Youjin Deng

Hua Tian, Lirong Zhang, Youjin Deng et al.

Percolation is an important topic in climate, physics, materials science, epidemiology, finance, and so on. Prediction of percolation thresholds with machine learning methods remains challenging. In this paper, we build a powerful graph convolutional neural network to study the percolation in both supervised and unsupervised ways. From a supervised learning perspective, the graph convolutional neural network simultaneously and correctly trains data of different lattice types, such as the square and triangular lattices. For the unsupervised perspective, combining the graph convolutional neural network and the confusion method, the percolation threshold can be obtained by the "W" shaped performance. The finding of this work opens up the possibility of building a more general framework that can probe the percolation-related phenomenon.

Yu Li, Yuan Huang, Tao Wang et al.

Most scientific materials compress reasoning, presenting conclusions while omitting the derivational chains that justify them. This compression hinders verification by lacking explicit, step-wise justifications and inhibits cross-domain links by collapsing the very pathways that establish the logical and causal connections between concepts. We introduce a scalable framework that decompresses scientific reasoning, constructing a verifiable Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT) knowledge base and projecting it into an emergent encyclopedia, SciencePedia. Our pipeline operationalizes an endpoint-driven, reductionist strategy: a Socratic agent, guided by a curriculum of around 200 courses, generates approximately 3 million first-principles questions. To ensure high fidelity, multiple independent solver models generate LCoTs, which are then rigorously filtered by prompt sanitization and cross-model answer consensus, retaining only those with verifiable endpoints. This verified corpus powers the Brainstorm Search Engine, which performs inverse knowledge search -- retrieving diverse, first-principles derivations that culminate in a target concept. This engine, in turn, feeds the Plato synthesizer, which narrates these verified chains into coherent articles. The initial SciencePedia comprises approximately 200,000 fine-grained entries spanning mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and computation. In evaluations across six disciplines, Plato-synthesized articles (conditioned on retrieved LCoTs) exhibit substantially higher knowledge-point density and significantly lower factual error rates than an equally-prompted baseline without retrieval (as judged by an external LLM). Built on this verifiable LCoT knowledge base, this reasoning-centric approach enables trustworthy, cross-domain scientific synthesis at scale and establishes the foundation for an ever-expanding encyclopedia.

Xiansheng Cai, Sihan Hu, Tao Wang et al.

Fundamental physics often confronts complex symbolic problems with few guiding exemplars or established principles. While artificial intelligence (AI) offers promise, its typical need for vast datasets to learn from hinders its use in these information-scarce frontiers. We introduce learning at criticality (LaC), a reinforcement learning (RL) scheme that tunes Large Language Models (LLMs) to a sharp learning transition, addressing this information scarcity. At this transition, LLMs achieve peak generalization from minimal data, exemplified by 7-digit base-7 addition -- a test of nontrivial arithmetic reasoning. To elucidate this peak, we analyze a minimal concept-network model (CoNet) designed to capture the essence of how LLMs might link tokens. Trained on a single exemplar, this model also undergoes a sharp learning transition. This transition exhibits hallmarks of a second-order phase transition, notably power-law distributed solution path lengths. At this critical point, the system maximizes a ``critical thinking pattern" crucial for generalization, enabled by the underlying scale-free exploration. This suggests LLMs reach peak performance by operating at criticality, where such explorative dynamics enable the extraction of underlying operational rules. We demonstrate LaC in quantum field theory: an 8B-parameter LLM, tuned to its critical point by LaC using a few exemplars of symbolic Matsubara sums, solves unseen, higher-order problems, significantly outperforming far larger models. LaC thus leverages critical phenomena, a physical principle, to empower AI for complex, data-sparse challenges in fundamental physics.

Sihan Hu, Xiansheng Cai, Yuan Huang et al.

Training large language models with Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) exhibits a set of distinctive and puzzling behaviors that remain poorly understood, including a two-stage learning curve, V-shaped response-length trajectories, and a pronounced vulnerability to catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose that these seemingly disparate phenomena can be explained using a single unifying theory: the model's reasoning process maps to the self-organization of a semantic complex network whose topology remains persistently sparse, with the average degree pinned close to two. This topology imposes a fundamental mechanism for forgetting and learning: it first drives the system into a maximally frustrated state where ``skill islands'' form, slow-learning happens, and forgetting is induced; then it enters a sharp growth phase where the new skills are ``bolted on'', driven by phase-transition-like learning at the web's frontier. Equipped with the theory, we propose \textit{Annealed-RLVR}, a principled algorithm that introduces an SFT-based ``heating'' step at the point of maximal frustration to resolve the competitive bottleneck and enhance the reasoning capability of the model. Experiments on a 1.5B-parameter model demonstrate that the approach outperforms standard RLVR on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks. By recasting RLVR from black-box optimization into a predictable process of structural self-organization, our work provides a new physical intuition for engineering the emergent reasoning capabilities of future AI systems.

Pengcheng Hou, Tao Wang, Daniel Cerkoney et al.

Quantum field theory (QFT) for interacting many-electron systems is fundamental to condensed matter physics, yet achieving accurate solutions confronts computational challenges in managing the combinatorial complexity of Feynman diagrams, implementing systematic renormalization, and evaluating high-dimensional integrals. We present a unifying framework that integrates QFT computational workflows with an AI-powered technology stack. A cornerstone of this framework is representing Feynman diagrams as computational graphs, which structures the inherent mathematical complexity and facilitates the application of optimized algorithms developed for machine learning and high-performance computing. Consequently, automatic differentiation, native to these graph representations, delivers efficient, fully automated, high-order field-theoretic renormalization procedures. This graph-centric approach also enables sophisticated numerical integration; our neural-network-enhanced Monte Carlo method, accelerated via massively parallel GPU implementation, efficiently evaluates challenging high-dimensional diagrammatic integrals. Applying this framework to the uniform electron gas, we determine the quasiparticle effective mass to a precision significantly surpassing current state-of-the-art simulations. Our work demonstrates the transformative potential of integrating AI-driven computational advances with QFT, opening systematic pathways for solving complex quantum many-body problems across disciplines.