In preparation for Higgs factories and energy-frontier facilities, future colliders are moving toward high-granularity calorimeters to improve reconstruction quality. However, the cost and construction complexity of such detectors is substantial, making software-based approaches like superresolution an attractive complementary tool. This study explores integrating superresolution techniques into an LHC-like reconstruction pipeline to effectively enhance calorimeter granularity and suppress noise. We find that this software preprocessing step significantly improves reconstruction quality at fixed detector granularity, narrowing the performance gap to a finer calorimeter without closing it. To demonstrate its impact, we propose a novel transformer-based particle-flow model that offers improved particle reconstruction quality and interpretability. Our results serve as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential of superresolution to enhance reconstruction in collider environments.
Self-supervised training is monitored without labels, through the loss and statistics of the learned features. We report a case where we know the encoders lost part of what they had learned, so we can check whether these signals noticed. We trained LeJEPA encoders on synthetic images with known generating factors. In nine of ten seeds, the readability of those factors fell abruptly and stayed down, nearly always along the same direction in factor space. Meanwhile the loss kept falling, and most of the eleven label-free signals we tracked kept improving and rated the declining runs better than runs that did not decline. Standard change-point detection rarely flagged the decline near its onset, and selecting checkpoints by these signals mostly chose ones after it.