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Friday 2 October

Physics and Society

Performance of Zero-determinant Strategies in Repeated Games without Discounting

Zero-determinant (ZD) strategies are a class of strategies in repeated games, which unilaterally control payoffs. It has been shown that several ZD strategies promote cooperation in social dilemma games. It has been widely believed that the performance of ZD strategies is expressed as “unilaterally enforce linear relations between payoffs”. However, in order to interpret properties of ZD strategies in repeated games without discounting, previous studies assumed that the limit of the Cesaro average of the probability distribution of the action profile exists. Here, we explain the performance of ZD strategies without this assumption, which leads to a stronger result than previous ones.
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Physics and Society

Human mobility shapes how urban policy effects spread across cities

Urban policies are often evaluated assuming their effects decay with geographic distance. However, cities are systems of human movement, and policy effects propagate through individual mobility rather than spatial proximity alone. This study demonstrates that neglecting mobility can systematically distort estimates of how urban policies affect activity. Using large-scale mobility data, we estimate the causal effects of three transportation interventions in Boston and New York City using both conventional geographic and mobility-based definitions of exposure. Geographic designs detect no effects, or even negative ones. When exposure is defined through mobility networks, the same interventions reveal substantial behavioral change. Boston's free-fare program increases overall activity by approximately 16%, with more pronounced effects among lower-income communities. Open Streets programs significantly increase visits to nearby businesses, particularly food establishments. For congestion pricing, geographic approaches suggest a decline in activity in Manhattan, while a mobility-based perspective indicates no net reduction but a shift away from shopping and grocery destinations. Analysis across 138 metropolitan areas in eight countries further reveals that geographic and mobility-network distances diverge locally in every city, indicating that this discrepancy is a general characteristic of urban mobility. Collectively, these findings show that urban policies operate not only where they are implemented but where and how people move, so their impact must be measured through mobility rather than through space.
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All authors Bijin Joseph, Hamish Gibbs, Takahiro Yabe, Esteban Moro

Thursday 1 October

Physics and Society

Strategic Governance of AI Models in Earth Science

AI foundation models pretrained on weather and climate data are increasingly fine-tuned to Earth science tasks well beyond weather forecasting. Their development and adoption are outpacing the scientific community's ability to evaluate them. These models are judged almost entirely by benchmark skill metrics, which measure how closely a forecast reproduces a reference product but not whether a model represents the physical processes governing the system it predicts. Forecast skill and physical reliability are therefore distinct properties. The distinction is most consequential under the nonstationary conditions of a changing climate for which these models were never trained. We identify five priorities for the physical evaluation of AI models in Earth science from task-specific emulators to foundation models, spanning training data, fine-tuning, behavioral testing, mechanistic interpretability, and output validation. We recommend three activities for the coming decade: 1) open AI-ready evaluation datasets, 2) a shared reporting standard for physics-based evaluation, and 3) a dedicated research program on the safety of these models.
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All authors Makoto Kelp, Amirhossein Arzani, Patricia Castellanos, Paul Griffiths, Ivan Higuera-Mendieta, Manuel Perez-Carrasco, Viral Shah, Patrick Obin Sturm, James Weber

Physics and Society

Professional Perspectives on Community and Public Engagement with Fusion Energy

Fusion energy technology is rapidly approaching demonstrator deployment, but relatively little consideration has been given to publics' perceptions of or engagement with the technology. This research explores the perspectives of diverse professionals involved with the US fusion energy industry as to their knowledge on, valuation of, and preparedness for community and public (C&P) engagement on fusion energy. Participants perceived multifaceted value in C&P engagement from both industry and personal perspectives including an expressed desire for self-involvement in engagement activities, though ideally with increased support from home organizations and from engagement experts. Participants also revealed framings of fusion C&P engagement that align with deficit and contextual models of science communication thinking. These findings suggest an opportunity for collaboration between fusion professionals and engagement experts beyond one-way science communication to more participatory engagements with implications for the future of fusion energy.
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All authors Jared Owens, Shanna R. Daly, Porter Malcolm, Aditi Verma

Physics and Society

Critical behavior of stochastic rumors on the one-dimensional integer lattice

We study rumor-spreading models on the one-dimensional integer lattice, with particular emphasis on the effect of forgetting mechanisms on the long-term behavior of the rumor. We consider the spatial version of the classical Maki–Thompson model together with two variants that incorporate forgetting. Each model is formulated as an interacting particle system and describes the propagation of information through local interactions between neighboring individuals. Our results show that the introduction of forgetting fundamentally changes the behavior of the process. In the classical Maki–Thompson model, the rumor becomes extinct, whereas the two models with forgetting exhibit nontrivial phase transitions between extinction and survival. More precisely, we establish the existence of critical transmission rates that separate regimes in which the rumor dies out almost surely from regimes in which it survives with positive probability. We also investigate the dependence of these critical thresholds on the stifling rate. Combining rigorous arguments with numerical simulations, we prove the existence of the phase transitions, obtain estimates for the critical values, and explore the corresponding phase diagrams. These findings show that forgetting, despite acting as a mechanism that removes spreaders, can qualitatively alter the dynamics of rumor propagation by creating regimes of sustained information spread. Our work provides new insight into the critical behavior of spatial rumor models and raises several questions for future research.
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Physics and Society

Measuring Diversity and Segregation with Convex Functions

The problem of segregation measurement is to quantitatively describe the interaction of a population's attributes (such as race, ethnicity, education level, or income) with a separating distinction (such as organizational rank, school district, or spatial location). This primarily expository article gives an opinionated tour of one mathematical approach to measuring segregation. We begin with some basic intuitions about diversity and unify these through the framework of convex functions on the probability simplex. Formalizing segregation as a local-to-global comparison of diversity measures, resulting in the general class of Jensen informations as segregation measurements. We describe and computationally illustrate three ways to incorporate spatial structure into segregation measurements: spatial smoothing, aggregation, and local Jensen information. We close with several suggestions for future work.
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Physics and Society

The efficacy-competitiveness frontier in the Swiss system

An ideal tournament is both efficacious and attractive: it selects the best player as the winner, but only at the end of the tournament in order to maintain suspense as long as possible. We identify and explore the trade-off between these criteria in Swiss-system chess team tournaments via simulations. Organising more rounds is shown to improve efficacy but increase the probability of a stakeless last round. The 2008 reform in the Chess Olympiad ranking is found to be a questionable move, as the previous rule based on board points determines the efficacy-competitiveness frontier, regardless of whether two or three points are awarded for winning a match. Combining board points and match points is better than using match points only. Our results can help optimise the design of the Swiss system, which, besides chess, is also widely used in e-sports.
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Physics and Society · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Evaluating LLM-Generated Preference Distributions

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as probabilistic generators for simulation, synthetic data generation, and decision support in settings where real-world data are unavailable. Yet, the structure and reliability of the distributions they produce remain understudied. Here, we systematically analyze LLM-generated distributions of preferences for air travel, restaurants, and consumer products. Encouragingly, all models considered in our analysis exhibit self-coherence, with the most probable outcomes stabilizing rapidly under repeated sampling. At the same time, we observe substantial discordance across both model families and scales, with little consensus even among their most probable outcomes. These patterns hold across nine open-weight models, three choice domains, and show robustness under temperature changes, greedy decoding, and perturbations of prompt and ordering. Our findings indicate that outcomes are influenced more by the choice of model than by the wording of the prompt, challenging the common assumption that sufficiently capable LLMs produce similar preference distributions when used as stand-ins for survey respondents.
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All authors Fan Huang, Minsuk Kim, C. Tyler Diggans, Filippo Radicchi

Physics and Society

Community-Centers Identify Robust Biomarkers in High-Dimensional, Low-Sample-Size Gene Expression Data

High-dimensional, low-sample-size bulk gene expression data poses a fundamental challenge in transcriptomics, which typically includes tens of thousands of genes but relatively few samples, leading to overfitting and unstable selection for key features as biomarkers. We propose a regression by community centers (RCC) framework tailored for such data. RCC converts gene expression data into a feature proximity network and leverages the phase transition of the giant connected component to identify a critical distance threshold that yields a sparse yet maximally informative network representation, indicated by a minimum normalized shortest compression length. Intuitively, at the criticality, the network balances fragmentation and over-connectivity, allowing meaningful gene-gene associations communities to emerge while filtering noises, such that community-centers capture the most informative and non-redundant signals. These representative genes are then fed to a simple ordinary least squares (OLS) model for downstream predictions. Across five bulk gene expression datasets, RCC displays exceptional prediction performance, clearly outperforming benchmark methods, remains robust to missing data and noises, and does not rely on external biological knowledge. These results suggest that network-based representations provide an effective and general framework for high-dimensional, low-sample-size prediction tasks beyond transcriptomics and illustrate how network-science ideas can support robust learning in data-scarce regimes.
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All authors Ruiqi Li, Te Bai, Renaud Lambiotte, Orr Levy, Paul Expert, Daqing Li, Shlomo Havlin

Physics and Society · Cross-listed from nlin.CG

Analytical derivation of a three-dimensional fundamental diagram for a real-valued max-plus particle system

We study a real-valued max-plus particle system on a finite periodic lattice. Its three-dimensional fundamental diagram relates the mean flow to two densities: the conserved particle density and a second density defined by a local state function. We prove that the deviation from the diagram tends to zero for arbitrary initial data with all state values in [0,1]. The proof uses two nonnegative local quantities and their evolution relations. For rational initial data with all state values in $[0,1]$, the orbit is eventually periodic, and the fundamental-diagram relation holds exactly on the periodic orbit.
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Physics and Society · Cross-listed from math.PR

Convergence of stationary distributions for a class of zero-range processes and its application to a wealth distribution model with debt

Understanding how macroscopic wealth distributions emerge from microscopic transaction rules among agents is a central problem in econophysics. While many traditional models restrict agents' wealth to non-negative values, debt is an essential feature of realistic economic systems. In this paper, we introduce a stochastic transaction mechanism into the agent-based model with a central-bank-mediated collective debt limit, as studied in [14]. In our model, each agent probabilistically determines whether to transfer a coin, depending on their current asset or debt level. From a probabilistic perspective, the resulting system can be formulated as a zero-range process with $\mathbb{Z}$-valued site occupation numbers, where negative values represent debt. We prove that, under an appropriate scaling, the wealth distribution in the stationary state converges to either a two-sided Gamma distribution or a Gamma distribution, depending on the asymptotic behavior of the function governing coin transfers. Our results rigorously identify these previously unconsidered limiting distributions and provide a mathematical framework for understanding how stochastic monetary exchanges give rise to macroscopic wealth distributions.
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Wednesday 30 September

Physics and Society

A Hilbert-Space Analogy for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

We introduce a finite-dimensional state-space representation of bisexuality in Dirac notation, specify normalized amplitude weights, and analyze the limits of inference from one single observation. We extend the basis for discussing attraction across genders, then define a distinct state space for gender identity with an illustrative normalized time-dependent trajectory. The model is an analogy, not a physical theory or a measurement procedure for human sexuality.
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Physics and Society

Intermittent quarantine suppresses epidemic spreading beyond simple contact reduction

Social interactions are shaped by networks that can be highly heterogeneous, with some individuals potentially interacting with many others. However, physical and temporal constraints limit the number of simultaneous interactions, making social contacts inherently intermittent. Here, we investigate how intermittency affects epidemic spreading on complex networks considering two distinct mechanisms: intermittency of connections (links) and individuals themselves (nodes), with periods of activity and inactivity governed by renewal processes with broadly distributed inter-event times. Combining mechanistic theoretical approaches with stochastic simulations, we show that these two forms of intermittency have fundamentally different effects on epidemic spreading. Link intermittency largely preserves the mechanisms responsible for sustaining transmission, and epidemic behavior can be largely explained by the average reduction in contact opportunities. Contrastingly, node intermittency is substantially more effective at containing spreading because the simultaneous interruption of all contacts suppresses transmission while recovery continues independently. The non-Markovian nature of node intermittency plays a key role: shorter and less heterogeneous inter-event times increase epidemic thresholds and enhance epidemic containment. Our results highlight how the temporal organization of individual activity, beyond the average reduction in contacts, can substantially alter epidemic spreading and may help inform interventions that exploit intermittency in social and biological contact networks.
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Physics and Society

Opinion dynamics under large-scale exogenous events

Large-scale events such as political scandals or misinformation campaigns can abruptly shift the collective opinion of a population and reshape the dynamics in ways that standard local-interaction models of sociophysics do not capture. Here, we investigate the dynamics of opinion formation when a group of interacting agents is subjected to sudden, macroscopic exogenous shocks. Our framework is general and applies to arbitrary opinion dynamics models; to illustrate its scope, we consider the voter model and variations thereof. We verify that the mathematical description is excellent in describing the first-passage properties to consensus of the voter model on the complete graph and on complex networks. Remarkably, we identify the conditions under which shocks can be advantageous or detrimental to reach consensus. For the case of the all-to-all noisy voter model under exogenous events, we unveil a rich phase diagram characterized by novel trimodal and asymmetric bimodal states. Ultimately, this work provides a rigorous yet flexible stochastic-process framework for understanding the out-of-equilibrium behavior of opinion dynamics under recurrent exogenous stressors.
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Physics and Society

Social comparison shapes the evolution of cooperation in structured populations

Human cooperation unfolds in social environments where individuals influence each other through payoff-based learning and social comparison, the tendency to evaluate fitness relative to others. However, it is still unclear how social comparison and population structure jointly shape cooperation. Here, we incorporate social comparison theory into evolutionary dynamics on structured populations, letting fitness depend on individual and neighbour payoffs weighted by a comparison parameter. Under weak selection, we derive conditions favoring cooperation and find that the proposed comparison nonlinearly reshapes the critical benefit-to-cost ratio. Even one individual applying this protocol can affect the population, especially in heterogeneous networks. When comparison tendencies vary, the full distribution, not just the mean, determines evolutionary outcomes. Using a swarm-intelligence-based framework across typical and empirical networks, we identify cooperation-maximizing patterns: optimal states exhibit heterogeneous comparison tendencies, yet collectively align toward assimilative development. These results provide a basis for designing social incentives that harness comparison to promote collective cooperation in human groups.
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All authors Xiaojin Xiong, Qin Li, Jurgen Kurths, Attila Szolnoki, Minyu Feng

Tuesday 29 September

Physics and Society · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Doc2LoRA Provides Decodable Representations of Scientific Ideas

Representing scientific papers as points in a space lets us search for similar papers and inquire about how fields relate to one another and drive innovation. Beyond search, the vector space of papers invites generation: mixing papers through simple vector operations creates new points, mirroring combinatorial novelty, the recombination of existing ideas into new ones. However, a mixed point often represents an idea no paper has yet realized, with no papers nearby to identify the idea. We propose representing each paper by a LoRA adapter generated by the Doc-to-LoRA hypernetwork. Every point in the space, including mixtures, thus represents a large language model (LLM) open to questions and instructions in natural language. On papers from the American Physical Society (APS), we instruct the LLM at the average of each subfield to name the field in a few words and obtain labels closer to the official names than the labels of five baselines, as judged by word overlap and a panel of five LLM judges. We also ask the LLMs at points between two APS papers to write an abstract and obtain descriptions shifting from one paper to the other in step with the mixing weight. While Doc-to-LoRA is trained for generation, a small invertible transform makes the embeddings competitive for search, on par with SPECTER2 and EmbeddingGemma and close to SBERT. Because the transform is invertible, every point in the transformed space still maps back to an LLM. The embeddings thus serve both search and generation, enabling researchers to question the idea at any point in the space as a starting point for generating new ideas.
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Physics and Society

Multi-agent discussion gains less when dissent is withheld

Multi-agent systems of LLMs add discussion to majority voting and are therefore expected to be more capable. However, empirical reports conflict on whether discussion improves accuracy or leads to an incorrect consensus. Here, we introduce a parsimonious model that explains when discussion improves accuracy and when it ends in an incorrect consensus, built from four behaviors repeatedly observed in LLM agents: (1) withholding dissent, (2) internalizing a stated answer, (3) reconsidering after seeing dissent, and (4) correcting toward the correct answer. The model shows that discussion can overturn an incorrect initial majority only when the withholding rate $c$ is below a critical rate $c^* = \gamma/(\gamma + a)$, set by the net correction rate $\gamma$ and the internalization rate $a$. We estimate these rates from conversation logs with a Bayesian method and place LLM teams relative to $c^*$. As the model predicts, the gain from discussion shrinks as withholding rises, across LLMs and on a hidden profile benchmark, HiddenBench, and MedEInst. Instructing agents not to withhold dissent increases this gain. Turning reasoning off also increases the gain, because reasoning raises the internalization rate $a$ and keeps agents from reconsidering a minority answer. These findings reconcile the conflicting reports and identify when discussion outperforms majority voting.
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All authors Chand Sahil Mansuri, Xin Wang, Mengying Li, Bryan Acton, Rory Eckardt, Dhaval Patel, Sadamori Kojaku

Physics and Society

Multiscale Renormalization of Weighted Networks

Recent progress in network renormalization has identified various ways to transform network representations consistently across resolution levels. In particular, the renormalization flow describing how random graph models transform under node aggregation has identified a fixed point corresponding to an aggregation-invariant model that preserves the form of the connection probability across arbitrary scales. While this probabilistic multiscale approach has successfully been used to model real-world networks, construct latent-space node embeddings, and reconstruct finer-grained versions of aggregate network data in a principled resolution-invariant way, it has so far been restricted to binary graphs. Here we reformulate multiscale network renormalization for weighted random graphs. Via a generating-function approach, we identify a weighted multiscale model whose full probability law, encoding both link creation and weight assignment, has an invariant compound-Poisson form under arbitrary node aggregation. The renormalization rules that transform parameters across aggregation levels allow the ensemble to be calibrated at one level and applied at another, enabling consistent modeling and reconstruction of weighted networks across arbitrary scales.
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Physics and Society

Emergence in Network Systems is Bounded by Boundary-Crossing Paths

Emergence, features of a whole that no part shows alone, is central to complex systems but rarely measured so as to locate its source. Viewing a system structurally, as a network of interacting parts, we evaluate emergence as what observing the coupled whole reveals beyond, or erases from, the combined observations of the parts. For observations that build what they see route by route, we show that every emergent feature is produced by its own route across the interface between parts, a route that traces it to the components and interactions responsible. We show the number of all such boundary-crossing paths bounds the total emergence discrepancy, and equals the emergence of measures that count routes. The bound is computed locally around the interface, validated through network examples, and in a nervous system the routes show that interneurons relay most of the emergence. Our work associates emergence with path structure in the network system that can be anticipated, attributed, and engineered.
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Physics and Society

Multiscale Reconstruction of Weighted Networks from Coarse-Grained Data

Network reconstruction from partial information is usually performed at the same resolution level at which constraints are observable. This becomes problematic when only coarse-grained information is available, while the relevant process occurs at a finer scale. Here we employ the multiscale model of weighted networks introduced in a companion paper and turn it into a probabilistic framework for reconstructing weighted networks across arbitrary aggregation levels. The model is built to preserve its functional form under coarse-graining, so that global parameters calibrated on an observable aggregate layer can be transferred to finer layers without refitting. We test the method on two empirical systems with different aggregation mechanisms. In the International Trade Network, countries are aggregated into geographic macro-regions and the observed coarse-grained layer is used to infer the underlying country-level network. In the Dutch production network, sectoral flows are reconstructed across the hierarchical industrial classification, using coarser sectoral layers to infer finer ones. In both geographical and sectoral settings, we benchmark our genuinely multiscale reconstruction method against a state-of-the-art weighted reconstruction model calibrated directly at the target resolution, and therefore using additional information available at the same (finer) scale at which performance is evaluated. Remarkably, despite this informational disadvantage, our method recovers the fine-scale binary structure with high accuracy, improving precision, specificity, accuracy and maximum degree-error diagnostics, while remaining nearly equivalent in sensitivity.
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Physics and Society

Statistical Physics of Fish Collective Motion

We review recent theoretical and empirical advances that recast fish schooling within a statistical-physics framework, emphasizing how heterogeneous and time-dependent interactions govern collective motion. Building on extensions of Vicsek-type models to complex and weighted social networks, we show that topology and link strength qualitatively alter flocking stability and critical thresholds, with empirical weights typically reducing global alignment. High-resolution trajectory inference reveals selective, nonreciprocal responses: individuals preferentially attend to faster neighbors, producing transient, speed-induced leadership rather than fixed hierarchies. At the mesoscopic scale, schools exhibit avalanche-like turning cascades with scale-free size and duration statistics, aftershock clustering, and an Omori-type temporal decay with a short memory. Together, these findings support a unified picture in which collective order and critical-like fluctuations coexist: alignment provides stability while near-critical variability preserves responsiveness. This synthesis highlights fish schools as a tractable experimental model for how living collectives organize, transmit and process information across scales.
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Physics and Society

Cultural, Structural, and Mediated Routes to Polarization in a Nonlinear Mean-Field Model

Collective polarization can arise through mechanisms acting at different stages of social communication, but similar polarized outcomes need not imply dynamically equivalent processes. We introduce a nonlinear two-group mean-field model that distinguishes three routes to polarization: individual content filtering, assortativity, and receiver-side message tailoring. Sender-side reformulation is included as a complementary mediation process that transforms source signals before they are mixed. These message transformations are motivated by AI-mediated cultural transmission, in which intermediaries can reformulate messages or adapt them to receivers. Using common and difference coordinates, we derive general conditions for instabilities toward consensus and balanced polarization and analyze the resulting stationary branches in the full two-dimensional phase plane. Individual filtering can generate polarization through state-dependent updating, assortativity can preserve group differences in the social field, and receiver tailoring can create a polarizing feedback even under complete mixing. By contrast, sender-side reformulation affects the polarization mode only when assortativity preserves differentiated source signals. Although these mechanisms can produce identical local instability conditions or balanced-branch amplitudes, they remain distinguishable through transverse stability, asymmetric equilibria, multistability, and basin geometry. In particular, balanced polarization may emerge as a saddle before becoming a stable attractor, while asymmetric saddles organize the boundary between consensus and polarization basins. These results show that collective polarization depends not only on feedback strength, but also on where feedback enters the communication process.
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Physics and Society

An LLM-powered Agent Framework for Heterogeneous Evacuation Behavior Modeling under a Moving Threat in a Public Plaza

Modeling heterogeneous evacuation behavior under a moving threat is difficult because human perception, memory, and evidence evaluation are not well captured by fixed rules. We propose a novel LLM-powered agent-based framework to represent these internal decision processes. Each pedestrian agent perceives a private symbolic ASCII view, maintains a Memory-based Knowledge Graph derived solely from individual observations, and makes decisions through persona-conditioned prompts under a common sampling configuration. A compressed decision context with stateless memory preserves trial-and-error experience across turns while excluding reasoning traces, and a validation engine separates behavioral choice from physical feasibility by executing routes only over observed terrain. We evaluated eight personality compositions in eight paired randomized blocks within a simulated public plaza. Usable-exit knowledge was strongly associated with evacuation success: 89.5% of agents possessing such knowledge evacuated, compared with 1.05% of those without it. Personality compositions also differed in their evaluation of remembered threat evidence: the proportion of danger assessments varied by 0.265, while high-urgency, low-directness decisions ranged from 11.41% to 34.33%. After direct threat sightings, responses converged, with 99.6% of assessments classifying the situation as dangerous. Movement was selected in 99.8% of decisions. Overall, evacuation outcomes were strongly associated with information access, while evacuation time was jointly associated with spatial geometry, information, and affect. The framework provides an auditable approach to generating endogenous behavioral heterogeneity through persona-conditioned LLM agents in crowd-evacuation simulations.
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All authors Jian Ma, Runxin Yu, Tianyu Tang, Xiaolian Li

Physics and Society

NuPaD: A Generative AI Framework for Fostering Deep Learning in Subatomic Physics

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in higher education has introduced a critical pedagogical paradox: while these systems possess extraordinary capacity for information retrieval and synthesis, their default operational mode of supplying immediate, unprompted answers actively undermines the cognitive processes upon which genuine scientific understanding is built. This paper presents NuPaD (Nuclear & Particle Physics – Deep Learning Tutor), a novel pedagogical framework designed for the graduate-level subatomic physics curriculum. For such advanced courses, instruction naturally shifts toward inquiry-driven, problem-based learning, making it an ideal environment to use GenAI to explore complex, open-ended physical questions rather than merely querying established facts. The framework consists of three tightly coupled and easy-to-use components: a primary agent instruction file that enforces a structured problem-based learning protocol, a purpose-built textbook optimized for precise parsing by privacy-preserving local GenAI, and a concise companion file that bridges the knowledge gap between the textbook and GenAI, alongside a comprehensive dynamic skill set for specialized tasks. We explain in detail the architectural principles of the modular NuPaD framework, the design philosophy of the Markdown-native textbook format, and the underlying GenAI regulation principles. By redefining the interaction loop between student and model, this framework transforms GenAI from a passive answer engine into an active, personalized tutor, ensuring that it accelerates rather than bypasses the development of deep learning and scientific reasoning.
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Physics and Society

Travel Mode- and Purpose-Specific Origin-Destination Matrices for England and Wales from Fused Travel Survey and Mobile Network Data

Origin-destination (OD) matrices sit behind much of quantitative transport planning, from model calibration and accessibility analysis to the appraisal of new services and development. The increasing emphasis on place-based solutions requires mobility data that can support decision-making not only at the strategic level, but also at finer spatial scales. This requires up-to-date OD evidence at small-area resolution, disaggregated by travel mode and purpose, which remains either inaccessible or unavailable. In this work, we present dense MSOA-to-MSOA OD matrices for England and Wales, segmented by seven travel modes and representative time periods, with eight trip purposes for the weekday morning peak. The matrices are built by calibrating aggregate mobile network data provided by BT against National Travel Survey (NTS), census and trip-rate evidence, preserving the observed spatial structure of movement while referencing its age, mode and purpose composition to the survey. The open-source data processing pipeline is released alongside the matrices, so that the construction of the dataset can be inspected in full and adapted to other years, regions or assumptions.
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All authors Bowen Zhang, Chen Zhong, Mingfei Ma, James Golding-Graham

Physics and Society

Hybrid Work and the Restructuring of Urban Mobility in U.S. Cities

Entering the post-pandemic era, cities navigate a new normal shaped by hybrid work and space-time flexibility, but existing evidence is spatially scattered and temporally limited. Here we develop an analytical approach that examines this reorganization through three dimensions: remote work adoption via sector composition, daily travel behavior via trip-level metrics, and functional urban form via mobility-derived measures. To capture the interplay of urban dynamics, we synthesize three complementary spatial metrics. In particular, coupling overall trip centrality with work-trip concentration differentiates whether employment and daily activity organize around the same centers. Applied to population-scale data across 15 U.S. metropolitan areas spanning 2019-2024, our approach shows that daily car travel increased despite elevated remote work, a pattern consistent across cities with distinct spatial structures. Decomposition and regression identify trip frequency as the primary contributor to VKT growth, moderated by compact urban form and concentrated employment. The approach provides a replicable framework for comparative study of post-pandemic urban mobility.
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Monday 28 September

Physics and Society

What Do City Codes Say About Climate Risk?

Climate change is intensifying natural hazards, and preparing cities for them falls primarily to local governments. Yet what municipal codes say about hazards, and whether their requirements match each city's risk profile, has not been measured. I analyze 3.6 million sentences from 204 U.S. cities' municipal codes and compare each city's hazard text to its actual risk from FEMA's National Risk Index. I document four patterns. First, a small share of code text consists of provisions relevant for natural hazards (1.5%), and codes in high-risk cities contain marginally more. Second, hazard coverage is highly concentrated on flooding (61% of hazard-relevant text), even though flooding accounts for only 9% of the average city's risk. Third, city codes emphasize emergency response over prevention. Emergency management is the largest regulatory category, and land use is the smallest. Fourth, codes track the types of risks relevant to each location, but only loosely. The median city would need to reallocate 70% of its regulatory text to match its risk profile. The results suggest that U.S. city codes do not include regulation for most of the hazards cities face.
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Physics and Society · Cross-listed from cs.SI

Group dynamics of engagement with AI topics on Bluesky

Social media increasingly shapes everyday life, serving as both a central venue for discussion of major events and a space where online collective behavior can spill over into real-world activity, while artificial intelligence (AI) is likewise becoming increasingly influential across society. Understanding how different online communities respond to AI-related events, and disentangling the mechanisms underlying the development of such engagement, are therefore increasingly important for studying information spreading and the societal reception of AI. Our work addresses the limited connection between empirical studies of AI-related online engagement and mathematical modeling of group-level spreading dynamics. We develop a framework to collect and organize empirical Bluesky activity into distinct user groups, then use a network-based dynamics model to investigate the mechanisms underlying their engagement. We use the release of DeepSeek R1 as a case study under two complementary grouping schemes: AI-related communities and academic disciplines. For each group, we fit a network-based Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR)-type model augmented with an exogenous engagement term, allowing us to quantify the relative strengths of endogenous network-driven spreading and direct external response. Across groups, we find that strong direct responses to the event do not necessarily coincide with strong network-driven propagation, revealing distinct engagement patterns that may be obscured by aggregate activity alone.
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Physics and Society

A citizen science behavioural dataset of an urban collective-risk dilemma on air pollution mitigation under resource inequality

This article describes a behavioural dataset from a collective-risk dilemma public experiment carried out in Barcelona, Spain, within the citizen science xAire air quality project. Participants played a ten-round game in groups of six, each deciding every round how many monetary units to contribute from a private endowment toward a shared target; groups that fell short forfeited all remaining capital. Three endowment treatments held the group total fixed: an equal condition and two unequal conditions in which low-endowment participants formed either the minority or the majority of the group. Data were collected at two public outdoor venues using a tablet-based interface under lab-in-the-field protocols. Participants were recruited on-site from a demographically heterogeneous pool of individuals passing through the venues, mostly local residents. The dataset comprises 462 participants across 77 six-player games, 4\,620 contribution decisions in total. Each participant record links the full ten-round contribution trajectory to initial endowment, wealth treatment, venue, district of residence and its measured nitrogen-dioxide concentration, and socio-demographic and attitudinal survey items covering gender, age, education, economic and working status, air-quality perception, fairness norms, environmental-justice beliefs, residential mobility, and community participation. The release provides raw and cleaned participant tables, a variable codebook, the survey instrument, the district-pollution linkage, and the preprocessing code.
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All authors Marc Sadurní, Martín F. Díaz, Julián Vicens, Anna Cigarini, Isabelle Bonhoure, Miquel Montero, Josep Perelló

Physics and Society

Structure of Exposure Modeling of Systems to Climate Change Related Hazards

Physical infrastructures designed for stable climate conditions support a significant portion of daily human life activities. However, climate change reshapes the distributions of extreme climate intensities. As a result, physical infrastructures that may face extreme events exceeding their design thresholds risk damage and require adaptation. A preliminary step to adaptation is to identify exposed infrastructures to climate hazards. This paper aims to structure the exposure modeling to climate change hazards by providing an overall methodology. This paper instantiates a framework using the Boolean Exposure Model to assess how physical systems may be exposed to climate hazards. The framework combines a Boolean System Model for infrastructures and a Boolean Hazard Model informed by extreme value statistics. An illustrative case study quantifies the exposure of road bridges in French administrative units to extreme temperatures. Results indicate increasing exposure across future climate scenarios and time periods, with spatial non-uniformity. This framework supports multi-level analysis and integrates non-stationary climate extremes, providing a structured exposure model to facilitate the adaptation of physical systems to climate change.
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All authors Matthieu Dutel, Adam Abdin, Didier Soto, Anne Barros