The main goal of this paper is to prove the following two conjectures for genus up to two: 1. Witten's conjecture on the relations between higher spin curves and Gelfand--Dickey hierarchy. 2. Virasoro conjecture for target manifolds with conformal semisimple Frobenius manifolds. The main technique used in the proof is the invariance of tautological equations under loop group action.

We verify the Invariance Conjectures of tautological equations in genus two. In particular, a uniform derivation of all known genus two equations is given.

A new tautological equation of $\bar{M}_{3,1}$ in codimension 3 is derived and proved, using the invariance condition explained in earlier works.

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 prove that all monomials of κ-classes and ψ-classes are independent in $R^k(\ocM_{g,n})/R^k(\partial\ocM_{g,n})$ for all k≤[g/3]. We also give a simple argument for κ_l≠0 in $R^l(\ocM_g)$ for l≤g−2.