Neural Spectral Bias and Conformal Correlators II: Modular and Annulus Bootstrap
Abstract
We develop a neural network bootstrap framework for reconstructing partition functions of two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) based on modular invariance and the Cardy condition, which are recast as crossing equations for four-point correlators. For torus partition functions, we use the twist-field representation in the symmetric-orbifold description to map modular S-invariance to four-point crossing and focus on the diagonal kinematics of four insertions on a line. For annulus partition functions, we formulate open/closed channel duality as crossing symmetry for mixed four-point functions of defect-changing operators in interface CFT. In both cases, the reconstruction problem is formulated in the anchored-bootstrap form, where the crossing constraints are supplemented by minimal spectral input (a gap) and anchor data. We solve this under-determined problem by using lightweight feed-forward neural networks to parametrise the correlators and their corresponding partition functions. A key ingredient of this approach is the spectral bias of the neural networks in the lazy training regime, which selects specific crossing-symmetric configurations. This reformulation unifies standard modular and annulus constraints in two dimensions with the anchored neural approach for CFT correlators, providing a new way to reconstruct full partition functions from sparse data with remarkable accuracy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.24913,
title = {Neural Spectral Bias and Conformal Correlators II: Modular and Annulus Bootstrap},
author = {Kausik Ghosh and Sidhaarth Kumar and Vasilis Niarchos and Andreas Stergiou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.24913},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
52 pages, 29 figures. Code used in this work is available at https://github.com/andstergiou/nn-cft