Learning to Unscramble Feynman Loop Integrals with SAILIR

arXiv cs.LG / 4/8/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces SAILIR, a self-supervised transformer-based ML method for integration-by-parts (IBP) reduction of Feynman loop integrals in high-energy physics.
  • SAILIR trains entirely on synthetic “scramble/unscramble” data generated by reversing known reduction identities, learning to undo stepwise transformations to reach reduced forms.
  • Using beam search plus a parallel, asynchronous, single-episode reduction strategy, SAILIR performs reductions in a fully online manner with bounded memory.
  • In benchmarks on a two-loop triangle-box topology, SAILIR shows approximately flat per-worker memory usage as integral complexity increases, unlike Kira where memory grows rapidly.
  • Although SAILIR is slower in wall-clock time, for the hardest integrals it uses about 40% of Kira’s memory while achieving comparable reduction times, suggesting a new paradigm that could make previously intractable precision calculations feasible.

Abstract

Integration-by-parts (IBP) reduction of Feynman integrals to master integrals is a key computational bottleneck in precision calculations in high-energy physics. Traditional approaches based on the Laporta algorithm require solving large systems of equations, leading to memory consumption that grows rapidly with integral complexity. We present SAILIR (Self-supervised AI for Loop Integral Reduction), a new machine learning approach in which a transformer-based classifier guides the reduction of integrals one step at a time in a fully online fashion. The classifier is trained in an entirely self-supervised manner on synthetic data generated by a scramble/unscramble procedure: known reduction identities are applied in reverse to build expressions of increasing complexity, and the classifier learns to undo these steps. When combined with beam search and a highly parallelized, asynchronous, single-episode reduction strategy, SAILIR can reduce integrals of arbitrarily high weight with bounded memory. We benchmark SAILIR on the two-loop triangle-box topology, comparing against the state-of-the-art IBP reduction code Kira across 16 integrals of varying complexity. While SAILIR is slower in wall-clock time, its per-worker memory consumption remains approximately flat regardless of integral complexity, in contrast to Kira whose memory grows rapidly with complexity. For the most complex integrals considered here, SAILIR uses only 40\% of the memory of Kira while achieving comparable reduction times. This demonstrates a fundamentally new paradigm for IBP reduction in which the memory bottleneck of Laporta-based approaches could be entirely overcome, potentially opening the door to precision calculations that are currently intractable.