26 July 2026 to 1 August 2026
University of Maryland, College Park
US/Eastern timezone

Bridging Euclidean Methods for Parton Distributions with Machine Learning

29 Jul 2026, 10:00
20m
Benjamin Banneker A (Adele H. Stamp Student Union)

Benjamin Banneker A

Adele H. Stamp Student Union

3972 Campus Dr, College Park, MD 20742
Contributed talk Structure of hadrons and nuclei Structure of hadrons and nuclei

Speaker

Alex NieMiera (Michigan State University)

Description

I​​n this work, we develop a unified machine learning strategy based on a variational autoencoder inverse mapper (VAIM) to explore the complementarity of the quasi-PDF and pseudo-PDF methodologies. VAIM is a conditional variational autoencoder–based framework that learns a low-dimensional latent representation of nonperturbative QCD information and constructs an inverse map from lattice-measured observables to the underlying partonic structure, enabling a flexible, data-driven reconstruction of PDFs while retaining correlations across different operator insertions and kinematic regimes. Despite a well-grounded theoretical understanding of the interplay between these two approaches, there are currently no established conventions for simultaneously extracting light-cone information from both frameworks in a unified manner. By combining information from the two methods across multiple values of small $z^2$ for the pseudo-PDF method and large $P_z$ for the quasi-PDF method, we aim to investigate how a flexible unified treatment can improve our understanding of higher-twist effects, increase the robustness of lattice determinations of PDFs, and clarify how the quasi-PDF methodology can be more naturally integrated into phenomenological analyses.

Author

Alex NieMiera (Michigan State University)

Co-authors

Brandon Kriesten (Argonne National Laboratory) Huey-Wen Lin Dr Tim Hobbs (Argonne National Laboratory) William Good (Michigan State University)

Presentation materials