When Is Collective Intelligence a Lottery? Toward a Physics of Bounded Agent Societies

July 22 (Wed) 16:00 - 17:30, 2026

Hidenori Tanaka (Group Leader, CBS-NTT Physics of Intelligence Program, Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, USA)

Multi-agent LLM systems can reach agreement quickly, but agreement alone does not reveal whether a group has integrated evidence, amplified a bias, or merely locked in the luck of early samples. In this talk, I will develop a physics-style approach to this problem through two synthetic games. In reward-free naming games, populations form conventions through mutual in-context learning: agents treat one another's sampled outputs as evidence, so early fluctuations compound into consensus. A minimal model, Quantized Simplex Gossip (QSG), identifies this regime as memetic drift and predicts scaling laws and a crossover from lottery-like drift to bias-driven selection. I will then introduce the Flag Game, in which a hidden country flag provides verifiable ground truth but each agent sees only a private crop of it. Here, bounded agents must balance private evidence against social input. We find rich phenomenologies, where adding agents can help or hurt, large groups can polarize, and social-awareness prompting, model diversity, and organizational structure all reshape collective performance. Extending QSG with grounded evidence and model-specific update rules explains these effects. More broadly, these studies frame an LLM society as a network of networks, neural networks coupled through social interaction, and outline a route toward a multiscale physics of interacting AI agents, linking model-internal representations, agent-level decision mechanisms, and population-level social dynamics.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Entanglement suppression for ΩΩ scattering

July 17 (Fri) 15:00 - 16:30, 2026

Katsuyoshi Sone (Ph.D. Student, Graduate School of Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University)

The S-matrix describing the scattering process can be expressed in terms of projection operators onto the allowed spin–flavor channels and the corresponding phase shifts. Using the entanglement entropy in the spin space of the two-particle state, one can define the entanglement power, which quantifies the ability of the S-matrix to generate entanglement in the system. By investigating the conditions under which the entanglement power of the S-matrix is minimized, namely, the conditions for entanglement suppression, one can derive relations among the phase shifts in different spin–flavor channels. Furthermore, by comparing these relations with the interaction Lagrangian, one can identify the underlying symmetries [1,2]. In this work, we apply the entanglement suppression framework to two-baryon scattering involving spin-3/2 baryons in the flavor decuplet [3]. Lattice QCD calculations have shown that the spin-0 ΩΩ system exhibits scattering close to the unitary limit. Combining this result with the relation between the phase shifts obtained from entanglement suppression, we discuss the scattering behavior of the spin-2 ΩΩchannel.

Venue: #445-447, 4F, Main Research Building (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

The 33th MACS Colloquium

July 17 (Fri) 14:45 - 18:00, 2026

Hajime Naruse (Professor, Division of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University)
Yohsuke Murase (Team Director, Mathematical Social Science Team, Division of Applied Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))

14:45-15:00 Teatime Discussion 15:00-16:00 Hajime Naruse (Professor, Department of Geophysics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University) "What Do Sedimentary Layers Remember? Exploring Past Earth Environments through Machine Learning" 16:15-17:15 Yosuke Murase (Team Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS), RIKEN) "Mathematics of Cooperation in Society: The Evolution of Cooperation through Direct and Indirect Reciprocity" 17:15-18:00 Discussion

Venue: Science Seminar House (Map 9), Kyoto University

Event Official Language: Japanese

A first step towards Non-Archimedean Geometric Quantization

July 17 (Fri) 14:00 - 15:30, 2026

Keita Goto (Special Postdoctoral Researcher, Division of Fundamental Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))

Calabi--Yau manifolds have long attracted interest from both mathematics and physics, particularly in the context of mirror symmetry, and form an important class of compact Kähler manifolds. A compact Kähler manifold is Calabi--Yau if and only if it admits a Ricci-flat Kähler metric, which we shall call a CY metric. Such a metric is highly analytic in nature, as it is given as the solution to a second-order PDE on the manifold, namely the complex Monge--Ampère equation. When the Calabi--Yau manifold is a complex projective variety, one algebraic approach to understanding this analytically defined CY metric is to approximate it by algebraically defined metrics called balanced metrics. This framework was initiated by Donaldson and is now known as geometric quantization. In this talk, following the spirit of this theory, we consider a non-Archimedean analogue of this approximation theory. More precisely, for a non-Archimedean analytic space associated with a maximally degenerating family of Calabi--Yau manifolds, we study the approximation of the NACY metric, a non-Archimedean analogue of the CY metric, by algebraically defined metrics. In particular, we introduce NA balanced metrics, which are expected to provide such an approximation, and explain that, for totally degenerating families of abelian varieties, NA balanced metrics indeed approximate the NACY metric.

Venue: Seminar Room #359, Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Mathematical Application Research Team Meeting #17

July 17 (Fri) 10:30 - 11:45, 2026

Hugo Koubbi (Ph.D. Student, CEREMADE, Université Paris Dauphine, France)

Mathematical Application Research Team is delighted to welcome Hugo Koubbi from CEREMADE, Université Paris Dauphine, for an upcoming team meeting. We warmly invite everyone to join us to hear his talk: Title: Mean-field Transformers Abstract: Since their introduction, Transformers have achieved unprecedented success across a wide range of deep-learning tasks. In this talk, we present a recent line of work that interprets Transformer architectures as interacting particle systems and studies their continuum, or mean-field, limits. By considering idealized attention dynamics on the sphere, we establish connections between Transformers, Wasserstein gradient flows, and synchronization models such as the Kuramoto model. We describe a global clustering phenomenon in which tokens eventually synchronize, following long-lived metastable regimes characterized by the coexistence of several clusters. Finally, we explain how recent work extends these ideas beyond idealized models and reveals analogous phenomena in more realistic Transformer architectures at initialization.

Venue: via Zoom / #359, Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

Artificial Intelligence in New Physics Electroweak Phase Transition Studies

July 16 (Thu) 15:00 - 16:00, 2026

Yang Zhang (Professor, Henan Normal University, China)

The study of electroweak phase transitions in BSM involves complex numerical calculations, large parameter spaces, and the integration of multiple computational tools. In this talk, I will review recent developments in applying artificial intelligence to new physics phase transition studies. First, I will discuss how machine learning methods can accelerate electroweak phase transition studies, including efficient evaluations of phase transition dynamics, such as bounce action calculations, and the exploration of detectable parameter regions for gravitational-wave searches. Then, I will introduce the emerging role of AI agents in scientific workflows, including automated model construction, effective potential generation, and parameter scans. These developments illustrate how AI can transform traditional computational pipelines and provide new possibilities for future high-energy physics research.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Visual system and (social) behavior in zebrafish

July 16 (Thu) 13:00 - 14:00, 2026

Fumi Kubo (Team Director, Laboratory for Sensorimotor Integration, RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS))

Animals make decisions about their actions using sensory information from the external world. Our lab investigates how the brain processes visual information and generates appropriate behavior using the vertebrate model organism, zebrafish. Our research has uncovered the neural circuits required for processing optic flow, a visual cue that animals use to estimate their own motion. We employ a diverse range of techniques, including behavioral tracking, live imaging of neural activity, and molecular and genetic characterization of neuronal cell types. More recently, our research has focused on social behavior, in which groups of animals collectively generate behavioral decisions. In this seminar, I will present our recent work investigating behavioral contagion in zebrafish.

Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

Joint Seminar on Cosmology

July 13 (Mon) 13:30 - 18:00, 2026

Yukihiro Kanda (Project Researcher, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR), The University of Tokyo)
Fumiya Okamatsu (Research Assistant, Department of Physics, College of Humanities and Sciences, Nihon University)
Fumiya Sano (JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo)

The Joint Seminar is a collaborative seminar series organized by universities and research institutes in and around Tokyo. It is held once every one or two months, with the venue rotating among the participating institutions. At each meeting, we have around three talks and open, informal discussions. After the seminar, participants are also welcome to join an informal social gathering.

Venue: Okochi Hall

Event Official Language: English

How did we come to be? — Particle Physics for the Next Decades —

July 10 (Fri) 15:30 - 17:00, 2026

Hitoshi Murayama (Professor, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), The University of Tokyo / Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Particle Physics is a study of the smallest and the biggest to uncover the fundamental laws that govern the universe. In recent years, both the United States and Europe have been through long-range planning processes. The future plans worldwide include the studies of (1) neutrinos that may have saved us from a complete annihilation, (2) the Higgs boson that keeps us in one piece, (3) dark matter that assembled us from the primordial soup, (4) inflation that created the macroscopic universe, and (5) the exploration of unknown particles and forces. It requires development of mind-boggling technologies.

Venue: Okochi Hall (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

What determines accuracy in matrix projection models?

July 10 (Fri) 14:30 - 15:30, 2026

Richard Shefferson (Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo)

Matrix projection models (MPMs) have grown in complexity as ecologists have sought to include more factors that may influence population size and structure. However, some studies suggest that MPMs may lead to predictions inaccurate enough as to question their overall utility. I used long-term (21-36 year) demographic datasets on 6 herbaceous perennial species to examine and compare the ability of MPMs with different structural characteristics to predict future population size and structure. In absolute terms, almost all models performed poorly. In relative terms, density-dependent, ahistorical stage-based models with simple life histories and fewer stages were most successful in predicting population size. My results indicate that MPMs and IPMs are typically poor predictors of absolute population size and structure, but, when constructed properly, can still be used as useful qualitative predictors of population change.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Multi-field Inflation with spectator Axions

July 9 (Thu) 14:00 - 16:00, 2026

Diederik Roest (Professor, Van Swinderen Institute for Particle Physics and Gravity, University of Groningen, Netherlands)

We will review the inflationary paradigm, with a focus on multi-field inflation. We then propose a generic mechanism in which a light axion spectator reshapes inflationary observables through purely gravitational multi‑field dynamics. In this scenario, the axion is frozen during inflation and starts rolling towards the end, inducing a turn in field space and transient tachyonic phases of the isocurvature mode. This generates a nearly scale‑invariant enhancement of the curvature power spectrum, suppressing the tensor‑to‑scalar ratio and shifting the scalar tilt to a weighted combination of adiabatic and entropic tilts at horizon crossing. We show that these effects can reconcile otherwise disfavored inflaton potentials with current CMB constraints, and predict order-one non-Gaussianities.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Sampling Lattice Gauge Theories with Gauge-Equivariant Neural Networks and Diffusion Models

July 8 (Wed) 14:00 - 15:30, 2026

Andreas Ipp (Senior Scientist, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Technische Universität Wien, Austria)
Thomas Ranner (Project Assistant (FWF), Institute for Theoretical Physics, Technische Universität Wien, Austria)

Simulating non-Abelian lattice gauge theories using classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is often bottlenecked by critical slowing down and topological freezing. Incorporating physical symmetries into machine learning architectures offers a powerful way towards overcoming these computational limitations. In this talk, we present an overview of how gauge-equivariant neural networks can enhance lattice simulations. In the first part, we introduce Lattice Gauge Equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks (L-CNNs), which build local gauge symmetry directly into the network structure. We discuss their ability to learn Wilson loops and highlight their versatility across different applications, such as approximating effective actions. In the second part, we focus on their application in generative modeling: gauge-equivariant diffusion models. Using a Metropolis-adjusted annealed Langevin scheme, these models are designed to generate uncorrelated field configurations. We demonstrate accurate sampling of 2D U(2) and SU(2) theories, showcase recent advancements in scaling up to 4D SU(3) pure gauge theory, and show that these models extrapolate remarkably well to larger lattices and inverse couplings beyond their training regime.

Venue: #445--447, 4F, Main Research Building (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

iTHEMS-FQSP joint seminar “Aspects of Tripartite Haar Random States”

July 8 (Wed) 10:30 - 12:00, 2026

Beni Yoshida (Research Faculty Senior Faculty, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada / Senior Visiting Scientist, Fundamental Quantum Science Program, RIKEN)

Randomness plays central roles in understanding strongly entangled quantum systems. The foundational result is Page’s theorem: a bipartite Haar random state is nearly maximally entangled. In this talk, I will ask what happens when the system is divided into three parts. We show that tripartite Haar random states have a very different structure: when each subsystem contains fewer than half of the total qubits, no EPR-like bipartite entanglement can be distilled between any pair by local unitaries or local operations. I will discuss several consequences of this observation, including its implications for quantum error correction, complementary recovery, connected entanglement wedges in AdS/CFT, and possible baby-universe degrees of freedom.

Venue: Okochi Hall (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Overview of quantum error correcting codes

July 7 (Tue) 15:00 - 16:30, 2026

Takaya Matsuura (Postdoctoral Researcher, Quantum Computing Theory Research Team, RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing (RQC))

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Watching SMBE

July 6 (Mon) 17:00 - 18:30, 2026

Watching some selected talks form SMBE 2026 conference.

Venue: via Zoom / 4F Common Space, Main Research Building

Event Official Language: English

PopGen Book Club (IV)

July 6 (Mon) 15:00 - 16:00, 2026

Alba Nieto Heredia (Postdoctoral Researcher, Mathematical Genomics RIKEN ECL Research Unit, Division of Fundamental Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))

Fourth session of the PopGen Book Club on chapter 2.2 "More on genetic drift: The coalescent"

Venue: via Zoom / 4F, Main Research Building

Event Official Language: English

Toward an understanding of microbial circulation in the Mongolian nomadic ecosystem

July 6 (Mon) 13:00 - 14:00, 2026

Akari Shinoda (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environmental, Life, Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University)

I have been studying microorganisms in the Mongolian nomadic ecosystem from several perspectives. First, I seek to characterize the microbial communities in traditional fermented dairy products—most notably airag (fermented mare's milk)—and their features. Second, I am analyzing the relationship between the traditional Mongolian diet and the gut microbiome. Third, focusing on environmental microorganisms (bioaerosols) in regions undergoing desertification, I aim to trace their origins and atmospheric transport. In the course of these studies, I have come to suspect that microorganisms may circulate among humans, livestock, fermented foods, and the environment. In this research, I aim to understand such microbial circulation by combining approaches from each of these perspectives and by investigating the relationships among these elements. In this talk, I will provide an overview of each topic and discuss the potential of an interdisciplinary approach that connects them.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Thom polynomials relative to prescribed maps around the boundary

July 3 (Fri) 15:00 - 17:30, 2026

Masato Tanabe (Special Postdoctoral Researcher, Division of Fundamental Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))

Thom polynomials are universal cohomological obstructions to the appearance of singularities of given types in differentiable maps. Introduced by R. Thom in the 1950s, they have been extensively studied ever since. In the first half of this talk, I would like to recall their theory with introduction of algebro-topological materials. In the second half, I would also like to talk about applications of Thom polynomials to topology of non-singular maps. Since this century, various invariants of immersions/embeddings have been expressed in terms of singularities of their extensions (a.k.a. singular Seifert surfaces). However, those formulas are obtained in different forms and remain somewhat scattered. As the first step to unify them, I would like to introduce Thom polynomials relative to prescribed maps around the boundary. As a main result, we show a structure theorem of Thom polynomials relative to framable immersions. In fact, most earlier formulas are summarized as the vanishing of "correction terms" appearing in the structure theorem. This is an advanced seminar for mathematical researchers.

Venue: Seminar Room #359, Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets

July 3 (Fri) 14:00 - 15:15, 2026

Ryo Sawada (Special Postdoctoral Researcher, Division of Fundamental Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))

A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are. The formation of terrestrial planets in our Solar System was strongly influenced by the radioactive decay heat of short-lived radionuclides (SLRs), particularly 26 Al (aluminum-26), likely delivered from nearby supernovae. However, current models struggle to reproduce the abundance of SLRs inferred from meteorite analysis without destroying the protosolar disk. We propose the "immersion" mechanism, where cosmic-ray nucleosynthesis in a supernova shockwave reproduces estimated SLR abundances at a supernova distance (~1 parsec), preserving the disk. We estimate that solar mass stars in star clusters typically experience at least one such supernova within 1 parsec, supporting the feasibility of this scenario. This suggests that Solar System─like SLR abundances and terrestrial planet formation are more common than previously thought.

Venue: #424-426, Main Research Building

Event Official Language: English

Gauge and Homological Structures in Quantum Error Correction

July 2 (Thu) 16:00 - 17:00, 2026

Junichi Haruna (Program-Specific Researcher, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University)

Gauge theory, quantum error correction, and homology theory share a common mathematical backbone that, when made explicit, becomes a practical toolkit for fault-tolerant quantum computation. A CSS code is naturally a length-2 chain complex in which the X-stabilizers act as Gauss-law generators and the code space is the gauge-invariant subspace, the toric code being the prototypical realization of a Z_2 lattice gauge theory. Building on this correspondence, I present two results. First, I introduce a gauge-field formalism in which logical gates are written as exponentials of polynomials of operator-valued cochains—the lattice gauge fields—on the underlying chain complex. Requiring no special structure on the code, the construction applies to general CSS codes and yields explicit physical-gate decompositions of logical S, H, CZ, and T gates whose action depends only on the cohomology class of the logical qubits. Second, I show that the transversal implementability of logical Pauli-Z rotations has a purely homological origin: their logical action is classified by a Z_{2^m}-module extending logical Pauli operators to higher levels of the Clifford hierarchy, and transversality is governed by compatibility and lifting obstructions on homology classes beyond the usual Z_2 coefficient. From a high-energy-physics viewpoint, a level-m transversal gate is a gauge-invariant "2^{m-1}-th root of a Wilson loop." Together these results offer a unifying language for designing logical gates and point toward fault-tolerance from lattice gauge theory and algebraic topology. This talk is based on arXiv:2511.15224 and arXiv:2602.14499.

Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English