5–6 Mar 2026
CERN
Europe/Berlin timezone

An IRIS-HEP Blueprint Workshop

Differentiable Programming in C++ and ROOT with Clad [25' + 5']

6 Mar 2026, 14:25
30m
4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room

CERN

110
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Speakers

Jonas Rembser (CERN) Vassil Vasilev (Princeton University (US))

Description

In this presentation, we make the case for differential programming in C++ for High Energy Physics. We will first introduce source code-transformation-based Automatic Differentiation (AD) with Clad, a Clang compiler plugin. Some success stories of how this is used for statistical analysis in ROOT are presented, including using Clad to differentiate through statistical likelihoods in RooFit and neural network inference with TMVA SOFIE. Finally, we are reporting on some toy studies on end-to-end differentiable analysis pipelines and how such studies could guide differentiable algorithm development and help identify the “killer app” for differentiable programming in HEP.

Presentation materials