This collection explores the fascinating world of chemistry and physics, where scientists investigate the fundamental building blocks of matter and the laws that govern our universe. From understanding how atoms bond to create new materials to unraveling the mysteries of quantum mechanics, these studies form the backbone of modern physical science.

At Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category directly from arXiv, ensuring you have immediate access to cutting-edge research before formal publication. Each paper is accompanied by both a clear, plain-language explanation for general readers and a detailed technical summary for experts, bridging the gap between complex data and human understanding.

Below are the latest papers in the chemistry and physics section, curated to help you stay informed on the most recent discoveries.

💻 computer science

Lexicographic Direct Access with Functional Dependencies

This paper investigates the fine-grained complexity of lexicographic direct access to join query answers under functional dependencies, establishing lower and upper bounds that fully characterize when linear preprocessing time suffices for polylogarithmic access, while demonstrating that simple FD incorporation works for unary dependencies but fails for general cases, necessitating an information-theoretic decomposition approach.

Florent Capelli, Nofar Carmeli, Stefan Mengel2026-07-16
🤖 AI

PluRel: Synthetic Data unlocks Scaling Laws for Relational Foundation Models

The paper introduces PLuRel, a lightweight framework for synthesizing diverse multi-table relational databases that demonstrates, for the first time, that scaling synthetic data leads to predictable performance improvements and strong generalization for Relational Foundation Models.

Vignesh Kothapalli, Rishabh Ranjan, Valter Hudovernik, Vijay Prakash Dwivedi, Johannes Hoffart, Carlos Guestrin, Jure Le (…)2026-07-15
💻 computer science

GRAFT: Graph-Matched Retrieval and Fusion of Tables in Data Lakes

The paper proposes GRAFT, a novel framework that models table retrieval in data lakes as a graph matching problem using an IGMS objective and an implicit Q-learning-based subgraph generation process to effectively integrate joinable and unionable tables, thereby significantly outperforming existing baselines in retrieval accuracy and evidence sufficiency.

Daomin Ji, Hui Luo, Zhifeng Bao, Shane Culpepper, Shazia Sadiq2026-07-15
💬 NLP

CRINN: Contrastive Reinforcement Learning for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

This paper introduces CRINN, a novel paradigm that leverages contrastive reinforcement learning to automatically generate high-performance approximate nearest neighbor search algorithms by optimizing for execution speed while maintaining accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks and demonstrating the potential of LLMs for automating complex algorithmic optimization.

Xiaoya Li, Albert Wang, Guoyin Wang, Chris Shum, Jiwei Li2026-07-14