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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Hua-Chen New Theory of Economic Optimization

arXiv:2504.19134v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Between 1957-1985, Chinese mathematician Loo-Keng Hua pioneered economic optimization theory through three key contributions: establishing economic stability's fundamental theorem, proving the uniqueness of equilibrium solutions in economic systems, and developing a consumption-integrated model 50 days before his death. Since 1988, Mu-Fa Chen has been working on Hua's theory. He introduced stochastics, namely Markov chains, to economic optimization theory. He updated and developed Hua's model and came up with a new model (Chen's model) which has become the starting point of a new economic optimization theory. Chen's theory can be applied to economic stability test, bankruptcy prediction, product ranking and classification, economic prediction and adjustment, economic structure optimization. Chen's theory can also provide efficient algorithms that are programmable and intelligent. {Stochastics} is the cornerstone of Chen's theory. There is no overlap between Chen's theory, and the existing mathematical economy theory and the economics developments that were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics between 1969 and 2024. The distinguished features of Chen's theory from the existing theories are quantitative, calculable, predictable, optimizable, programmable and can be intelligent. This survey provides a theoretical overview of the newly published monograph [5rw24]. Specifically, the invariant of the economic structure matrix, also known as the Chen's invariant, was first published in this survey.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the Berry-Keating Operator

arXiv:2606.24405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review here two different viewpoints on the Berry-Keating operator $H_{BK}$, whose connection to the Riemann hypothesis remains an intriguing and not yet fully understood question, despite considerable attention in the recent literature. In particular, we propose two somehow complementary views to $H_{BK}$: the first is based on a purely Hilbertian point of view, on dilation operators and on the Mellin transform. The second is a distributional approach, with a specific view to ladder operators, generalized eigenstates of $H_{BK}$, and generalized coherent states.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limits of the single-curve interface and outermost loops in the planar random field Ising model

arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.

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

A Practical Evaluation Method for Long-Form Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech-to-speech translation (SimulS2ST) enables real-time cross-lingual communication, but existing evaluation has focused largely on short or pre-segmented speech rather than long-form, continuous input. Prior approaches are difficult to reproduce and make assumptions that do not hold for end-to-end systems. We present a practical evaluation method for long-form SimulS2ST. Given source speech, pre-segmented source transcripts, and reference translations, we run automatic speech recognition (ASR) and forced alignment on the generated target speech to recover token-level timestamps, then apply a sentence-embedding-based aligner to match the target text to its corresponding source sentences. This enables sentence-level computation of latency and quality metrics, including YAAL and xCOMET, which are then aggregated into final system-level scores. Experiments on representative SimulS2ST systems show that the method is effective in practice and reveal that current systems suffer from substantial latency accumulation on long speech.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY ABNORMALITIES IN PREECLAMPSIA WITH SEVERE FEATURES.

Purpose To determine the frequency of echocardiographic abnormalities in women with preeclampsia with severe features. To describe the spectrum and types of echocardiographic abnormalities associated with preeclampsia with severe features. Method This is a Prospective observational study conducted in Vani Vilas hospital attached to Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute, Bangalore from January 2023 to December 2025. 560 pregnant women diagnosed with severe preeclampsia(SPE) were included in the study. Chronic hypertension without superimposed preeclampsia, underlying cardiac diseases and previous history of peripartum cardiomyopathy were excluded from the study. Transthoracic echocardiography-TTE (2D ECHO) was done to evaluate cardiac structure and function. Echocardiographic abnormalities identified during the study were documented and analysed using descriptive statistical methods. Results Abnormalities in ECHO was noted in 23.03%. A unique finding was the documentation of elevated pulmonary artery systolic pressures (PASP) suggestive of Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) (PASP >35 mm HG) among 20.25% of the participants. It was also the commonest abnormality on ECHO. Mild PH was the commonest (15.71%), moderate PH was seen in 3.92% and severe PH in 0.71% of cases. Next most frequent abnormality was moderate to severe valvular regurgitation (10%), followed by left ventricular hypertrophy (5.53%). Diastolic dysfunction (DD) was seen in 3.92%, systolic dysfunction(SD) in 3.57%, chamber dilatation in 3.57% and LV global hypokinesia in 3.03% cases of SPE Conclusion Preeclampsia with severe features (SPE) is associated with 23.03% abnormalities on echocardiography. SPE is associated with systolic dysfunction, diastolic dysfunction, chamber dilatation, valvular regurgitation, left ventricular hypertrophy and pulmonary hypertension.

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

A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection

arXiv:2606.17775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed trigger acts as a low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and forwarding only these to a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN and evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Collective Emission in LH2 Assembly Beyond the Point-Dipole Approximation

arXiv:2606.11227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collective emission in light-harvesting assemblies is governed by the local transition dipole and finite geometry of emitting units, a fact that point-dipole approximation obscures. To go beyond this picture, we develop a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian using the quantum electrodynamic dyadic Green's tensor for a purple bacteria. We construct it for the isolated 24-bacteriochlorophyll conical frustum and its P42$_1$2 crystallographic assembly. The P42$_1$2 unit-cell symmetry is found to invert the bright-dark ordering of the single ring, placing subradiant states at the low-energy end and revealing the entire crystal to be the energy-harvesting entity. Tilt-driven switching is activated only in crystal geometries where the finite dipole-carrier (LH2) lies perpendicular to the growth plane. Vacancy and orientational disorder work only in cooperation to renormalize the switching threshold from higher polar angles to lower values.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

The 1/4-phenomenon of placement probabilities of tilings in the Aztec diamond

arXiv:2512.08377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider domino tilings of the Aztec diamond. Using the Domino Shuffling algorithm introduced by Elkies, Kuperberg, Larsen, and Propp in arXiv:math/9201305, we are able to generate domino tilings uniformly at random. In this paper, we investigate the probability of finding a domino at a specific position in such a random tiling. We prove that this placement probability is always equal to $1/4$ plus a rational function, whose shape depends on the location of the domino, multiplied by a position-independent factor that involves only the size of the diamond. This result leads to significantly more compact explicit counting formulas compared to previous findings. As a direct application, we derive explicit counting formulas for the domino tilings of Aztec diamonds with $2\times 2$-square holes at arbitrary positions.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

SLEEPING-DISCO 9M: A large-scale pre-training dataset for generative music modeling

arXiv:2506.14293v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Sleeping-DISCO 9M, a large-scale pre-training dataset for music and song. To the best of our knowledge, there are no open-source high-quality dataset representing popular and well-known songs for generative music modeling tasks such as text-music, music-captioning, singing-voice synthesis, melody reconstruction and cross-model retrieval. Past contributions focused on isolated and constrained factors whose core perspective was to create synthetic or re-recorded music corpus (e.g. GTSinger, M4Singer) and arbitrarily large-scale audio datasets (e.g. DISCO-10M and LAIONDISCO-12M) had been another focus for the community. Unfortunately, adoption of these datasets has been below substantial in the generative music community as these datasets fail to reflect real-world music and its flavour. Our dataset changes this narrative and provides a dataset that is constructed using actual popular music and world-renowned artists.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Fast Human Attention Prediction for Fixation-guided Active Perception in Autonomous Navigation

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Semantic Editing with Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations

Editing the content of an image with a pretrained text-to-image model remains challenging. Existing methods often distort fine details or introduce unintended artifacts. We propose using coupled stochastic differential equations (coupled SDEs) to guide the sampling process of any pre-trained generative model that can be sampled by solving an SDE, including diffusion and rectified flow models. By driving both the source image and the edited image with the same correlated noise, our approach steers new samples toward the desired semantics while preserving visual similarity to the source. The method works out-of-the-box, without retraining or auxiliary networks, and achieves high prompt fidelity along with near-pixel-level consistency. These results position coupled SDEs as a simple yet powerful tool for controlled generative AI. Project page: https://z-jianxin.github.io/syncSDE-release/. Code: https://github.com/Z-Jianxin/syncSDE-release.

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

EPMF: Efficient Perception-aware Multi-sensor Fusion for 3D Semantic Segmentation

We study multi-sensor fusion for 3D semantic segmentation that is important to scene understanding for many applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing fusion-based methods, however, may not achieve promising performance due to the vast difference between the two modalities. In this work, we investigate a collaborative fusion scheme called perception-aware multi-sensor fusion (PMF) to effectively exploit perceptual information from two modalities, namely, appearance information from RGB images and spatio-depth information from point clouds. To this end, we project point clouds to the camera coordinate using perspective projection, and process both inputs from LiDAR and cameras in 2D space while preventing the information loss of RGB images. Then, we propose a two-stream network to extract features from the two modalities, separately. The extracted features are fused by effective residual-based fusion modules. Moreover, we introduce additional perception-aware losses to measure the perceptual difference between the two modalities. Last, we propose an improved version of PMF, i.e., EPMF, which is more efficient and effective by optimizing data pre-processing and network architecture under perspective projection. Specifically, we propose cross-modal alignment and cropping to obtain tight inputs and reduce unnecessary computational costs. We then explore more efficient contextual modules under perspective projection and fuse the LiDAR features into the camera stream to boost the performance of the two-stream network. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show the superiority of our method. For example, on nuScenes test set, our EPMF outperforms the state-of-the-art method, i.e., RangeFormer, by 0.9% in mIoU. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ICEORY/PMF.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

People are turning to AI chatbots to plug gaps in health information

A systematic assessment of health-related queries to a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence highlights shortfalls in health-care provision and the responsibilities of AI companies. A systematic assessment of health-related queries to a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence highlights shortfalls in health-care provision and the responsibilities of AI companies.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry

Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Denoising Implicit Feedback for Cold-start Recommendation

arXiv:2606.19658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Implicit feedback is widely used in recommender systems due to its accessibility and generality, yet it usually presents noisy samples (e.g., clickbait, position bias). Meanwhile, recommenders inevitably face the item cold-start problem due to the continuous influx of new items. We identify that cold items are more prone to noisy samples due to the aforementioned factors, and researchers often overlook the significance of denoising implicit feedback for cold items. Previous denoising studies usually identify noisy samples based on heuristic patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate noise through sample selection or re-weighting. However, these methods have limited adaptability and are ineffective in cold-start scenarios. To achieve denoising implicit feedback for cold-start recommendation, we propose a model-agnostic denoising method called DIF. First, user preferences for content remain stable, which allows us to infer pseudo-labels indicating whether a user is interested in a cold item through content-similar warm items. Furthermore, to improve pseudo-label accuracy, we model the confidence of pseudo-labels based on the content similarity between the cold item and warm items, and then aggregate multiple pseudo-labels for each sample. Finally, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of the noisy sample label by considering its relative entropy and the cold-start status of the item, which adaptively guides the role of pseudo-labels to correct the noisy labels at the sample level. DIF's superiority is supported by both theoretical justification and extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The method has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application Kuaishou and has significantly improved various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

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

Influence-Guided Concolic Testing of Transformer Robustness

arXiv:2509.23806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Concolic testing for neural networks alternates concrete execution with constraint solving to search for inputs that flip model decisions. We present a concolic tester for Transformer classifiers that uses SHAP estimates to rank pending path predicates by their impact on the current prediction. To support self-attention with multiple heads in execution backed by SMT solving, we implement attention semantics in pure Python that are compatible with the solver and make the softmax boundary explicit by concretizing exponentiation arguments. We evaluate our method on CIFAR-10 across three compact Transformer classifiers, ResNet18, and VGG16 under a one-pixel budget and a 900s horizon. Across the 500 model–input pairs in this matched comparison, our method achieves 60% success, compared with 15% for a differential evolution baseline that treats the model as a black box. In the primary two-layer Transformer branch-ordering study, SHAP-based predicate prioritization raises success from 56% to 60% and reduces median attack time by 51%. These results show that influence-guided path exploration can make concolic testing a practical way to find adversarial examples in Transformer models.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Connecting Quantum Tomography and Quantum Retrodiction

arXiv:2606.23777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum tomography and quantum retrodiction are traditionally viewed as separate inference tasks: tomography reconstructs quantum states from measurement data, whereas retrodiction infers past quantum states from observed outcomes. We show that the two are manifestations of the same underlying principle. We prove that the Petz recovery map associated with a measurement channel is precisely the gradient update of the log-likelihood used in maximum-likelihood tomography. Consequently, repeated applications of the Petz map monotonically increase the likelihood. Extending beyond measurement channels, we derive a noncommutative generalization of the Petz map from the gradient of a generalized likelihood for arbitrary quantum channels. The resulting iterative procedure maximizes the likelihood and provides a general framework for quantum tomography, establishing a direct bridge between retrodiction, recovery maps, and statistical inference.

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

Steerable Cultural Preference Optimization of Reward Models

It is essential for large language model (LLM) technology to serve many different cultural sub-communities in a manner that is acceptable to each community. However, research on LLM alignment has so far predominantly focused on predicting a unified response preference of annotators from certain regions. This paper aims to advance the development of alignment models with a more global outlook, that are able to accurately represent the preferences of subcommunities and do not exhibit excessive bias towards any of them. We focus on the development of reward models for this purpose and present a novel reward model training algorithm (SCPO) that can incorporate diverse cultural preferences in a balanced manner. Our method results in performance increases of the minority reward model of up to 7 points over the baseline model across two datasets, PRISM and GlobalOpinionQA, and across 7 countries. SCPO is up to 280% more training data-efficient than full-data finetuning of reward models. In addition, we perform analysis of bias by separately evaluating on the preference of subcommunities and show that excessive bias is mitigated via our weighting method. Our code is available at https://github.com/minsik-ai/Steerable-Cultural-Preference

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

Dual-State Slot Attention: Decoupling Appearance and Identity for Video Object-Centric Learning

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-level representations without supervision. However, existing slot-based methods struggle to maintain stable object identity in challenging settings such as rapid motion and partial occlusion. First, they typically encode both the per-frame appearance of an object and its identity across frames in a single slot vector, creating an objective conflict that leads to slot swapping: reconstruction requires sensitivity to transient visual changes, whereas temporal consistency requires invariance to them. Second, the token renormalization used in Slot Attention can amplify weakly attending slots, allowing them to absorb tokens from other objects and destabilize slot-to-object correspondence. We propose Dual-State Slot Attention (DSSA), a fully self-supervised framework that addresses these limitations by separating appearance from identity and by reducing spurious updates from weakly matching slots. DSSA decomposes each slot into a local state for per-frame appearance and an identity state for temporally stable object information, thereby aligning reconstruction and temporal consistency with separate representations. The identity state is updated through a learned recurrent transition that acts as a temporal filter on the local state, while competition-modulated aggregation (CMA) down-weights updates from weakly matching slots and prevents them from absorbing tokens from other objects. Experiments on MOVi-C, MOVi-D, and YouTube-VIS demonstrate that DSSA consistently improves segmentation quality and temporal consistency over prior methods, while also yielding stronger downstream object recognition and video dynamics prediction. Code and models will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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

Latent Thought Flow: Efficient Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead. Latent reasoning moves deliberation into continuous space, but existing methods mostly learn deterministic or reward-maximizing paths, lacking a principled way to allocate probability across trajectories with different correctness and costs. We propose Latent Thought Flow (LTF), which models reasoning as variable-length continuous trajectories and trains a sampler to match a reward-induced posterior over answer quality and computation cost. We instantiate this with a continuous GFlowNet using stochastic latent transitions. To handle sparse answer supervision, we introduce an Entropy-Weighted Subtrajectory Balance objective for intermediate rewards and a reference-prior regularizer to anchor exploration. Experiments under finetuning and transfer learning settings show that LTF outperforms explicit CoT and latent reasoning baselines, improving accuracy by 9.5% while reducing reasoning length by 27.2% on average compared with strong latent reasoning baselines.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QPU-scale randomized benchmarking via Bell-pair injection

arXiv:2606.20123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror randomized benchmarking (MRB) is an established technique that provides a global error metric at the scale of a whole QPU. To expand upon this we introduce Mirror Quantum Awesomeness (MQA), a hybrid protocol that adds a structured entangling layer to MRB circuits. This enables per-edge correlation dynamics to be tracked via mutual information while preserving the MRB infidelity estimate. The resulting analysis of the injected entangled pairs locates a critical circuit depth, beyond which rudimentary error mitigation techniques can be expected to fail. A topological variant, Topological MQA, supplies a second critical depth via a decoder based on the surface-code decoding problem. Both are validated in simulation and demonstrated on the 156-qubit \texttt{ibm\_fez} and \texttt{ibm\_kingston} processors, where MQA closely agrees with MRB on the entanglement infidelity and the critical depth for \texttt{ibm\_fez} is found to be $\sim 50$.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Improved State Readout in NV Centers using Regression Models and Rabi Driving

arXiv:2606.23454v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Readout of state populations in nitrogen-vacancy centers from fluorescence measurements at room-temperature is routinely achieved via contrast-based calibration. The fidelities achieved by this conventional approach are limited by reducing the dynamical fluorescence behaviour of the NV center to a scalar value, and calculating the population of each possible state independently. To address these limitations, we use regression models trained on experimental data to map the fluorescence signals onto ideal simulated populations. Additionally, we enhance the informational content of the fluorescence signals by performing measurements during induced Rabi oscillations. Our results demonstrate that including these dynamical signals significantly reduces state readout errors across multiple tested models. Notably, linear ridge regression performs nearly on par with a non-linear kernel-based model, showing that simple models already capture the relevant mapping between the enhanced fluorescence signals and the underlying state populations. This data-driven approach provides a robust alternative that achieves higher fidelities than conventional calibration in our setting, paving the way for high-fidelity state readout in solid-state quantum registers.

23.
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.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

‘Footballers are not superheroes’: we must tackle the mental and physical pressures of elite sport

作者:

As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge. As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Effect of tenofovir on the outcomes of COVID-19 in persons with chronic hepatitis B: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden.

Background: Patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) may have an increased risk of severe COVID-19. Tenofovir has been hypothesized to confer protection against severe disease, but evidence is inconclusive. We evaluated the risk of severe COVID-19 among CHB patients treated with tenofovir compared with other nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs). Methods and findings: In this nationwide, registry-based cohort study, we included all adults with CHB and laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Sweden between February 2020 and July 2022. Data from national health and socioeconomic registers were linked using unique personal identification numbers (PINs). Patients with HIV, hepatitis C, or hepatitis D coinfection were excluded. Exposure was defined as tenofovir versus other NA therapy. The primary outcome was severe COVID-19, defined as hospitalization >2 days or death within 30 days of diagnosis. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), controlling for age, sex, comorbidities, vaccination, socioeconomic status, and region of birth. Among 5,877 CHB patients with COVID-19, 672 were receiving NA therapy (437 tenofovir, 235 other NAs). Severe COVID-19 occurred in 8.0% of tenofovir-treated patients and 14.5% of those receiving other NAs (unadjusted OR 0.52; 95% CI, 0.31-0.85). After adjustment, the association was attenuated and no longer significant (aOR 0.72; 95% CI, 0.39-1.31). Older age, comorbidities, and unvaccinated status were strongly associated with severe disease. Conclusions: The apparent protective effect of tenofovir against severe COVID-19 in unadjusted analyses was largely explained by confounding factors. The risk of severe disease was primarily driven by age, comorbidities, and vaccination status. Prevention of severe COVID-19 in patients with CHB should instead focus on vaccination and management of comorbidities.