cs.SIMay 18, 2026

Prism: Structural Symmetry Scanning via Duality-Constrained Laplacian Projection

Authors: Jiatong Xie

Organizations: Independent researcher.

Abstract

We introduce \textbf{Prism}, a framework for structural symmetry diagnosis in complex networks. Given a graph Laplacian LL and a duality operator PP (a symmetric involution), Prism computes the \emph{duality defect} δ(L,P)=LPPLF/LFδ(L,P) = \|LP - PL\|_F / \|L\|_F -- a scalar measuring how far the network deviates from structural self-consistency. When PP encodes the network's true symmetry, δδ starts near zero and rises monotonically as structure degrades; an arbitrary PP gives noise. We prove that the optimal LL' satisfying [L,P]=0[L', P] = 0 is given by a closed-form block-diagonal projection, and provide an unsupervised alternating optimization that learns PP from the graph's own Fiedler vector. Experiments on synthetic networks show the true-PP defect is 3.38×3.38\times more sensitive to structural degradation than an index-reversal baseline and more sensitive than modularity. On Zachary's Karate Club with edge noise, Prism achieves 94.5%94.5\% community detection accuracy at 5%5\% noise versus 76.6%76.6\% for the raw Laplacian baseline. Applied to live S&P~500 data (2026-05-17), Prism detects rising structural stress (defect 0.430.730.43 \to 0.73 over 90 days) while surface correlations remain low -- a signal invisible to correlation-based methods. In a historical backtest spanning five major stress events (2011--2020), the duality defect exhibits a consistent pattern: it reaches elevated levels \emph{before} the correlation spike that accompanies each crisis, and sustains high readings during periods of structural fragility that conventional metrics classify as calm. The duality defect is a first-principles structural admissibility condition, requiring no training data and computable in milliseconds.

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