We realize the moduli spaces of cubic fourfolds with specified group actions as arithmetic quotients of complex hyperbolic balls or type IV symmetric domains, and study their compactifications. We prove the geometric (GIT) compactifications are naturally isomorphic to the Hodge theoretic (Looijenga, in many cases Baily–Borel) compactifications. The key ingredients of the proof are the global Torelli theorem by Voisin, the characterization of the image of the period map given by Looijenga and Laza independently, and the functoriality of Looijenga compactifications proved in the Appendix.

For ordinary flops, the correspondence defined by the graph closure is shown to give equivalence of Chow motives and to preserve the Poincaré pairing. In the case of simple ordinary flops, this correspondence preserves the big quantum cohomology ring after an analytic continuation over the extended Kähler moduli space. For Mukai flops, it is shown that the birational map for the local models is deformation equivalent to isomorphisms. This implies that the birational map induces isomorphisms on the full quantum rings and all the quantum corrections attached to the extremal ray vanish.

We establish a generic vanishing theorem for surfaces in characteristic p that lift to p and use it for classification of surfaces of general type with Euler characteristic p and large Albanese dimension.

The main goal of this paper is to introduce a set of conjectures on the relations in the tautological rings. In particular, the framework gives an efficient algorithm to calculate all tautological equations using only finite dimensional linear algebra. Other applications are also indicated.

We give an effective algorithm to compute the Euler characteristics χ(\mbar_{1,n}, \otimes_{i=1}^n L_i^{d_i}). In addition, we give a simple proof of Pandharipande's vanishing theorem H^j (\mbar_{0,n}, \otimes_{i=1}^n L_i^{d_i})=0 for j≥1,di≥0.