The Non-Backtracking Spectrum of the Universal Cover of a Graph
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A non-backtracking walk on a graph, $H$, is a directed path of directed edges of $H$ such that no edge is the inverse of its preceding edge. Non-backtracking walks of a given length can be counted using the non-backtracking adjacency matrix, $B$, indexed by $H$'s directed edges and related to Ihara's Zeta function. We show how to determine $B$'s spectrum in the case where $H$ is a tree covering a finite graph. We show that when $H$ is not regular, this spectrum can have positive measure in the complex plane, unlike the regular case. We show that outside of $B$'s spectrum, the corresponding Green function has ``periodic decay ratios.'' The existence of such a ``ratio system'' can be effectively checked, and is equivalent to being outside the spectrum. We also prove that the spectral radius of the non-backtracking walk operator on the tree covering a finite graph is exactly $\sqrt\gr$, where $\gr$ is the growth rate of the tree. This further motivates the definition of the graph theoretical Riemann hypothesis proposed by Stark and Terras \cite{ST}. Finally, we give experimental evidence that for a fixed, finite graph, $H$, a random lift of large degree has non-backtracking new spectrum near that of $H$'s universal cover. This suggests a new generalization of Alon's second eigenvalue conjecture.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it