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Optimal Mixing of Glauber Dynamics for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Model at $β< 1/2$

We prove that for every fixed inverse temperature $β< 1 / 2$, with high probability over the disorder, the single-site Glauber dynamics for the $n$-spin Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model mixes from every initial configuration to within total variation distance $\varepsilon$ in $O_β\left(n \log\left(n / \varepsilon\right)\right)$ steps. The bound holds uniformly over all external fields and is optimal up to constants depending only on $β$. The main ingredient is a deterministic criterion for optimal-order Poincaré inequalities in general Ising models, established via the integrated Bakry-Émery criterion together with a new two-spin estimate. A standard application of the localization-scheme framework of Chen and Eldan then upgrades the Poincaré inequality to a modified log-Sobolev inequality, yielding the optimal mixing-time bound. The main ideas underlying the proof of the Poincaré inequality were generated by GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra.

math.PR

Efficient Polynomial-Time Decoding of Simplicial Anticodes with Near-Optimal Performance

In this work, we propose an efficient decoding algorithm for codes arising from simplicial complexes, a family of binary linear codes for which no decoding method of this type was previously known. Although the algorithm does not always attain the maximum theoretical error-correcting capability, it provides an explicit bound that can be computed directly from the structure of the complex. Moreover, this bound is asymptotically optimal: the ratio between the guaranteed correcting capability and the theoretical maximum converges to $1$ as the code length increases, under natural assumptions on the dimension of the maximal faces. The correction capability is also presented in specific examples. Finally, we introduce specific families of simplicial complexes where the algorithm successfully reaches this theoretical bound.

cs.IT

Security Science (SecSci), Basic Concepts and Mathematical Foundations

This textbook compiles the lecture notes from security courses taught at Oxford in the 2000s, at Royal Holloway in the 2010s, and currently in Hawaii. The early chapters are suitable for a first course in security. The middle chapters have been used in advanced courses. Towards the end there are also some research problems.

cs.CR

On the Equality of the ELBO to a Sum of Entropies at Stationary Points of Learning

The variational lower bound (a.k.a. ELBO or free energy) is the central objective for many established as well as for many novel algorithms for unsupervised learning. Such algorithms usually increase the bound until parameters have converged to values close to a stationary point of the learning dynamics. Here we show that (for a very large class of generative models) the variational lower bound is at all stationary points of learning equal to a sum of entropies. Concretely, for standard generative models with one set of latents and one set of observed variables, the sum consists of three entropies: (A) the (average) entropy of the variational distributions, (B) the negative entropy of the model's prior distribution, and (C) the (expected) negative entropy of the observable distribution. The obtained result applies under realistic conditions including: finite numbers of data points, at any stationary point (including saddle points) and for any family of (well behaved) variational distributions. The class of generative models for which we show the equality to entropy sums contains many standard as well as novel generative models including standard (Gaussian) variational autoencoders. The prerequisites we use to show equality to entropy sums are relatively mild. Concretely, the distributions defining a given generative model have to be of the exponential family, and the model has to satisfy a parameterization criterion (which is usually fulfilled). Proving equality of the ELBO to entropy sums at stationary points (under the stated conditions) is the main contribution of this work.

stat.ML

Covering 1024 syndromes with 50 columns

We exhibit a binary linear $[50,40]_2$ code of covering radius $2$, so $\ell_2(10,2)\le 50$, one column below the Kaikkonen--Rosendahl length $51$ that has stood since 2003 and that still seeds the $R=2$ family of Davydov--Marcugini--Pambianco (arXiv:2511.02542). The new matrix admits a $(2,0)$-partition into ten blocks, so Construction $\mathrm{QM}_2^2$ propagates it to exhaustively verified codes of lengths $815$ and $1631$ at $r=18$ and $r=20$, and to the family $n=51\cdot 2^{r/2-5}-1$ of asymptotic density $2601/2048$. The matrices, verifiers, and source are at https://github.com/wustep/maths, pin problems/covering/share/2026-08-24/ at commit 736a38f.

cs.IT

A proof of Ross's conjecture for two-site moving-target search

A target moves between two sites according to a discrete-time Markov chain with a $2\times2$ transition matrix $M$. At each epoch one site is searched at positive cost, and a search may overlook a target that is present. Ross conjectured that an optimal policy is threshold in the posterior probability that the target is at site~1. MacPhee and Jordan proved the conjecture throughout the nonpositive-determinant ($\det M\le0$) regime and for part of the positive-determinant ($\det M>0$) regime, leaving the remaining cases open. We prove threshold optimality throughout the positive-determinant regime, completing Ross's conjecture for all parameter values.

math.PR

Distinguishing classes of intersection graphs of homothets or similarities of two convex disks

For smooth convex disks $A$, i.e., convex compact subsets of the plane with non-empty interior and with at most one tangent at every boundary point, we classify the classes $G^{\text{hom}}(A)$ and $G^{\text{sim}}(A)$ of intersection graphs that can be obtained from homothets and similarities of $A$, respectively. Namely, we prove that $G^{\text{hom}}(A)=G^{\text{hom}}(B)$ if and only if $A$ and $B$ are affine equivalent, and $G^{\text{sim}}(A)=G^{\text{sim}}(B)$ if and only if $A$ and $B$ are similar.

cs.CG

Bernstein--von Mises theorems for Bayesian probabilistic numerics

We study probabilistic numerical methods for solving nonlinear PDEs from a Bayesian nonparametric perspective. Given noisy evaluations at random collocation points, we place a truncated Gaussian series prior on the unknown solution and establish contraction at the minimax nonparametric rate, up to a logarithmic factor. Our main results give Gaussian approximations of the posterior in positive-order Sobolev spaces and, under suitable conditions, in the uniform topology. This contrasts with classical ill-posed inverse problems, where Bernstein--von Mises theorems typically require substantially weaker topologies. Here, the observation operator is differential rather than smoothing, and inversion of its linearisation gains regularity, making these strong-topology results possible. The posterior may be centred at either the posterior mean or the posterior mode. We further prove that the Gaussian Laplace approximation is asymptotically equivalent to the true posterior at a $\sqrt{N}$-scale.

math.ST

A counterexample to Kusner's conjecture on equilateral sets

We disprove Kusner's 1983 conjecture that every equilateral set in $\ell_p^n$ with $2 57$. This is the first equilateral set of more than $n+1$ points in $\ell_p^n$ for any finite $p\ge2$. The construction persists on an open interval of exponents around $5$; since Ge, Xu and Zhou recently proved the conjecture for $2\le p\le4$, the infimum of exponents at which it fails lies in $[4,5)$. The configuration is the unique solution of an explicit polynomial system with rational coefficients in a rational box, established in exact arithmetic.

math.MG

An Exposition of the $\widetilde{O}(\log^{1/4} n)$ Bound for the Komlós Problem

A conjecture of Komlós states that the combinatorial discrepancy of any matrix $A\in\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ whose columns have Euclidean norm at most one is bounded by a universal constant. We prove that the combinatorial discrepancy of every such matrix is at most $O((\log n)^{1/4}(\log\log n)^{7/4})$. This is the first asymptotic improvement over the $O(\sqrt{\log n})$ bound established by Banaszczyk [Banaszczyk, Random Struct.\ Algorithms, 1998], and it refutes a conjecture of Hajela [Hajela, European J.\ Combin., 1988] that a lower bound of order $Ω(\sqrt{\log n})$ should hold.

math.CO

Sharp Restricted Isometry Thresholds for Global Minima of Rank-Restricted Matrix LASSO

We determine the sharp restricted isometry threshold for recovery at global minima of the rank-restricted matrix LASSO. For target rank $r_{\star}$, if the rank-$k$ RIP constant satisfies $δ<δ_{\mathrm{sharp}}(k/r_{\star})$, where $δ_{\mathrm{sharp}}(t)=t/(4-t)$ for $0<t<4/3$ and $δ_{\mathrm{sharp}}(t)=\sqrt{(t-1)/t}$ for $t\ge4/3$, then every global minimizer has Frobenius error $\lesssim\sqrt{r_{\star}}λ$ for all $λ\gtrsim\|\mathcal{A}^{*}(ξ)\|_{\mathrm{op}}$ and at every search rank $r\ge r_{\star}$. The constants depend only on the RIP constant and $t=k/r_{\star}$, and in particular are independent of the search rank. When the rank restriction is inactive, the result specializes to the ordinary convex matrix LASSO. We also obtain the analogous results for sparsity-restricted vector LASSO. Conversely, we show that the threshold $δ<δ_{\mathrm{sharp}}(k/r_{\star})$ cannot be improved, due to the existence of counterexamples whose global minimizers fail to recover the ground truth.

stat.ML

Blind Random Search with Noisy Loss Measurements: Averaging, Thresholding, and Almost Sure Convergence

Blind random search repeatedly draws a candidate point and replaces the current estimate whenever the candidate has a lower loss. In the absence of noise, the true loss is observed directly. It decreases strictly at every accepted update and is monotone nonincreasing over all iterations. Measurement noise can make a worse candidate appear better and thereby break this monotonicity. To recover almost sure convergence under noise, we incorporate averaging and thresholding into the original decision criterion. These two classical tools are coupled. As the sample sizes grow, the positive threshold shrinks at a matched rate. These modifications allow blind random search to recover eventual monotonicity of the true loss under noisy measurements and to converge almost surely.

math.OC

TopoAlign: A Framework for Aligning Code to Math via Topological Decomposition

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at both informal and formal (e.g. Lean 4) mathematical reasoning but still struggle with autoformalisation, the task of transforming informal into formal mathematical statements. Yet, the performance of current Math LLMs is constrained by the scarcity of large-scale corpora, particularly those containing pairs of informal and formal statements. Interestingly, the formal languages used in autoformalisation share structural similarities with programming languages, and code data is available at scale. However, current models trained on code do not transfer effectively to formal math, due to structural and syntactic differences between them. To address this, we propose TopoAlign, a framework that unlocks widely available code repositories as training resources for Math LLMs. TopoAlign decomposes code into docstrings, main functions, and dependency functions, and reassembles these components into analogues that structurally mirror formal statements. We train three state-of-the-art models, DeepSeek-Math, Qwen-3 and Herald, and evaluate them on the MiniF2F, Putnam, and ProofNet benchmarks. TopoAlign provides substantial gains for DeepSeek-Math, improving performance by 17.77% on BEq@10 and 68.82% on typecheck@10, and also measurably improves Herald by 0.12% on BEq@10 and 1.09% on typecheck@10 despite introducing no new mathematical knowledge.

cs.CL

Discrepancy of geometric incidences

We study the combinatorial (red-blue) discrepancy of finite point sets with respect to hyperplanes and, more generally, bounded-complexity affine algebraic sets. We prove that every $n$-point set in a real Euclidean space admits a red-blue coloring for which every affine algebraic set of dimension at most $D$ and degree at most $k$ has discrepancy at most $n^{\frac12-\frac{1}{2(D+1)}-\varepsilon}$ for some $\varepsilon=\varepsilon(D,k)>0$. This gives a polynomial improvement over the straightforward VC-dimension bound $\tilde O(n^{\frac12-\frac{1}{2(D+1)}})$. In the opposite direction, we construct $n$-point sets in $\mathbb R^d$ whose discrepancy with respect to hyperplanes is $\tildeΩ(n^{\frac12-\frac{1}{d+1}}),$ extending the point-line discrepancy lower bound of Chazelle and Lvov. We present further applications of our methods in communication complexity, concerning separation between randomized communication cost and deterministic communication cost with access to equality oracle.

math.CO

Residual neural networks overcome the curse of dimensionality for semilinear heat equations

Rigorous results show that feedforward neural networks can overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs), but comparatively little is known about residual neural networks (ResNets) in the nonlinear PDE setting. We prove that ResNets overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of solutions of semilinear heat equations with globally Lipschitz continuous, gradient-independent nonlinearities: under polynomial growth and network approximability hypotheses on the PDE data, there exist $η\in(0,\infty)$ and ResNets $Ψ_{d,\varepsilon}$, $d\in\mathbb{N}$, $\varepsilon\in(0,1]$, with at most $ηd^η\varepsilon^{-η}$ parameters whose realizations approximate the solution in dimension $d$ with an $L^2$-error of at most $\varepsilon$. The proof represents one deterministic realization of a multilevel Picard estimator by a ResNet whose shortcut connections transmit the spatial variable and a scalar accumulator, while the residual branches successively add the summands of the estimator. For ridge-sum initial conditions, admissible sigmoidal activations, and globally Lipschitz truncations of the nonlinearity, we obtain, for every $ξ>0$, the explicit bound $C_ξd^{4+ξ}\varepsilon^{-(3+ξ)}$ on the number of parameters.

math.NA

Proof-Carrying Analytic Approximation: Local-to-Global Evidence Transport at Encoding Cost

Under quasi-uniform refinement, bounded local-encoding hypotheses, and local $W^{r,2}$ approximation of order $r\ge 2$ in a rational piecewise-polynomial presentation of $W^{1,2}(0,1)$, carrying the complete proof genealogy up to the level required by an accuracy $\varepsilon$ costs the same asymptotic bit order as the finest-level conventional coefficient encoding. If $B_n=Θ(M_nβ_n)$ denotes that level-$n$ encoding size, our compiler transports supplied local approximation and overlap witnesses through exact partition-of-unity synthesis and geometric refinement to a represented limit with total certificate size $O(B_{m(\varepsilon)})$, where $m(\varepsilon)=O(\log(1/\varepsilon)/(r-1))$. The construction makes no oracle query to an independently supplied semantic target name ($Q_{\rm target}=0$). When $β_n=O(n+1)$, this becomes $O(\varepsilon^{-1/(r-1)}(1+\log(1/\varepsilon)))$. The surrounding framework is intentionally separated from this resource theorem. Every real computable Banach presentation admits a uniformly computable linear isometric embedding into standard computable $C([0,1])$, with computable inverse on its represented range. Complete metric evidence with rational strict slack collapses extensionally to the represented analytic metric once effective names are available, while chosen evidence transformations retain construction history and resource information. For the Lipschitz grammar used here, qualitative evidence-local lifting is canonical; the nontrivial question is therefore which evidence is retained and at what cost.

math.FA

The Discrete Harmonic Center of a Quadrilateral

Triangulate a simple quadrilateral by connecting all vertices to an additional point. If the vertices carry values, the piecewise linear function can be assigned a Dirichlet energy. We show that the minimal Dirichlet energy as a function of the location of the inserted point is convex, and the location of the minimum is independent of the values at the corners - a quadrilateral has a discrete harmonic center, characterized by an equilibrium of currents across the inserted edges. It turns out that the fixed points of the Möbius involution swapping opposite corners of the quadrilateral are critical points of this energy, so the discrete harmonic center is Möbius-covariant. For tangential and cyclic quadrilaterals the center admits simple closed forms related to the circle centers. The center and its data-independence generalize to polytopes with d + 2 vertices in dimension d, but the conformal characterizations are special to four points in the plane.

math.DG

A Projected Semiexplicit Integrator for Dissipative Systems with Configuration-Dependent Kinetic Energy: Contact-Herglotz Formulation and Benchmarks

Contact Hamiltonian dynamics gives dissipative mechanics an intrinsic action variable, but explicit contact splittings reach only kinetic energies whose terms are exactly integrable: frozen-coordinate diagonal metrics (the spherical pendulum, a torus particle) are included, while dense metrics with momentum cross terms, with the double pendulum as flagship, are not. We introduce a projected Pihajoki-contact integrator for this non-separable setting, combining phase-space duplication, symmetric projection onto the physical diagonal, and constant-friction damping half-steps, with the action factor carried by an exact Herglotz update. As in the projected extended-phase-space framework it builds on, the construction needs no binding parameter, returns the copies to the diagonal at every step, and confines the nonlinear solve to the $2n$ projection variables. For constant friction the step rescales $ω=dη$ by the exact factor $e^{-γτ}$ when the projection is solved exactly (a classical conformally symplectic identity, realized here for this class), while time-symmetry, consistency, and smoothness yield an $O(τ^3)$ one-step contact-form residual, a bound not specific to the contact form. On the damped double pendulum, spherical pendulum, and torus particle the method is second-order accurate, reproduces the contact decay law, and controls long-time energy and contact drift in coarse or stiff regimes where the Tao baseline and the unprojected average lose the solution. A head-to-head with exact-contactomorphism splittings delimits the niche: where a frozen-coordinate splitting exists it preserves the contact form exactly and wins at matched cost; for the dense double-pendulum metric the realizable alternative is first-order with a prohibitive constant and the projected method prevails. The contact-form estimate is local, one-step, and constant-friction.

math-ph