail: szumlak@agh.edu.pl
^*** e-mail: pkowal@agh.edu.pl
^**** e-mail: tomasz.bold@cern.ch

Published online: 7 October 2025

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) marked their presence in track reconstruction a few years ago. Initial studies eventually grew into mature pipelines, performing end-to-end track reconstruction for different detectors. Publications describing those efforts usually present the selected GNN architectures for specific reconstruction steps. Therefore, in this study, we would like to contribute to research on which of the general-purpose GNN architectures are especially promising in link prediction of high-energy physics (HEP) data. For this analysis, we compare three graph neural networks: one leveraging only SAGEConv layers and two additionally using Graph Transformer or PointNet networks. We also present achievable metrics for the simplified edge classification task. In addition, we advocate for the use of the ACTS toolkit as a simulation testbed and present a simple VELO-inspired toy detector.