In this paper we describe a machinery for homological calculations of representations of FI_G, and use it to develop a local cohomology theory over any commutative Noetherian ring. As an application, we show that the depth introduced by the second author coincides with a more classical invariant from commutative algebra, and obtain upper bounds of a few important invariants of FI_G-modules in terms of torsion degrees of their local cohomology groups.

We introduce and study mutation of torsion pairs, as a generalization of mutation of cluster tilting objects, rigid objects and maximal rigid objects. It is proved that any mutation of a torsion pair is again a torsion pair. A geometric realization of mutation of torsion pairs in the cluster category of type A_n or A_\infty is given via rotation of Ptolemy diagrams.

The notion of central stability was first formulated for sequences of representations of the symmetric groups by Putman. A categorical reformulation was subsequently given by Church, Ellenberg, Farb, and Nagpal using the notion of FI-modules, where FI is the category of finite sets and injective maps. We extend the notion of central stability from FI to a wide class of categories, and prove that a module is presented in finite degrees if and only if it is centrally stable. We also introduce the notion of d-step central stability, and prove that if the ideal of relations of a category is generated in degrees at most d, then every module presented in finite degrees is d-step centrally stable.

Let k be a commutative Noetherian ring and C−− be a locally finite k-linear category equipped with a self-embedding functor of degree 1. We show under a moderate condition that finitely generated torsion representations of C−− are super finitely presented (that is, they have projective resolutions each term of which is finitely generated). In the situation that these self-embedding functors are genetic functors, we give upper bounds for homological degrees of finitely generated torsion modules. These results apply to quite a few categories recently appearing in representation stability theory. In particular, when k is a field of characteristic 0, we obtain another upper bound for homological degrees of finitely generated FI-modules.

We develop a local cohomology theory for FI^m-modules, and show that it in many ways mimics the classical theory for multi-graded modules over a polynomial ring. In particular, we define an invariant of FI^m-modules using this local cohomology theory which closely resembles an invariant of multi-graded modules over Cox rings defined by Maclagan and Smith. It is then shown that this invariant behaves almost identically to the invariant of Maclagan and Smith.