I introduce a new family of axioms extending ZFC set theory, the $Σ_n$-correct forcing axioms. These assert roughly that whenever a forcing name $\dot{a}$ can be forced by a poset in some forcing class $Γ$ to have some $Σ_n$ property $φ$ which is provably preserved by all further forcing in $Γ$, then $\dot{a}$ reflects to some small name such that there is already in $V$ a filter which interprets that small name so that $φ$ holds. $Σ_1$-correct forcing axioms turn out to be equivalent to classical forcing axioms, while $Σ_2$-correct forcing axioms for $Σ_2$-definable forcing classes are consistent relative to a supercompact cardinal (and in fact hold in the standard model of a classical forcing axiom constructed as an extension of a model with a supercompact), $Σ_3$-correct forcing axioms are consistent relative to an extendible cardinal, and more generally $Σ_n$-correct forcing axioms are consistent relative to a hierarchy of large cardinals generalizing supercompactness and extendibility whose supremum is the first-order version of Vopenka's Principle. By analogy to classical forcing axioms, there is also a hierarchy of $Σ_n$-correct bounded forcing axioms which are consistent re
We study a recent variation of zero forcing called leaky forcing. Zero forcing is a propagation process on a network whereby some nodes are initially blue with all others white. Blue vertices can "force" a white neighbor to become blue if all other neighbors are blue. The goal is to find the minimum number of initially blue vertices to eventually force all vertices blue after exhaustively applying the forcing rule above. Leaky forcing is a fault-tolerant variation of zero forcing where certain vertices (not necessarily initially blue) cannot force. The goal in this context is to find the minimum number of initially blue vertices needed that can eventually force all vertices to be blue, regardless of which small number of vertices can't force. This work extends results from zero forcing in terms of leaky forcing. In particular, we provide a complete determination of leaky forcing numbers for all unicyclic graphs and upper bounds for generalized Petersen graphs. We also provide bounds for the effect of both edge removal and vertex removal on the $\ell$-leaky forcing number. Finally, we completely characterize connected graphs that have the minimum and maximum possible $1$-leaky forci
Generic absoluteness is the phenomenon that certain truths in the set-theoretic universe remain stable under forcing expansions. A classical result by Kripke asserts that every complete Boolean algebra completely embeds into a countably generated one, implying that any forcing extension can be realised inside one obtained via a collapse forcing. This observation raises a deeper question: are all forcing notions truly necessary when studying projective generic absoluteness, or does a particular class of forcing notions suffice to capture the same level of invariance? Here we show that, under suitable large cardinal hypotheses, projective generic absoluteness for collapse forcings is indeed equivalent to absoluteness for arbitrary forcings; and we discuss the necessity of these hypotheses, showing that at a low projective level the result holds in ZFC. Thus, we reveal the terminality of collapse forcings since they capture the full robustness of the universe under forcing extensions.
A forcing set for a perfect matching of a graph is defined as a subset of the edges of that perfect matching such that there exists a unique perfect matching containing it. A complete forcing set for a graph is a subset of its edges, such that it intersects the edges of every perfect matching in a forcing set of that perfect matching. The size of a smallest complete forcing set of a graph is called the complete forcing number of the graph. In this paper, we derive new upper bounds for the complete forcing number of graphs in terms of other graph theoretical parameters such as the degeneracy or the spectral radius of the graph. We show that for graphs with the number of edges more than some constant times the number of vertices, our result outperforms the best known upper bound for the complete forcing number. For the set of edge-transitive graphs, we present a lower bound for the complete forcing number in terms of maximum forcing number. This result in particular is applied to the hypercube graphs and Cartesian powers of even cycles.
Zero forcing is an iterative graph coloring process studied for its wide array of applications. In this process, the vertices of the graph are initially designated as blue or white, and a zero forcing set is a set of initially blue vertices that results in all vertices becoming blue after repeated application of a color change rule. The zero forcing number of a graph is the minimum cardinality of a zero forcing set. The zero forcing number has motivated the introduction of a host of variants motivated by linear-algebraic or graph-theoretic contexts. We define a variant we term the $k$-fault tolerant zero forcing number, which is the minimum cardinality of a set $B$ such that every subset of $B$ of cardinality $|B|-k$ is a zero forcing set. We study the values of this parameter on various graph families, the behavior under several graph operations, and characterize the 1-fault tolerant zero forcing number of trees.
The modal logic of forcing arises when one considers a model of set theory in the context of all its forcing extensions, interpreting necessity as "in all forcing extensions" and possibility as "in some forcing extension". In this modal language one may easily express sweeping general forcing principles, such as the assertion that every possibly necessary statement is necessarily possible, which is valid for forcing, or the assertion that every possibly necessary statement is true, which is the maximality principle, a forcing axiom independent of but equiconsistent with ZFC (Stavi-Väänänen, Hamkins). Every definable forcing class similarly gives rise to the corresponding forcing modalities, for which one considers extensions only by forcing notions in that class. In previous work, we proved that if ZFC is consistent, then the ZFC-provably valid principles of the class of all forcing are precisely the assertions of the modal theory S4.2. In this article, we prove that the provably valid principles of collapse forcing, Cohen forcing and other classes are in each case exactly S4.3; the provably valid principles of c.c.c. forcing, proper forcing, and others are each contained within S4
In zero forcing, the focus is typically on finding the minimum cardinality of any zero forcing set in the graph; however, the number of cardinalities between $0$ and the number of vertices in the graph for which there are both zero forcing sets and sets that fail to be zero forcing sets is not well known. In this paper, we introduce the zero forcing span of a graph, which is the number of distinct cardinalities for which there are sets that are zero forcing sets and sets that are not. We introduce the span within the context of standard zero forcing and skew zero forcing as well as for standard zero forcing on directed graphs. We characterize graphs with high span and low span of each type, and also investigate graphs with special zero forcing polynomials.
A leak is a vertex that is not allowed to perform a force during the zero forcing process. Leaky forcing was recently introduced as a new variation of zero forcing in order to analyze how leaks in a network disrupt the zero forcing process. The $\ell$-leaky forcing number of a graph is the size of the smallest zero forcing set that can force a graph despite $\ell$ leaks. A graph $G$ is $\ell$-resilient if its zero forcing number is the same as its $\ell$-leaky forcing number. In this paper, we analyze $\ell$-leaky forcing and show that if an $(\ell-1)$-leaky forcing set $B$ is robust enough, then $B$ is an $\ell$-leaky forcing set. This provides the framework for characterizing $\ell$-leaky forcing sets. Furthermore, we consider structural implications of $\ell$-resilient graphs. We apply these results to bound the $\ell$-leaky forcing number of several graph families including trees, supertriangles, and grid graphs. In particular, we resolve a question posed by Dillman and Kenter concerning the upper bound on the $1$-leaky forcing number of grid graphs.
To achieve real-time interactive video generation, current methods distill pretrained bidirectional video diffusion models into few-step autoregressive (AR) models, facing an architectural gap when full attention is replaced by causal attention. However, existing approaches do not bridge this gap theoretically. They initialize the AR student via ODE distillation, which requires frame-level injectivity, where each noisy frame must map to a unique clean frame under the PF-ODE of an AR teacher. Distilling an AR student from a bidirectional teacher violates this condition, preventing recovery of the teacher's flow map and instead inducing a conditional-expectation solution, which degrades performance. To address this issue, we propose Causal Forcing, which uses an autoregressive teacher for ODE initialization to bridge the architectural gap, and then applies the same DMD procedure as in Self Forcing. Empirical results show that our method outperforms all baselines across all metrics, surpassing the SOTA Self Forcing by 19.3\% in Dynamic Degree, 8.7\% in VisionReward, and 16.7\% in Instruction Following. Project page: \href{https://thu-ml.github.io/CausalForcing.github.io/}{https://thu-
Vertex leaky forcing was recently introduced as a new variation of zero forcing in order to show how vertex leaks can disrupt the zero forcing process in a graph. An edge leak is an edge that is not allowed to be forced across during the zero forcing process. The $\ell$-edge-leaky forcing number of a graph is the size of a smallest zero forcing set that can force the graph blue despite $\ell$ edge leaks. This paper contains an analysis of the effect of edge leaks on the zero forcing process instead of vertex leaks. Furthermore, specified $\ell$-leaky forcing is introduced. The main result is that $\ell$-leaky forcing, $\ell$-edge-leaky forcing, and specified $\ell$-leaky forcing are equivalent. Furthermore, all of these different kinds of leaks can be mixed so that vertex leaks, edge leaks, and specified leaks are used. This mixed $\ell$-leaky forcing number is also the same as the (vertex) $\ell$-leaky forcing number.
Recent advances have substantially improved real-time interactive video generation in the autoregressive regime. However, most existing few-step autoregressive video generation methods, often distilled from a corresponding many-step teacher, default to a 4-step sampling configuration, which still incurs considerable latency during deployment and suffers from severe quality degradation when the number of sampling steps is further reduced, particularly in the one-step setting. Trajectory-style consistency distillation methods often produce videos with weak dynamics, while DMD-based approaches, such as Self-Forcing, tend to yield blurry frames. To address this challenge, we propose One-Forcing, a simple yet effective approach which augments the DMD objective with an auxiliary GAN loss for high-quality and efficient one-step video generation. Experiments on VBench show that One-Forcing achieves a total score of 83.76, establishing state-of-the-art performance among one-step causal video generation methods and remaining competitive with strong many-step approaches. We further demonstrate that one-step framewise autoregressive generation can be achieved stably with merely one-third of th
Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for long video generation, enabling causal synthesis beyond the limits of bidirectional models. To address training-inference mismatch, a series of self-forcing strategies have been proposed to improve rollout stability by conditioning the model on its own predictions during training. While these approaches substantially mitigate exposure bias, extending generation to minute-scale horizons remains challenging due to progressive temporal degradation. In this work, we show that this limitation is not primarily caused by insufficient memory, but by how temporal memory is utilised during inference. Through empirical analysis, we find that increasing memory does not consistently improve long-horizon generation, and that the temporal placement of historical context significantly influences motion dynamics while leaving visual quality largely unchanged. These findings suggest that temporal memory should not be treated as a homogeneous buffer. Motivated by this insight, we introduce Relax Forcing, a structured temporal memory mechanism for AR diffusion. Instead of attending to the dense generated history, Rela
The ultimate goal of video generation is to satisfy a fundamental trilemma: achieving high visual quality, maintaining rigorous physical consistency, and enabling precise controllability. While recent models can maintain this balance in simple, isolated scenarios, we observe that this equilibrium is fragile and often breaks down as scene complexity increases (e.g., involving collisions or dense traffic). To address this, we introduce \textbf{Motion Forcing}, a framework designed to stabilize this trilemma even in complex generative tasks. Our key insight is to explicitly decouple physical reasoning from visual synthesis via a hierarchical \textbf{``Point-Shape-Appearance''} paradigm. This approach decomposes generation into verifiable stages: modeling complex dynamics as sparse geometric anchors (\textbf{Point}), expanding them into dynamic depth maps that explicitly resolve 3D geometry (\textbf{Shape}), and finally rendering high-fidelity textures (\textbf{Appearance}). Furthermore, to foster robust physical understanding, we employ a \textbf{Masked Point Recovery} strategy. By randomly masking input anchors during training and enforcing the reconstruction of complete dynamic dept
Sidorenko's conjecture states that the number of copies of any given bipartite graph in another graph of given density is asymptotically minimized by a random graph. The forcing conjecture further strengthens this, claiming that any minimizer in fact needs to be quasi-random. Here we extend the family of bipartite graphs for which the forcing conjecture is known to hold to include balanced blow-ups of Sidorenko graphs and subdivisions of Sidorenko graphs by a forcing graph. This partially generalizes results by Conlon et al. (2018) and Conlon and Lee (2021). We also show that the box product of a Sidorenko graph with an edge is forcing, partially generalizing results of Kim, Lee, and Lee (2016) and, in particular, showing that cubes are forcing. We achieve these results through algebraic arguments building on Razborov's flag algebra framework (2007). This approach additionally allows us to construct Sidorenko hypergraphs from known 2-uniform Sidorenko graphs and to study forcing pairs.
We show that higher Sacks forcing at a regular limit cardinal and club Miller forcing at an uncountable regular cardinal both add a diamond sequence. We answer the longstanding question, whether $κ= κ^{<κ} \geq\aleph_1$ implies that $κ$-supported iterations of $κ$-Sacks forcing do not collapse $κ^+$ and are $κ$-proper in the affirmative. The results pertain to other higher tree forcings.
We give an algorithm that finds a zero forcing set which approximates the optimal size by a factor of $\text{pw}(G)+1$, where $\text{pw}(G)$ is the pathwidth of $G$. Starting from a path decomposition, the algorithm runs in $O(nm)$ time, where $n$ and $m$ are the order and size of the graph, respectively. As a corollary, we obtain a new upper bound on the zero forcing number in terms of the fort number and the pathwidth. The algorithm is based on a correspondence between zero forcing sets and forcing arc sets. This correspondence leads to a new bound on the zero forcing number in terms of vertex cuts, and to new, short proofs for known bounds on the zero forcing number.
The forcing number of a perfect matching $M$ in a graph $G$ is the smallest number of edges inside $M$ that can not be contained in other perfect matchings. The anti-forcing number of $M$ is the smallest number of edges outside $M$ whose removal results in a subgraph with a single perfect matching, that is $M$. Recently, in order to investigate the distributions of forcing numbers and anti-forcing numbers, the forcing polynomial and anti-forcing polynomial were proposed, respectively. In this work, the forcing and anti-forcing polynomials of a polyomino graph are obtained. As consequences, the forcing and anti-forcing spectra of this polyomino graph are determined, and the asymptotic behaviors on the degree of freedom and the sum of all anti-forcing numbers are revealed, respectively.
Autoregressive video generation has emerged as a powerful paradigm for World Action Models (WAMs). However, existing approaches suffer from slow training convergence and limited converged accuracy, particularly at high frame rates, as the training supervision is confined to the current chunk without explicit signals about future dynamics; they also suffer from slow inference due to iterative video denoising. In this paper, we present Next Forcing, a multi-chunk prediction (MCP) framework for causal world modeling that enables faster training, higher accuracy, and accelerated inference. Inspired by multi-token prediction in large language models, Next Forcing introduces an MCP training objective that augments the main model with lightweight auxiliary MCP modules to simultaneously denoise video chunks at multiple future temporal horizons (next$^1$, next$^2$, next$^3$ chunks). These MCP modules form a causal chain across prediction depths, where intermediate features fused from multiple layers of the main model are leveraged to predict future dynamics, allowing near-future predictions to inform farther-future ones and providing dense multi-scale temporal supervision back to the main m
In this paper we continue the study of equivalence of generics filters started by Smythe in [Smy22]. We fully characterize those forcing posets for which the corresponding equivalence of generics is smooth using the purely topological property of condensation. Next we leverage our characterization to show that there are non-homogeneous forcing for which equivalence of generics is not smooth. Then we prove hyperfiniteness in the case of Prikry forcing and some additional results addressing the problem whether generic equivalence for Cohen forcing is hyperfinite.
The forcing number of a perfect matching of a graph was introduced by Harary et al., which originated from Klein and Randić's ideal of innate degree of freedom of Kekulé structure in molecular graph. On the opposite side in some sense, Vukičević and Trinajstié proposed the anti-forcing number of a graph, afterwards Lei et al. generalized this idea to single perfect matching. Recently the forcing and anti-forcing polynomials of perfect matchings of a graph were proposed as counting polynomials for perfect matchings with the same forcing number and anti-forcing number respectively. In this paper, we obtain the explicit expressions of forcing and anti-forcing polynomials of a pyrene system. As consequences, the forcing and anti-forcing spectra of a pyrene system are determined.