arXiv subjects

Benjamin Snyder

Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Snyder.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Impact of Cosmic Variance and Satellites on JWST Clustering Measurements at Redshift around 6

We present a framework for inferring the dark matter halo masses of quasars and [O III]-emitting galaxies from JWST/NIRCam Wide Field Slitless Spectroscopy (WFSS) clustering measurements at z approximately 6. Using the FLAMINGO-10k N-body simulation, we construct mock realizations of quasar and galaxy catalogs that incorporate realistic selection functions, spatial coverage, and sensitivity limits matched to the ASPIRE survey. These mocks enable accurate measurements of the quasar-galaxy cross-correlation and galaxy auto-correlation functions, with covariance matrices derived from 1000 realizations that capture both cosmic variance and bin-to-bin correlations. We employ Bayesian inference to fit the correlation functions and infer the minimum halo masses for quasars and galaxies. Our results demonstrate that Poisson pair-count uncertainties, commonly adopted in high-redshift clustering studies, significantly underestimate the true measurement errors. The dominant missing component is cosmic variance: even the diagonal of the full covariance matrix exceeds the Poisson expectation, with off-diagonal bin-to-bin correlations contributing a smaller additional correction. In particular, 1) the commonly used Poisson error on the correlation functions underestimates the true uncertainty by a factor of approximately 3; 2) the uncertainties on the inferred minimum halo masses are underestimated by a factor of approximately 1.5-3 when adopting Poisson errors instead of the full covariance matrix; 3) the inferred QSO halo mass is robust to whether central and satellite [O III]-emitters share a common mass threshold. Our framework provides a more complete error budget for JWST/WFSS clustering analyses, enabling robust constraints on the host halo masses and duty cycles of high-redshift quasars and emission-line galaxies.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2023

The minimum degree of $(K_s, K_t)$-co-critical graphs

Given graphs $G, H_1, H_2$, we write $G \rightarrow ({H}_1, H_2)$ if every {red, blue}-coloring of the edges of $G$ contains a red copy of $H_1$ or a blue copy of $H_2$. A non-complete graph $G$ is $(H_1, H_2)$-co-critical if $G \nrightarrow ({H}_1, H_2)$ and $G+e\rightarrow ({H}_1, H_2)$ for every edge $e$ in the complement of $G$. The notion of co-critical graphs was initiated by Ne$\check{s}$et$\check{r}$il in 1986. Galluccio, Simonovits and Simonyi in 1992 proved that every $(K_3, K_3)$-co-critical graph on $n\ge6$ vertices has minimum degree at least four, and the bound is sharp for all $n\ge 6$. In this paper, we first extend the aforementioned result to all $(K_s, K_t)$-co-critical graphs by showing that every $(K_s, K_t)$-co-critical graph has minimum degree at least $2t+s-5$, where $t\ge s\ge 3$. We then prove that every $(K_3, K_4)$-co-critical graph on $n\ge9$ vertices has minimum degree at least seven, and the bound is sharp for all $n\ge 9$. This answers a question of the third author in the positive for the case $s=3$ and $t=4$.

math.CO↗

arXiv2019

Seeker: Real-Time Interactive Search

This paper introduces Seeker, a system that allows users to interactively refine search rankings in real time, through feedback in the form of likes and dislikes. When searching online, users may not know how to accurately describe their product of choice in words. An alternative approach is to search an embedding space, allowing the user to query using a representation of the item (like a tune for a song, or a picture for an object). However, this approach requires the user to possess an example representation of their desired item. Additionally, most current search systems do not allow the user to dynamically adapt the results with further feedback. On the other hand, users often have a mental picture of the desired item and are able to answer ordinal questions of the form: "Is this item similar to what you have in mind?" With this assumption, our algorithm allows for users to provide sequential feedback on search results to adapt the search feed. We show that our proposed approach works well both qualitatively and quantitatively. Unlike most previous representation-based search systems, we can quantify the quality of our algorithm by evaluating humans-in-the-loop experiments.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2014

Multilingual Part-of-Speech Tagging: Two Unsupervised Approaches

We demonstrate the effectiveness of multilingual learning for unsupervised part-of-speech tagging. The central assumption of our work is that by combining cues from multiple languages, the structure of each becomes more apparent. We consider two ways of applying this intuition to the problem of unsupervised part-of-speech tagging: a model that directly merges tag structures for a pair of languages into a single sequence and a second model which instead incorporates multilingual context using latent variables. Both approaches are formulated as hierarchical Bayesian models, using Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling techniques for inference. Our results demonstrate that by incorporating multilingual evidence we can achieve impressive performance gains across a range of scenarios. We also found that performance improves steadily as the number of available languages increases.

cs.CL↗