arXiv subjects

Arnav Garg

Publications and source records attributed to Arnav Garg.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Impartial Combinatorial Games and the Nuclear Escalation Ladder

We model Herman Kahn's escalation ladder as an impartial combinatorial game. Reindexing each rung by its distance to the nuclear threshold turns the ladder into a subtraction game, the most tractable class in combinatorial game theory, and the doctrinal fact that no side wishes to fire first selects the misere convention. We prove that single-ladder stability is governed by a congruence (Theorem 4.1) and derive a ladder-design corollary that makes the burden of first escalation a function of ladder length and escalation granularity (Corollary 4.2). For simultaneous theaters we show, under normal play, that joint stability is the Nim-sum of the theater-wise escalation distances (Theorem 5.2), a condition that is neither additive nor dominated by the most dangerous theater. We then show the Nim-sum reduction fails under misere play, introduce the misere quotient as its replacement, and prove by exhaustive backward induction that for two-step escalation the quotient is the order-six monoid with generators a, b satisfying a^2=1 and b^3=b, with loss set {a,b^2} (Theorem 6.3). To our knowledge, impartial combinatorial game theory has not previously been applied to nuclear escalation ladders; the existing game-theoretic literature on escalation is classical and payoff-based.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

Proof of Conjecture 19 of Ballantine, Beck, Merca, and Sagan on Elementary Symmetric Partitions

Ballantine, Beck, Merca, and Sagan conjectured four identities, collectively Conjecture 19, relating the image of the map pre_k on integer partitions to four OEIS sequences. We prove parts (i) and (iii) unconditionally, prove part (iv) unconditionally using the injectivity of pre_2 on partitions of n (Conjecture 1 of the same paper, proved by Li in arXiv:2508.00971), and show that this injectivity is in fact equivalent to part (iv). For part (ii) we prove the partition-theoretic half unconditionally and reduce the remaining content to a 2006 conjecture of Dean Hickerson on the OEIS concerning Huffman coding. We also correct a sign error in the published statement of part (iii): the correct identity is chi(ImP_3(n)) = A213213(n) - 1, not 1 + A213213(n) as stated.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

A note on partitions in the image of pre$_2$

Devnani and Eyyunni recently studied the maps pre$_k$ on integer partitions, which arise from applying elementary symmetric polynomials to the parts of a partition. They asked whether there exists $n \ge 1$ such that exactly one partition of $n$ lies in the image of pre$_2$. We show that this occurs only for $n$ in {1, 2, 4}, and that for all $n \ge 5$, at least two partitions of n are in the image of pre$_2$.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

Structural Results for 4 x n Chomp: Unique Extension, Bimodal Asymptotic Structure, and Period-112 Geometry

We present a complete computational tabulation of all 961,619,972 P-positions in 4xn Chomp for n <= 3000, obtained via a new O(n^4) shadow-array sieve that replaces the O(n^5) hash-set approach of prior work. Three structural results are reported. First, we prove the Unique Extension property: for any triple (a,b,c), there is at most one value of d such that (a,b,c,d) is a P-position. The proof is a short contradiction using the move structure of Chomp and generalizes immediately to all k-row Chomp. Second, the P-positions exhibit a persistent bimodal decomposition into two subfamilies, HIGH and LOW, separated by a clean gap in the per-a median of d/a that grows monotonically from 0.040 at n=500 to 0.062 at n=3000, with the HIGH subfamily maintaining a stable density of 56.2% throughout. The previously conjectured global limit d/a -> 2/9 is shown to be a mixture artifact. Third, within each family the two larger row-length ratios satisfy an exact quadratic relation at machine precision, and numerical evidence suggests d/a -> 1/4 in the HIGH family, though a power-law convergence fit gives an asymptote of approximately 0.248 with exponent alpha ~ 0.05, leaving the exact limit open. The LOW family limit L3 ~ 0.183 is not well approximated by 3/16; the best rational with denominator at most 2000 is 20/109. Code and the n <= 500 dataset are available at https://github.com/gargarnav/chomp-4xn-v2.

math.GM↗

arXiv2024

LoRA Land: 310 Fine-tuned LLMs that Rival GPT-4, A Technical Report

Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as one of the most widely adopted methods for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of Large Language Models (LLMs). LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. We aim to assess the viability of training and serving LLMs fine-tuned with LoRA in real-world applications. First, we measure the quality of LLMs fine-tuned with quantized low rank adapters across 10 base models and 31 tasks for a total of 310 models. We find that 4-bit LoRA fine-tuned models outperform base models by 34 points and GPT-4 by 10 points on average. Second, we investigate the most effective base models for fine-tuning and assess the correlative and predictive capacities of task complexity heuristics in forecasting the outcomes of fine-tuning. Finally, we evaluate the latency and concurrency capabilities of LoRAX, an open-source Multi-LoRA inference server that facilitates the deployment of multiple LoRA fine-tuned models on a single GPU using shared base model weights and dynamic adapter loading. LoRAX powers LoRA Land, a web application that hosts 25 LoRA fine-tuned Mistral-7B LLMs on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU with 80GB memory. LoRA Land highlights the quality and cost-effectiveness of employing multiple specialized LLMs over a single, general-purpose LLM.

cs.CL↗