Learning to Trace Seiberg Dualities

We present DualityCert, a symbolic verifier for candidate Seiberg-duality claims in four-dimensional N=1 quiver gauge theories. The verifier evaluates 't Hooft anomaly matching, superpotential R-charge consistency, central-charge matching, and a bounded chiral-ring proxy. A claim that passes receives a consistency certificate, which states that no tested inconsistency was found, not that the duality is proven. We use the verifier as a repair environment for language-model agents, which receive a deliberately broken claim and must edit it until it certifies. On a preregistered benchmark of 145 broken claims, with the analysis fixed before the first confirmatory model call, verifier-gated retry improves final repair success over a single attempt by +8.3 percentage points (pp) on deepseek-chat and +7.1 pp on qwen-plus (Holm-adjusted p<0.002). Under an equal budget of eleven attempts, the stop-first strategy portfolio underperforms independent verifier-filtered resampling by 10.3 percentage points on deepseek-chat but outperforms it by 14.7 points on qwen-plus, reversing the ordering of the two tested verifier-exploitation policies across the two confirmatory models. On qwen-plus, category-level verifier feedback is worth +8.7 pp over content-free retry, and interpretable obligation identities alone are worth +6.4 pp over structurally identical masked feedback. Neither effect is detected on deepseek-chat. Separately, a preregistered MiniMax-M2.5 extension again finds an iteration gain and independent verifier-filtered resampling outperforming the strategy portfolio. Which policy is better thus differs between the two models, while every winning policy uses the same cheap certificate. The verifier, benchmark, protocol, and all per-attempt records are released.

We introduce dualGNN', an autoregressive message-passing GNN for sampling fine, regular triangulations of lattice polytopes. dualGNN operates on a generalization of the dual graph of a triangulation, with edges labeled by signed circuits' -- combinatorial invariants from the theory of oriented matroids. We show that these circuits are necessary and sufficient to determine a triangulation's regularity from the graph, provided certain magnitude information is retained. The model is independent of the polytope's point count and invariant under its orientation-preserving symmetries ($\mathrm{SL}(d,\mathbb{Z}) \ltimes \mathbb{Z}^d$), and our masking procedure further guarantees that every rollout produces a fine triangulation (in 2D). On unseen polygons with $N_\mathrm{pts} \leq 40$, dualGNN is the only sampler we tested that is consistent with uniform sampling across all our diagnostics (KL divergence from uniformity, collision counts, and sample autocorrelation). The model is small ($\sim92$k parameters) and trains in $\sim7.5$ hours on a single consumer GPU. We apply dualGNN to string theory, sampling Calabi-Yau threefolds uniformly at $h^{1,1}=86$; we also sample CYs at $h^{1,1}=128$, observing no deviations from uniformity, but our diagnostics are weaker here. Code, training scripts, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/natemacfadden/dualGNN (pip install dualgnn), and dualGNN is integrated into CYTools.

Algorithmic reasoning -- the ability to perform step-by-step logical inference -- is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating multi-step reasoning abilities, designed for graph neural networks and also for transformer models. Prior work has evaluated reasoning for executing a single algorithmic task, whereas a more desirable objective is to perform multiple algorithmic reasoning tasks simultaneously. We start by noting that this is inherently difficult due to differences arising from the execution traces of the algorithms (such as depth- vs. breadth-first search), which cause interference when they are trained together. In this paper, we introduce {branching neural networks}, a new architecture for multitask algorithmic reasoning. The main idea is to search for a recursive tree-structured partition of $n$ algorithmic tasks into a $k$-ary tree (divided into $L$ layers). Naive search requires $O(k^{nL})$ complexity; we develop an algorithm that reduces this to $O(nL)$ by solving a convex relaxation at each layer to approximate an optimal partition. Our approach clusters these tasks using gradient-based affinity and can be used on top of any base model. We validate our approach on algorithmic reasoning benchmarks and their extensions with text descriptions. We show that gradient-based affinity scores help estimate true performance with less than 5% error, measured across eight different architectures with up to 34 billion parameters. On the CLRS benchmark, our approach outperforms existing graph neural networks by 3.7% and baselines by 1.2%, while reducing runtime by 48% and memory usage by 26%. The learned branching structure shows a hierarchical clustering of related algorithms. On three text-based graph reasoning benchmarks, our approach improves over baseline methods by 3.2%. Finally, we validate our approach for overlapping community detection.