The study of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties originally arose from arithmetic geometry, but many problems on affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties are purely Lie-theoretic in nature. This survey deals with recent progress on several important problems on affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties. The emphasis is on the Lie-theoretic aspect, while some connections and applications to arithmetic geometry will also be mentioned.

In this article we study a conjecture of Geiss-Leclerc-Schröer, which is an analogue of a classical conjecture of Lusztig in the Weyl group case. It concerns the relation between canonical basis and semi-canonical basis through the characteristic cycles. We formulate an approach to this conjecture and prove it for type quiver. In the general type A case, we reduce the conjecture to show that certain nearby cycles have vanishing Euler characteristic.

We study large groups of birational transformations Bir(X), where X is a variety of dimension at least 3, defined over C or a subfield of C. Two prominent cases are when X is the projective space P^n, in which case Bir(X) is the Cremona group of rank n, or when X⊂P^{n+1} is a smooth cubic hypersurface. In both cases, and more generally when X is birational to a conic bundle, we produce infinitely many distinct group homomorphisms from Bir(X) to Z/2, showing in particular that the group Bir(X) is not perfect, and thus not simple. As a consequence, we also obtain that the Cremona group of rank n⩾3 is not generated by linear and Jonquières elements.

We construct a smooth algebraic stack of tuples consisting of genus two nodal curves, line bundles, and twisted fields. It leads to a desingularization of the moduli of genus two stable maps to projective spaces. The construction is based on systematical application of the theory of stacks with twisted fields (STF), which has its prototype appeared in arXiv:1906.10527 and arXiv:1201.2427 and is fully developed in this article. The results of this article are the second step of a series of works toward the resolutions of the moduli of stable maps of higher genera.

In this paper, we give a simple proof of Mirzakhanis recursion formula of Weil-Petersson volumes of moduli spaces of curves using the Witten-Kontsevich theorem. We also briefly describe a very general recursive phenomenon in the intersection theory of moduli spaces of curves. In particular, we present several new recursion formulas for higher degree classes.