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Oct 16

Cylindric plane partitions, Lambda determinants, Commutants in semicircular systems

This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with cylindric plane partitions. The second with lambda-determinants and the third with commutators in semi-circular systems. For more detailed abstract please see inside. Cylindric plane partitions may be thought of as a natural generalization of reverse plane partitions. A generating series for the enumeration of cylindric plane partitions was recently given by Borodin. The first result of section one is a new bijective proof of Borodin's identity which makes use of Fomin's growth diagram framework for generalized RSK correspondences. The second result is a (q,t)-analog of Borodin's identity which extends previous work by Okada in the reverse plane partition case. The third result is an explicit combinatorial interpretation of the Macdonald weight occurring in the (q,t)-analog using the non-intersecting lattice path model for cylindric plane partitions. Alternating sign matrices were discovered by Robbins and Rumsey whilst studying λ-determinants. In the second part of this thesis we prove a multi-parameter generalization of the λ-determinant, generalizing a recent result by di Francesco. Like the original λ-determinant, our formula exhibits the Laurent phenomenon. Semicircular systems were first introduced by Voiculescu as a part of his study of von Neumann algebras. In the third part of this thesis we study certain commutator subalgebras of the semicircular system. We find a projection matrix with an interesting self-similar structure. Making use of our projection formula we given an alternative, elementary proof that the semicircular system is a factor.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 25, 2021

An Infinite Family of Non-Rational VOAs from Strongly Coupled 4d Higgsless SCFTs

We study an infinite family of strongly coupled four-dimensional mathcal N=2 superconformal field theories (SCFTs) distinguished by a trivial Higgs branch, known as the (A_2,D_{3m+1}) Argyre-Douglas theories. We propose that their associated vertex operator algebras (VOAs) are the doublet algebras mathcal A(4m+2), an infinite family of non-rational vertex operator superalgebras with a remarkably simple strong generating set of only three fields. We provide several highly nontrivial checks of this proposal. In particular, we reproduce the four-dimensional conformal anomalies a and c from the VOA and analytically prove the exact equality between the Schur index of the SCFT and the supercharacter of the VOA. A key ingredient is a diagonal-gauging realization of the (A_2,D_{3m+1}) theories in terms of two simpler building blocks, which makes the Schur-index computation tractable. Remarkably, we find that the resulting Schur index of the (A_2,D_{3m+1}) theory coincides with that of mathcal N=4 SU(2) Super-Yang-Mills theory, up to an overall prefactor and an appropriate identification of fugacities. We also discuss a generalization to the two-parameter family (A_{2s},D_{(2s+1)m+1}), whose members likewise have trivial Higgs branches and admit diagonal-gauging realizations. A particularly interesting subfamily is (A_{2s},D_{2s+2}), for which the four-dimensional conformal anomalies coincide, a=c. Our results reveal a systematic connection between Higgsless SCFTs, diagonal gauging, and strongly finite but non-rational vertex operator algebras.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 1

Faces of highest weight modules and the universal Weyl polyhedron

Let V be a highest weight module over a Kac-Moody algebra g, and let conv V denote the convex hull of its weights. We determine the combinatorial isomorphism type of conv V, i.e. we completely classify the faces and their inclusions. In the special case where g is semisimple, this brings closure to a question studied by Cellini-Marietti [IMRN 2015] for the adjoint representation, and by Khare [J. Algebra 2016; Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 2017] for most modules. The determination of faces of finite-dimensional modules up to the Weyl group action and some of their inclusions also appears in previous work of Satake [Ann. of Math. 1960], Borel-Tits [IHES Publ. Math. 1965], Vinberg [Izv. Akad. Nauk 1990], and Casselman [Austral. Math. Soc. 1997]. For any subset of the simple roots, we introduce a remarkable convex cone which we call the universal Weyl polyhedron, which controls the convex hulls of all modules parabolically induced from the corresponding Levi factor. Namely, the combinatorial isomorphism type of the cone stores the classification of faces for all such highest weight modules, as well as how faces degenerate as the highest weight gets increasingly singular. To our knowledge, this cone is new in finite and infinite type. We further answer a question of Michel Brion, by showing that the localization of conv V along a face is always the convex hull of the weights of a parabolically induced module. Finally, as we determine the inclusion relations between faces representation-theoretically from the set of weights, without recourse to convexity, we answer a similar question for highest weight modules over symmetrizable quantum groups.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 31, 2016

On composition and decomposition operations for vector spaces, graphs and matroids

In this paper, we study the ideas of composition and decomposition in the context of vector spaces, graphs and matroids. For vector spaces V_{AB}, treated as collection of row vectors, with specified column set Auplus B, we define V_{SP}lrarv V_{PQ}, Scap Q= emptyset, to be the collection of all vectors (f_S,f_Q) such that (f_S,f_P)in V_{SP}, (f_P,f_Q)in V_{PQ}. An analogous operation G_{SP}lrarg G_{PQ}equivd G_{PQ} can be defined in relation to graphs G_{SP}, G_{PQ}, on edge sets Suplus P, Puplus Q, respectively in terms of an overlapping subgraph G_P which gets deleted in the right side graph (see for instance the notion of k-sum oxley). For matroids we define the `linking' M_{SP}lrarm M_{PQ} equivd (M_{SP}vee M_{PQ})times (Suplus Q), denoting the contraction operation by 'times'. In each case, we examine how to minimize the size of the `overlap' set P, without affecting the right side entity. In the case of vector spaces, there is a polynomial time algorithm for achieving the minimum, which we present. Similar ideas work for graphs and for matroids under appropriate conditions. Next we consider the problem of decomposition. Here, in the case of vector spaces, the problem is to decompose V_{SQ} as V_{SP}lrarv V_{PQ}, with minimum size P. We give a polynomial time algorithm for this purpose. In the case of graphs and matroids we give a solution to this problem under certain restrictions.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 13, 2023

QuIVer: Rethinking ANN Graph Topology via Training-Free Binary Quantization

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) graph indices such as HNSW and Vamana construct their edge topology in full-precision or high-fidelity quantized metric spaces, relegating binary quantization (BQ) to a post-hoc distance estimator during search. This paper asks a different question: Can binary quantization define the graph topology itself -- and if so, under what conditions? We study this question through QuIVer (Quantized Index for Vector Retrieval), a training-free ANN graph index that performs Vamana edge selection, diversity pruning, and beam-search navigation entirely within a 2-bit Sign-Magnitude BQ metric space, accessing float32 vectors only for final reranking. Systematic evaluation on twelve million-scale datasets reveals a sharp applicability boundary: BQ-native topology is highly effective on cosine-native contrastive-learning embeddings (>=88% Recall@10 at ef=64 across five datasets, 384--3072 dimensions), moderately effective on multimodal CLIP data (71--78%), and empirically unsuitable for Euclidean-native or structureless distributions (<15%). Our results suggest an empirical "impossible triangle" between aggressive compression, high throughput, and universal data compatibility. The central contribution is not merely the system, but the boundary it reveals: falsifiable criteria for when industrial vector search systems can safely trade metric fidelity for compact BQ-native navigation. On compatible workloads, the system benefits are substantial: QuIVer's BQ-native hot path (<1.3 GB for 1M vectors) yields 2.5--5.5x higher multi-threaded throughput than DiskANN Rust and HNSW variants at matched recall, with 4.7x less hot memory and no codebook or rotation training (unlike PQ/OPQ/RaBitQ).

  • 3 authors
·
May 16

Counting higher-rank sheaves on toric threefolds

We develop an equivariant K-theoretic vertex formalism for a colored, abelianized higher-rank sector on smooth projective toric threefolds X. Nonzero first Chern classes are encoded as magnetic fluxes and absorbed into line-bundle twists, after which the virtual character is redistributed into finite perturbative, vertex, and edge contributions. We compute the resulting (unreduced and trace-free) virtual dimensions and analyze the interaction terms relevant to a possible reduction to rank one. We emphasize that, on a compact toric threefold, colored partitions do not classify all torus-fixed stable higher-rank sheaves: the resulting series is therefore a proposed abelianized/framed vertex series unless an additional comparison theorem with the full stable-sheaf moduli problem is supplied. When the threefold obstruction theory is not available in the desired form, we pass to the local Calabi--Yau fourfold Y=Tot(K_X) and formulate the corresponding colored DT4 vertex. A K_X-twisted tautological insertion removes fixed points with nontrivial fiber layers, reducing solid partitions to plane partitions at the level of the local vertex. In rank one we give a scheme-theoretic explanation: the Hilbert functor of subschemes of X is canonically isomorphic to the constrained Hilbert functor of subschemes of Y lying scheme-theoretically in the fixed zero section. Under the hypotheses of the DT4 K-theoretic Lefschetz/virtual-pullback formalism, the associated support insertion reduces the rank-one fourfold theory to the threefold theory. We keep this global rank-one statement logically distinct from the higher-rank colored-vertex reduction.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3

Lie Group Decompositions for Equivariant Neural Networks

Invariance and equivariance to geometrical transformations have proven to be very useful inductive biases when training (convolutional) neural network models, especially in the low-data regime. Much work has focused on the case where the symmetry group employed is compact or abelian, or both. Recent work has explored enlarging the class of transformations used to the case of Lie groups, principally through the use of their Lie algebra, as well as the group exponential and logarithm maps. The applicability of such methods to larger transformation groups is limited by the fact that depending on the group of interest G, the exponential map may not be surjective. Further limitations are encountered when G is neither compact nor abelian. Using the structure and geometry of Lie groups and their homogeneous spaces, we present a framework by which it is possible to work with such groups primarily focusing on the Lie groups G = GL^{+}(n, R) and G = SL(n, R), as well as their representation as affine transformations R^{n} rtimes G. Invariant integration as well as a global parametrization is realized by decomposing the `larger` groups into subgroups and submanifolds which can be handled individually. Under this framework, we show how convolution kernels can be parametrized to build models equivariant with respect to affine transformations. We evaluate the robustness and out-of-distribution generalisation capability of our model on the standard affine-invariant benchmark classification task, where we outperform all previous equivariant models as well as all Capsule Network proposals.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 17, 2023

Hyperbolic Category Discovery

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an intriguing open-world problem that has garnered increasing attention. Given a dataset that includes both labelled and unlabelled images, GCD aims to categorize all images in the unlabelled subset, regardless of whether they belong to known or unknown classes. In GCD, the common practice typically involves applying a spherical projection operator at the end of the self-supervised pretrained backbone, operating within Euclidean or spherical space. However, both of these spaces have been shown to be suboptimal for encoding samples that possesses hierarchical structures. In contrast, hyperbolic space exhibits exponential volume growth relative to radius, making it inherently strong at capturing the hierarchical structure of samples from both seen and unseen categories. Therefore, we propose to tackle the category discovery challenge in the hyperbolic space. We introduce HypCD, a simple Hyperbolic framework for learning hierarchy-aware representations and classifiers for generalized Category Discovery. HypCD first transforms the Euclidean embedding space of the backbone network into hyperbolic space, facilitating subsequent representation and classification learning by considering both hyperbolic distance and the angle between samples. This approach is particularly helpful for knowledge transfer from known to unknown categories in GCD. We thoroughly evaluate HypCD on public GCD benchmarks, by applying it to various baseline and state-of-the-art methods, consistently achieving significant improvements.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 8, 2025

A structure theorem for streamed information

We identify the free half shuffle algebra of Schützenberger (1958) with an algebra of real-valued functionals on paths, where the half shuffle emulates integration of a functional against another. We then provide two, to our knowledge, new identities in arity 3 involving its commutator (area), and show that these are sufficient to recover the Zinbiel and Tortkara identities of Dzhumadil'daev (2007). We use these identities to prove that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be expressed as a polynomial over iterated areas. Moreover, we consider minimal sets of iterated integrals defined through the recursive application of the half shuffle on Hall trees. Leveraging the duality between this set of Hall integrals and classical Hall bases of the free Lie algebra, we prove using combinatorial arguments that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be written uniquely as a polynomial over Hall integrals. We interpret this result as a structure theorem for streamed information, loosely analogous to the unique prime factorisation of integers, allowing to split any real valued function on streamed data into two parts: a first that extracts and packages the streamed information into recursively defined atomic objects (Hall integrals), and a second that evaluates a polynomial function in these objects without further reference to the original stream. The question of whether a similar result holds if Hall integrals are replaced by Hall areas is left as an open conjecture. Finally, we construct a canonical, but to our knowledge, new decomposition of the free half shuffle algebra as shuffle power series in the greatest letter of the original alphabet with coefficients in a sub-algebra freely generated by a new alphabet with an infinite number of letters. We use this construction to provide a second proof of our structure theorem.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 29, 2023

Distinguishability and linear independence for H-chromatic symmetric functions

We study the H-chromatic symmetric functions X_G^H (introduced in (arXiv:2011.06063) as a generalization of the chromatic symmetric function (CSF) X_G), which track homomorphisms from the graph G to the graph H. We focus first on the case of self-chromatic symmetric functions (self-CSFs) X_G^G, making some progress toward a conjecture from (arXiv:2011.06063) that the self-CSF, like the normal CSF, is always different for different trees. In particular, we show that the self-CSF distinguishes trees from non-trees with just one exception, we check using Sage that it distinguishes all trees on up to 12 vertices, and we show that it determines the number of legs of a spider and the degree sequence of a caterpillar given its spine length. We also show that the self-CSF detects the number of connected components of a forest, again with just one exception. Then we prove some results about the power sum expansions for H-CSFs when H is a complete bipartite graph, in particular proving that the conjecture from (arXiv:2011.06063) about p-monotonicity of ω(X_G^H) for H a star holds as long as H is sufficiently large compared to G. We also show that the self-CSFs of complete multipartite graphs form a basis for the ring Λ of symmetric functions, and we give some construction of bases for the vector space Λ^n of degree n symmetric functions using H-CSFs X_G^H where H is a fixed graph that is not a complete graph, answering a question from (arXiv:2011.06063) about whether such bases exist. However, we show that there generally do not exist such bases with G fixed, even with loops, answering another question from (arXiv:2011.06063). We also define the H-chromatic polynomial as an analogue of the chromatic polynomial, and ask when it is the same for different graphs.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 11, 2025

CayleyPy Growth: Efficient growth computations and hundreds of new conjectures on Cayley graphs (Brief version)

This is the third paper of the CayleyPy project applying artificial intelligence to problems in group theory. We announce the first public release of CayleyPy, an open source Python library for computations with Cayley and Schreier graphs. Compared with systems such as GAP and Sage, CayleyPy handles much larger graphs and performs several orders of magnitude faster. Using CayleyPy we obtained about 200 new conjectures on Cayley and Schreier graphs, focused on diameters and growth. For many Cayley graphs of symmetric groups Sn we observe quasi polynomial diameter formulas: a small set of quadratic or linear polynomials indexed by n mod s. We conjecture that this is a general phenomenon, giving efficient diameter computation despite the problem being NP hard. We propose a refinement of the Babai type conjecture on diameters of Sn: n^2/2 + 4n upper bounds in the undirected case, compared to previous O(n^2) bounds. We also provide explicit generator families, related to involutions in a square with whiskers pattern, conjectured to maximize the diameter; search confirms this for all n up to 15. We further conjecture an answer to a question posed by V M Glushkov in 1968 on directed Cayley graphs generated by a cyclic shift and a transposition. For nilpotent groups we conjecture an improvement of J S Ellenberg's results on upper unitriangular matrices over Z/pZ, showing linear dependence of diameter on p. Moreover. Some conjectures are LLM friendly, naturally stated as sorting problems verifiable by algorithms or Python code. To benchmark path finding we created more than 10 Kaggle datasets. CayleyPy works with arbitrary permutation or matrix groups and includes over 100 predefined generators. Our growth computation code outperforms GAP and Sage up to 1000 times in speed and size.

  • 49 authors
·
Sep 23, 2025

Qudit Designs and Where to Find Them

Unitary t-designs are some of the most versatile tools in quantum information theory. Their applications range from randomized benchmarking and shadow tomography, to more fundamental ones such as emulating quantum chaos and establishing exponential separations between classical and quantum query complexity. While unitary designs originating from a group structure, such as the Clifford group, have proven to be incredibly useful for qubit systems, unfortunately, this is no longer true for qudits. In fact, the classification of finite-group representations rules out the existence of unitary 2-designs for arbitrary qudit dimensions. This severely limits the applicability of standard quantum information primitives when it comes to qudit systems. We overcome these limitations with a three-fold contribution. First, we introduce a general technique to construct families of weighted state t-designs in arbitrary qudit dimensions. These weighted state-designs generalize classical shadow tomography protocol from qubits to qudits. Second, we introduce a Clifford character RB that allows us to benchmark the qudit Clifford group in any dimension, including non-prime-power dimensions. And third, we establish bounds on the quantum circuit complexity of generating approximate unitary-designs from native gates in existing quantum hardware such as high-spin and cavity-QED qudits. Our work further highlights the analogy between spin and optical coherent states by proving that spin-GKP codewords form a state 2-design while spin coherent states do not; in direct analogy with the optical case. This work is structured as a pedagogical and self-contained introduction to unitary designs and their applications to qudit systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 3

Polynomial-Time Optimal Group Selection via the Double-Commutator Eigenvalue Problem

The algebraic diversity framework generalizes temporal averaging over multiple observations to algebraic group action on a single observation for second-order statistical estimation. The central open problem in this framework is group selection: given an M-dimensional observation with unknown covariance structure, find the finite group whose spectral decomposition best matches the covariance. Naive enumeration of all subgroups of the symmetric group S_M requires exponential time in M. We prove that this combinatorial problem reduces to a generalized eigenvalue problem derived from the double commutator of the covariance matrix, yielding a polynomial-time algorithm with complexity O(d^2M^2 + d^3), where d is the dimension of a generator basis. The minimum eigenvector of the double-commutator matrix directly constructs the optimal group generator in closed form, with no iterative optimization. The reduction is exact: the double-commutator minimum eigenvalue is zero if and only if the optimal generator lies in the span of the basis, and its magnitude provides a certifiable optimality gap when it does not. This problem does not appear in the standard catalogs of computational complexity (Garey and Johnson, 1979) and represents a new class linking group theory, matrix analysis, and statistical estimation. We establish connections to independent component analysis (JADE), structured matrix nearness problems, and simultaneous matrix diagonalization, and we show that the double-commutator formulation is the unique approach that is simultaneously polynomial-time, closed-form, and certifiable. We extend the framework to non-Abelian symmetry recovery via a Sequential GEVP with deflation, and add two identifiability theorems characterizing the commutant-lattice ambiguity and the dichotomy on whether Aut(R) recovers a generative subgroup or only a supergroup.

  • 1 authors
·
May 7

An analytical framework for the Levine hats problem: new strategies, bounds and generalizations

We study the Levine hat problem, a classic combinatorial puzzle introduced by Lionel Levine in 2010. This problem involves a game in which n geq 2 players, each seeing an infinite stack of hats on each of their teammates' heads but not on their own, must simultaneously guess the index of a black hat on their own stack. If one of the players fails to do so, the team loses collectively. The players must therefore come up with a good strategy before the game starts. While the optimal winning probability V_{n} remains unknown even for n=2, we make three key advances. First, we develop a novel geometric framework for representing strategies through measurable functions, providing a new expression of V_{n} and a unified treatment of the game for finite and for infinite stacks via integral formulations. Secondly, we construct a new strategy K_{5} that reaches the conjectured optimal probability of victory : 0.35. We also show that K_{5} is part of a larger class of strategies that allow us to improve current bounds and resolve conjectured inequalities. Finally, we introduce and entirely solve a continuous generalization of the problem, demonstrating that extending to uncountable hat stacks increases the optimal winning probability to exactly 1/2. This generalization naturally leads to a broader and smoother strategic framework, within which we also describe how to compute optimal responses to a range of strategies.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 3, 2025

Learning Semi-supervised Gaussian Mixture Models for Generalized Category Discovery

In this paper, we address the problem of generalized category discovery (GCD), \ie, given a set of images where part of them are labelled and the rest are not, the task is to automatically cluster the images in the unlabelled data, leveraging the information from the labelled data, while the unlabelled data contain images from the labelled classes and also new ones. GCD is similar to semi-supervised learning (SSL) but is more realistic and challenging, as SSL assumes all the unlabelled images are from the same classes as the labelled ones. We also do not assume the class number in the unlabelled data is known a-priori, making the GCD problem even harder. To tackle the problem of GCD without knowing the class number, we propose an EM-like framework that alternates between representation learning and class number estimation. We propose a semi-supervised variant of the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with a stochastic splitting and merging mechanism to dynamically determine the prototypes by examining the cluster compactness and separability. With these prototypes, we leverage prototypical contrastive learning for representation learning on the partially labelled data subject to the constraints imposed by the labelled data. Our framework alternates between these two steps until convergence. The cluster assignment for an unlabelled instance can then be retrieved by identifying its nearest prototype. We comprehensively evaluate our framework on both generic image classification datasets and challenging fine-grained object recognition datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

  • 3 authors
·
May 10, 2023

Extending Bootstrap AMG for Clustering of Attributed Graphs

In this paper we propose a new approach to detect clusters in undirected graphs with attributed vertices. We incorporate structural and attribute similarities between the vertices in an augmented graph by creating additional vertices and edges as proposed in [1, 2]. The augmented graph is then embedded in a Euclidean space associated to its Laplacian and we cluster vertices via a modified K-means algorithm, using a new vector-valued distance in the embedding space. Main novelty of our method, which can be classified as an early fusion method, i.e., a method in which additional information on vertices are fused to the structure information before applying clustering, is the interpretation of attributes as new realizations of graph vertices, which can be dealt with as coordinate vectors in a related Euclidean space. This allows us to extend a scalable generalized spectral clustering procedure which substitutes graph Laplacian eigenvectors with some vectors, named algebraically smooth vectors, obtained by a linear-time complexity Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) method. We discuss the performance of our proposed clustering method by comparison with recent literature approaches and public available results. Extensive experiments on different types of synthetic datasets and real-world attributed graphs show that our new algorithm, embedding attributes information in the clustering, outperforms structure-only-based methods, when the attributed network has an ambiguous structure. Furthermore, our new method largely outperforms the method which originally proposed the graph augmentation, showing that our embedding strategy and vector-valued distance are very effective in taking advantages from the augmented-graph representation.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 20, 2021

Symbolic Synthesis of Neural Networks

Neural networks adapt very well to distributed and continuous representations, but struggle to generalize from small amounts of data. Symbolic systems commonly achieve data efficient generalization by exploiting modularity to benefit from local and discrete features of a representation. These features allow symbolic programs to be improved one module at a time and to experience combinatorial growth in the values they can successfully process. However, it is difficult to design a component that can be used to form symbolic abstractions and which is adequately overparametrized to learn arbitrary high-dimensional transformations. I present Graph-based Symbolically Synthesized Neural Networks (G-SSNNs), a class of neural modules that operate on representations modified with synthesized symbolic programs to include a fixed set of local and discrete features. I demonstrate that the choice of injected features within a G-SSNN module modulates the data efficiency and generalization of baseline neural models, creating predictable patterns of both heightened and curtailed generalization. By training G-SSNNs, we also derive information about desirable semantics of symbolic programs without manual engineering. This information is compact and amenable to abstraction, but can also be flexibly recontextualized for other high-dimensional settings. In future work, I will investigate data efficient generalization and the transferability of learned symbolic representations in more complex G-SSNN designs based on more complex classes of symbolic programs. Experimental code and data are available at https://github.com/shlomenu/symbolically_synthesized_networks .

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 6, 2023