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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29

Availability, appeal, and addictiveness by design: Tobacco and nicotine industry deliberate targeting of youth

by Raglan Maddox, Becky Freeman, Charlotta Pisinger, Emily Banks Contemporary tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed, marketed, and distributed to maximize youth appeal, uptake, dependence, and use. Youth uptake is a predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize product availability, appeal, and addictiveness. In recognition of the World No Tobacco Day 2026 theme, "unmasking the appeal", this Perspective by Raglan Maddox and colleagues discusses how tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed and marketed to maximize youth appeal, and highlight the need for policies to ensure greater industry accountability and to tackle concerning uptake trends.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Clifford disentanglers for entanglement reduction in molecular electronic structure simulations

arXiv:2606.12056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is a key bottleneck limiting the efficiency of tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structures. Here, we systematically assess and extend Clifford disentanglers as a structure-preserving approach to entanglement reduction: they can modify the entanglement structure of qubit wavefunctions while retaining the Pauli-string form of qubit Hamiltonians. To enable a practical search over Clifford transformations, we classify Clifford operators by their action on the Schmidt spectrum across a bipartition, reducing the two- and four-qubit search spaces to 20 and 91392 representatives, respectively. Embedded in an iterative Clifford-augmented matrix product state framework, these transformations reduce the energy errors at fixed bond dimension for the molecular test cases studied and mitigate the dependence on orbital orderings and fermion-to-qubit mappings. We further show that Clifford disentanglers can also benefit quantum simulations such as the shallow-circuit variational quantum eigensolver calculations. Together, these results establish Clifford disentanglers as a useful structure-preserving entanglement-engineering tool for tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structure, while also clarifying their correlation dependence and motivating future developments.

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

Bridging data-driven priors via the score function for posterior sampling – Comparative review and experimental study

arXiv:2606.14800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper reviews how a diverse set of popular data-driven priors commonly used in Bayesian inverse problems can be unified through their respective score functions. By framing these priors under this common perspective, we show that they can benefit from their straightfoward and effective integration into a recently proposed sampling algorithm. The applicability of this common framework is illustrated by considering several data-driven priors, namely regularization-by-denoising, normalizing flow-based priors, score-based generative models, and convex-ridge regularizers. For these four particular priors, the performance of the method is evaluated when conducting image inpainting and single image super-resolution. These results, as well as those obtained when restoring real images acquired in a geological context, demonstrate the efficiency of the method. This unified framework proves versatile enough to handle any posterior distribution defined by a broad class of score function-based priors, beyond the specific cases considered in this paper.

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

Beyond Visual Cues: CoT-Enhanced Reasoning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation has emerged as a dominant research problem in medical image analysis, mitigating annotation scarcity by leveraging consistency regularization on unlabeled data. However, existing approaches operate predominantly via visual pattern matching, relying heavily on pixel-level similarities. This visual-centric dependency often falters in clinical scenarios characterized by the visual-semantic mismatch, where visually similar lesions warrant distinct diagnostic conclusions, thus failing to capture the underlying diagnostic logic used by experts. To address this, we move beyond visual cues and propose CERS (CoT-Enhanced Reasoning Segmentation), a framework that integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to distinguish pathologically distinct cases. Specifically, we construct a knowledge pool enriched with linguistic reasoning descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs). A semantic-aware reference selection strategy is introduced to identify historical evidence, filtering candidates first by morphology, and then refining them via CoT consistency to eliminate hard negatives. Furthermore, a multi-scale coordinate attention module (MCAM) is designed to effectively fuse this reasoning-derived context into the decoding process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CERS against state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in resolving boundary ambiguities and semantic inconsistencies. The code is available at https://github.com/cymasuna/CERS.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Radar-Guided Polynomial Fitting for Metric Depth Estimation

We propose POLAR, a novel radar-guided depth estimation method that introduces polynomial fitting to efficiently transform scaleless depth predictions from pretrained monocular depth estimation (MDE) models into metric depth maps. Unlike existing approaches that rely on complex architectures or expensive sensors, our method is grounded in a fundamental insight: although MDE models often infer reasonable local depth structure within each object or local region, they may misalign these regions relative to one another, making a linear scale and shift (affine) transformation insufficient given three or more of these regions. To address this limitation, we use polynomial coefficients predicted from cheap, ubiquitous radar data to adaptively adjust predictions non-uniformly across depth ranges. In this way, POLAR generalizes beyond affine transformations and is able to correct such misalignments by introducing inflection points. Importantly, our polynomial fitting framework preserves structural consistency through a novel training objective that enforces local monotonicity via first-derivative regularization. POLAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three datasets, outperforming existing methods by an average of 24.9% in MAE and 33.2% in RMSE, while also achieving state-of-the-art efficiency in terms of latency and computational cost.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Evidence-guided AI regularization for suicidal ideation prediction in pediatric bipolar disorder

Background: Suicide prediction models in psychiatry often rely on purely data-driven feature selection, which can produce unstable and clinically opaque predictor sets in modest-sized samples. We developed Evidence-Based AI LASSO (EBAL), an evidence-guided regularization framework that incorporates curated clinical evidence into feature-specific penalty factors for interpretable prediction. Methods: Baseline data from 136 youth with confirmed bipolar spectrum disorder in the Greater Houston Area Bipolar Registry were analyzed using 20 candidate clinical predictors. Forty higher-level evidence documents on suicidality and related predictor domains were curated through a structured evidence synthesis workflow and indexed as an auditable evidence corpus. An open-weight large language model assigned feature-specific penalty factors using a prespecified scoring rubric, and these penalties were used to fit a weighted LASSO model. EBAL was compared with a standard evidence-agnostic LASSO using nested leave-one-out cross-validation. Results: For suicidal ideation, EBAL achieved an AUROC of 0.768, balanced accuracy of 0.757, sensitivity of 0.758, and specificity of 0.757. The standard LASSO achieved an AUROC of 0.760 and balanced accuracy of 0.715. EBAL improved balanced accuracy (+0.042, p=0.010) and Matthews correlation coefficient (+0.079, p=0.010), while retaining fewer stable predictors than standard LASSO (11/20 vs 18/20). The strongest positive predictors were current depressed mood, duration of mood disorder illness, and comorbid generalized anxiety disorder. For suicidal behavior, both models performed near chance and retained all candidate predictors. Limitations: The study was cross-sectional, single-site, and modest in sample size, with no external validation cohort. Conclusions: EBAL produced a sparser and more clinically coherent model for suicidal ideation in pediatric bipolar disorder, but did not improve prediction of suicidal behavior. These findings support evidence-guided regularization as a transparent strategy for aligning psychiatric prediction models with prior clinical knowledge while preserving interpretability.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TwinBI: An Agentic Digital Twin for Efficient Augmented Interactions with Business Intelligence Dashboards

arXiv:2606.13731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Business intelligence (BI) increasingly combines dashboard interaction with LLM-based assistance, but these two modes often fall out of sync during multi-step analysis. As users switch between direct dashboard manipulation and natural-language queries, it becomes difficult to preserve a consistent analytical state across filters, hierarchies, metrics, and chart context. We present TwinBI, an agentic digital-twin framework that couples an LLM-based agent system with an executable BI dashboard state. TwinBI unifies conversational interaction, dashboard manipulation, semantic grounding, and provenance tracking through a shared analytical state reconstructed from a unified interaction log. It also exposes artifacts such as schema views, SQL, logs, and an /insights command for state-grounded analytical summaries. We evaluate TwinBI in two complementary ways. In a controlled A/B benchmark with the same backbone agent, TwinBI improves exact-match accuracy from 43.3% to 63.3%, partial-credit accuracy from 48.3% to 70.8%, and substantially reduces timeout rate from 40.0% to 10.0% relative to Dashboard alone. In a usability study, participants benefited from the integrated dashboard-and-chat workflow, with high task accuracy, moderate workload, and favorable ratings for state-aware interaction mechanisms. These results suggest that TwinBI improves both agent-level analytical reliability and user-facing analytical support by turning visible dashboard state into richer actionable context. Our dataset and source code are available at: https://github.com/simonjisu/TwinBI

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Analysis of the asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In an asymmetric shelf shuffle, a deck of $n$ cards is dealt sequentially from the bottom and assigned one of the $m$ shelves uniformly at random. The card is placed at the top of the assigned shelf with probability $p$, and at the bottom of the assigned shelf with probability $(1-p)$. Analysis of the shelf shuffle has gained much attention recently, and the case $p=1/2$ was first treated by Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes [Ann. Appl. Prob. 23 (2013), no. 4, 1692–1720]. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the shelf shuffle to general $p\in (0, 1)$. In particular, we study the distribution of cycles, cycle lengths, number of descents, number of valleys, number of inversions, and the RSK shape of a permutation obtained from an asymmetric shelf shuffle. Our results extend the analysis of Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes to arbitrary $p$. Furthermore, our analysis of the distribution of descents and inversions is new even for $p=1/2$.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Daily briefing: How many elementary particles are there?

作者:

Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality. Estimates range from 17 to 995.5. Plus, one man with paralysis is using a brain–computer interface at home and GLP-1 obesity drugs appear to boost testosterone and sperm quality.

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

LatticeBridge: Rare-Event Sequential Inference for Faithful Structured Sequence Synthesis

Structured sequence generation often requires a model to satisfy several input-derived constraints in a single output. Standard decoding methods may assign high probability to fluent continuations while placing low mass on continuations that realize all required anchors jointly. We study this regime as a rare-event sequential inference problem. LatticeBridge combines a compact prefix language model, instance-compiled surface automata, and a twisted sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) decoder with resampling, multilevel splitting, and a source-support proposal term derived from instance-provided phrases. The constraint representation is compiled from each input instance and does not rely on manually curated lexical classes. On 2,610 attainable validation tasks spanning CommonGen, E2E NLG, and WikiBio, the particle decoder improves exact anchor satisfaction and mean anchor coverage over greedy, beam-filtered, and best-of-k ancestral baselines under a shared proposal model. Since exact anchor satisfaction alone does not rule out unsupported attribute substitutions, the evaluation reports required-anchor coverage, source coverage, source-intrusion diagnostics, overlap, runtime, and particle statistics jointly. The benchmark characterizes the faithfulness-overlap-latency frontier under a fixed proposal model.

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

Style-CCL: Content-Preserving Style Transfer via Curriculum Continual Learning

Content-Preserving Style transfer, given content and style references, remains challenging for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to entangled content and style features. With a reverse triplet synthesis pipeline to build a million-scale training set and a dual-branch Style-Content DiT (SC-DiT) that decouples style and content via separate ROPE embeddings and causal masking, we observe that such a one-stage training paradigm on mixed style categories causes semantic styles to dominate, hindering texture style learning, and harming content preservation. To address these issues, we propose Style-CCL, a Multi-Stage Curriculum Continual Learning framework that trains SC-DiT from semantic (easy) to texture (hard) styles, and from clean to synthetic data, with Random Memory Rehearsal across stages to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Style-CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance in three core metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing

Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Tantalum as a base material for superconducting integrated circuits

arXiv:2606.13750v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of superconducting integrated circuits for quantum applications is fundamentally limited by material-related losses. Tantalum, as an emerging material for next-generation quantum circuits, has attracted considerable attention in recent years after demonstrating breakthrough performance in both superconducting microwave resonators and qubits. Concurrently, a growing body of work is devoted to the operation of tantalum-based circuits and related fabrication techniques. This interest is further stimulated by tantalum thin films polymorphism resulting in a variety of its crystalline structure, superconducting properties, coherence, etc. Furthermore, tantalum circuits exhibit distinctive features in cryogenic experiments, which have not been observed in aluminum- or niobium-based ones. In this review, we summarize the recent research of tantalum thin films growth and phase selection mechanisms on various substrates, key aspects of fabrication and performance of superconducting circuit, including a material first-principles theoretical study. In conclusion, we address a number of open issues, including the role of \b{eta}-phase impurities, the effect of hydrofluoric acid solutions on chain characteristics, and the anomalous behavior of {\alpha}-tantalum chains at cryogenic temperatures.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

V2P-Manip: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Monocular Human Videos

Achieving autonomous robotic dexterous manipulation requires precise, human-like action sequences at scale. As a scalable supplement to costly teleoperation data, extracting trajectories with both visual fidelity and physical plausibility from monocular videos represents a promising frontier in embodied AI. To this end, we introduce V2P-Manip, an efficient framework designed to learn dexterous manipulation policies directly from human demonstration videos. We establish an efficient, integrated pipeline encompassing 3D asset acquisition, trajectory estimation, and dexterous policy learning. To bridge the gap between visual perception and physical constraints, we introduce a two-stage refinement process to enforce spatial alignment and physical consistency. Evaluations on the TACO and OakInk benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in pose accuracy, adaptability to unstructured environments, and training efficiency. Ultimately, experimental results confirm an average success rate of over 75% across multiple synthetic manipulation tasks and validate the adaptability of the extracted manipulation priors across diverse dexterous hand embodiments.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Asymptotically Optimal Circuit Depth for Diagonal Unitary Synthesis and Compilation on Two-Dimensional Grids

arXiv:2606.17589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diagonal unitaries are a fundamental but resource-intensive class of quantum operations, arising as the phase separators of QAOA and the time-evolution blocks of Hamiltonian simulation. Under all-to-all connectivity their optimal depth is established, but on nearest-neighbor hardware general-purpose compilers fall back on heuristic search, which yields no analyzable cost bound and becomes intractable at the very sizes where depth is the bottleneck. We address synthesis and compilation jointly. On the synthesis side, we develop a Gray-Path Framework (GPF) that realizes any $n$-qubit diagonal unitary in asymptotically optimal $R_z$ and CNOT depth $O(2^n/n)$ without ancillas. Our main result is that compiling GPF onto a two-dimensional nearest-neighbor grid preserves this optimality: routing adds depth $\Theta(2^n/n)$ and gate count $\Theta(2^n)$. Because GPF fixes its entire interaction structure in advance, routing reduces to scheduling a known sequence, with no heuristic search. We give the construction both with and without ancillas: the ancilla-free, cost-optimized layout is a two-row grid, and a $2k$-row layout introduces a space–time tradeoff that cuts depth by $1/k$ while remaining asymptotically optimal for the enlarged register; both are deterministic and analyzed in closed form. The same complexity is also attained on a linear nearest-neighbor chain, so the preservation is topology-independent, holding on any architecture that contains such a chain. All routing bounds are closed-form, giving the concrete resource estimates that heuristic compilers cannot provide at scale.

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

SpikF-GO: Spiking Fourier Graph Operators for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks, demonstrating strong performance in computer vision and robotics. More recently, SNNs have been applied to time series forecasting (TSF), with methods exploring spiking temporal backbones, spike-compatible positional encodings, Fourier-domain processing, and redesigned neuron dynamics. However, existing SNN forecasting approaches process variables independently, lacking explicit mechanisms for modeling inter-variable dependencies. This is a critical limitation in multivariate settings, where cross-variable correlations carry substantial predictive information. We propose Spiking Fourier Graph Operators (SpikF-GO), which addresses this gap by combining a hypervariate graph formulation in which every scalar observation becomes a graph node with spike-driven spectral processing. SpikF-GO introduces a Hard Concrete frequency gate for learnable sparse frequency selection and a Complex LIF gate that applies independent spiking neurons to real and imaginary Fourier components, preserving binary, event-driven computation throughout the spectral domain. We further present a variant incorporating Central Pattern Generator-based positional encodings for stronger long-range temporal modeling. Evaluated on eight benchmarks under a unified experimental protocol, SpikF-GO achieves the best average rank among all SNN methods and outperforms its ANN counterpart, FourierGNN, at reduced energy cost. SpikF-GO maintains competitive accuracy even at substantially smaller embedding dimensions, thereby achieving significant energy reductions. To our knowledge, this is among the first works to bring graph-based multivariate modeling into the spiking domain for TSF and the first to provide a unified comparison across SNN forecasting architectures under a common experimental protocol.

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

Light Interaction: Training-Free Inference Acceleration for Interactive Video World Models

arXiv:2605.31158v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interactive video world models generate video chunk by chunk in response to user-controlled camera movements, enabling applications such as real-time game simulation, virtual scene navigation, and embodied AI training. However, scaling to long interactive trajectories is prohibitively expensive due to growing context memory, quadratic attention complexity, and repeated denoising steps. We present Light Interaction, a training-free inference acceleration framework for interactive video world models. Our key insight is that interaction naturally enables trajectory-dependent adaptive computation: retrieved spatial memory can be discarded during novel exploration, temporal context can be adjusted according to local latent dynamics, and early-step model outputs can be reused when the camera revisits familiar regions. Based on this insight, Light Interaction combines adaptive context management, denoising cache acceleration, and hardware-software co-designed 3D block sparse attention with fused Triton kernels. Evaluated on HY-WorldPlay and Matrix-Game-3.0, Light Interaction achieves up to 2.59x speedup without model retraining while maintaining competitive visual quality.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

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

From Agent Traces to Trust: A Survey of Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.04990v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents are evolving from passive text generators into autonomous systems capable of planning, tool use, retrieval, memory access, environmental interaction, and multi-agent collaboration. These capabilities expand agent autonomy, but also make agent behavior harder to verify, debug, and audit. Final-answer accuracy alone cannot explain how an output was produced, which evidence supported each claim, whether tool calls were justified, how memory influenced later decisions, or where failures originated. This survey examines evidence tracing and execution provenance as foundations for process-level accountability in trustworthy LLM agents. We define execution provenance as the typed graph of an agent execution and evidence tracing as its projection onto evidence-support relations. This perspective connects retrieval grounding, claim support, tool-use safety, memory lineage, observability, debugging, audit, and recovery within a unified framework. We introduce a taxonomy covering trace sources, evidence and execution units, provenance relations, tracing granularity and timing, representation forms, and trust functions. We then review key methodological directions, including provenance representation, evidence attribution, tool-use provenance, runtime guardrails, provenance-bearing memory, observability, and failure diagnosis. Finally, we discuss benchmarks, datasets, metrics, and open challenges for building provenance-aware, auditable, and recoverable agent systems.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative insights into the role of phages and plasmids in the persistence of nontuberculous mycobacteria in chloraminated drinking water

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are opportunistic pathogens that persist in chloraminated drinking water systems, yet the roles of phages and plasmids in their persistence remain largely unexplored. Using genome-resolved and quantitative metagenomics, we characterized NTM, phages, prophages, and plasmids in a chloraminated building plumbing system. Bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and viral operational taxonomic units (vOTUs) were quantified at mean concentrations of 8.41 * 10^7 and 8.00 * 10^8 copies/L, respectively, including seven NTM MAGs at a mean total concentration of 4.01 * 10^5 copies/L. NTM concentrations were highest at the site with the lowest bacterial and viral diversity. Predicted NTM-infecting virus concentrations were inversely related to NTM concentrations across sites, suggesting complex phage-host dynamics that warrant direct experimental investigation. NTM, putative phages, prophages, and plasmids encoded functions related to disinfectant tolerance, stress response, metal resistance, and secretion. These findings identify phage interactions, prophages, and plasmids as overlooked genomic and ecological dimensions of NTM persistence in engineered water systems.

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

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Molecular glue degraders of HuR suppress BRAF-mutant colorectal cancer

作者:

BRAF gain-of-function mutations, particularly BRAF(V600E), affect roughly 10% of all patients with colorectal cancer (CRC), and portend poor prognosis with limited therapeutic interventions. BRAF inhibitors such as encorafenib are ineffective due to MAPK pathway reactivation driven by BRAF dimerization. Combined inhibition of BRAF and EGFR, although approved therapies, results in short survival benefits and frequent treatment resistance and relapse1–3. Here, through rational chemical library design coupled with parallel proteomic screening, we identified dHuR as a molecular glue degrader of human antigen R (HuR), an RNA-binding protein that drives tumour growth, invasion and therapy resistance. dHuR binds to the CRBN ubiquitin ligase to create a unique benzofuran-tethered composite surface to recruit HuR as a neosubstrate by engaging its β-hairpin G-loop degron, as revealed by the cryo-electron microscopy structure of the ternary complex. dHuR abrogated BRAF expression by inducing its exon 18 skipping, and demonstrated superior suppression of BRAF-mutant CRC tumours including those gaining resistance to BRAF inhibitors. Finally, we performed kinome library CRISPR screening and revealed that inactivation of EGFR or MEK enhanced dHuR cytotoxicity, thus establishing a combinatorial strategy to treat patients with refractory BRAF-mutant CRC. Molecular glue degraders of the RNA-binding protein HuR have therapeutic potential for BRAF-mutant cancers.