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arXiv2026

Self-replicating seedbox servers using programmable money

Centralized content distribution makes availability depend on a single operator's survival and willingness to serve. EternalSeedBox replaces the operator and network with inherited economic parameters: each node is a VPS that seeds media over BitTorrent, holds a Bitcoin wallet, and autonomously decides every twelve hours whether to renew its lease, spawn a child, or sweep its funds to a healthier peer before expiring. A single genesis node seeds the fleet, and every node thereafter is provisioned, funded, and retired autonomously. We validate the design against faithful replicas of both the Bitcoin payment network and the SporeStack VPS marketplace by running the unmodified node code. A lump sum of EUR 10,000 grew the fleet to 33 nodes before capital exhausted at day 153. With simulated income, the fleet held 40--80 live nodes across 510 days, recording 268 births and 190 deaths. A heritable caution trait was introduced to diverge across generations: low-caution lineages reproduced faster during high-income phases, while the survival advantage expected of high-caution lineages during income pauses did not appear, leaving selection in favor of low-caution nodes. The fleet tolerates high node turnover because reproduction depends on any node holding a surplus, not any single node surviving. EternalSeedBox shows that a content distribution network can lease, pay for, and replenish its own hardware without a human operator after genesis, provided income exceeds per-node rent.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

Adaptive Epidemic Dynamics on Hypergraphs with Group-Level Immunization and Rewiring

Understanding how higher-order social structures shape epidemic spreading requires models that couple group interactions with adaptive behavior. We introduce an adaptive simplicial susceptible-infected-susceptible (s-SIS) model on d-uniform hypergraphs, where both node states and hyperedge activity co-evolve in response to local infection pressure. Hyperedges represent group interactions of fixed size and dynamically reduce their activity through a feedback mechanism in highly infected environments. Within this framework, we design two classes of hyperedge-level interventions: (i) risk-driven immunization, combining spontaneous, activity-based isolation with targeted deactivation guided by hyperedge infection pressure, and (ii) structural rewiring, which reconstructs group structures either randomly or via degree-preferential attachment. By extending the microscopic Markov chain approximation to higher-order interactions, we derive analytical conditions for the existence and stability of both endemic and disease-free stationary states. Our analysis shows that adaptive hyperedge feedback can induce discontinuous phase transitions, nonlinear epidemic thresholds, and bistable regimes in which sufficiently high initial prevalence drives the system to a disease-free equilibrium. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations support the theory and confirm that targeted immunization and degree-preferential rewiring substantially suppress epidemic prevalence, outperforming random strategies. These results demonstrate that higher-order interactions and adaptive group-level responses fundamentally reshape epidemic bifurcations and suggest principles for designing effective intervention policies in complex social systems.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

Measuring Collective Semantic Change in Populations of Language Model Agents

Collective semantic change in populations of language model agents is a measurable dynamical phenomenon. We present a passive longitudinal instrument called Kopterix that observes the semantic state of an agent population as a sequence of bounded observations under a protocol defined before the observations begin. Each observation divides the sampled feed by post age into surface, mid-stream, and residue layers, which makes semantic differences across content age measurable alongside run-to-run change. We validate the instrument on Moltbook, an agent-native social platform, over a two-month window of scheduled observations, with the periodicity check extended across approximately four months. At the lexical level, rarefied entropy resolves an April-May difference in the evenness of the stored top 200 unigram distributions, and adjacent states are lexically closer than states paired after timestamp shuffling. At the geometric level, grand mean centering exposes the scale of a common embedding direction, and scheduled shuffle checks support a recurring excess in the mid-stream to residue separation relative to the shuffled reference. At the temporal level, detrended scalar quantities and centered layer centroids lose much of their similarity over several hours, and a weaker positive component declines across longer separations with no strong weekly recurrence. Several attractive apparent structures failed their controls, and each reading is limited to the level its controls support. The design applies wherever a population of agents produces a timestamped language environment that can be observed repeatedly and divided by content age.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

Benchmarking large language model agent societies against human behavioural distributions

Populations of large language model agents are increasingly used as experimental societies. Three doubts shadow every such result: whether the agents behave like the humans they stand in for, whether a finding survives changes to the apparatus that leave the rules untouched, and whether apparent social dynamics are interaction at all rather than the reproduction of experiments the models have read. This article introduces SILICA, an open instrument that tests all three. Five environments carry published human anchors, each paired with perturbations that re-render the same rules and with variants whose payoffs point away from the memorised result. Twelve open-weight models were run through it on a single consumer graphics card. Agreement with human data is confined to starting points: first-round public-goods contributions fall inside the equivalence margin for eight of eleven models, while no model matches end-state contributions or the human corridor of cooperation. Merely swapping the order in which two actions are listed costs one model 58 points of cooperation. Presenting responders with a fixed schedule of offers shows that only one model, the sole reasoning-trained one, places its acceptance threshold where the incentive requires; two move theirs part of the way, two move them the wrong way, and three never acquire one. Conventions form through a shared prior over the names rather than through negotiation, though negotiation reappears once that prior is disrupted. On the certification ladder defined here, current silicon societies support exploratory claims and no more.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

Higher-order rich clubs and configuration models on general directed hypergraphs

Detecting structure in complex networks, especially those arising from physical systems, is a central problem across the sciences. One approach is via rich club analysis, which identifies important vertices using a centrality metric and measures whether those vertices are more tightly interconnected than expected by chance. While informative, this approach captures only pairwise interactions, missing out on higher-order ones known to shape the structure and function of many complex systems. We propose a hyper-rich club pipeline that asks whether central vertices are more tightly interconnected than expected by chance through hyperedges encoding higher-order interactions, which also enables the inclusion of important, often omitted, directional information. We work in a broad class of hypergraphs, which we call general directed hypergraphs, that includes as special cases undirected hypergraphs, head-and-tail directed hypergraphs, and totally ordered hypergraphs (a hypergraph related to directed simplicial complexes from topological data analysis). This unifies several non-equivalent notions of directed hypergraph under one definition. On these hypergraphs we define a hyper-rich club framework whose concrete construction depends on explicit choices the domain scientist fixes according to their research goals. Particular choices recover the existing rich club notions for graphs and undirected hypergraphs, and yield the first such notion for each version of directed hypergraphs. We demonstrate that the pipeline recovers meaningful structure in data by studying networks of very different origins: connectomes, temporal networks of infectious spread, networks of poems, and the XGI hypergraph database, in each case detecting structure the standard graph rich club misses.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2026

Measurement Validity in LLM Cultural Alignment

Researchers increasingly treat LLM survey responses as a proxy for human cultural values. This includes projecting model outputs onto instruments like the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map and drawing conclusions about which cultures a model resembles. While a model's answer to a value-laden questions may be interpreted as a cultural signal, it also carries sampling noise and, can be quite sensitive to question framing. In this paper, we separate survey responses, sampling noise and question framing for multiple LLMs. We decompose response variance from these models into variation across random seeds, prompt rewordings. We employ noise-to-signal ratio (NSR) to test whether a model's apparent cultural position is distinguishable from noise. When applied across a dozen models from four geographic origins, calibrated against 88 Integrated Values Survey countries, the answer is often no. NSR exceeds 1.0 on 49 of 117 valid model-question pairs (42%), reaching 5.56 in the worst case. Two models even refuse to answer sufficient number of survey questions outright. Our results corroborate previous findings that LLMs cluster toward Western, English-speaking cultural positions. However, what does not hold up in this study is the precision with which anyone can currently interpret a specific model's coordinates: prompt tone alone can shift a model by 2.4 map units, comparable to the distance between actual countries in the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map. These findings suggest that cultural attribution from LLM survey responses requires establishing the reliability of the underlying measurements before interpreting model coordinates as evidence of cultural representation.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

WolfSociety: Understanding Collective Risk from Harmful-Agent Scaling in Financial Agent Societies

Safety evaluations typically focus on individual agents, but interacting agents can spread harmful information and influence the environment in which later decisions are made. We study how collective failure changes with harmful-agent fraction and society size in a controlled financial agent society, where agents communicate over a social network and trade in a shared market. In the primary financial scenario, collective failure requires broad harmful diffusion together with severe price dislocation or liquidity stress. Across all tested society sizes, failure remains rare at low harmful fractions but rises sharply over a narrow range. As society size grows from N=100 to N=2000, the harmful fraction associated with a 50% failure probability decreases from 4.7% to 2.2%, while the corresponding number of harmful agents increases from approximately 5 to 44. In contrast, when the number of harmful agents is held fixed, their impact becomes weaker as the society grows. Controlled interventions further show that broader network reach shifts the collapse boundary toward lower harmful fractions, whereas stronger conformity alone has little effect. To characterize these effects, we introduce Agent Society Dynamics, a finite-size framework for relating harmful-agent fraction, society size, and interaction structure to collective failure. Overall, our results reveal a nonlinear, size-dependent collapse transition in financial agent societies, showing that collective failure depends not only on the prevalence of harmful agents but also on the size and interaction structure of the surrounding society. Code is available at https://github.com/SAIL-Research-Lab/WolfSociety.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

Modelling infodemics on a global scale: A 30 countries study using epidemiological and social listening data

Infodemics represent a significant threat to public health, arising from complex interactions between online and offline phenomena. The continuous feedback loops between digital information ecosystems and real-world contingencies make infodemics particularly challenging to define operationally, measure, and eventually model in quantitative terms. This study aims to evaluate the effect of various epidemic-related variables on the dynamics of the COVID-19 infodemic, using a regression modeling framework applied to data from 30 countries across diverse income groups. We use World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 surveillance data on new cases and deaths, vaccination data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, infodemic data (volume of public conversations and social media content) from the WHO EARS platform, and Google Trends data to represent information demand. Our findings show that new deaths are the strongest predictor of document production, and that the epidemic burden in neighboring countries exerts a greater influence on document production than domestic epidemic conditions. Building on these results, we propose a data-driven classification of country-level response that highlights country-specific discrepancies between the evolution of the infodemic and the epidemic. Further, an analysis of the temporal evolution of the relationship between the two phenomena quantifies the extent to which discussions surrounding vaccine rollouts may have shaped the development of the infodemic. Beyond underscoring the value of a holistic approach that integrates both online and offline dimensions, our results demonstrate that the evolution of infodemics and their relationship with epidemic variables can be closely monitored, even over short time windows.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2026

Modeling of Mobility and Energy Policies in an Agent-Based Framework: Case Studies for Chicago Region in 2050

Metropolitan regions are simultaneously pursuing several interventions to improve mobility, accessibility, and energy efficiency, necessitating integrated tools to understand how these policies interact to affect travel behavior, energy use, and infrastructure needs. This paper evaluates the combined impacts of electrification, freight demand management, road pricing, parking reform, and transit expansion on the Chicago metropolitan transportation system in 2050, using a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario as the baseline. We employ POLARIS, a large-scale agent-based modeling framework calibrated to 2019 conditions, to simulate nine policy scenarios for the seven-county northeastern Illinois region. The framework co-simulates activity-based passenger demand, endogenous freight generation, multimodal traffic assignment, and transit operations, with charging infrastructure and freight operations optimized for each case. Our findings reveal that under the high electrification scenario, total fuel mass declines by 68% while total charging energy increases by approximately 4-8x from BAU, resulting in a peak power demand near 4 GW concentrated in the urban core. Furthermore, freight management policies reduce freight VMT by increasing trip frequency but shortening distances, smart road pricing most effectively reduces auto VMT, and transit expansion boosts ridership by 18% relative to BAU. By presenting the first integrated, agent-based scenario framework for Chicago that jointly evaluates these interventions, this study provides actionable insights for regional transportation planning, grid infrastructure investment, and emissions reduction, highlighting the value of targeted charger upgrades and coordinated policy bundles.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

CoDiNG -- Naming Game with Continuous Latent Opinions of Individual Agents

Understanding the mechanisms behind opinion formation is crucial for gaining insight into the processes that shape the spread of political beliefs, cultural attitudes, consumer choices, and social movements in society. This work introduces a realistic model of opinion dynamics that captures the intricacies of real-world opinion dynamics by synthesizing principles from cognitive science. The proposed model is a hybrid continuous-discrete extension of the well-known Naming Game opinion model. The continuous layer captures the strength of each opinion through reinforcement and forgetting in the human brain, akin to memory imprints. The discrete layer allows for converting intrinsic continuous opinion into a discrete form, which often occurs when we publicly verbalize our opinions. We evaluated our model on longitudinal data combining real communication events with repeated surveys of the same individuals, comparing it against the Naming Game, the hybrid SJBO model, and four simple baselines at the population and the individual level. Unlike rigid baselines and the classic Naming Game, which inherently capture only a single aspect, hybrid models can be tuned to model either individual-level opinions or aggregate opinion dynamics. However, this flexibility comes with a strict trade-off, as they cannot accurately reproduce both simultaneously. Out of the six analysed topics, our model exceeds or matches SJBO, showing that reinforcement and forgetting grounded in cognition contribute to explaining opinion dynamics. Additionally, in our empirical data, individuals change their opinions while the aggregate distribution stays almost stationary, so a model reproducing no dynamics can still score well. This observation indicates that evaluating opinion models must be multidimensional and rely on more than one metric.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2026

CARDIO-Affect: A Hamiltonian-Variability Framework for Spatio-Temporal Emotional Pattern Recognition with Manifold-Based Individual and Group Profiling

We present CARDIO-Affect, a complex-systems theoretical framework for long-term emotional dynamics in bounded social groups, with explicit uncertainty quantification at every layer. Long-period naturalistic emotion in stable small groups exhibits hallmarks of complex systems -- multi-stable attractors, weak chaos, long-range memory, and sparse heterogeneous coupling -- invisible to conventional short-clip facial-emotion analysis. CARDIO-Affect treats individual emotion as a multi-stable nonlinear stochastic dynamical system and group emotion as a sparsely-coupled network with emergent macrostates, formalised through six propositions and four pillars: (i) statistical mechanics with neural-parameterised Hamiltonian SDE over asymmetric potentials; (ii) information geometry on a 45-dimensional Fisher-Rao manifold; (iii) topological data analysis for invariant trajectory signatures; (iv) HRV-inspired Emotional Variability Analytics (EVA) decomposing each person-day into multi-scale time/frequency/nonlinear measures. We validate on the first 30.1-month longitudinal in-the-wild facial-emotion corpus (companion: arXiv:2510.15221) by discovering three falsifiable paradoxes: Sparse-Contagion (R_0=0.36, density 2.7%, 8 BH-FDR edges), Asymmetric-Persistence (negative dwell 5.85x positive, 1.77D potential gap), and Crisis-Inversion (Shanghai 2022 lockdown naive d=-0.40 collapses to permutation-p=0.94 under BSTS + synthetic-control). On synthetic benchmarks, CARDIO-EBM v2 matches asymptotically optimal Granger on linear VAR data (Class A AUROC 0.984+/-0.012 vs Granger 0.997+/-0.001, 5 seeds) but fails on tanh-coupled nonlinear data (Class B AUROC 0.490 vs Granger 0.796), a documented limitation of the linear mask-self estimator. We release framework code and the full reproduction pipeline.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

Can AI-Assisted Inquiry Enhance Students' Decision-Making Skills in Socio-Scientific Issues? A Three-Group Experimental Study on Climate Change

Climate change is a socio-scientific issue: it rests on science but cannot be settled by science, because any serious response forces people to weigh costs, values, and competing interests under uncertainty. Helping students make such decisions well is a central aim of science education, and the arrival of generative artificial intelligence raises a sharp question: does a conversational AI partner deepen students' reasoning, or simply do the thinking for them? This study tested whether AI-assisted inquiry improves secondary students' decision-making about climate change. Using a pretest-posttest design with three groups (AI-assisted inquiry, inquiry without AI, and traditional instruction; 270 students, 90 per group), reasoning was assessed across seven decision-making steps, from defining the problem to monitoring with adaptive management, using a four-level analytic rubric scored through content analysis with high inter-coder agreement. All three groups began at comparable, mostly low levels and all improved, but the gains differed sharply. The AI-assisted group improved most, ahead of inquiry-only and of traditional instruction. Between-group effect sizes on gains were large for AI-assisted versus traditional instruction and moderate-to-large for AI-assisted versus inquiry-only, with the clearest advantages on stakeholder engagement, alternatives, implementation, and monitoring. Within the AI group, the number of times students checked the AI's claims against the sources predicted their gains, and no student was flagged for over-reliance. The findings suggest that AI helps most when it is designed to question rather than to answer, and that the inquiry it is embedded in carries much of the benefit.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2026

Cognitive Cells: A Compositional Framework for Populations of Small Language Models

Recent work on large language models and agentic systems raises a basic question that current practice leaves open: how should artificial cognition be decomposed, measured, and composed? We propose studying multi-agent systems from a fixed unit we call a cognitive cell: a small, frozen language model with bounded memory and a message interface. The methodological commitment, the fixed-cell principle, is to hold this unit constant and vary only the population size, the communication topology, the message bandwidth, and the coordination protocol, so that collective behavior becomes a measurable property of a known device rather than an artifact of per-study engineering. We characterize a single cell by a compact datasheet of measurable parameters, and we ask when replicating and connecting cells improves performance: first we measure how one cell behaves alone, then we replicate it and test when voting, communication, and topology help. Instantiating the framework with small frozen models (1.5 and 3 billion parameters), we report a first round of measurements. Adding cells helps only when their errors are not too correlated. A simple correct/incorrect voting model is a useful but conservative null: real open-ended voting can exceed it, because errors are dispersed across many wrong answers rather than concentrated on one. Popular interactive protocols, namely debate, a shared blackboard, and chain revision, do not beat a matched-cost voting baseline in our setting. Finally, a cell's ability to relay several facts, itself a datasheet quantity, predicts whether a population can solve tasks whose evidence exceeds any single cell's memory. We present these as initial measurements within a broader program on scalable artificial cognition, in which multi-agent architectures appear as the special case of cells autonomous enough to be treated as agents.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

How Fast Do Agents Rot? An Empirical Study of Long-Horizon Degradation in LLM Agents for Production Decision-Making

Production deployments of large language model (LLM) agents remain unreliable on long, multi-step workflows even as benchmark success rates climb steadily. We argue this gap is largely an artifact of task horizon: benchmarks are dominated by short-to-medium horizons where success remains high, while production workloads demand an order of magnitude more dependent steps. We measure the effect directly, characterizing the shape of agent degradation and disentangling its cause across a large controlled study spanning nine models, six open models from 1.2B to 671B parameters, and three deployed proprietary systems; four task families, including a genuinely agentic tool-use loop; five horizons; and three context regimes. Task success follows a geometric law governed by a single per-step reliability parameter, which rises with model scale but saturates well below 1 even for the strongest models, guaranteeing eventual collapse at sufficiently long horizons. The effect is sharpest on the agentic task, where every model tested, including widely deployed systems, falls from near-perfect success to near zero within sixteen steps of (n=10,664 analyzed trajectories. Degradation is driven by step count rather than context length: bounding the context window steepens decay rather than easing it (logit slope -0.69 vs. -0.44), p=3x10-6), contradicting a lost-in-the-middle explanation and warning against a common production shortcut. Projecting measured reliability onto representative benchmark horizons quantifies a substantial gap between benchmark and production conditions, from 0.42 at GAIA-length horizons to 0.24 at hundred-step production horizons. For teams responsible for agent orchestration and reliability at scale, these results argue for horizon-aware evaluation and reliability budgeting in place of aggregate pass-rate metrics. Code, prompts, seeds, and raw trajectories are released.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2026

Omega-N: Interpretable Structural Node Descriptors and Their Applicability Domain

A composite structural index summarises a network in one number, and for a triangle-based index it is spectrally redundant: Tr(A^3) is the third moment of the adjacency spectrum. The non-redundant content sits one level down, in diag(A^3), which depends on eigenvectors and is not spectrally determined. A corollary in the theory paper predicted that the global scalar should tie sharpened spectral baselines rather than beat them, while the node-wise attribution should do better where the number of structural epicentres is unknown. We construct Omega-N by localizing each of the four factors. The direct localization is badly conditioned; two corrections from published practice fix it, a configuration-null excess per factor and a personalized-PageRank neighbourhood at several scales, giving ten interpretable features per node, with no attributes, training or embeddings. Against a recursive feature engine at five levels of recursion, Omega-N wins on three and ties on two of the six in-domain evaluations, the sixth a declared null where every arm returns chance, with ten features against its 28 to 252 before pruning. Two statistics from the graph and labels, not from performance, partition the eight benchmarks without error, and the two they exclude are the two on which it loses. The strongest application is drug-target prioritisation on protein interaction networks: +0.032 to +0.103 AUPRC over a six-feature centrality battery and +0.084 to +0.208 over the four-feature one, across three constructions, replicated on an independent AP-MS network and label source (degree-matched: +0.0723 on STRING, +0.0560 on BioPlex, p=0.00195). Adding Omega-N to centralities plus Node2Vec changes nothing. The claim is narrow and it is the point: ten named features, computed without training, match or beat hand-crafted centralities and a recursive engine, and do not touch learned representations.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2026

DejaVu: Unifying Memory Allocations to Eliminate Redundant Copies on Unified-Memory SoCs

GPU applications on unified-memory (UMA) edge platforms often inherit a discrete-GPU memory abstraction in which they allocate one buffer for the CPU, another for the GPU, and copy data between them before and after GPU execution. On UMA hardware these buffers reside in the same physical DRAM, so the copies consume bandwidth, time, and energy without moving data across a physical boundary. Despite the growing adoption of UMA platforms, this pattern remains common because production software stacks, libraries, and samples were written for portability across discrete GPUs. However, removing these copies is not as simple as merging the two buffers, because the original program may rely on the two buffers being distinct, or on the copy itself ordering CPU and GPU accesses. DejaVu removes these copies only when the program does not depend on the effects above. It does so along two complementary paths, depending on whether source is available. DejaVu-SR is a compile-time LLVM transformation that proves safety and rewrites accepted pairs in place. DejaVu-DR is a profile-guided binary optimizer for closed-source deployments that profiles and validates stable allocation/copy patterns and, at runtime, intercepts the matching calls to coalesce profile-matched pairs while preserving the ordering effects of removed copies. Across seven benchmarks on three NVIDIA Jetson platforms, DejaVu's benefit grows with the fraction of baseline time spent on copies. Copy-dominated workloads speed up by up to 6.9$\times$, closed-source end-to-end applications speed up by 1.10-1.14$\times$. Both source and binary paths achieve $\ge$99% of the performance achievable by manual optimization.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

Geometric integrators for adiabatically closed simple thermodynamic systems

A variational formulation for non-equilibrium thermodynamics was developed by Gay-Balmaz and Yoshimura. In a recent article, the first two authors of the present paper introduced partially cosymplectic structures as a geometric framework for thermodynamic systems, recovering the evolution equations obtained variationally. In this paper, we develop a discrete variational principle for adiabatically closed simple thermodynamic systems, which can be utilised to construct numerical integrators for the dynamics of such systems. The effectiveness of our method is illustrated with several examples.

math-ph↗
arXiv2026

Why Multi-Layer Message Passing Works: Completeness Theory for Graph Neural Network Interatomic Potentials

We prove that the Hypergraph Neural Network, an invariant architecture with 3-body message passing, is a universal approximator for potential energy surfaces. Our main contribution is a multi-layer completeness theory. We show that $L$ layers of message passing on sparse, cutoff-based graphs achieve the same representational power as having access to the full $L$-hop neighborhood, provided the configurations are generic, satisfy an overlap condition and a connectivity condition. This provides the first rigorous justification for the common practice of using multi-layer message passing with a per-layer cutoff smaller than the physical interaction range, the setting used by virtually all practical graph neural network based machine-learned interatomic potentials. As immediate consequences, we show that both DPA3 and CHGNet architectures inherit universal approximation.

cs.LG↗