Better Queries, Cheaper Attention: Adapting Transformers for Efficient Sparse Reconstruction

Abstract: Query-based transformer decoders are effective for object reconstruction from sparse scientific sensor measurements, but their scalability to high-multiplicity data is limited by fixed, input-independent query sets and costly decoder cross-attention. We introduce a geometry-aware dynamic-query decoder that couples input-conditioned query construction with structured sparse cross-attention. Decoder queries are initialised from selected encoder-level measurement representations that serve as candidate trajectory seeds, making both query content and query multiplicity input-dependent. Local Strided Cross-Attention (LSCA) exploits the induced geometric ordering by replacing learned mask-gated cross-attention with a geometry-defined local support that restricts attention to physically plausible query-hit interactions and exposes sparsity for block-sparse execution. We study this architecture for charged-particle trajectory reconstruction in a simplified High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider detector, where thousands of trajectories must be reconstructed from tens of thousands of sparse measurements. In the nominal configuration, the dynamic-query (DQ) architecture increases trajectory reconstruction efficiency from 94.1% to 98.1% and reduces the fake rate by more than a factor of two relative to the fixed-query baseline. The DQ+LSCA model reduces end-to-end inference latency by nearly 50% and peak allocated inference memory by more than a factor of 10 relative to the fixed-query baseline.