arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 23, 2026 — 22:33:27 EST
We investigate the problem of confinement of massive ghost, which violates the unitarity of the physical S-matrix, in quadratic gravity on the basis of a manifestly covariant and local canonical operator formalism. First, we reconsider the manifestly covariant quantization of quadratic gravity in the de Donder gauge (the harmonic...
Esakia duality is the dual equivalence between Heyting algebras and Esakia spaces. However, the traditional proof uses the Prime Ideal Theorem to recover the algebra from its spectrum, a choice principle that is not constructively valid. We build on Townsend's localic Priestley duality to describe a fully constructive, localic...
Deep neural networks often exploit spurious associations in their training data, a failure known as shortcut learning. Concept-based explainability methods screen for shortcuts by testing whether concepts such as a patient's sex or scanner settings can be decoded from a network layer. Because each concept is evaluated in isolation,...
We show that the $d+0$-dimensional Yang-Lee theory describing classical Ising spins in an imaginary magnetic field can be realized, without post-selection, within a $(d-1)+1$ open quantum system whose dynamics consist of local unitaries and engineered dissipation. Competition between the coherent unitary and dissipative dynamics...
Collective intelligence can emerge when individuals coordinate through a shared environment, allowing local actions to accumulate into durable social organization. Language-model agents offer a new substrate for this process, yet most multi-agent systems rely on direct conversation, predefined roles, or centralized workflows. It...
Many empirical investigations of long-run relations are based on cross-section regressions in averaged or long differenced data that effectively have the time dimension of a $T\times N$ panel compressed. We analyze a class of time-compressed I(1) data and show that they have magnified variability stemming from the fact that the...
Agnostic sequential equilibrium (ASE) is a refinement of sequential equilibrium that does not force on the players a single, arbitrary belief system. In addition, whereas sequential equilibrium assumes the players' beliefs to be fully consistent (a notion that is based on perturbations of strategies), ASE employs a novel, simpler and...
This paper develops a new econometric framework to identify and estimate policy-relevant causal effects in contexts with endogenous selection into treatment and spillovers within single large networks or spatial settings. Conventional causal inference methods relying on either unconfoundedness or no-interference assumptions are...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in scientific work, but researchers may not evaluate its use uniformly across research tasks. This study examines task-specific attitudes towards AI among an international, self-selected sample of 3,785 PhD students in STEM and medical and health sciences who participated in...
Generative AI relocates the fixed cost of automation. A model provider pays to train a frontier system, while a downstream firm rents capability by usage; the same firm must carry a continuing payroll to supply a human-augmented service. We study this asymmetry in a local service economy with household budgets and a market-clearing...
Despite theory tying wealth inequality to social structure, empirical evidence has been limited to a few studies based on online social media data. This study uses a very different type of data, expands the global coverage to very different types of societies, and investigates new questions. In particular, we collect data from ~3500...
We develop a theory of measurement scales for utility functions, based on a generalization of the notion of numeraire commodity. Every sufficiently well-behaved utility is denominated in some scale of this form, and conversely, the choice of a compatible scale unit uniquely identifies utilities up to an additive constant. We define a...
Comparing economic models requires balancing fit against flexibility. Yet standard selection criteria often proxy flexibility using parameter counts, overlooking differences due to functional form and experimental design. This paper introduces a data compression approach for evaluating economic models. Following the Minimum...
The coordinated movement of animal groups is one of the most widespread social behaviors, which are generally attributed to high-order cognitive processing in the brain. Yet, collective coordination can seemingly emerge from rapid, local interactions between individuals, suggesting the existence of decentralized mechanisms of online...
There is growing international interest in generative AI (GenAI) literacy and its assessment among high school students, but objective assessment in this population remains underdeveloped. This article reports the iterative development and validation of the GenAI Literacy Test (GenAIT), an 18-item multiple-choice test measuring high...
Communication requires a shared code, and any change to it must be coordinated between senders and receivers to avoid a breakdown of communication. The honeybee waggle dance illustrates this problem: species with horizontal combs point directly at a food source, while species with vertical combs cannot point directly and instead...
Continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) provide the backbone for modeling discrete stochastic dynamics across applied, physical, and biological sciences. Their integration with modern gradient-based machine learning, however, is limited by the hard categorical event selection intrinsic to Gillespie-type simulation algorithms. We exploit...
Strongly connected components (SCCs) characterize modular structure in directed networks but are fragile to single node failures. We study strongly biconnected components (SBCs), which are the set of nodes in which every node pair remains mutually reachable after the removal of any single node, as a more robust notion of connectivity....
Recently, there has been a growing adoption of protein language models (PLMs) in biomedical science. Their embeddings provide a rich numerical representation of protein sequences which achieve state-of-the-art performance on several downstream tasks including protein fitness prediction. However, PLM embeddings are not directly...
Phylogenetic trees are used in evolutionary biology to represent the evolutionary history of a collection of taxa. As we have incomplete information about any evolutionary history, recovering trees from partial information is a focus of phylogenetic combinatorics. However, in some cases the available data does not describe a single...
We describe a systematic approach for spawning and aggregating multi-class cryo-EM reconstruction jobs. This approach formalizes standard ad hoc strategies of iterative classification and filtering typically used by practitioners to sort impure, heterogeneous samples. To our knowledge, this is the first method that can successfully...
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to accelerate biological research by automating computational analyses. Yet the ability of AI agents to carry out computational biology at the scale of complete research studies has not been systematically evaluated. Here we introduce BixBench3, a benchmark that measures the capacity of AI agents...
Natural language driven autonomous co-scientist workflows involve a fundamental trade-off between flexibility and reasoning at the expense of determinism, reproducibility, and observability. Such agents increasingly must communicate across institutional boundaries, where federation topology can shape latency and cost. We...
RNA inverse folding asks for an RNA sequence whose prescribed secondary structure is the unique maximum-base-pair compatible fold. In the four-letter Watson-Crick model (A-U and C-G pairs only, no pseudoknots, and zero minimum base-pair span), Hales et al. introduced a separated-coloring certificate and an even-odd device, while Boury...
Frozen hematology foundation-model (FM) embeddings reach near-saturated in-domain white-blood-cell (WBC) accuracy, but clinical deployment demands reliability across scanners, sites, stains and preparation pipelines. We audit 15 frozen encoders (hematology, pathology, and general vision) across four public single-cell acquisition...