arXiv:2610.23087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting the drag coefficient $C_\mathrm{d}$ of irregular particles requires representing their complex three-dimensional geometry in a form suitable for predictive models. Empirical drag correlations and many data-driven models represent particle geometry through a small set of hand-crafted shape descriptors. Geometric differences omitted by these descriptors are unavailable to the predictor. We propose a variational autoencoder-multilayer perceptron (VAE-MLP) framework that learns a latent representation directly from voxelized particle geometry. Geometry reconstruction and drag coefficient prediction jointly guide the learning of this representation. We compare VAE-MLP with a descriptor-based MLP (Descriptor-MLP) and established empirical correlations using CFD data for synthetic particle geometries at Reynolds numbers of 10--200. When the evaluated geometric variations are represented in the training data, the two learned models achieve comparable accuracy for regular ellipsoids, while VAE-MLP yields lower errors for irregular particles. When high-order surface perturbations are excluded from training, VAE-MLP achieves lower overall mean absolute relative error in all five training runs. At the strongest tested perturbation, the mean errors across these runs are 4.97% for VAE-MLP and 9.88% for Descriptor-MLP. These results support learning geometric representations directly from particle geometry to improve drag prediction for the irregular geometries and unseen surface perturbations examined here.