In this paper, we prove a conjecture of Kottwitz and Rapoport on a union of (generalized) affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties $X(\mu, b)_J$ for a $p$-adic group $G$ and its parahoric subgroup $P_J$. We show that $X(\mu, b)_J \neq \emptyset$ if and only if the group-theoretic version of Mazur's inequality is satisfied. In the process, we obtain a generalization of Grothendieck's conjecture on the closure relation of $\s$-conjugacy classes of a twisted loop group.

We study smooth toroidal compactifications of Siegel varieties thoroughly from the viewpoints of mixed Hodge theory and K\"ahler-Einstein metric. We observe that any cusp of a Siegel space can be identified as a set of certain weight one polarized mixed Hodge structures. We then study the infinity boundary divisors of toroidal compactifications, and obtain a global volume form formula of an arbitrary smooth Siegel variety $\sA_{g,\Gamma}(g>1)$ with a smooth toroidal compactification $\overline{\sA}_{g,\Gamma}$ such that $D_\infty:=\overline{\sA}_{g,\Gamma}\setminus \sA_{g,\Gamma}$ is normal crossing. We use this volume form formula to show that the unique group-invariant K\"ahler-Einstein metric on $\sA_{g,\Gamma}$ endows some restraint combinatorial conditions for all smooth toroidal compactifications of $\sA_{g,\Gamma}.$ Again using the volume form formula, we study the asymptotic behaviour of logarithmical canonical line bundle on any smooth toroidal compactification of $\sA_{g,\Gamma}$ carefully and we obtain that the logarithmical canonical bundle degenerate sharply even though it is big and numerically effective.

This paper studies affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties $X_{w}(b)$ in the affine flag variety of a quasi-split tamely ramified group. We describe the geometric structure of $X_{w}(b)$ for a minimal length element $w$ in the conjugacy class of an extended affine Weyl group, generalizing one of the main results in \cite{HL} to the affine case. We then provide a reduction method that relates the structure of $X_{w}(b)$ for arbitrary elements $w$ in the extended affine Weyl group to those associated with minimal length elements. Based on this reduction, we establish a connection between the dimension of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties and the degree of the class polynomial of affine Hecke algebras. As a consequence, we prove a conjecture of G\"ortz, Haines, Kottwitz and Reuman in \cite{GHKR}.