The Analysis, not the Aperture: End-to-End Transformer Reconstruction for Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes

arXiv:2608.31148 · astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.HE · Submitted 2026-08-31 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.HE

Submitted: 2026-08-31

Updated: 2026-08-31

Comments: 22 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables. Submitted for publication. Corresponding author: David Paneque

Code: https://github.com/cta-observatory/cta-lstchain

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Transformer — 78× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AUC — 15× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 11× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Core — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Aperture — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Monte Carlo — 5× in this paper
• Adaptation — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory — 3× in this paper
• Transformer Architecture — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Area Under the Curve (AUC) — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Attention Mechanism — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Data Augmentation — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Diffusion Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 8 episodes
• Domain Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Multi-messenger Astronomy — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Regularization — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Small Virtual Telescope — 1× in this paper
• Temporal Correlations — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Reciprocal Landmark Detection and Tracking with Extremely Few Annotations
• First Full-Event Reconstruction from Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope Real Data with Deep Learning
• Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multitask Image Analysis in Realistic Context with Extreme Label Shift; Application to the CTAO first Large Sized Telescope
• A model independent parametrization of the optical properties of the refrozen IceCube drill holes
• Enhancing event reconstruction for $\gamma$-ray particle detector arrays using transformers
• An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
• Symbolic Discovery of Optimization Algorithms
• Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization
• Super-Convergence: Very Fast Training of Neural Networks Using Large Learning Rates

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