August 30, 2026 – Kavli Institute Pre-Print Publications

Host Dependence and Line-of-Sight Effects on Galaxy-Galaxy Strong Lensing in Clusters

Posted by klaurent August 30, 2026MIT

Kavli Affiliate: Michael McDonald | Summary:The cross section for galaxy-galaxy strong lensing (GGSL) events in galaxy clusters has repeatedly been found to be higher in observations than in cosmological simulations. We revisit this discrepancy using updated simulation methodology and investigate the dependence of the GGSL probability, $P_rm GGSL$, on host-cluster lensing properties, baryonic physics, and […]

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When 3D Gaussian Splatting Recovers Real Surfaces

Posted by klaurent August 30, 2026Chicago

Kavli Affiliate: David W. Miller | Summary:When does 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) recover the true scene surface rather than just overfitting view-dependent appearance? We answer this by developing a mathematical framework based on a first-hit rendering abstraction that cleanly isolates geometry from appearance. We prove that geometric misalignment forcefully converts spatial textures into high-frequency angular […]

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Advancing Fundamental Physics and Cosmology with high-resolution X-ray imaging

Posted by klaurent August 30, 2026MIT

Kavli Affiliate: Herman Marshall | Summary:Black Holes are the key to solving many unanswered questions in fundamental physics: in particular, the very extreme properties shown by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies make them obvious candidates for testing gravity theories in the strong-field regime. Since X-rays are generated by matter under extreme physical […]

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The Structural Abundance Crisis of Massive Galaxies in Current Cosmological Simulations

Posted by klaurent August 30, 2026Peking

Kavli Affiliate: Luis Ho | Summary:The internal structure of galaxies encodes the complex baryon cycle driven by gas accretion, star formation, and feedback, together with secular evolution and environmentally driven processes such as mergers and tidal interactions. We present a population-level census of massive nearby galaxies ($log(M_star/M_odot) > 10$) by comparing Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic […]

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Spatial-sign-based multilinear principal component analysis for tensor data

Posted by klaurent August 30, 2026Peking

Kavli Affiliate: Feng Long| Summary: Multilinear principal component analysis (MPCA) reduces the dimension of tensor-valued data while preserving their mode-specific structure, but its quadratic scatter criterion can be unstable under heavy-tailed distributions and contamination. We propose spatial-sign-based multilinear principal component analysis (SMPCA), a robust dimension-reduction method that centers the observations by their spatial median, removes […]

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ValueGraph: Value-Signal Guided Graph Pre-training for Contextualized User Representation

Posted by klaurent August 30, 2026Caltech

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Value signals are aggregated user-level moral representations that capture users’ inferred value-related tendencies from their online discourse. User behavior on social media is shaped not only by what users say or whom they interact with, but also by the value signal through which they express attitudes. Existing user representation methods largely […]

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