Empirical universality and non-universality of local dynamics in the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model

This paper empirically demonstrates that while the runtime of local greedy search for optimizing Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin glass Hamiltonians is universal across various coupling distributions, the performance of Parisi's local reluctant search is surprisingly non-universal and sensitive to the specific entry distribution, particularly when couplings have discrete support.

Grace Liu, Dmitriy Kunisky2026-03-10🔢 math

Benchmarking stabilized and self-stabilized p-virtual element methods with variable coefficients

This paper presents a numerical benchmark of stabilized and self-stabilized p-version Virtual Element Methods, demonstrating that while self-stabilized formulations achieve optimal accuracy at the cost of worse conditioning, a newly introduced projection operator accounting for variable coefficients significantly enhances robustness for high polynomial degrees.

Paola Pia Foligno, Daniele Boffi, Fabio Credali + 1 more2026-03-10🔢 math

On the rigidity of special and exceptional geometries with torsion a closed $3$-form

This paper establishes that Riemannian manifolds admitting a connection with closed, covariantly constant torsion decompose locally into a product of a semisimple Lie group and a torsion-free manifold, a result used to simplify proofs for special geometries like KT and HKT manifolds and to fully characterize the geometry of complete, simply connected G2G_2, Spin(7)\mathrm{Spin}(7), and compact 8-dimensional HKT manifolds under these conditions.

Georgios Papadopoulos2026-03-10🔢 math

New Results on the Polyak Stepsize: Tight Convergence Analysis and Universal Function Classes

This paper establishes the tightness of known convergence rates for the Polyak stepsize in gradient descent by constructing worst-case functions, demonstrates its ability to escape worst-case scenarios via floating-point errors, and proves its universality across diverse function classes including those with Hölder smoothness and growth conditions.

Chang He, Wenzhi Gao, Bo Jiang, Madeleine Udell, Shuzhong Zhang2026-03-10🔢 math