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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

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

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.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

OBCache: Optimal Brain KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size. Existing cache eviction methods address this by exploiting attention sparsity, yet they typically rank tokens heuristically using accumulated attention weights without considering their true impact on attention outputs. We propose Optimal Brain Cache (OBCache), a principled framework that formulates cache eviction as a layer-wise structured pruning problem. Building upon the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) theory, OBCache quantifies token saliency by measuring the perturbation in attention outputs induced by pruning tokens, with closed-form scores derived for isolated keys, isolated values, and joint key-value pairs. Our scores account not only for attention weights but also for information from value states and attention outputs, thereby enhancing existing eviction strategies with output-aware signals. Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that replacing the heuristic scores in existing works, which estimate token saliency across different query positions, with OBCache's output-aware scores consistently improves long-context accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamSoul-AI/OBCache.

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

AURA: Active-Response Attribution under Treatment Ambiguity in Bacterial Cytological Profiling

When a bacterial sample is exposed to several antibiotics, not every applied drug necessarily acts: if the organism is resistant to one of them, that drug leaves no morphological trace. The clinically meaningful quantity is therefore not which antibiotics were applied, but which ones were active. We show that these two are sharply decoupled in real E. coli microscopy - naively assuming the applied combination equals the active one is correct only about 37% of the time - yet existing computational tools are ill-suited to recovering the active set. Forward perturbation models such as scGen, CPA, and IMPA are designed to predict appearance from treatment, not the reverse, and inverting them degrades sharply; discriminative image classifiers tend to memorise strain- and batch-specific texture and fail to transfer across experimental replicates. We introduce AURA, which reframes the task as constrained, energy-based inverse attribution. Its central inductive bias is that the active set must be a subset of the applied set; this collapses the candidate space and lets AURA infer the active subset of applied antibiotics by decomposing residual morphology into antibiotic response atoms and selecting the subset with the lowest reconstruction energy, using no strain label at test time. AURA-E adds evidence-aware abstention, withholding a prediction when candidate explanations remain near-equally plausible. On cross-replicate transfer in an E. coli cytological profiling dataset, AURA recovers the active antibiotic combination with 95.47% exact-match accuracy.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SoK: AI-Augmented Binary Reversing

arXiv:2606.17398v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary reversing is fundamental to software understanding, vulnerability discovery, malware investigation, and firmware auditing. However, it remains inherently challenging due to the irreversible loss of semantic information during compilation. Recent advances in machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI systems have accelerated the adoption of AI-augmented binary reversing. Yet, the resulting body of work has become increasingly fragmented across reversing domains, artifact representations, learning approaches, and evaluation practices. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on AI-augmented binary reversing. We analyze 144 research papers published since 2015, and organize them into 22 binary reversing domains according to the inference tasks. We further introduce a unified taxonomy spanning conventional and AI-augmented reversing pipelines. Our taxonomy connects traditional analysis techniques, binary-derived artifacts, representation strategies, learning paradigms, and downstream inference tasks, while clarifying the emerging roles of LLMs and agentic AI systems. By establishing a common vocabulary and structured framework, we provide a holistic view of the field's evolution over the past decade. Our study reveals common structures underlying seemingly disparate approaches, highlights persistent technical challenges and evaluation gaps, and identifies promising opportunities for future research. Collectively, these insights clarify the current state of the field and provide a foundation for the next generation of reliable and scalable AI-augmented binary reversing systems.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Resilient Solution for Sewer Overflow Monitoring across Cloud and Edge

arXiv:2605.10592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aging combined sewer systems in many historical cities are increasingly stressed by extreme rainfall events, which can trigger combined sewer overflows (CSO) with significant environmental and public health impacts. Forecasting the filling dynamics of overflow basins is critical for anticipating capacity exceedance and enabling timely preventive actions for CSO. We present a web-based demonstrator that integrates Deep Learning forecasting methods in both cloud and edge settings into an interactive monitoring dashboard for overflow monitoring, resilient to network outages. A video showcase is available online (https://cloud.bht-berlin.de/index.php/s/b9xt4T3SdiLBiFZ).

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Distinguishing quantum processes with bounded coherent memory

arXiv:2606.19511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distinguishing multi-time quantum processes is a fundamental task underlying the diagnosis, benchmarking, and learning of temporally correlated quantum dynamics. The standard benchmark for distinguishing two processes is the strategy-norm distance, which optimizes over arbitrary adaptive probing strategies but can require large coherent memory and time-dependent control. We introduce machines for autonomous distinction~($\mathsf{MAD}$s): probing strategies that apply the same quantum instrument at each time step, retain the full classical outcome record, and carry a coherent memory of dimension $d_A$. Optimizing over these strategies defines a memory-parametrized distinguishability measure, $d^{(N)}_{\mathsf{MAD}}(\mathbf{P}^N,\mathbf{Q}^N;d_A)$. We show that the resulting hierarchy is monotone in coherent memory and complete at finite times. Specifically, any admissible $N$-step probing strategy can be compiled into a single $\mathsf{MAD}$ with an internal counter and sufficiently large coherent memory, so the hierarchy saturates the strategy-norm benchmark. For recurrent processes generated by repeated system–environment interactions, we derive a single-step description that separates the generation of new distinguishing information from the propagation and decay of information generated at earlier times. Numerical results in a repeated-interaction model show that increasing coherent memory systematically improves the $\mathsf{MAD}$ success probability and closes the gap to the strategy-norm distance while remaining substantially more tractable to evaluate. $\mathsf{MAD}$ distinguishability therefore provides an operational and scalable framework for quantifying what can be learned about genuinely multi-time quantum processes with bounded coherent memory.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage

Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.

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

Beyond Problem Solving: UOJ-Bench for Evaluating Code Generation, Hacking, and Repair in Competitive Programming

arXiv:2606.12864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite strong performance in competitive programming, the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in supporting human learning in the same setting remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce UOJ-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate not only the problem-solving ability of LLMs, but also their ability to identify errors in human-written code – a crucial educational activity traditionally supported by running test cases over online judge systems. UOJ-Bench consists of three distinct tasks: code generation, code hacking, and code repair, all constructed from real-world code submissions on the Universal Online Judge (UOJ) and evaluated through UOJ's native judging infrastructure. Our results show that under one-shot evaluation, even the strongest models fail to identify errors in more than 50% of a set of submissions that have been found to be incorrect by UOJ users. While test-time scaling improves success rates to above 90%, the substantial computational costs incurred from model inference limit its practicality for large-scale deployment. Despite these limitations, we find that the best-performing models under test-time scaling can uncover errors in over 5% of full-score submissions across roughly 30 problems, suggesting that frontier LLMs can already provide complementary signals beyond standard judging systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Rotational Symmetry based Object Pose Estimation from Point Clouds in the Absence of Known 3D Models

Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Equity with Efficiency: An Empirical Study of Tokenizers for Multilingual Large Language Models

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) depend on subword tokenization to bridge discrete text and continuous neural representation. State-of-the-art multilingual LLMs often use Byte-level Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers that structurally favor high-resource languages and Latin scripts. For speakers of underrepresented languages, particularly those across Southeast Asia, this bias inflates inference costs and widens cross-lingual capability gaps. We present the first systematic comparison of equitable tokenizers on a unified benchmark spanning 11 Southeast Asian languages. Beyond tokenizer-level analysis of compression efficiency and cross-lingual equity, we assess downstream task performance through controlled 1.5B-parameter language model training using the same training data. Our results show that Parity-aware BPE lies on the Pareto frontier of the efficiency-equity trade-off, achieving strong compression parity at competitive cost. Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding delivers the best semantic reasoning performance through morphologically richer representations, albeit at a higher computational expense. Byte Latent Transformer underperforms on downstream tasks, possibly because its architectural assumptions misalign with the constraints of limited low-resource training data. Together, our findings demonstrate that cross-lingual fairness and tokenization efficiency are not fundamentally at odds, and offer practical guidance for designing equitable multilingual models.

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

Instrument-based quantum resources: quantification, hierarchies and towards constructing resource theories

arXiv:2508.09134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum resources are certain features of the quantum world that provide advantages in certain information-theoretic, thermodynamic, or other useful operational tasks that are outside the realm of what classical theories can achieve. Quantum resource theories provide us with an elegant framework for studying these resources quantitatively and rigorously. While numerous state-based quantum resource theories have already been investigated, and to some extent, measurement-based resource theories have also been explored, instrument-based resource theories remain largely unexplored, with only a few notable exceptions. As quantum instruments are devices that provide both the classical outcomes of induced measurements and the post-measurement quantum states, they are quite important, especially for scenarios where multiple parties sequentially act on a quantum system. In this work, we study several instrument-based resource theories, namely (1) the resource theory of information preservability, (2) the resource theory of (strong) entanglement preservability, (3) the resource theory of (strong) incompatibility preservability, (4) the resource theory of traditional incompatibility, and (5) the resource theory of parallel incompatibility. Furthermore, we outline the hierarchies of these instrument-based resources and provide measures to quantify them. We then also established a relationship between our resource measure and the advantage in an information-theoretic task. In short, we provide a detailed framework for a wide variety of instrument-based quantum resource theories.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a non Levy-Renewal environment

arXiv:2606.15596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a multivariate risk model, with common counting process and common process of logarithmic returns for the investment portfolio. We assume that the claim-vectors, the counting process and the logarithmic returns of the investment portfolio satisfy a weak dependence structure. Further, we consider that the counting process represents an inhomogeneous renewal process, and the logarithmic returns represent a cadlag process with independent but not necessarily stationary increments. Under these conditions we provide an asymptotic expression for the infinite-time entrance probability of the discounted aggregate claims into some rare set xA, where A denotes a set from a general set family, crucial for the actuarial practice, when the common distribution of the claim vectors belong to a multivariate heavy-tailed distribution class. This result, is derived under a moment condition for the financial risks, and underlines the multivariate linear single big jump principle. When we restrict the distribution class of the claim-vectors to multivariate regular variation, we find more explicit asymptotic expressions, weakening the moment conditions on the financial risks. The asymptotic formulas, derived through double dependence solution, become more direct and practical in applications. With respect to the technical part, due to non Levy-Renewal framework, the classical Kesten-Goldie theorems are not applicable, nor their extensions. The way we make the discretization of the process of the discounted aggregate claims permits to derive uniform asymptotics with respect to the number of summands, that facilitate the approximation of the infinite sums of the main results.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

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

Topical Phase Transitions in Artificial Intelligence Research: Large-Scale Evidence and an Early-Warning Signature for Emerging Topics

arXiv:2606.12828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Do research topics in artificial intelligence grow gradually, or do they advance through abrupt, detectable jumps? Analyzing 80,814 accepted main-track papers from five premier AI conferences (ACL, CVPR, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS) spanning 2017 to 2025, we show major AI topics advance through topical phase transitions: remaining marginal for years, then surging across venues within one to three years. Large language models became the dominant cross-venue topic by 2025, diffusion models rose with comparable abruptness, and language-model methods crossed into computer vision via vision-language models, whereas reinforcement learning compounded smoothly, distinguishing genuine phase transitions from ordinary growth. This structure is our primary contribution: a large-scale, cross-venue characterization of how AI research reorganizes. We then ask whether a transition leaves a detectable footprint before it peaks. We define an early-warning signature, four publication-dynamics criteria frozen on 2017-2021 data, and evaluate it out of sample on 2023-2025 transitions, obtaining a precision of 27% and recall of 63% against a 13.5% base rate. Applied to 2025 data, the signature flags reasoning and test-time compute, agentic AI, multimodal LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and world models as topics to monitor over 2026-2028. The source code is also publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/ai-phase-transitions.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

STITCH links cellular morphology and gene expression in spatial transcriptomics

In situ spatial (ISS) sequencing can uncover co-variation between cellular morphology and gene expression in vivo. However, a principled and interpretable mathematical representation of morphology has not yet been applied in this context. In particular, current deep learning-based representations of cell images confound a cell's shape with its size. We present an interpretable representation of cellular boundary contours, based on tangent principal component analysis (TPCA) in a Kendall shape manifold, that captures size-independent contour shape features. This approach successfully recovers shape-perturbing genes in an RNAi screen than a previous metric geometry-based approach. We build on TPCA to develop STITCH (Shape-TranscriptomIc Correlation and Harmonization), an approach to reveal covariation between cell morphology with gene expression in ISS datasets. In a Xenium dataset, STITCH outperforms a deep learning-based approach in both recovering the layered organization of keratinocytes and a spatial gradient in nuclear eccentricity. Across samples in a melanoma CosMx dataset, STITCH reproducibly associates elongated and triangular fibroblasts with proximity to malignant cells and myofibroblast-like transcriptional program. Finally, STITCH independently recovers a known link between mesenchymal-like malignant cell states and increased cell area in two melanoma cohorts. STITCH can thus yield interpretable morphology-transcriptome relationships across cell types, patients, and spatial transcriptomics platforms.

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

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Where Do Backdoors Live? A Component-Level Analysis of Backdoor Propagation in Speech Language Models

Speech language models (SLMs) are systems of systems: independent components that unite to achieve a common goal. Despite their heterogeneous nature, SLMs are often studied end-to-end; how information flows through the pipeline remains obscure. We investigate this question through the lens of backdoor attacks. We first establish that backdoors can propagate through the SLM, leaving all tasks highly vulnerable. From this, we design a component analysis to discover the role each component takes in backdoor learning. We find that backdoor persistence or erasure is highly dependent on the targeted component. Beyond propagation, we examine how backdoors are encoded in shared multitask embeddings, showing that poisoned samples are not directly separable from benign ones, challenging a common separability assumption used in filtering defenses. Our findings emphasize the need to treat multimodal pipelines as intricate systems with unique vulnerabilities, not solely extensions of unimodal ones.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

On Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Automated Log Parsing

Context: Log parsing is a critical standard operating procedure in software systems, enabling monitoring, anomaly detection, and failure diagnosis. However, automated log parsing remains challenging due to heterogeneous log formats, distribution shifts between training and deployment data, and the brittleness of rule-based approaches. Objectives: This study aims to systematically evaluate how sequence modelling architecture, representation choice, sequence length, and training data availability influence automated log parsing performance and computational cost. Methods: We conduct a controlled empirical study comparing four sequence modelling architectures: Transformer, Mamba state-space, monodirectional LSTM, and bidirectional LSTM models. In total, 396 models are trained across multiple dataset configurations and evaluated using relative Levenshtein edit distance with statistical significance testing. Results: Transformer achieves the lowest mean relative edit distance (0.111), followed by Mamba (0.145), mono-LSTM (0.186), and bi-LSTM (0.265), where lower values are better. Mamba provides competitive accuracy with substantially lower computational cost. Character-level tokenization generally improves performance, sequence length has negligible practical impact on Transformer accuracy, and both Mamba and Transformer demonstrate stronger sample efficiency than recurrent models. Conclusion: Overall, Transformers reduce parsing error by 23.4%, while Mamba is a strong alternative under data or compute constraints. These results also clarify the roles of representation choice, sequence length, and sample efficiency, providing practical guidance for researchers and practitioners.

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

How to Detect and Measure the AI Dangers to Democracy

arXiv:2606.16054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research on artificial intelligence and democracy has grown quickly over the last decade. A shared conclusion in this literature is that AI does not create new democratic problems so much as it makes old ones worse. We now see this across information ecosystems, in elections, and in public administration. However, despite growing evidence, we lack a clear way to prioritize risks in this area, compare them across domains, and identify where democratic control is most likely to break down. So, our problem is: How can we systematize the problems that AI systems pose to democratic processes? This paper argues that principal agent theory may fit the task. In many phases of democratic systems, principals delegate key functions to AI systems and their providers without really being able to monitor how these systems operate or the outputs they produce. Treating AI as a delegation problem helps identify accountability gaps and other governance failures. Most importantly, as we shall illustrate, it provides metrics for empirical assessments of AI impact on democracy. As a second analytical element, we draw on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and its seven characteristics of trustworthy AI, which supply substantive criteria for evaluating delegated tasks. Operationalized across the three domains through measurable indicators and domain specific trustworthiness criteria, we propose an analytical framework that centers on institutional assessability as the central condition for democratic control over AI. However, we stress that how severe a harm is, and how much risk is acceptable, are evaluative judgments that current methodologies neither acknowledge nor operationalize. This becomes acute when such evaluative judgments are (silently) delegated to private vendors. We identify this as a strong limitation left for future work.

20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-12

Social contact patterns in the United Kingdom following the COVID-19 pandemic: The Reconnect cross-sectional survey

by Lucy Goodfellow, Billy J. Quilty, Kevin van Zandvoort, W. John Edmunds Background Close-contact and respiratory infectious diseases are spread through social interactions. Measuring these interactions has transformed our ability to understand transmission and control these infections. Social contact patterns were disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic and have been affected by wider demographic, cultural, and workplace changes since then. Methods and findings To estimate post-pandemic social contact patterns in the United Kingdom, we conducted a cross-sectional social contact survey from November 2024 to March 2025 on a nationally representative sample of participants. Interactions were captured by age, gender, and across socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic groups. We calculated the mean number of daily contacts and contact matrices, stratified by variables of interest, using a negative binomial regression model weighted by age, gender, ethnic group, and weekday/weekend. 13,238 participants were recruited, 3,019 of whom were aged under 18 years old; survey response rates were 36% and 27% for adults and children, respectively. The mean number of daily contacts was 9.1 (95% confidence interval (CI): 8.7, 9.5); this figure was 13.8 (95% CI: 12.8, 14.9) for children, and 7.8 (95% CI: 7.4, 8.2) for adults. Higher numbers of contacts were positively associated with employment, household income, and educational qualifications held. Contact matrices showed high levels of age-assortativity, as well as inter-generational contacts in the home. Contacts were assortative between ethnic groups and SES in all settings; this effect was strongest between ethnic groups in the home, and between SES in the workplace. We constructed socially-stratified next-generation matrices for a novel respiratory pathogen, projecting that the majority White ethnic group would account for the largest share of new infections (76.7% (95% CI: 75.5, 77.9) of cases), but that per-capita infection risk would disproportionately affect minority ethnic groups, with the risk for the Black population being 2.27 (95% CI: 2.06, 2.51) times that of the White population. This study may be limited by the inherent recall biases and reporting fatigue involved with self-reporting contacts. Conclusions This study provides crucial data to inform post-pandemic mathematical models of infectious disease transmission, and allows ethnicity and SES to be incorporated in such models.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Net-Ev$^2$: A Generative Simulator for Network Event Evolution

arXiv:2606.12494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reducing real-world trial and error has long been a central goal of decision making, and generative simulators advance this goal by modeling the evolution of future states. An even more challenging yet meaningful task is simulating how disturbance events (e.g., accidents) propagate their impacts across real-world networks. The existing approaches fall short of modeling both structured attributes and unstructured semantics of events, and capturing topological structures in simulating network event evolution. Therefore, we are motivated to propose Net-Ev$^2$ ($\underline{Net}$work $\underline{Ev}$ent $\underline{Ev}$olution), a novel generative simulator that jointly leverages event cues while preserving network topology in simulations. Specifically, the framework consists of two stages, namely structure-guided masked pre-training and topology-aware diffusion process, which is achieved by U-Net-like graph downsampling and upsampling during denoising. At inference time, Net-Ev$^2$ can generate simulations using natural-language event input only, with greater flexibility for practical usage. Furthermore, we introduce Net-Ev$^2$-6.5M, a multimodal benchmark of aligned event and network traffic data across four large-scale road networks, as well as a new topology-aware metric, namely JL-MMD, to evaluate topological fidelity in generated network dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization ability of Net-Ev$^2$. Code is made available at https://github.com/Guangyu4/Net-Ev-2.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Towards Scalable Customization and Deployment of Multi-Agent Systems for Enterprise Applications

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems demonstrate strong performance on complex reasoning and task execution, enabling broad enterprise applications. However, production deployment remains challenging due to domain-specific customization requirements and high latency and inference costs in agentic workflows. We propose a unified framework for customization and efficient deployment of multi-agent systems in real-world settings. The first stage, Agentic Model Customization, combines continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization to adapt a compact model to specialized domains while retaining strong agentic capabilities. The second stage, Inference Optimization, integrates speculative decoding and FP8 quantization with targeted calibration to enable cost-efficient serving with minimal quality loss. Across enterprise workloads, our framework enables rapid domain adaptation and achieves a 4.48x speedup in throughput while maintaining performance and improving robustness on long-tail scenarios.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Continuous stochastic flows driven by white noise and their duals

作者:

arXiv:2606.12143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a class of continuous stochastic flows driven by a space-time white noise and characterize their dual flows by explicit stochastic differential equations. A key ingredient of the proof is the convergence of solutions under coefficient approximations. As an application, we derive the dual flows in two illustrative examples, the squared Bessel flow and the Jacobi flow. We also introduce a new model of polynomially self-repelling (PSR) flow and show that it enjoys a self-duality property.