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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

HairPort: In-context 3D-aware Hair Import and Transfer for Images

Transferring hairstyles between images is an important but challenging task in computer graphics, computer vision, and visual effects. It enables users to explore new looks without physically altering their hair, with applications in virtual try-on systems, augmented reality, and entertainment. Most prior works operate best under small pose gaps, and they fall short under large viewpoint and scale differences, where missing hair content must be synthesized rather than transferred. We propose HairPort, a 3D-aware hairstyle transfer framework that attempts to solve these issues by explicitly separating hair removal from transfer and enforcing geometric consistency before synthesis. We introduce a Bald Converter, which produces realistic bald versions of faces through LoRA-based in-context adaptation of FLUX.1 Kontext. To train our Bald Converter, we introduce a new dataset, Baldy, containing 6,000 paired bald and original images across diverse identities and conditions. We also use a 3D-Aware Transfer Pipeline that reconstructs and re-renders the reference hairstyle from the target viewpoint before compositing it onto the source image. Being 3D aware, our method supports large pose and scale discrepancies between the source and target. Finally, a conditional flow-matching generator synthesizes the transferred result from the bald source and geometry-aligned reference guidance. Together, our method enables accurate, pose-consistent, and identity-preserving hairstyle transfer, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Arbitrarily Configurable Wavefunctions via Imaginary Gauge Phase Imprint in Non-Hermitian Lattices

arXiv:2603.28153v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a general framework, termed the imaginary gauge phase imprint (IGPI), which enables engineering arbitrarily configurable wavefunctions with exact solutions and self-organization dynamics in any-dimensional non-Hermitian lattices under imaginary gauge fields. Using this method, we uncover a novel phase with exact critical wavefunctions, dubbed the skin critical phase (SCP), which is marked by unconventional localization, topological-skin, and dynamical characteristics. Furthermore, we validate the IGPI by imprinting and visualizing complex fractal states with Sierpinski-carpet and Koch-snowflake profiles, as well as exotic super-moire and 3D-moire states in regular lattices. Our work not only offers fresh insights into non-Hermitian critical and fractal physics, but also provides a rigorous paradigm for controlling and visualizing wavefunction patterns using the IGPI in engineered non-Hermitian systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Landsat-Sentinel-2 Algal Bloom Mapping Using Vision Transformers: Model Description, Implementation, and Examples

Coastal algal bloom monitoring requires frequent, spatially detailed, and globally consistent observations, provided by Landsat-8/9 and Sentinel-2 A/B/C. Together, these missions offer over a decade of medium-resolution multispectral imagery with near-global coverage every 2-3 days, enabling the detection of fragmented bloom structures not resolvable by coarse ocean-color sensors. However, their use in aquatic environments remains challenging due to limited spectral coverage and a lack of harmonized reflectance products. As an alternative to traditional bio-optical methods, deep learning-based image classification offers a data-driven approach that can overcome many of these limitations. This study presents the first successful implementation of vision transformer-based coastal algal bloom mapping using 30-m Landsat-Sentinel-2 images. A globally distributed bloom patch dataset was generated across bloom-prone coastal hotspots worldwide. Four transformer-based architectures were compared against a standard convolutional baseline for fine-scale bloom detection, and assessed under different optical water types and atmospheric and surface conditions. All deep learning models showed strong capabilities in detecting floating bloom areas, with omission and commission errors of 8-65%. Under cloud and glint stress in a time series, the Swin Transformer outperformed traditional spectral-index approaches, which produced widespread false positives, effectively avoiding cloud- and glint-affected pixels. Comparisons with MODIS-derived products further highlighted the benefits of higher spatial resolution in detecting fragmented and irregularly affected blooms. Our findings support deep learning as a reliable tool for medium-resolution, consistent monitoring of floating algal blooms in dynamic coastal environments.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TurboGS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Error-Guided Sparse Pixel Sampling and Optimization

Consumer-level applications require fast optimization of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with high-fidelity novel view rendering. However, existing 3DGS acceleration approaches still incur substantial computation on redundant pixels while sacrificing fine details. In this paper, we present TurboGS, an error-guided training framework that accelerates 3DGS by concentrating optimization on perceptually informative pixels. TurboGS is built upon four core components: (1) a tile-wise sparse pixel sampling, which, driven by multi-view reconstruction errors during training, prioritizes challenging regions and skips well-reconstructed ones to avoid redundant gradient computation; (2) a tile-wise structure-aware loss with sparse Normalized Cross-Correlation, which provides sparse yet effective supervision to preserve fine details and stabilize training; (3) an error-driven Gaussian density control strategy, which dynamically allocates model capacity and removes redundant primitives; and (4) a tailored hybrid optimizer that couples Hessian-informed updates with Adam moment damping to stabilize and improve convergence under sparse supervision. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that TurboGS can deliver on par or superior rendering quality within 100 seconds on a single RTX 5090 GPU card (up to 10x training speedup over vanilla 3DGS).

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

How Controlling the Variance can Improve Training Stability of Sparsely Activated DNNs and CNNs

arXiv:2602.05779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge-of-Chaos (EoC) theory developed for the random initialization of deep networks allows more efficient training by both preserving information in the initial outputs of the network and minimising exploding or vanishing gradients through characterisation of the intermediate layers as Gaussian processes. This EoC theory provides formulae for the choice of the initialisation distribution variances of the weights and biases. For activations which are approximately linear around the origin, the EoC theory typically encourages the Gaussian process variance to converge towards zero with increasing depth. Here we consider the less studied setting of highly sparsity inducing activations where a large region of values near the origin are set to zero. In this setting we prove a new phenomenon whereby initialisations leading to larger fixed Gaussian processes are beneficial to training stability. This theory informs a new, yet simple, initialisation strategy that allows training DNNs and CNNs with as large as 90\% sparsity in the hidden layers.

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

MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instruction

Motion forecasting is central to visual intelligence: agents must anticipate how objects will move in order to plan actions, reason about physical interactions, and synthesize realistic futures. We argue that 3D points in world coordinates provide a general representation that is class-agnostic, view-stable, compact, and directly useful for downstream tasks. We formalize the task of goal-conditioned 3D point motion forecasting: given a short visual history, a set of 3D query points on an object of interest, and a language description of the intended goal, the model predicts the future 3D trajectory of each point. We introduce a full stack to study this task at scale: (1) MolmoMotion-1M is a large corpus of action-described, object-grounded 3D point trajectories annotated from 1.16M unconstrained videos; (2) PointMotionBench is a human-verified benchmark spanning 111 object categories and 61 motion types; and (3) MolmoMotion is a general motion forecasting model that supports both autoregressive coordinate prediction and flow-matching-based trajectory generation. MolmoMotion accurately predicts diverse motion patterns with different language instructions, and significantly outperforms existing motion prediction baselines on PointMotionBench. Finally, we show that the learned 3D motion prior transfers well to downstream applications: it improves training efficiency and generalization for robot manipulation, and its predicted trajectories provide effective motion guidance for generative models to synthesize videos with more realistic object motion.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ELVA: Exploring Ranking-Driven Universal Multimodal Retrieval

arXiv:2606.20280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR). However, previous works have ignored the grain blindness when adapting the contrastive paradigm into retrieval tasks. Grain blindness refers to the tendency of the model to overlook grain-level information contained in the query, which is crucial for effectively handling complex queries. This stems from contrastive learning treating samples as a binary classification (positive/negative), while ignoring the different information carried by each negative sample. To address this, we argue that negatives should be treated differently according to their similarity to the positive sample, enabling the model to learn distinct grain information from each negative. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective framework, called ELVA, a novel rule-based RL framework that mitigates grain blindness through ranking-driven MLLMs. 1) Instead of relying on reward models, we extend Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to retrieval tasks, allowing the model to explore new ranking behaviors without explicit ranking labels. 2) By utilizing rule-based rewards, our approach jointly optimizes the ranking of negative samples while enlarging the similarity gap between positive and negative. To more precisely measure grain blindness, we further introduce MRBench, a new benchmark specifically designed for multi-grain query scenarios. ELVA achieves state-of-the-art results across standard retrieval benchmarks, and its notable 13.1% improvement on MRBench further demonstrates its effectiveness in alleviating grain blindness.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Robust Local Polynomial Regression with Similarity Kernels

Authors:

arXiv:2501.10729v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local Polynomial Regression (LPR) is a widely used nonparametric method for modeling complex relationships due to its flexibility and simplicity. It estimates a regression function by fitting low-degree polynomials to localized subsets of the data, weighted by proximity. However, traditional LPR is sensitive to outliers and high-leverage points, which can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper revisits the kernel function used to compute regression weights and proposes a novel framework that incorporates both predictor and response variables in the weighting mechanism. The focus of this work is a conditional density kernel that robustly estimates weights by mitigating the influence of outliers through localized density estimation. The proposed method is implemented in Python and is publicly available at https://github.com/yaniv-shulman/rsklpr. The population analysis quantifies the bias induced by density-based robust weighting, and the reported experiments show lower empirical bias than iterative robust LOWESS while remaining competitive with standard LOWESS. This advancement provides a promising extension to traditional LPR, opening new possibilities for robust regression applications.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Low-Cost Neuromorphic Fall Detection Using Synthetic Event Data and Hybrid SNNs

This work presents the development of hybrid models that integrate spiking neural networks (SNNs) with components of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn from simulated event-based camera data (Dynamic Vision Sensor, DVS) generated from conventional smartphone videos. Aimed primarily at human fall detection, the approach leverages the energy efficiency and spatio-temporal processing capabilities of SNNs by converting video frames into event-based data. The proposed models are evaluated through simulations on multiple datasets, comparing their performance to that of traditional machine learning models. Results demonstrate significant gains in efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, underscoring the potential of combining SNNs and DVS technology for complex tasks in real-world environments.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe must seize the moment to lead on free and open science

Authors: Unknown Author

An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent. An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal Toffoli-Depth Multi-Controlled Toffoli Decomposition in 2D Qubit Layout

arXiv:2606.15113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a key primitive in quantum arithmetic, oracle construction, and quantum cryptanalysis. Although recent work has established optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions under all-to-all qubit connectivity, their realization on near-term quantum hardware with restricted qubit connectivity remains largely unexplored. While general-purpose quantum mappers can route arbitrary circuits, they do not explicitly exploit the repeated interaction patterns inherent in MCT decompositions. In our present paper, we study architecture-aware mappings of optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions onto restricted two-dimensional qubit layouts. We begin with a structured geometric placements that preserve the parallelism of state-of-the-art Toffoli and MCT decompositions with no additional depth overhead. We further introduce a motif-based packing framework in which decomposition layers are represented by interaction motifs derived from basic Toffoli gates. By embedding these motifs vertex-disjointly into hardware graphs, we characterize the minimum-size topologies supporting the required qubit resources and derive explicit bounds on the resulting depth overhead under tight qubit budgets. Finally, we compare these bounds with routing-aware placement heuristics and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of embedding different motifs across a range of hardware topologies.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Martingale Solutions to a Stochastic Keller-Segel System with nonlocal Source and Super-linear Noise

arXiv:2606.11774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global nonnegative martingale solutions are shown to exist for a stochastic Keller-Segel system with a nonlocal Fisher-KPP source and super-linear multiplicative noise. The result is obtained for nonnegative initial data with no smallness assumption, provided that the nonlocal source term is dominant. The main difficulty stems from the absence of a coercive structure and the super-linear nature of the noise. An additional cut-off with finite L^2 norm in the classical Galerkin method is added to establish a well-posed approximation problem. Moreover, due to the nonlocal Fisher-KPP structure, it is necessary to prove the positivity of the approximating solution in order to obtain uniform estimates. In the compactness arguments, the usual tightness argument in the framework of Hilbert spaces cannot be directly applied to the uniform estimates obtained in this paper. As a result, we develop a more general version of the compactness argument and tightness criterion, presented in the appendix, which will be applied throughout the paper. This allows for the global existence of nonnegative martingale solutions to be derived from Jakubowski's version of the Skorokhod Theorem, along with a thorough discussion of the convergence properties.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Model Validation of Agentic AI Systems: A POMDP-Based Framework for Belief-State, Forecast, and Policy Validation

arXiv:2606.17383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence systems introduce a new class of model risk. Unlike traditional predictive models, autonomous agents continuously acquire information, form beliefs regarding latent states of the environment, generate forecasts, select actions, and adapt their behavior over time. Existing validation methodologies focus primarily on predictive accuracy and therefore provide limited insight into the quality of the underlying decision process. This paper proposes a model validation framework for agentic AI based on Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The framework decomposes autonomous decision making into information, beliefs, forecasts, actions, and utility, allowing each component to be validated independently. Large language models (LLMs) are formalized as approximate Bayesian filtering operators, and a model-risk taxonomy is developed encompassing state-space, filtering, forecast, policy, utility-specification, and parameter risks. The model risk validation methodology is demonstrated through a portfolio-management case study in which an agent infers latent market regimes from market and macroeconomic information, generates belief-conditioned forecasts, and constructs portfolios using a Black–Litterman framework. Empirical validation combines performance analysis, belief calibration diagnostics, coverage tests, ablation studies, and parameter-sensitivity analysis. The results indicate that latent-state inference contributes independently to decision quality and that the principal conclusions remain robust across a broad range of parameter values. The principal contribution of the paper is a practical framework for extending established model risk management concepts to autonomous AI systems and providing a rigorous foundation for their validation, governance, and monitoring.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Equivariant Flow Matching for Symmetry-Breaking Bifurcation Problems

arXiv:2509.03340v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bifurcation phenomena in nonlinear dynamical systems often lead to multiple coexisting stable solutions, particularly in the presence of symmetry breaking. Deterministic machine learning models are unable to capture this multiplicity, averaging over solutions and failing to represent lower-symmetry outcomes. In this work, we formalize the use of generative AI, specifically flow matching, as a principled way to model the full probability distribution over bifurcation outcomes. Our approach builds on existing techniques by combining flow matching with equivariant architectures and an optimal-transport-based coupling mechanism. We generalize equivariant flow matching to a symmetric coupling strategy that aligns predicted and target outputs under group actions, allowing accurate learning in equivariant settings. We validate our approach on a range of systems, from simple conceptual systems to physical problems such as buckling beams and the Allen–Cahn equation. The results demonstrate that the approach accurately captures multimodal distributions and symmetry-breaking bifurcations. Moreover, our results demonstrate that flow matching significantly outperforms non-probabilistic and variational methods. This offers a principled and scalable solution for modeling multistability in high-dimensional systems.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

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

G-Long: Graph-Enhanced Memory Management for Efficient Long-Term Dialogue Agents

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced open-domain dialogue systems, maintaining long-term consistency remains a challenge due to inherent limitations in long-context reasoning and the inefficiency of processing extensive raw text. Existing approaches typically rely on either unstructured memory storage, which is prone to information loss, or computationally expensive LLMs that incur high latency. To address these limitations, we propose G-Long, a graph-enhanced framework that utilizes a fine-tuned small Language Model (sLM) for structured triplet extraction and associative retrieval, significantly reducing operational costs. Furthermore, we introduce the novel attention-aware importance scoring mechanism that leverages the intrinsic cross-attention signals of a T5 summarizer to identify salient memories. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that G-Long achieves state-of-the-art performance in both response generation and memory retrieval, yielding performance gains of up to 9.8% in response quality on MSC and 40.8% in retrieval recall on LME, while significantly minimizing computational overhead.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets

We present ReMoT, a unified training paradigm to systematically address the fundamental shortcomings of VLMs in spatio-temporal consistency – a critical failure point in navigation, robotics, and autonomous driving. ReMoT integrates two core components: (1) A rule-based automatic framework that generates ReMoT-16K, a large-scale (16.5K triplets) motion-contrast dataset derived from video meta-annotations, surpassing costly manual or model-based generation. (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization, which we empirically validate yields optimal performance and data efficiency for learning this contrastive reasoning, far exceeding standard Supervised Fine-Tuning. We also construct the first benchmark for fine-grained motion contrast triplets to measure a VLM's discrimination of subtle motion attributes (e.g., opposing directions). The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark and multiple standard VLM benchmarks, culminating in a remarkable 25.1% performance leap on spatio-temporal reasoning tasks.

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Parental body mass index and offspring childhood body size and eating behaviour: A structural equation modelling analysis in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study

Authors:

by Tom A. Bond, Tom A. McAdams, Nicole M. Warrington, Laurie J. Hannigan, Espen Moen Eilertsen, Ziada Ayorech, Fartein A. Torvik, George Davey Smith, Deborah A. Lawlor, Eivind Ystrom, Alexandra Havdahl, David M. Evans Background The intergenerational transmission of obesity-related traits could propagate an accelerating cycle of obesity, if parental adiposity causally influences offspring adiposity. The extent to which intergenerational obesity associations are due to such causal effects, as opposed to genetic confounding (inheritance), is unclear. We aimed to establish whether associations between parental peri-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and offspring birth weight (BW), BMI until 8 years of age, and 8-year-old eating behaviour are due to genetic confounding. Methods and findings Data were from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, a prospective population-based birth cohort born between 1999 and 2009 at 50 out of 52 hospital maternity units in Norway. We compared the strength of the associations of maternal pre-pregnancy BMI versus paternal BMI during pregnancy, with offspring outcomes including birth weight and BMI assessed between age 6 months and 8 years of age, and appetite-related eating behaviour traits assessed at age 8 years via the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (CEBQ), adjusting for potential confounders including parity, parental/grandparental language group and parental age, smoking, education and income). We then used an extended children of twins structural equation model (SEM) to quantify the extent to which associations were due to genetic confounding. Up to 85,866 children (51.3% male) were included in linear regression models, whereas SEM models included up to 50,999 children. Maternal BMI was more strongly associated than paternal BMI with offspring BW, but the maternal-paternal difference decreased for offspring BMI after birth. Greater parental BMI was associated with obesity-related offspring eating behaviours. SEM results indicated that genetic confounding did not explain the association between parental BMI and offspring BW, but explained the majority of the association with offspring BMI from 6 months onwards. For 8-year BMI, genetic confounding explained 79% (95% CI [62, 95]; p = 1.9 × 10−12) of the covariance with maternal BMI and 94% (95% CI [72, 113]; p = 2.7 × 10−14) of the covariance with paternal BMI. Limitations of this study include selective recruitment and attrition, potential bias due to parental assortative mating, and that findings may not generalise beyond high-income country settings with high obesity prevalence. Conclusions We found strong evidence that parent–child BMI associations may primarily be due to genetic confounding. When considered alongside prior evidence, this finding may argue against a strong causal effect of maternal or paternal adiposity on childhood adiposity via intrauterine or periconceptional mechanisms.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where other actors are ignored or treated as environmental noise, preventing effective coordination. Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines. Crucially, training with diverse artificial agents enables zero-shot generalization to safer human interaction. These results suggest that the path to robust robotic co-existence lies not in isolated safety constraints, but in the rigorous demands of multi-agent interaction. Multimedia materials are available at: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/marl

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Digital self-efficacy as a potential intermediary between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults: A cross-sectional analysis of HINTS 2024

Background: Older adults with vision impairment often experience barriers to using digital technology. The indirect associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills via digital self-efficacy and frustration among older adults remain largely unknown. Objective: This study aimed to 1) explore factors associated with digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults with vision impairment; 2) examine associations between vision impairment and digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults; and 3) examine whether digital self-efficacy and frustration may help explain associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills among older adults. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2024. Respondents aged 60 and older were included. Vision impairment was assessed using a self-reported item. Outcomes included self-reported digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration. Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling were conducted, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and the number of comorbidities. Results: Among 3,149 older adults (mean [SD] age, 70.7 [10.0] years; 45.6% female), 7.1% (n=223) reported vision impairment. Among older adults with vision impairment, 65.6% (95% CI, 53.5% to 75.9%) used the internet daily, and 79.5% (95% CI, 66.8% to 88.2%) used a smartphone in the past 12 months. In multivariable logistic regression analyses among older adults with vision impairment, older age was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.90), smartphone use (OR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.97), wearable device use (OR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80 to 0.93). Older adults who self-identified as racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Black/African American, Hispanic) had lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.50) and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.17; 95% CI, 0.04 to 0.73) compared with Non-Hispanic White older adults. Vision impairment was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.37 to 0.99) and digital self-efficacy (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.86). Digital self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of daily internet use (OR, 2.95; 95% CI, 2.04 to 4.26). Generalized structural equation modeling identified an indirect association between vision impairment and daily internet use via digital self-efficacy (coefficient, -0.68; 95% CI, -1.24 to -0.12). Conclusions: Findings suggest that reduced digital self-efficacy may help explain the observed association between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults. Interventions targeting digital self-efficacy, including accessible interface designs, personalized coaching, and peer support, may help bridge the digital divide among older adults with vision impairment.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

AutoMine Solution for AV2 2026 Scenario Mining Challenge

arXiv:2606.11874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the development of autonomous driving systems, mining high-value, safety-critical, and planning-relevant scenarios from large-scale driving logs has become essential for data-driven evaluation. In this paper, we propose AutoMine, a robust self-refining scenario mining method based on LLMs and VLMs. AutoMine uses semantics-preserving prompt augmentation to reduce LLM prompt sensitivity, combines robust trajectory atomic functions with VLM-based functions to handle perception noise and open-world visual cues, and refines generated code through execution feedback from real logs. In the Argoverse 2 Scenario Mining Competition at CVPR 2026, AutoMine achieves a HOTA-Temporal score of 36.38 and a Timestamp BA score of 77.21.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum thermodynamics of the Caldeira-Leggett model with non-equilibrium Gaussian reservoirs

arXiv:2405.00215v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a non-equilibrium version of the Caldeira-Leggett model in which a quantum particle is strongly coupled to a set of engineered reservoirs. The reservoirs are composed by collections of squeezed and displaced thermal modes, in contrast to the standard case in which the modes are assumed to be at equilibrium. The model proves to be very versatile. Strongly displaced/squeezed reservoirs can be used to generate an effective time dependence in the system Hamiltonian and can be identified as sources of pure work. In the case of squeezing, the time dependence is stochastic and breaks the fluctuation-dissipation relation, this can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics by correctly accounting for the energy used to generate the initial non-equilibrium conditions. To go beyond the average description and compute the full heat statistics, we treat squeezing and displacement as generalized Hamiltonians on a modified Keldysh contour. As an application of this technique, we show the quantum-classical correspondence between the heat statistics in the non-equilibrium Caldeira-Leggett model and the statistics of a classical Langevin particle under the action of squeezed and displaced colored noises. Finally, we discuss thermodynamic symmetries of the heat generating function, proving a fluctuation theorem for the energy balance and showing that the conservation of energy at the trajectory level emerges in the classical limit.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Strategic Feature Selection

arXiv:2606.18867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When algorithmic predictors inform resource allocation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, these predictors must account for strategic manipulation of input features. The typical solution is to redesign the predictor itself to explicitly account for strategic interactions. In practice, however, decision makers are often constrained to adjusting coarser levers within existing prediction pipelines. For example, healthcare organizations often select which features to exclude based on perceived manipulability, while using standard regularization procedures to shrink the coefficients of retained features. In this work, we initiate a formal study of strategic classification through feature selection and its interaction with ridge regularization. Our main finding is that excluding individual features based on their manipulability alone is generally suboptimal. We provide a fine-grained characterization of the performance of a feature subset under optimal regularization, yielding new insights for policy design. Motivated by this characterization, we develop a practical algorithm for jointly choosing the feature set and the level of ridge regularization. Through a real-world case study on a healthcare payments benchmark, we illustrate how our algorithm can guide the design of coarse policy levers in practice. Our results provide a principled, practical framework for mitigating the effects of strategic behavior in algorithmic decision-making systems.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

County Year Informatics Model for Annual and Cumulative Unique Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility in Maryland, 2026 to 2045

Purpose: Population-level lung cancer screening programs require denominators that reflect age, smoking history, geography, and changing eligibility over time. We estimated annual prevalent and 20-year cumulative unique low-dose computed tomography screening eligibility for Maryland residents under alternative screening criteria. Methods: We built a deterministic cohort-cell stock-flow simulation using Maryland county-equivalent jurisdiction projections by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, with ACS socioeconomic/nativity covariates and smoking-history priors for ever-smoked status, pack-years, and quit-years. Scenarios included USPSTF 2013 legacy, USPSTF 2021, ACS 2023/2024, a risk-model-expanded sensitivity, and ever-smoked-only capacity stress tests. Cumulative unique eligibility counted people once at first eligibility rather than summing annual prevalent person-years. Results: Under USPSTF 2021, an estimated 238,346 Maryland residents were eligible in 2026 and 245,326 in 2045. The 20-year cumulative unique denominator was 768,668, whereas naively summing annual prevalent counts produced 4,850,735 person-years, a 6.31-fold overcount. ACS 2023/2024 expanded annual eligibility to 314,616 in 2026 and cumulative unique eligibility to 902,796 by adding remote former smokers. Ever-smoked-only adult eligibility was 1,957,699 in 2026 and 3,383,683 cumulative unique over 20 years. Conclusion: A Maryland statewide screening initiative should plan from cumulative unique eligibility and county-equivalent jurisdiction-specific burden rather than annual prevalence alone. Explicit pack-year and quit-year modeling materially changes statewide and county allocation compared with current-smoking proxy models.