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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HAFMat: Hybrid Priors Guided Adaptive Fusion for Single-Image Human Material Estimation

Physically based rendering (PBR) material estimation is a fundamental appearance decomposition task with broad applications in virtual content creation, relighting, and digital human rendering. However, estimating PBR materials from a single human image remains highly ill-posed, since illumination, geometry, and reflectance are heavily entangled in the observed appearance. To mitigate this ambiguity, we propose HAFMat, a hybrid-prior-guided framework for single-image human material estimation. Our method introduces guidance maps that encode complementary cues, including appearance, body geometry, structure, and prior material predictions from pre-trained models. A key observation is that these guidance cues are heterogeneous: some cues mainly provide texture-level constraints, while others convey higher-level semantic information. To exploit this property, we design a Multi-layer Adaptive Feature Fusion Mechanism, which adaptively fuses guidance features with decoder features at different stages. This design enables texture-dominant and semantic-dominant cues to guide material decoding at appropriate levels, leading to more accurate and physically plausible material estimation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in material estimation and downstream relighting.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Source-Grounded Data Generation for Text-to-JSON Learning

From financial filings to clinical records, legacy industries rely heavily on long, unstructured documents to store high-value information. Reliably extracting this information into structured, machine-readable representations is a key prerequisite to making the contents accessible to automated systems. JSON is a natural target for such structured extraction, yet constructing reliable and scalable text-to-JSON training data remains challenging. To address this gap, we propose STAGE (Spreadsheet-grounded Text-to-JSON Artifact GEneration), a source-grounded data generation pipeline that constructs reports and JSON schema by using LLMs for scalable synthesis while validating ground-truth values against the underlying spreadsheet. Evaluations on STAGE-Eval, our source-grounded benchmark with an 851-example test set, show that STAGE produces stronger training data than existing approaches. This improves Qwen3-4B exact match from 31.37% to 74.27% and value accuracy from 45.46% to 90.69%.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Longitudinal monitoring exposes correlated temporal protein variations in the female plasma proteome

The plasma proteome is a valuable resource for assessment of the physiological state of the donor. Containing hundreds of different proteins of variable concentrations, it displays substantial inter-donor differences in individual protein levels, making each plasma proteome highly donor-specific. Less is known about intra-donor variability in the plasma proteome over time, although such variations may even be more indicative of a changing physiological state. Here we assessed data obtained from the TIMES cohort, comprising 51 apparently healthy participants monitored monthly over 12 months, focusing especially on temporal variations in blood protein levels. Most strikingly, we observed that several women in this cohort revealed strongly correlated temporal variations in their plasma proteome, including most notably PZP, SHBG, FETUB, AGT, SERPINA6, SERPINA7, CP, APOL1 and KNG1, with levels sometimes fluctuating by more than 20-fold. In contrast, such variations were absent in men. Some of the fluctuating proteins have been known to be hormone-regulated (e.g., PZP, SHBG), but for others this was not yet fully clear. Through the tight co-variation observed for these proteins in the plasma proteome of women, we can conclude that all these proteins are similarly hormone regulated. The findings reported here not only corroborate previous studies showing estrogen-dependent regulation of several plasma proteins, but also extend this category to include also CP, APOL1, and KNG1. As these latter have been often proposed as candidate biomarkers, they should be validated in sex-balanced cohorts and interpreted with caution, especially in large-scale plasma proteomics studies wherein often only one or a few sampling time points are measured per donor.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Documented clinical genetic testing among carriers of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer variants: Ancestry and socioeconomic disparities in the All of Us research program

Importance: Hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC) variant carriers benefit from risk-reducing interventions, but only if identified. The extent to which carriers are clinically recognized, and whether recognition is equitable across diverse populations, is poorly characterized in a single large U.S. cohort. Objective: To estimate P/LP HBOC carrier prevalence across genetic ancestry groups, quantify documented clinical genetic testing among carriers, and evaluate ancestry and socioeconomic disparities in testing. Design, Setting, and Participants: Cross-sectional analysis of the All of Us Research Program Controlled Tier (Curated Data Repository v8/C2024Q3R9), comprising participants with short-read whole genome sequencing and linked electronic health record (EHR) and survey data. Carriers were ascertained from research genomic data independent of clinical testing. Exposures: Genetically inferred ancestry (African [AFR], Admixed American [AMR], East Asian [EAS], European [EUR], Middle Eastern [MID], South Asian [SAS]); self-reported household income and educational attainment. Main Outcomes and Measures: (1) Carrier prevalence with Wilson 95% CIs; (2) documented clinical genetic testing (procedure codes) among carriers; (3) adjusted odds of documented testing among women, by ancestry, before and after socioeconomic adjustment, using multivariable logistic regression. Results: Among 414,830 participants, P/LP HBOC carrier prevalence was 1.42% (95% CI, 1.38-1.45) overall and similar across ancestry groups (AFR 1.24%, AMR 1.32%, EAS 1.19%, EUR 1.52%, MID 1.68%, SAS 1.33%; overlapping CIs). Among 250,071 women in the testing analysis, documented clinical genetic testing was rare: only 74 of 5,878 carriers overall (1.3%) and 59 of 3,572 European-ancestry carriers (1.7%) had a documented test, with counts below reportable thresholds in all other ancestry groups. African-ancestry women had lower adjusted odds of documented testing than European-ancestry women (Model 1 adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.32; 95% CI, 0.27-0.39), an association that attenuated but persisted after adjustment for income and education (Model 2 aOR, 0.48; 95% CI, 0.40-0.58; P < 0.001); Admixed American women also had reduced adjusted odds (aOR, 0.71; 95% CI, 0.61-0.84). Lower income and lower education were independently and dose-dependently associated with lower testing odds (income

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Variational autoencoders with latent high-dimensional steady geometric flows for dynamics

Authors:

arXiv:2410.10137v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop Riemannian approaches to variational autoencoders (VAEs) for PDE-type ambient data with regularizing geometric latent dynamics, which we refer to as VAE-DLM, or VAEs with dynamical latent manifolds. We redevelop the VAE framework such that manifold geometries, subject to our geometric flow, embedded in Euclidean space are learned in the intermediary latent space developed by encoders and decoders. By tailoring the geometric flow in which the latent space evolves, we induce latent geometric properties of our choosing, which are reflected in empirical performance. We reformulate the traditional evidence lower bound (ELBO) loss with a considerate choice of prior. We develop a linear geometric flow with a steady-state regularizing term. This flow requires only automatic differentiation of one time derivative, and can be solved in moderately high dimensions in a physics-informed approach, allowing more expressive latent representations. We discuss how this flow can be formulated as a gradient flow, and maintains entropy away from metric singularity. This, along with an eigenvalue penalization condition, helps ensure the manifold is sufficiently large in measure, nondegenerate, and a canonical geometry, which contribute to a robust representation. Our methods focus on the modified multi-layer perceptron architecture with tanh activations for the manifold encoder-decoder. We demonstrate, on our datasets of interest, our methods perform at least as well as the traditional VAE, and oftentimes better. Our methods can outperform this and a VAE endowed with our proposed architecture, frequently reducing out-of-distribution (OOD) error between 15% to 35% on select datasets. We highlight our method on ambient PDEs whose solutions maintain minimal variation in late times. We provide empirical justification towards how we can improve robust learning for external dynamics with VAEs.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adjusted Cup-Product Neural Layer

arXiv:2606.13568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many important observables in physics and geometry are cup products of cochains. The adjusted cup product neural layer has been introduced in this paper. It is a neural primitive that hard wires the cup product with an adjustment term from higher gauge theory. This creates a readout that is gauge invariant by design. Their main theoretical result shows that on a closed cycle the output relies entirely on the adjustment coefficient. Setting this coefficient to zero removes the output completely regardless of other parameters. Thus the adjustment is the only source of gauge invariant signal. They prove this observable is a nonzero quadratic form and is exactly invariant under one and two gauge transformations.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Neural network inverse design of nanophotonic scintillators

arXiv:2606.16309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scintillators are materials converting high-energy radiation into optical light, essential in a range of technologies such as medical imaging systems and security scanners. Scintillator development and optimization have remained limited by the complexity of their underlying physics, involving stochastic cascades of electron-electron, electron-phonon, and electron-photon interactions. Such processes are typically modeled by non-differentiable Monte Carlo simulations, limiting the applicability of machine learning for scintillator development. Here we present a physics-informed neural network that learns the scintillation cascade process from the incident high-energy particle to photon emission, substantially accelerating scintillator design and optimization. Combining this neural network with photonic simulations enables end-to-end differentiable optimization of the scintillator geometry. This allows us to optimize for arbitrary figures of merit, such as specific target emission patterns.. We demonstrate the concept and characterize it relative to previous approaches by inverse design of nanophotonic scintillators for X-ray imaging.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

fuzzyfold: a high-performance framework for stochastic RNA folding kinetics

Authors:

The analysis of nucleic acid secondary structures is overwhelmingly dominated by methods that analyze the thermodynamic equilibrium distribution and which ignore all dynamic aspects of nucleic acid folding. Yet, there are numerous popular examples of nucleic acid folding that rely on kinetic models, such as RNA riboswitches or DNA strand displacement systems. Here, I am presenting fuzzyfold, a Rust-based software package for nucleic acid secondary structure analysis with an explicit focus on stochastic modeling. The framework introduces three-way and four-way shift moves with a biophysically motivated rate-model parameterization, and it is developed with an emphasis on both model flexibility and performance, e.g. allowing for the generation of single co-transcriptional trajectories for thousand-nucleotide long RNA molecules in just a few minutes. The main strength of the fuzzyfold package, however, is its focus on user and developer interfaces for long-term development. It provides easily installable command-line interfaces, e.g. for aggregating data from multiple parallel trajectories efficiently into an ensemble-level dynamic analysis. For developers, the code-base supports straight-forward substitution of thermodynamic and kinetic free-energy models, and a flexible library interface with Python bindings, enabling integration of individual components into custom computational workflows.

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

SVHighlights: Towards Extremely Long Sport Video Highlight Detection

While highlight detection for long-form videos is of great practical importance, most existing methods remain limited to short-form content, largely due to the absence of a suitable benchmark. To bridge this gap, we introduce SVHighlights, to the best of our knowledge, the first benchmark for highlight detection in extremely long sports videos, each exceeding one hour in duration, across multiple sports categories. SVHighlights is constructed from pairs of full-length sports videos and their corresponding official highlight videos using a dataset generation pipeline, enabling scalable label generation without conventional per-clip saliency annotation. The benchmark comprises 320 videos with an average duration of 2.00 hours and a total of 640.18 hours, substantially exceeding previous datasets. Existing methods also face fundamental challenges on long videos: models trained on short clips fail to generalize to hour-long content, and their clip-level scoring lacks the broader context needed to identify highlights. To address this and provide a strong baseline, we present TF-SELECTOR, a training-free segment-based approach that divides each video into context-aware segments by merging adjacent shots sharing the same semantic content, and predicts segment-level saliency scores using a large language model with multimodal inputs including visual captions, transcripts, and audio volume. Experiments demonstrate that TF-SELECTOR achieves superior performance across most metrics compared to Video Temporal Grounding (VTG)-tuned baselines, with improvements of +2.50 in HIT@1, +4.04 in HIT@K, and +2.95 in IoU. These results establish SVHighlights as a challenging testbed for long-form highlight detection and demonstrate that a simple segment-based strategy can effectively scale to hour-long videos.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

arXiv:2508.05762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. We introduce UniFFBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring the MinX dataset – a diverse collection of 1,500+ mineral systems spanning 85 elements, extreme thermodynamic conditions (0–5000 K, 0–1000 GPa), and structural complexity, including partial occupancy and disorder. This diversity, combined with experimental reference values for validation, enables assessment of UMLFF generalization across chemical space and conditions substantially beyond typical training scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial ``reality gap'': models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. We observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method.

13.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

<b>PROTEUS trial heralds perioperative therapy for prostate cancer</b>

Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer. Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer.

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

FrequencyFormer: A Co-Designed Sensor-to-Processor Pipeline for Frequency-Domain Vision Transformer Inference

Deploying vision transformers (ViTs) on sensor-edge systems is limited not only by on-device compute, but also by the energy and bandwidth required to transmit high-dimensional image data from the sensor to the processor. While in-sensor and near-sensor computing reduce this cost through early feature extraction, existing methods often provide only modest compression. We observe that the frequency domain provides a naturally compact representation of visual information and can be exploited at the sensor level to reduce sensor-to-processor data movement. Building on this insight, we present FrequencyFormer, a co-designed sensor-to-processor pipeline for efficient ViT inference. FrequencyFormer includes: (1) a multi-scale DCT tokenizer that compresses a 224x224 image into compact frequency-domain tokens, achieving up to 128x reduction in off-chip data volume with modest accuracy loss; (2) a LUT-based near-sensor hardware implementation that leverages fixed DCT coefficients for multiplier-free, energy- and area-efficient tokenization; and (3) a modified MIPI-based low-power communication architecture that further reduces transfer energy. FrequencyFormer serves as a drop-in replacement for standard ViT patch embedding and remains compatible with pretrained backbones across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. The pipeline achieves 28.8 TOPS/W, reduces communication energy by 230x, and lowers total sensor-side energy by 2.22x, demonstrating frequency-domain tokenization as a scalable foundation for in-sensor ViT deployment.

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

Rewrite to Translate, Translate to Reward: Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting in Machine Translation

Rewriting source text with large language models (LLMs) before translation has been shown to improve machine translation (MT) quality. However, we find that prompt-based rewriting can degrade translation quality rather than improve it, particularly when smaller LLMs, such as 4B-parameter models, are used. We argue that this limitation stems from the difficulty of controlling rewriting behavior through natural-language prompts alone: a rewrite is useful only if it improves downstream translation, yet existing prompt-based methods do not explicitly optimize for this signal. To address this issue, we propose RLSR (Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting), a reinforcement learning framework that trains the rewriting model with a reward based on the downstream translation-quality improvement produced by each rewrite. Experiments across six MT systems and 16 language pairs show that our 4B RLSR-trained rewriting models significantly outperform both the no-rewriting baseline and prompt-based rewriting baselines at the same model scale, while remaining competitive with baselines that use a 235B LLM.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Information Lattice Learning as Probabilistic Graphical Model Structure Learning

arXiv:2606.19366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information lattice learning (ILL) learns interpretable rules of a signal by alternately projecting the signal onto a partition lattice that encodes a hierarchy of abstractions and lifting selected rules back to the signal domain. When the signal is a probability mass function, we show the probabilistic rules learned by ILL admit a natural probabilistic graphical model (PGM) interpretation and develop this interpretation in detail. A partition in ILL induces a deterministic quotient variable, and a rule is the marginal law of that quotient variable. A rule set is therefore a collection of marginal constraints over interpretable abstractions. General lifting is the feasible family of all joint distributions satisfying those constraints, while special lifting chooses a maximum-ignorance reconstruction, implemented in ILL by an L2 uniformity principle closely related to maximum entropy. Under a Shannon-entropy lifting, the same constraints yield a log-linear factor graph whose factors are indexed by learned abstractions. The information lattice itself, however, is not a Bayesian network: its edges encode refinement and coarsening of abstractions, not conditional dependence. Thus ILL is best viewed as structure learning for interpretable constraint-based factor graphs over quotient variables. This view clarifies how ILL relates to graphical models and maximum entropy models, while suggesting new directions for inference, identifiability, and hybrid symbolic-probabilistic learning.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Flow Matching: Dimension-Improved KL Bounds and Wasserstein Guarantees

arXiv:2606.16610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) has recently emerged as a versatile framework for generative modeling, yet its theoretical convergence properties remain only partially understood. In this work, we provide refined and novel convergence guarantees for Brownian motion based DFMs, focusing on the discretization error. Our analysis is conducted under the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the 2-Wasserstein distance. Under finite-moment conditions and a mild score integrability assumption, we derive KL convergence bounds with improved dimensional dependence compared to prior work, achieving, up to our knowledge, state-of-the-art scaling under minimal conditions. We further extend the analysis to the 2-Wasserstein distance: under an additional first-order score integrability assumption and a weak log-concavity condition, we obtain convergence guarantees with dimensional dependence consistent with the KL case.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Population-scale detection of methylation outliers from long-read genome sequencing

Background: Aberrant DNA methylation can mediate the functional effects of rare genetic variation and contribute to imprinting disorders, repeat expansion diseases, and other pathogenic regulatory mechanisms. Long-read sequencing technologies now enable genome-wide detection of CpG methylation alongside genetic variation from a single assay. However, methods for systematic identification and interpretation of methylation outliers from long-read sequencing data remain limited. Methods: We developed METAFORA, a computational workflow for detecting methylation outlier regions from PacBio and Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing data. METAFORA constructs population-level methylation references, segments the genome into correlated CpG blocks, infers technical and biological sources of variation through hidden factor estimation, models uncertainty due to variable depth sequencing, and computes covariate-adjusted methylation outlier scores for individual samples. We applied METAFORA across large long-read sequencing cohorts and integrated methylation outliers with multi-omic data. METAFORA is implemented as a snakemake workflow available at https://github.com/tjense25/METAFORA. Results: METAFORA identified methylation outlier regions associated with rare structural variants, tandem repeat expansions, and imprinting abnormalities. We found outlier regions were enriched for molecular outliers across transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility datasets, supporting their functional relevance in gene regulation. In a representative case, METAFORA identified an imprinting defect affecting the GNAS locus associated with an STX16 deletion. Conclusions: METAFORA enables scalable detection and interpretation of methylation outliers from long-read sequencing data and provides a framework for integrating epigenetic outliers with genomic and multi-omic analyses. These approaches may improve interpretation of rare regulatory variation and support discovery of clinically relevant epigenetic abnormalities in genomic medicine.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Device assessed 24-hour movement behaviour and cardiovascular disease mortality amongst cancer survivors.

Background: Cancer survivors face elevated risks of mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD). The potential importance of physical activity (PA) and other behaviours across the 24-hour day (e.g. sedentary behaviour (SB) and sleep) for CVD-mortality risk is not well understood in this at-risk population. Objectives: To assess the importance of 24-hour movement behaviour, using a compositional approach, for mitigating CVD-mortality amongst cancer survivors. Methods: Participants with a prior cancer diagnosis were drawn from the UK Biobank accelerometry sub-study (n=6,158). Accelerometer-derived movement (moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), vigorous PA (VPA), moderate PA (MPA), light PA (LPA), SB, sleep) was examined in relation to CVD-mortality, identified from health record linkage data (using Fine-Gray Cox proportional-hazards models adjusted for demographic, health, lifestyle covariates). Results: Median follow-up was 8.0 years (Q1-Q3: 7.4-8.5), with n=500 (8.2%) deaths (CVD-deaths: n=118). Greater MVPA, in place of any other behaviour, was inversely associated with CVD-mortality with e.g. 10% lower hazard if MVPA theoretically replaced 7 minutes (mins)/day SB (Hazard ratio (HR): 0.91, (95% Confidence Interval: 0.86-0.95)), 9 mins/day LPA (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97), or 11 mins/day sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97). The VPA component of MVPA proved critical, requiring only ~1-2 additional mins/day for equivalent hazard reduction. Sleep duration, was also inversely associated with CVD-mortality. A 10% lower hazard required replacing 29 mins/day of SB with sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.84-0.96); no other behavioural replacement amongst SB, sleep or LPA could provide an equivalent risk reduction. Conclusions: Among cancer survivors, the most potent reduction in CVD-mortality followed theoretically reallocating time to higher intensity movement.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus transmission: exploring perceptions of human-animal-tick interactions across six districts in Uganda

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) causes a viral zoonotic disease transmitted through tick bites and direct contact with infected blood or tissue of infected animals. Socio-ecological and behavioural risk factors for CCHFV exposure in Uganda remain poorly understood, which can lead to the omission of key risk factors in quantitative survey design and limit our wider understanding. In this study, we explored human-animal-tick interaction transmission risks in Uganda. We conducted 24 focus group discussions (FGDs) and 31 key-informant interviews (KIIs) across six environmentally and socio-ecologically diverse districts, between October 2023 and March 2024. Study sites were selected using K-prototype analysis, which combined environmental and socio-ecological variables to identify distinct clusters within Uganda. FGDs were conducted separately with groups of community leaders, men, women and teenagers with stratified purposive sampling. Medical doctors, veterinarians, traditional healers, district surveillance officers, and herdsmen were individually interviewed as key informants and purposively sampled. Data were transcribed and translated into English, and analysed thematically using iterative categorisation in NVivo 14. Most participants reported tick bites, some as frequently as every day. Close contact with animals was common, including sleeping next to them in the same building, largely due to concerns about animal theft. Less frequent but notable practices included slaughtering animals for consumption or sacrifice and interactions with wild animals during hunting. Slaughtering and butchering an animal which was sick or had died was reportedly performed by participants in most districts. Plucking and roasting engorged ticks was a practice described in the Kaabong and Arua districts of Northern Uganda. These practices and behaviours highlight potential key risks of CCHFV transmission and underscore the need for future studies to address specific behaviours, to quantify if, and to what extent, they present an exposure risk. Further work should include underlying reasons for the behaviours, which would help ensure that culturally appropriate interventions are targeted.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

The Simplified Stabilizer ZX-Calculus is Minimal

arXiv:2606.12383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The stabilizer fragment of the ZX calculus is amongst the most important fragments of the theory. The closely related Clifford+T fragment is approximately universal (arXiv:1705.11151). Additionally, the stabilizer calculus can be described by a small collection of rewrites, most of which have been shown to be necessary (arXiv:1709.08903). However, two rules, describing the red/green compact-structure coincidence and the important bialgebra law, had not been shown to be necessary. We present a countermodel-style argument showing that both of these rules are individually necessary relative to the connectivity meta-rule of Backens–Perdrix–Wang (arXiv:1709.08903), and hence establish that the rule set presented in arXiv:1709.08903 has no redundant rewrite rule.

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

Finding Sparse Subnetworks in One Training Cycle via Progressive Magnitude-Based Pruning

Neural network pruning reduces model size by removing less important parameters while aiming to preserve predictive performance. Although the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) shows that sparse subnetworks can match dense networks when trained from suitable initializations, its iterative pruning procedure requires multiple complete training cycles. This work evaluates progressive magnitude-based pruning as a single-cycle alternative. The method gradually increases sparsity during training using a linear schedule and updates pruning masks based on active weight magnitudes. We conduct systematic experiments on CIFAR-10 and MNIST across ResNet, VGG-style, and LeNet architectures, comparing the proposed method with representative iterative and initialization-based pruning baselines, including LTH, SNIP, and GraSP. On CIFAR-10, the method achieves 95.12\% accuracy on ResNet-18 at 72.9\% sparsity, compared with 90.5\% reported for LTH. At extreme sparsity, it achieves 93.13\% accuracy on a VGG-like architecture at 97\% sparsity, compared with approximately 92.0\% for SNIP, and 93.44\% accuracy on VGG-19 at 97.97\% sparsity, compared with 92.19\% for GraSP at 98\% sparsity. A sparsity-accuracy analysis on ResNet-18 further shows that accuracy remains within 0.1 percentage points of the dense baseline across 70–85\% sparsity. These results indicate that progressive magnitude-based pruning provides an effective single-cycle approach for neural network sparsification under the evaluated settings.

24.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A major obstacle confronting HIV-1 vaccine and cure research is the lack of an outbred animal model for rapid and consistent induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). We designed an epitope-focused simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV.5MUT) that elicited broad and potent V3-glycan-targeted antibodies within a year of infection in 14 of 22 macaques compared with 0 of 14 control animals. SHIV.5MUT elicited bNAbs by a two-step mechanism, inducing an initial wave of V1-directed antibodies that selected for Envs with shortened, hypoglycosylated V1 loops, which in turn primed V3-glycan bNAb precursors. Rhesus bNAbs were immunogenetically and structurally diverse, closely resembling human V3-glycan bNAbs. Env-bNAb coevolution revealed a diverse repertoire of bNAb precursors and the Env variants that matured them, yielding a molecular blueprint for vaccine design.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.