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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.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning from almost nothing: How neural networks survive heavy input corruption

arXiv:2606.11319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from imperfect data is a central theme in machine learning, connecting practical questions of robustness to fundamental questions of learnability. Here we examine attribute noise: learning from corrupted inputs while keeping the labels intact, a setting that has received considerably less analytical attention than its label-noise counterpart. We consider two types of corruption models: additive noise and replacement noise. Through experiments with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on corrupted classification datasets, we find that neural networks remain robust, maintaining well-above-chance accuracy even when inputs are >90% corrupted – far beyond human recognition. To understand this robustness, we analyze infinite-width networks in the heavy-corruption regime using a mean-field-inspired approach and derive a leading-order decision rule for the classification outcome: the network implements a prototype rule, the nearest-class-mean, assigning each test point to the class whose training-set average it most closely resembles. This leading-order decision rule is universal across a broad range of MLP architectures, holding for any depth, as well as a wide class of activation functions and noise distributions. The same centroid mechanism closely matches finite-width network behavior in our experiments and provides an interpretable and analytically tractable account of why learning can succeed even when individual training examples carry almost no signal.

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

LLM Features Can Hurt GNNs: Concatenation Interference on Homophilous Graph Benchmarks

Adding LLM-generated node features to graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely reported to improve accuracy on standard benchmarks. We document a contrasting observation: when LLM features are introduced through pure input concatenation (rather than joint training, distillation, or prompt-conditioning), they can systematically degrade accuracy on the same homophilous benchmarks where end-to-end LLM pipelines succeed. With an MLP backbone on the Planetoid public split and bag-of-words original features, concatenating SBERT-encoded GPT-4o-mini TAPE features reduces PubMed test accuracy by -17.0 +/- 0.3 pp and Cora by -4.3 +/- 0.6 pp (CiteSeer -0.6 +/- 0.8 pp, within seed noise). The drop attenuates as we relax each condition (GCN / GCNII / GAT backbones, random splits, smaller encoders) and reverses on medium-homophily WikiCS (+4.4 pp) and ogbn-arxiv (+11.7 pp). To predict when concatenation helps versus hurts, we report a simple measure of LLM-alone discriminability, Delta_sig. Across 9 datasets Delta_sig correlates with the concatenation cost more strongly than homophily at point estimate (r^2 = 0.38 vs. 0.06; N=9, bootstrap CIs overlap). The bootstrap-best change-point is tau = 13.8 pp, and the rule "Delta_sig

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

RT-Counter: Real-Time Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided open-vocabulary object counting (TOOC) aims to count objects belonging to the categories specified by natural language descriptions. Although vision-language pre-trained models have been successful applied to TOOC tasks, they still struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and real-time inference requirements in counting scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a real-time TOOC framework, called the Real-Time Counter (RT-Counter), that achieves not only good counting accuracy but also high computational efficiency. RT-Counter designs a novel Visual Prototype Textualization (VPT) module that can project learned visual features into a text feature space and then generate features containing the abstract information that is hard to capture with visual prototypes and the detailed prototype information that is difficult to describe in text, enhancing the object-level visual-language model's counting capabilities. Additionally, RT-Counter incorporates our Weaving Transformer (Weaformer) layers, maintaining high descriptive power at a fraction of the computational cost. The Weaformer layer adopts a novel hybrid attention mechanism that can efficiently weave together local and global visual features. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that RT-Counter successfully breaks the accuracy-speed trade-off in TOOC. While achieving a competitive MAE of 13.30 on FSC147, RT-Counter operates at 112.48 FPS, making it 7.4x faster and over 4$\times$ more parameter-efficient than the existing leading methods in TOOC. Our work aims at balancing high accuracy and real-time performance in TOOC. Code is available at: https://github.com/Jason-Mar1/RT-Counter.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cucurbituril-based anion-conducting membranes with supramolecular nanopores

作者:

Nanoporous anion-conducting membranes have gained considerable interest for their potential to reduce resistance in electrochemical devices1–4. Current pore-forming methods, such as backbone engineering through polymers of intrinsic microporosity5,6 or covalent organic and metal–organic frameworks7,8, however, suffer from limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis. Here we establish a supramolecular strategy that overcomes these limitations by constructing uniform, dynamic nanopores. Co-assembly of the rigid macrocyclic host cucurbit[7]uril with the cationic polymer guest quaternized poly(piperidinium-terphenyl) yields a robust network of nanometre-scale channels while simultaneously enhancing mechanical and chemical stability. The dynamic host–guest interactions allow the pore structure to fluctuate on picosecond and angstrom scales. This transient environment supports low-friction hydroxide migration through a Grotthuss mechanism, producing a marked enhancement in ionic conductivity. This bottom-up design principle provides a versatile new tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways and promises to advance electrochemical reactors with respect to energy efficiency, operational stability and the production of high-purity products. A supramolecular strategy, in which uniform, dynamic nanopores are constructed, overcomes the limitations of limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis in nanoporous anion-conducting membranes, providing a versatile tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Nickel and Dimed: How a Common Earth Element is Short-Changing Our Health

Nickel has been studied for a long time as an environmental contaminant but less so in its connection to population health. It does not announce itself as loudly as its transition metal brethren like mercury and cadmium, but its chemical properties permit it to be deleterious as a low-dose, chronic exposure, particularly among those with immune systems sensitized to it. There is a growing evidence base and vocabulary to discuss nickel's affect on health. However, in the U.S., there are not recent, reliable estimates of the share of the population with a nickel allergy, let alone how much nickel Americans are exposed to through their diet. This paper seeks to close this evidence gap by creating a new dataset of dietary nickel and other heavy metal exposure and assessing how high levels of dietary nickel exposure shape local demand for health care services. We use soil data from the U.S. Geological Survey and data on agricultural product transport from FoodFlows.org to create a county-level dietary nickel exposure index. We then use a large electronic health record database and double machine learning to estimate how demand for primary care services varies across levels of dietary nickel exposure. We find that counties with high nickel exposure experience an increase in the share of primary care office visits for symptoms highly suggestive of nickel poisoning. This result survives multiple hypothesis test corrections and placebo tests. Our research suggests that nickel has harmful effects on individual health whose exposure can be measured at a population level, and is shaping primary care across the U.S.

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

ASTRA: A Scalable Next-Generation ATCO Training Simulator with Autonomous Simpilots

arXiv:2606.18319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air Traffic Control Operators (ATCOs) are vital in ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient flow of air traffic, yet training capacity is constrained by reliance on specialized human trainers known as simpilots, who must role-play both pilots and ATCOs in a simulated airspace. Existing automated solutions rely on Western-centric speech models that perform poorly in Singaporean operational contexts, with off-the-shelf systems exhibiting Word Error Rates (WER) of up to 107.80% on Singaporean-accented aviation speech. We introduce ASTRA, an end-to-end training simulator that automates these simpilot roles through a pipeline that transcribes ATCO speech, interprets instructions, and generates appropriate pilot and ATCO responses using locally adapted voice models. Our fine-tuned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) pipeline reduces WER to 23.45%, substantially outperforming existing approaches in this domain. Beyond traffic simulation, ASTRA incorporates an AI-assisted performance evaluation framework that assesses trainee radiotelephony communications across accuracy, brevity, and completeness, achieving post-optimization scores of 91.7%, 88.2%, and 86.9%, respectively. Built on open-source foundations such as DSPy and Unsloth, this approach enables scalable, standardized ATCO assessment while reducing instructor workload.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Non-Parametric Machine Text Detection via Multi-View Gaussian Processes

Adversarial conditions such as paraphrasing and targeted style transfer sharply degrade the accuracy of machine text detectors. A document, however, carries multiple complementary signals (e.g., stylistic features, likelihood and rank-order features, and structural features), and an attack that suppresses one may leave others intact. While a parametric classifier can learn to combine these features given sufficient supervision, classifiers are prone to making confidently incorrect predictions when the distribution shifts (e.g., novel attacks or unseen language models). To address this, we propose a multi-view, non-parametric detection framework that extracts complementary feature views from the same document and aggregates per-view evidence through a Gaussian process ensemble. By aggregating evidence across views, an adversary must simultaneously defeat multiple independent axes of detection, substantially raising the cost of evasion. The Gaussian process formulation additionally provides calibrated probabilities and principled abstention on out-of-distribution inputs, supporting reliable deployment in high-stakes settings. We evaluate on three benchmarks spanning diverse generators and attacks: the DetectRL and RAID benchmarks, and the PAN2025 shared task and demonstrate that our multi-view detector maintains strong performance under the considered attacks, outperforming existing approaches against held out attacks.

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

RAID: Semantic Graph Diffusion for True Cold-Start and Cross-Lingual Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models show strong transfer performance when given a non-empty history window. However, true cold-start scenarios, where a new item has no prior observations, violate this assumption. We propose RAID (Retrieval-Augmented Iterative Diffusion) a framework, which replaces history-based correlation learning with metadata-driven semantic retrieval and graph-conditioned diffusion. RAID maps textual metadata into a shared semantic space using a frozen multilingual embedding model and constructs an inductive retrieval graph that extends naturally to unseen items. It first forms a base forecast by aggregating information from semantically related neighbors, then refines this forecast with a gated diffusion module to model residual uncertainty. Under a strict true cold-start protocol, RAID outperforms strong foundation models and competitive baselines on both forecasting accuracy and prediction interval coverage, while reducing inference latency by an order of magnitude through non-autoregressive decoding. The shared semantic space also enables zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, allowing a model trained on English descriptions to generalize to items described in other languages without direct supervision.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Comparison of count-based and clustering definitions of multimorbidity and their association with prevalence of multimorbidity, health profiles, and mortality: A cohort study of UK Biobank participants

by Gabriella C. Silva, Aurore Fayosse, Louis Jacob, Séverine Sabia, Archana Singh-Manoux, Benjamin Landré Background Multimorbidity, the presence of several chronic conditions, is linked to higher mortality and healthcare use and thus poses a major challenge for aging populations. While most studies rely on simple counts of conditions, clustering approaches have been proposed to describe patterns of co-occurring diseases. We aimed to evaluate the extent to which these methodological choices influence prevalence and association with health profiles and mortality. Methods and findings Using UK Biobank baseline data (n = 474,397), collected between 2006 and 2010, we compared six count-based definitions of multimorbidity based on different condition lists (extended, most prevalent, or body systems) and thresholds (≥2 versus ≥3 conditions). We also applied a clustering analysis to characterize subtypes of multimorbidity among participants with at least two chronic conditions. We compared prevalence and associations with concurrent health outcomes (polypharmacy, self-rated health, frailty, falls, surgery, chronic pain), blood-based measures (C-reactive protein, Cystatin-C, HDL, LDL Cholesterol, IGF-1), and 3- and 10-year mortality risks. Analyses were undertaken separately in men and women using multivariable regression models adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics and body mass index. Multimorbidity prevalence ranged from 1.0% (cluster-based) to 35.3% (count-based). Count-based definitions using lists with more conditions yielded higher prevalence. Higher thresholds identified more severe health profiles on all measured health outcomes, blood-based measures, but not higher mortality risks. Associations with blood-based measures were more pronounced using clustering, with the highest differences from the standard definition distributed across clusters. Odds ratios for 3-year mortality ranged from 1.44 [1.26; 1.64] to 4.60 [3.73; 5.62] for men and 1.35 [1.07; 1.69] to 3.83 [2.78; 5.14] for women. For 10-year mortality, they ranged from 1.42 [1.34; 1.50] to 3.86 [3.46; 4.30] in men and 1.29 [1.21; 1.39] to 3.33 [2.93; 3.77] for women, with clustering identifying groups with low prevalence and high mortality risks. Findings should be interpreted in light of the selected nature of the UK Biobank cohort and the cross-sectional assessment of several health indicators. Conclusion Operational definitions of multimorbidity substantially influence prevalence estimates, while associations with mortality appear more robust across count-based approaches. Clustering analyses provide complementary insights into heterogeneity within multimorbid populations. Future translational studies are warranted to determine how multimorbidity definitions can be optimized to ultimately improve clinical management and health outcomes in practice.

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

Hardy-type self-testing and exposedness of tripartite GHZ correlations

arXiv:2512.16242v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlocality can be witnessed either through Bell-inequality violations or through logical contradictions such as Hardy's paradox. In the bipartite two input two outcome scenario, these two routes have distinct geometric behavior: CHSH-maximal correlations are exposed points of the quantum set, whereas known Hardy-type self-testing correlations on the no-signaling boundary are non-exposed. Here we show that this bipartite intuition fails in the tripartite two input two outcome scenario. We study the tripartite instance of a multipartite Hardy-type paradox and prove that the correlation attaining the maximal Hardy success probability self-tests the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state and the associated measurements. Although this correlation lies on the no-signaling boundary, we show that it is an extremal and exposed point of the quantum correlation set. Moreover, it coincides with the correlation attaining the maximal violation of the Mermin inequality. Thus, in the tripartite GHZ scenario, the logical-paradox and Bell-inequality routes to nonlocality select the same exposed quantum boundary point. We also establish a robust version of the self-test, showing that small deviations from the ideal Hardy constraints imply quantitative closeness to the target state and measurements. Our results reveal a qualitative geometric difference between bipartite and tripartite Hardy-type nonlocality and suggest a broader investigation of exposedness for multipartite Hardy correlations in the multiparty setting.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

KGEdit: Ambiguity-Aware Knowledge Graphs for Training-Free Precise Video Generation and Editing

In recent years, training-free video generation has progressed remarkably. However, when handling complex textual instructions, existing methods still suffer from semantic ambiguity, incorrect concept binding, and cross-frame inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose KGEdit, a structured semantic control framework for text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models. Specifically, we first construct an ambiguity-aware knowledge graph (AAKG) to disentangle and disambiguate the input prompt, converting it into four types of structured semantics: identity, relation, attribute, and negative constraints. We then design a structured semantic injection module (SSIM) to inject these semantic signals into key layers of the diffusion Transformer, enabling fine-grained semantic control. In addition, we introduce a temporal-aware semantic control (TASC) module that dynamically schedules semantic objectives according to the stage-wise characteristics of the denoising process, further improving semantic alignment and temporal consistency. Experiments show that KGEdit outperforms existing methods in editing precision and temporal stability, while offering higher efficiency and controllability in text-driven interaction scenarios.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Manga109-v2026: Revisiting Manga109 Annotations for Modern Manga Understanding

Manga is a culturally distinctive multimodal medium and one of the most influential forms of Japanese popular culture. As AI systems increasingly target manga understanding, OCR, and translation, Manga109 has become a foundational dataset for manga-related AI research. However, the current Manga109 dataset contains inaccurate transcriptions and coarse annotations, which do not align well with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding tasks. In this work, we revisit the dialogue text annotations of Manga109 and identify five categories of annotation issues, including inaccurate transcriptions, missing text regions, overlapping dialogue and onomatopoeia, and under-segmented speech balloons. To address these issues, we combine OCR-based issue detection and manual revision to construct Manga109-v2026, revising approximately 29,000 dialogue annotations. Our revisions better align Manga109 with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding systems while preserving expressive structures characteristic of manga.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LAST: Bridging Vision-Language and Action Manifolds via Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment

We take a Gromov-Wasserstein perspective on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning, where the goal is to make the relational geometry of action representations compatible with the semantic geometry of VL embeddings. However, this alignment is non-trivial due to the mathematical heterogeneity between the domains: the semantic space of vision-language is topologically linear and isotropic, whereas the physical manifold of robotic action is non-Euclidean and anisotropic. Their disjoint metric structures render direct regression ill-posed. To resolve this incompatibility, we introduce LAST (Lie-algebraic Action Space Tokenizer), which reconstructs the action space to establish local metric compatibility with the VL modality via a two-stage transformation: (1) Global Topological Linearization: linearizing the action manifold via Lie-algebraic mapping, converting trajectories into a fixed-length, physically additive representation. (2) Local Metric Discretization: hierarchically discretizing the representation into schemas and whitened residuals, yielding approximately isotropic local charts that are statistically aligned with the semantic metric. By resolving the structural mismatch at both global and local levels, LAST enables VLA models with superior convergence and generalizability.

15.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks

Specialized clinical artificial intelligence (AI) tools are entering medical practice despite scarce independent evaluation. We quantitatively evaluate two clinical AI tools, OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI, built on large language models (LLMs) against three frontier LLMs: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6. Our evaluation has three stages: (1) 500 MedQA questions testing medical knowledge, (2) 500 HealthBench items measuring alignment with clinicians and (3) the real clinical queries (RCQ) benchmark, built from 100 de-identified queries from physicians to a general-purpose language model in a live clinical environment. For the RCQ benchmark, 12 US clinicians performed randomized, blinded review of model outputs, producing 1,800 model–question annotations. Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings. In an independent evaluation, frontier large language models outperformed specialized clinical artificial intelligence tools on medical knowledge, clinician alignment and real-world clinical queries.

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

Agentomics: Economic Foundations for the Valuation, Attribution, and Pricing of AI Agents in Human-AI Workflows

作者:

arXiv:2606.14769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being deployed as productive resources in organizational workflows, yet existing evaluation methods primarily measure isolated technical performance rather than economic contribution. This paper introduces Agentomics, a workflow-based framework for valuing, attributing, and pricing human and artificial agents. The framework models a workflow as a configuration of heterogeneous agents whose collective performance determines gross value, deployment cost, reliability, and expected failure loss. Workflow value is treated as a team-level quantity that may include complementarities, substitution effects, bottlenecks, and nonlinear production; additive stage-level value is only a special case. Building on this workflow model, the paper formulates AI deployment as a coalition-formation problem and defines coalition value as the incremental net surplus generated relative to a benchmark human workflow. The Shapley value is then used to attribute economic surplus among participating AI agents, yielding a principled connection among valuation, accountability, and market pricing. The resulting Shapley pricing equilibrium provides a normative benchmark for assessing whether agent prices reflect expected marginal contribution. A security-operations case study illustrates how the framework accounts for productivity gains, deployment costs, reliability losses, and coalition-level complementarities in hybrid human–AI workflows.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stein's method for the matrix normal distribution

arXiv:2601.11422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work presents the first systematic development of Stein's method for matrix distributions. We establish the basic essential ingredients of Stein's method for matrix normal approximation: we derive an extended-generator-based Stein identity from a matrix Ornstein-Uhlenbeck diffusion with two-sided scales, provide an explicit semigroup representation for the solution of the Stein equation, and obtain regularity estimates for the solution. The new methodology is demonstrated in three examples: (i) smooth Wasserstein distance bounds to quantify the matrix central limit theorem (a didactic example), (ii) a Wasserstein distance bound for the matrix normal approximation of the centered matrix $T$ distribution, and (iii) a Stein's method-of-moments approach to estimating the row and column covariance factors of the matrix normal, yielding a flexible class of weighted flip-flop Stein estimators that generalize Dutilleul's classical flip-flop algorithm and naturally accommodate row/column importance weights, systematic missingness, and projection onto structured covariance families. The latter two examples are intrinsically matrix-valued and cannot be treated using naive vectorization.

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

DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry without Daylight Tax

Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated strong performance and flexibility in efficient end-to-end scene geometry estimation from image streams. However, their reliance on visible-light appearance makes them vulnerable in dark and low-visibility environments, where RGB cues are severely degraded and geometric evidence becomes ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose DarkVGGT, an RGB-T feed-forward geometry framework that uses physics-aware thermal modeling for robust 3D estimation in low-light scenes. DarkVGGT introduces two complementary modules. First, physics-inspired thermal factorization extracts emissive-dominant, geometry-consistent thermal cues while isolating sparse reflective residuals that may introduce geometric ambiguity. Second, geometry-shared thermal routing isolates modality-invariant geometric structures from thermal-specific patterns, selectively injecting reliability-aware structural guidance into the RGB stream. Together, these components enable accurate thermal-informed geometry estimation under degraded RGB conditions while largely preserving performance in well-lit environments. Experiments on low-visibility RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both depth and camera pose estimation over existing feed-forward geometry baselines.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Very large cliques in a scale-free random graph

arXiv:2606.18722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this short article we consider a preferential attachment random graph model with edge steps, studied by Alves, Ribeiro and Sanchis. Starting with an initial graph $\mathbb{G}_1$ formed by a vertex with a self-loop attached to it, the model evolves as follows. At every subsequent (discrete) time step, either with probability $p$ we add a vertex to the graph and connect it to exactly one of the older vertices selected with probability proportional to its degree, or with probability $1-p$ we add one edge between two existing vertices, both selected (independently) with probability proportional to their degrees. Let $\omega(\mathbb{G})$ be the clique number of a graph $\mathbb{G}$, i.e.\ the number of vertices in a largest complete subgraph of $\mathbb{G}_{}$. Alves, Ribeiro and Sanchis showed that, for any given $\varepsilon>0$, we have $\omega(\mathbb{G}_{2t})\geq t^{\frac{1-p}{2-p}(1-\varepsilon)}$ with high probability (i.e.\ with probability tending to $1$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$). Here we strengthen this bound by showing that, for any function $f:\mathbb{N}\mapsto \mathbb{N}$ that satisfies $f(t)\rightarrow \infty$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$, with high probability \[\omega(\mathbb{G}_{2t}) = \Omega\left(t^{\frac{1-p}{2-p}}\Big(\log^{\frac{1}{2-p}}(t)f(t)\Big)^{-1}\right).\]

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Finite-Width Neural Tangent Kernels from Feynman Diagrams

arXiv:2508.11522v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural tangent kernels (NTKs) are a powerful tool for analyzing deep, non-linear neural networks. In the infinite-width limit, NTKs can easily be computed for most common architectures, yielding full analytic control over the training dynamics. However, at infinite width, important properties of training such as NTK evolution or feature learning are absent. Nevertheless, finite width effects can be included by computing corrections to the Gaussian statistics at infinite width. We introduce Feynman diagrams for computing finite-width corrections to NTK statistics. These dramatically simplify the necessary algebraic manipulations and enable the computation of layer-wise recursion relations for arbitrary statistics involving preactivations, NTKs and certain higher-derivative tensors (dNTK and ddNTK) required to predict the training dynamics at leading order. We demonstrate the feasibility of our framework by extending stability results for deep networks from preactivations to NTKs and proving the absence of finite-width corrections for scale-invariant nonlinearities such as ReLU on the diagonal of the Gram matrix of the NTK. We numerically implement the complete set of equations necessary to compute the first-order corrections for arbitrary inputs and demonstrate that the results follow the statistics of sampled neural networks for widths $n\gtrsim 20$.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Volterra Generative Models

arXiv:2606.18071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models typically use Brownian perturbations, which provide tractable reverse-time dynamics but impose memoryless noising. We introduce Volterra generative models, a continuous-time score-based framework whose forward process injects path-dependent noise through fractional kernels. To handle the non-Markovian and non-semimartingale dynamics, we construct finite-dimensional Markovian lifts using Gaussian quadrature in both regimes and a hybrid finite-difference exponential approximation in the smooth regime. We prove squared error bounds, derive an augmented linear-Gaussian forward process, and show that the learning can remain data-dimensional by considering residual states and analytic auxiliary Gaussian scores. We also identify covariance and reverse-time degeneracies caused by shared Brownian factors and signed smooth-regime weights. The degeneracy motivates stabilized conditioning and, for stiff larger lifts, a Gaussian-bridge reconstruction sampler. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that persistent fractional perturbations with small Markovian lifts can improve score-based generation on MNIST and provide a promising extension to natural images, while the bridge sampler provides a stability mechanism for larger lifts.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Optimization for Learning Nonlinear MPC in Autonomous Agent Navigation

arXiv:2606.14763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time autonomous navigation in dynamic, unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robotics. We propose a map-free framework that tightly integrates reactive rolling-horizon planning with nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). At each control cycle, a LiDAR-based Gaussian occupancy representation is constructed and used to generate collision-free trajectories via A* search, which are then tracked by a CasADi/IPOPT MPC formulation incorporating a smooth sigmoid obstacle barrier. To improve robustness to parameter sensitivity, we adopt an offline Bayesian optimization scheme based on Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE), which identifies near-optimal controller parameters with respect to a composite navigation objective. In addition, a Gaussian Process surrogate is used to analyze parameter sensitivity and provide insight into the optimization landscape. The proposed framework is robot-agnostic and is evaluated on the Unitree Go2 quadruped in simulation using Gazebo, followed by deployment on the physical robot. Experimental results show that parameters tuned in simulation transfer effectively to hardware, maintaining comparable performance without additional tuning. The full system achieves up to a 90.0\% navigation success rate when deployed, along with a 38.9\% average improvement in the evaluation metrics across simulated environments.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Robust Mixed-State Cluster States and Spurious Topological Entanglement Negativity

arXiv:2504.16165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate 1D and 2D cluster states under local decoherence to assess the robustness of their mixed-state subsystem symmetry-protected topological (SSPT) order. By exactly computing fidelity correlators via dimensional reduction of effective statistical mechanics models, we pinpoint the critical error rate for strong-to-weak spontaneous breaking of strong subsystem symmetry. Without resorting to the replica trick, we demonstrate that mixed-state SSPT order remains remarkably robust up to the maximal decoherence rate when noise respects strong subsystem symmetry. Furthermore, we propose that the mixed-state SSPT order can be detected by a constant correction to the area-law scaling of entanglement negativity, termed spurious topological entanglement negativity. This also highlights that topological entanglement negativity, a widely used diagnostic for mixed-state topological order, is generally not invariant under finite-depth quantum channels.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semi-Supervised Noise Adaptation: Transferring Knowledge from Noise Domain

arXiv:2606.00558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transfer learning aims to facilitate the learning of a target domain by transferring knowledge from a source domain. The source domain typically contains semantically meaningful samples (*e.g.*, images) to facilitate effective knowledge transfer. However, a recent study observes that the noise domain constructed from simple distributions (*e.g.*, Gaussian distributions) can serve as a surrogate source domain in the semi-supervised setting, where only a small proportion of target samples are labeled while most remain unlabeled. Based on this surprising observation, we formulate a novel problem termed *Semi-Supervised Noise Adaptation* (SSNA), which aims to leverage a synthetic noise domain to improve the generalization of the target domain. To address this problem, we first establish a generalization bound characterizing the effect of the noise domain on generalization, based on which we propose a Noise Adaptation Framework (NAF). Extensive experiments demonstrate that NAF effectively leverages the noise domain to tighten the generalization bound of the target domain, leading to improved performance. The codes are available at https://github.com/AIResearch-Group/SSNA.