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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Impact of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain: a representative interrupted time-series study 2022-2026

Authors:
Tattan-Birch↗Jackson↗S. E↗Buss↗V. H↗Cox↗Shahab↗Kock↗Bauld↗Brown↗

Objective: To examine changes in vaping and smoking trends following the announcement and implementation of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain. Design: Interrupted time-series analysis of representative monthly cross-sectional data from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 118,946 adults ([≥]16y), including 12,042 young adults (16-24y), surveyed between Jan-2022 and Feb-2026. Main outcome measures: Changes in trends in disposable vape use among vapers, and current vaping and smoking prevalence, using seasonally-adjusted generalised additive models with comparisons against a no-ban counterfactual in which pre-announcement trends continued unchanged. Results: The proportion of vapers mainly using disposable devices began to decline following the announcement of the ban in Jan-2024, with the fall accelerating after implementation in June-2025. By Feb-2026, 5.6% (95%CI 4.6-6.9) of adult vapers and 7.1% (5.1-10.1) of young adult vapers mainly used disposables, compared with 62.0% (53.6-71.8) and 63.6% (52.7-76.7), respectively, under a no-ban counterfactual. Increases in vaping prevalence slowed post-announcement and plateaued post-implementation; by Feb-2026, prevalence was lower than the no-ban counterfactual in adults (13.6% v 18.8%; difference -5.2 percentage points, 95%CI -7.1 to -3.3) and young adults (27.8% v 39.1%; -11.3, -18.6 to -4.1). Declines in smoking prevalence stalled among adults and reversed among young adults post-announcement, before shifting downward again post-implementation; by Feb-2026, smoking prevalence was similar to the no-ban counterfactual in adults (difference +0.9 percentage points, -0.5 to +2.2) but possibly higher in young adults (+3.3, -0.5 to +7.1). Conclusions: The disposable vape ban in Great Britain was associated with substantial changes after both announcement and implementation, including a marked reduction in disposable vape use and a slowing then plateauing of growth in overall vaping prevalence. However, declines in smoking also temporarily slowed–and among young adults, reversed–after the announcement, before downward trends resumed after implementation.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models

Authors:
Wancong Zhang↗Basile Terver↗Artem Zholus↗Soham Chitnis↗Harsh Sutaria↗Mido Assran↗Randall Balestriero↗Amir Bar↗Adrien Bardes↗Yann LeCun↗Nicolas Ballas↗

arXiv:2604.03208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models are a promising path to zero-shot embodied control through planning. However, existing world model planners struggle on long-horizon, multi-stage tasks: prediction errors compound and naive search is exponential in the planning horizon. Hierarchy mitigates both by decomposing tasks into shorter, tractable subproblems; yet prior hierarchical approaches either amortize control into task-specific policies (hierarchical RL) or assume low-dimensional states and known dynamics (classical hierarchical MPC). We present Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models (HWM), an architecture and planning paradigm for hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) directly on visual world models trained solely via next-latent prediction. HWM learns world models at multiple temporal scales within a shared latent space, so predictions from the long-horizon model serve as subgoals for the short-horizon model via latent matching, without task-specific rewards, skill learning, or hierarchical policies. To keep long-horizon search tractable, HWM learns an action encoder that compresses primitive action chunks into latent macro-actions. On real-world Franka manipulation, HWM solves pick-and-place from a single goal image at 70% success vs. 0% for single-level planning. Across simulated push manipulation and maze navigation, HWM consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks while requiring up to 3x less planning compute.

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04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limit of additive functionals for reversible non-gradient exclusion process: critical cases

Authors:
Chenlin Gu↗Linzhi Yang↗Linjie Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.13442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For the reversible speed-change exclusion process $(\eta_t)_{t \geq 0}$ in $\mathbb{Z}^d$, we study the scaling limit of additive functionals ${\Gamma_t(f) = \int_0^t f(\eta_s)\, \mathrm{d} s}$. Concerning the local centered function $f$, the previous work [Commun. Math. Phys. 104, 1-19, 1986] by Kipnis and Varadhan and [Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 66: 649-677, 2013] by Gon{ç}alves and Jara respectively covered the cases $d \geq 3$ and $d=1$. The present paper completes the missing part $d=2$, and also develops the theory for functions with higher degree. The novelty is a quantitative homogenization of the resolvent, which allows to overcome the obstacle of correlation function in non-gradient models.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Bounded Context Management for Tabular Foundation Models on Stream Learning

Authors:
Jinmo Lee↗Doyun Choi↗Moongi Choi↗Jaemin Yoo↗

arXiv:2606.18677v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular stream learning requires predictions on sequentially arriving examples under distribution shift. While standard methods adapt by updating model states, tabular foundation models (TFMs) make predictions conditioned on a labeled context in an in-context manner, making them a natural alternative for stream learning. This shifts the challenge from how to update the model to how to manage the context. We propose a future information view that yields three practical requirements for context management: preserve recent examples, retain uncertain examples, and remove redundant examples. We instantiate these requirements as CURE (Context management via Uncertainty-aware admission and Redundancy aware Eviction), a context-managing policy with entropy-gated admission and redundancy-aware eviction. Across seven streams, CURE shows up to 27.0% relative improvement over classical stream learners, remains robust across multiple TFM backbones, and ranks first among other policy variants. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/morcellinus/CURE-ICML-FMSD.

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06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

When Iterative RAG Beats Ideal Evidence: A Diagnostic Study in Scientific Multi-hop Question Answering

Authors:
Mahdi Astaraki↗Mohammad Arshi Saloot↗Ali Shiraee Kasmaee↗Hamidreza Mahyar↗Soheila Samiee↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) beyond parametric knowledge, yet it is unclear when iterative retrieval-reasoning loops meaningfully outperform static RAG, particularly in scientific domains with multi-hop reasoning, sparse domain knowledge, and heterogeneous evidence. We provide the first controlled, mechanism-level diagnostic study of whether synchronized iterative retrieval and reasoning can surpass an idealized static upper bound (Gold Context) RAG. We benchmark eleven state-of-the-art LLMs under three regimes: (i) No Context, measuring reliance on parametric memory; (ii) Gold Context, where all oracle evidence is supplied at once; and (iii) Iterative RAG, a training-free controller that alternates retrieval, hypothesis refinement, and evidence-aware stopping. Using the chemistry-focused ChemKGMultiHopQA dataset, we isolate questions requiring genuine retrieval and analyze behavior with diagnostics spanning retrieval coverage gaps, anchor-carry drop, query quality, composition fidelity, and control calibration. Across models, Iterative RAG consistently outperforms Gold Context, with gains up to 25.6 percentage points, especially for non-reasoning fine-tuned models. Staged retrieval reduces late-hop failures, mitigates context overload, and enables dynamic correction of early hypothesis drift, but remaining failure modes include incomplete hop coverage, distractor latch trajectories, early stopping miscalibration, and high composition failure rates even with perfect retrieval. Overall, staged retrieval is often more influential than the mere presence of ideal evidence; we provide practical guidance for deploying and diagnosing RAG systems in specialized scientific settings and a foundation for more reliable, controllable iterative retrieval-reasoning frameworks.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

Authors:
Dong Hyun Jeong↗Feng Chen↗Jin-Hee Cho↗Lance M. Kaplan↗Audun J{\o}sang↗Soo-Yeon Ji↗

arXiv:2606.15767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Controlled ion-ion interactions and cavity-enhanced emission of a coherent dinuclear Eu$^{3+}$ complex

Authors:
Evgenij Vasilenko↗Vishnu Unni Chorakkunnath↗Barbora Brachnakova↗Nicholas Lester Jobbitt↗Senthil Kumar Kuppusamy↗David Hunger↗Mario Ruben↗

arXiv:2606.11947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular rare-earth-ion complexes offer unique opportunities for quantum technologies by combining the intrinsic coherence properties of rare-earth ions with chemically tunable molecular environments. A crucial capability is the realization of multi-qubit architectures with defined qubit couplings to enable two-qubit quantum gates. Here, we investigate the optical coherence properties and excitation-induced interactions of two Eu$^{3+}$-based molecular complexes, comparing a mononuclear reference system with a dinuclear analogue in which two Eu$^{3+}$ ions are positioned at a well-defined intramolecular distance of about 7 Angstrom. Using cryogenic ensemble spectroscopy, including spectral hole burning, free-induction decay, and photon echo measurements at temperatures down to 100 mK, we demonstrate long optical coherence times $T_{2,o}$ of up to 9 $\mu$s. As a key step toward scalable multi-qubit architectures, a control-target sequence was implemented to probe conditional ion-ion interactions, revealing a stronger interaction-induced dephasing in the dinuclear complex. Finally, we show the integration of the dinuclear complex into a fiber-based optical microcavity, and observe an 380-fold emission enhancement of the $\mathrm{}^5\mathrm{D}_0\rightarrow\mathrm{}^7\mathrm{F}_0$ transition. Together, these results position molecular rare-earth complexes as versatile and chemically tunable building blocks for scalable quantum technologies.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

Authors:
Abhinit Sen↗Ajeet Kumar↗Manaranjan Pradhan↗

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Fine-Grained Image Tasks: From Evaluation to Diagnosis

Authors:
Hong-Tao Yu↗Chen-Wei Xie↗Yuxin Peng↗Serge Belongie↗Xiu-Shen Wei↗

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. While numerous benchmarks have evaluated LVLMs from holistic or task-specific perspectives, their capabilities on fine-grained image tasks-fundamental to computer vision-remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we introduce FG-BMK, a comprehensive fine-grained evaluation benchmark containing 1.01 million questions and 0.28 million images, covering diverse scenarios from common object-centric domains to specialized domains. FG-BMK jointly evaluates dialogue-level fine-grained semantic recognition and feature-level visual discriminability through human-oriented and machine-oriented paradigms, enabling diagnostic analysis of whether LVLM failures arise from insufficient visual representations, weak visual-to-semantic grounding, or limited fine-grained knowledge. Through extensive experiments on a diverse set of representative LVLMs/VLMs, we find that current LVLMs remain inadequate fine-grained recognizers, with failures arising from intertwined bottlenecks in visual representations, semantic grounding, modality alignment, and category-level knowledge. We further analyze training design factors for improving fine-grained capabilities and examine how visual and linguistic perturbations affect LVLM predictions. These findings provide diagnostic insights into the limitations of current LVLMs and offer guidance for future data construction and model design in developing more reliable LVLMs for fine-grained visual tasks. Our code is open-source and available at https://fg-bmk.github.io/.

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11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

Authors:
Nader Karimi↗Foad Shokrollahi↗

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

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12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

Authors:
Sauter↗

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [≥]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Non-Hermitian Delocalization Realizes Random Dirac Criticality in One Dimension

Authors:
Bo Li↗Shen Zhang↗Ren Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.12089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems can evade Anderson localization and exhibit delocalized states even in one dimension. Here, we show that such non-Hermitian delocalized states under periodic boundary conditions (PBC) are intrinsically critical, realizing the universality class of one-dimensional random Dirac fermions. By linking spectral winding to topological Anderson transitions via Hermitization, we demonstrate that the delocalized PBC states exhibit a Dirac-type criticality with universal algebraic correlations. In contrast to Hermitian systems, where this criticality occurs only at fine-tuned transition points, it emerges generically in non-Hermitian systems as a consequence of spectral topology. These results identify a universal mechanism by which non-Hermiticity promotes criticality, providing a unified description of non-Hermitian delocalization in one dimension.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Robust $Q$-learning for mean-field control under Wasserstein uncertainty in common noise

Authors:
Mathieu Lauri\`ere↗Ariel Neufeld↗Kyunghyun Park↗

arXiv:2606.20356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this article, we present a robust $Q$-learning algorithm for discrete-time mean-field control problems under Wasserstein uncertainty in the common noise law. The algorithm combines a quantization-and-projection scheme with a Wasserstein dual reformulation on the common-noise space. We establish its convergence together with finite-time iteration bounds for both synchronous and asynchronous learning schemes. Numerical experiments on systemic risk and epidemic models compare the asynchronous implementation with an idealized Bellman iteration, illustrate the robustness-performance tradeoff under common-noise misspecification, and report the observed convergence behavior of the asynchronous $Q$-learning algorithm.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Conservation Law for Equilibrium Propagation and Coupled Learning

Authors:
Joshua A. McGinnis↗Adam G. Kline↗Yoichiro Mori↗

arXiv:2606.15444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we show that the physical learning methods known as coupled learning (CL) and equilibrium propagation (EP) conserve a mass-like quantity in the trainable parameters in the continuous-time, small-nudging limit. We prove that this conservation holds in a broad range of physically relevant settings. We then show that the conservation law constrains the training dynamics in a way that makes convergence reliable in important settings for linear circuits. We conclude by discussing some practical implications of this conservation law.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

Authors:
Chuyang Chen↗Zhiqiang Lin↗

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

AudioX-Turbo: A Unified Framework for Efficient Anything-to-Audio Generation

Authors:
Zeyue Tian↗Lei Ke↗Zhaoyang Liu↗Ruibin Yuan↗Liumeng Xue↗Yujiu Yang↗Weijia Chen↗Xu Tan↗Qifeng Chen↗Wei Xue↗Yike Guo↗

Audio and music generation based on flexible multimodal control signals is a widely applicable topic, with the following key challenges: 1) a unified multimodal modeling framework, 2) large-scale, high-quality training data, and 3) the prohibitive inference cost of multi-step diffusion sampling. As such, we propose AudioX-Turbo, a unified and efficient framework for anything-to-audio generation that integrates varied multimodal conditions (i.e., text, video, and audio signals) in this work. AudioX-Turbo follows a teacher-student paradigm. The teacher AudioX-Base is built on a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer with a Multimodal Adaptive Fusion module that aligns diverse multimodal inputs for high-fidelity synthesis, and is then distilled into the few-step student AudioX-Turbo via Distribution Matching Distillation adapted to flow matching, complemented by a diffusion-based discriminator for high-quality few-step generation. To support the training of AudioX-Turbo, we construct a large-scale, high-quality dataset, IF-caps-Pro, comprising approximately 9.2M samples curated through a two-stage data collection and annotation pipeline. We benchmark AudioX-Turbo across a wide range of tasks, finding that our model achieves superior performance, especially on text-to-audio and text-to-music generation, while operating at only 4 sampling steps and requiring approximately 25x fewer function evaluations (NFE) than multi-step baselines. These results demonstrate that our method is capable of audio generation under flexible multimodal control, showing efficient and powerful instruction-following capabilities. The code and datasets will be available at https://zeyuet.github.io/AudioX-Turbo/.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Estimating the effectiveness of syndromic screening at airports for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease

Authors:
Quilty↗B. J↗

We used a stochastic simulation model to estimate the effectiveness of combined exit and entry airport screening for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease (BVD), using natural-history parameters from a Bayesian re-analysis of the 2012 Isiro outbreak. For a 12-hour international flight from DRC or Uganda at 86% screening sensitivity, we estimate 65% of infected travellers would arrive undetected (95% CrI: 38 - 76%). The main driver of this outcome is the relative duration of the the incubation period (approximately 7.7 days) and the onset-to-severe-disease interval (approximately 4 days): most infected travellers board before symptom onset and are undetectable by any syndromic screen, whilst those who are symptomatic progress rapidly to illness severe enough to preclude travel. This is compounded during active epidemic growth, when recently exposed (and therefore pre-symptomatic) cases are overrepresented among travellers. Syndromic airport screening offers limited protection against BVD spread via air travel, and should be complemented by outbreak control at source and strengthened clinical surveillance in receiving countries with high travel connectivity to affected areas.

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19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for Antibody Sequence-Structure Design

Authors:
Liu↗Zhang↗Yan↗

Antibodies specifically recognize antigens and play a central role in therapeutic discovery. Designing antibodies for a given antigen remains challenging because antigen-antibody complex data are limited, whereas the sequence and conformational spaces of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) are large. Retrieved CDR templates from databases or candidate libraries can narrow the design space and improve controllability, but retrieval for novel antigens is often sparse and imperfect; treating retrieved templates as hard conditions can bias the denoising process and cause negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for antibody sequence-structure design (NT-ABDiff), a joint diffusion framework that treats candidate CDR-only templates as optional and potentially unreliable conditions. NT-ABDiff uses reliability-aware template modulation to estimate the context-conditioned usefulness of each candidate and to adaptively reweight and fuse multiple templates during conditioning. We further train the model with mixed-quality and corrupted templates as conditional perturbation regularization, encouraging the denoiser to exploit informative templates while remaining stable when templates are uninformative. Experiments under controlled template shifts and a train-set retrieval evaluation show that NT-ABDiff improves CDR-H3 sequence recovery and structural accuracy over strong baselines, while retaining robustness to missing, mismatched, and corrupted templates. Under a stringent random-template CDR-H3 evaluation, NT-ABDiff improves amino-acid recovery (AAR) from 30.03% to 39.47% and reduces RMSD from 3.160 to 2.915A; with train-set retrieval candidates, it achieves 39.50% AAR and 2.76 {ring} A RMSD. Code, processed splits, {ring} configuration files, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ShiDeng7rz/NT-ABDiff.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction

Authors:
Xu Zhang↗Ruijie Quan↗Wenguan Wang↗Yi Yang↗

Reconstructing visual stimuli from fMRI signals is a central challenge bridging machine learning and neuroscience. Recent diffusion-based methods typically map fMRI activity to a single neural embedding, using it as static guidance throughout the entire generation process. However, this fixed guidance collapses hierarchical neural information and is misaligned with the stage-dependent demands of image reconstruction. In response, we propose MindHier, a coarse-to-fine fMRI-to-image reconstruction framework built on scale-wise autoregressive modeling. MindHier introduces three components: a Hierarchical fMRI Encoder to extract multi-level neural embeddings, a Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Alignment scheme to enforce layer-wise correspondence with CLIP features, and a Scale-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Neural Guidance strategy to inject these embeddings into autoregression at matching scales. These designs make MindHier an efficient and cognitively aligned alternative to diffusion-based methods by enabling a hierarchical reconstruction process that synthesizes global semantics before refining local details, akin to human visual perception. Extensive experiments on the NSD dataset show that MindHier achieves superior semantic fidelity, 4.67$\times$ faster inference, and more deterministic results than the diffusion-based baselines.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Some Complexity Results for Robustness Verification for Binarized Neural Networks

Authors:
Harshit Goyal↗Sudakshina Dutta↗

arXiv:2606.18918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies the computational complexity of verification problems for Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), where activations (and sometimes weights) are binary. We analyze two problems: satisfiability and robustness under uniform image occlusion. We show that BNN satisfiability is NP-complete via a reduction from Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), and that uniform occlusion induces a piecewise-constant structure in the network output, enabling a polynomial-time robustness-checking algorithm.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

Authors:
Mengxi Liu↗Sizhen Bian↗Vitor Fortes↗Francisco Calatrava Nicolas↗Daniel Gei{\ss}ler↗Maximilian Kiefer-Emmanouilidis↗Bo Zhou↗Paul Lukowicz↗

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CRAG: Can 3D Generative Models Help 3D Assembly?

Authors:
Zeyu Jiang↗Sihang Li↗Siqi Tan↗Chenyang Xu↗Juexiao Zhang↗Julia Galway-Witham↗Xue Wang↗Scott A. Williams↗Radu Iovita↗Chen Feng↗Jing Zhang↗

Most existing 3D assembly methods treat the problem as pure pose estimation, rearranging observed parts via rigid transformations. In contrast, human assembly naturally couples structural reasoning with holistic shape inference. Inspired by this intuition, we reformulate 3D assembly as a joint problem of assembly and generation. We show that these two processes are mutually reinforcing: assembly provides part-level structural priors for generation, while generation injects holistic shape context that resolves ambiguities in assembly. Unlike prior methods that cannot synthesize missing geometry, we propose CRAG, which simultaneously generates plausible complete shapes and predicts poses for input parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across in-the-wild objects with diverse geometries, varying part counts, and missing pieces. Project Page: https://ai4ce.github.io/CRAG/

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

FUSER: Feed-Forward MUltiview 3D Registration Transformer and SE(3)$^N$ Diffusion Refinement

Authors:
Haobo Jiang↗Jin Xie↗Jian Yang↗Liang Yu↗Jianmin Zheng↗

Registration of multiview point clouds conventionally relies on extensive pairwise matching to build a pose graph for global synchronization, which is computationally expensive and inherently ill-posed without holistic geometric constraints. This paper proposes FUSER, the first feed-forward multiview registration transformer that jointly processes all scans in a unified, compact latent space to directly predict global poses without any pairwise estimation. To maintain tractability, FUSER encodes each scan into low-resolution superpoint features via a sparse 3D CNN that preserves absolute translation cues, and performs efficient intra- and inter-scan reasoning through a Geometric Alternating Attention module. Particularly, we transfer 2D attention priors from off-the-shelf foundation models to enhance 3D feature interaction and geometric consistency. Building upon FUSER, we further introduce FUSER-DF, an SE(3)$^N$ diffusion refinement framework to correct FUSER's estimates via denoising in the joint SE(3)$^N$ space. FUSER acts as a surrogate multiview registration model to construct the denoiser, and a prior-conditioned SE(3)$^N$ variational lower bound is derived for denoising supervision. Extensive experiments on 3DMatch, ScanNet and ArkitScenes demonstrate that our approach achieves the superior registration accuracy and outstanding computational efficiency.

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