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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

Novel symptoms associated with eclampsia could improve detection and save lives

by Alice Beardmore-Gray, Andrew Shennan Eclampsia is a life-threatening complication of pre-eclampsia, yet remains difficult to predict. In this Perspective, Alice Beardmore-Gray and Andrew Shennan highlight a recent study that identifies 10 novel prodromal symptoms of eclampsia, with potential to better predict which women are at risk and therefore reduce delays in intervention.

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

DIMOS: Disentangling Instance-level Moving Object Segmentation

Moving instance segmentation (MIS) attracts increasing attention due to its broad applications in traffic surveillance, autonomous driving, and animal tracking. Event cameras record asynchronous brightness changes, providing high temporal resolution and dynamic range, which makes them highly sensitive to motion information. By fusing event and image features, motion cues from events can complement spatial details from images, enhancing the performance of MIS. However, current multimodal MIS methods still struggle to segment small moving instances, as event cameras often yield sparse features under limited resolution. Moreover, event features entangle appearance attributes with motion cues, which further restricts effective cross-modal fusion. To address these challenges, we first propose a dual-disentangling feature extraction framework that separates and extracts appearance and motion information within both image and event modalities, thereby improving feature density. Subsequently, a multi-granularity cross-modal alignment is introduced to align distributionally and semantically consistent features across modalities, enabling more effective fusion with rich spatial and temporal details. The experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal MIS, especially for small instances under challenging conditions such as fast motion and low-light settings.

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

Who Should Lead Decoding Now? Tracking Reliable Trajectories for Ensembling Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge. Toward this, we first investigate the unique decoding dynamics of MDLMs. We find that successful generations exhibit stable confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions, while unreliable trajectories can often be corrected by injecting promising intermediate states from other models. Guided by this observation, we propose $TIE$ ($T$rajectory-based $I$terative $E$nsembling), a knowledge fusion framework in which MDLMs iteratively identify reliable decoding trajectories and relay them across models. TIE tracks confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions to determine which model currently follows a more reliable trajectory and selectively transfers partially denoised sequences across models. As the model on the more promising trajectory often changes across denoising steps, TIE allows different models to contribute complementary strengths at different stages of generation. Strong performance across diverse reasoning tasks, along with our analyses, suggests that TIE offers a practical approach to the underexplored problem of MDLM ensembling.

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

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution. The standard remedy is to collect multi-view teleoperation data for every failure case, but this scales poorly in both cost and time. We introduce Pose6DAug, a failure-driven data augmentation framework that turns a policy's own successful episodes into targeted demonstrations for its failure modes, without any new data collection. Our key insight is that each successful episode already encodes a physically valid action trajectory together with calibrated multi-view observations. By swapping only the manipulated object while preserving this trajectory, we obtain new and physically grounded demonstrations. However, naive 2D video editing breaks multi-view consistency and physical plausibility, particularly under heavy occlusion and egocentric viewpoints. Our method instead operates directly in 3D, anchoring the target object with an explicit mesh driven by a temporally coherent 6D pose trajectory, ensuring geometrically consistent renderings across all camera views. Fine-tuning a VLA on data augmented by our method improves success rates by 16.5% relative to the state-of-the-art baseline on novel objects, while preserving in-distribution performance. These results show that multi-view and physically consistent augmentation is a practical path to scalable VLA generalization.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Let Them Steal: Trapping Large Language Model Extraction Attacks with Knowledge Honeypot

arXiv:2606.15810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models deployed as commercial APIs are vulnerable to model extraction attacks, while existing defenses either act too late or degrade utility for legitimate users. We propose Knowledge Trap, a defense that redirects extraction attacks toward low-transferability knowledge through a Honeypot Knowledge Graph (HKG) and breadcrumb-guided exploration. Instead of blocking queries or perturbing outputs, Knowledge Trap consumes the attacker's limited query budget on knowledge with negligible downstream utility while preserving benign-user performance. Experiments in medical and financial domains show that Knowledge Trap reduces surrogate Agreement by 6.2\% on average without degrading legitimate-user accuracy, outperforming existing defenses that impose measurable user impact. These results suggest that defending knowledge-space traversal is a practical direction for mitigating LLM extraction attacks.

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

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exceptional Points as Manifestations of Analyticity Breakdown in the 't Hooft Model

作者:

arXiv:2606.10141v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We use the exactly-solvable t Hooft model of 1+1D large-N_c QCD as a rigorous laboratory for the breakdown of analyticity of a causal response function, the meson two-point function. A PT-symmetric deformation i gamma(x-1/2) of the light-cone meson operator, the analogue of an imaginary chemical potential, drives the lowest two mesons to an exceptional point (EP) at gamma_c. Recasting the resolvent as a Jacobi continued fraction yields gamma_c in closed form: 2 pi g^2 N_c at the two-pole level, converging to 7.966 g^2 N_c by depth five – an analytic, not numerical, threshold. The square-root exponent nu=1/2 is fixed by the 2x2 Jordan form and confirmed by finite-size scaling to N=1999. The breakdown has an unambiguous time-domain signature: the propagator norm is bounded for gamma < gamma_c, grows linearly at gamma_c (the Jordan secular law), and exponentially beyond – observable, since the deformed operator is a non-Hermitian Wannier-Stark ladder, in photonic and topolectrical analogues. The threshold is locked to confinement, gamma_c propto g^2 N_c, and recurs as a uniform EP cascade; a second, non-reciprocal deformation yields an exactly-exponential non-Hermitian skin effect. This is the first analytically-controlled instance of exceptional-point analyticity breakdown in a confining gauge theory.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SSD: Spatially Speculative Decoding Accelerates Autoregressive Image Generation

Autoregressive models excel in visual generation by treating images as 1D sequences of discrete tokens, mirroring language modeling. However, this flattening discards the intrinsic 2D spatial locality of visual signals, creating severe computational bottlenecks during inference. We introduce Spatially Speculative Decoding (SSD), a framework that aligns the predictive objective with the natural geometry of images. Rather than predicting only the immediate next token in a 1D sequence, our model simultaneously predicts the adjacent horizontal token and the token directly below it. By capitalizing on this 2D spatial correlation, spatially speculative decoding overcomes the memory wall in visual inference. Our approach accelerates autoregressive image generation by up to 13.3x while maintaining high fidelity on DPG-Bench and GenEval. Our results suggest that respecting the underlying geometry of vision unlocks massive computational efficiencies, paving the way for real-time, high-resolution autoregressive generative models.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Fisher-Geometric Sharpness and the Implicit Bias of SGD toward Flat Minima

arXiv:2606.20469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A widely held intuition in deep learning is that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) implicitly favors flat minima and that flat minima generalize better, but standard Euclidean measures of flatness such as the trace or maximum eigenvalue of the loss Hessian are not invariant under reparametrizations that preserve the network function, which undermines the theoretical foundations of this narrative. In this study we resolve this issue by grounding flatness in the Riemannian geometry of the statistical manifold induced by the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM). We define Riemannian sharpness mathematically and prove that it is invariant under smooth, function-preserving reparametrizations, which directly addresses the critique of Dinh et al. in the paper ``Sharp minima can generalize for deep nets''.We note that this invariance is a property of the true FIM; the diagonal empirical estimator used in practice (and in all experiments below) inherits invariance only approximately, and exact invariance under arbitrary reparametrizations would require structured estimators such as K-FAC. We formalize the gradient noise of mini-batch SGD as having a covariance structure proportional to the FIM, derive the stationary distribution of the resulting stochastic differential equation, and then show that the probability mass is exponentially concentrated at Riemannian-flat minima. A PAC-Bayes generalization bound controlled explicitly by SR formally links this geometric bias to test performance. Our experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 confirm that SR reliably tracks generalization in ways that Euclidean sharpness does not, and that its scaling with $\eta/B$ matches the theoretical predictions. Together these results provide a rigorous, reparametrization-invariant account of why flat minima generalize.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2602.10635v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop Omnisapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample's contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. Omnisapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Entanglement of Bethe States

arXiv:2606.14140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the quantum entanglement of Bethe states across a family of integrable spin chains, including the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ model, its higher-spin generalizations (XXX$_s$), and the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain. For on-shell eigenstates, we perform a comprehensive scan of the bipartite entanglement entropy across the entire spectrum of finite chains with periodic boundary conditions, and identify the Bethe solutions that minimize and maximize the entanglement. These extremal solutions follow systematic, spin-dependent patterns in the Bethe quantum numbers. In the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ spin chain, for the antiferromagnetic chain, the state with minimal entropy always coincides with the lowest-energy state (the ground state) within a given fixed-magnon sector. For the higher-spin XXX$_s$ model, however, the lowest-entropy state is not always identical to the ground state, and can even be the state of highest energy. By contrast, the Bethe roots that maximize entropy exhibit considerably more intricate structure. Our analysis further reveals how special Bethe root configurations, such as singular and strange solutions, affect entanglement, and it uncovers characteristic entanglement features in the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain that are absent from compact spin chains. For off-shell Bethe states, we develop an optimization algorithm that extremizes the entanglement entropy over rapidity distributions, enabling us to explore the maximum entanglement achievable by a Bethe state without imposing the Bethe ansatz equations.

12.
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.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Steering Emotional Dynamics for Art Therapy: Controllable Narrative Script Generation through Hierarchically Guided LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Art therapy plays a vital role in emotional healing, in which narrative creation acts as the primary vehicle for emotional expression. Given the inherently dynamic nature of emotions during healing, narratives with finely controlled emotional fluctuations enable individuals to safely project inner conflicts and achieve emotional catharsis. Recently, with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated narrative generation technology has provided a new pathway to support such artistic designs. However, while existing methods can produce fluent texts, they struggle to generate narratives that adhere to specified affective trajectories, failing to meet the demands of emotion-oriented psychological healing. To address these issues, this paper proposes EC-Script, an LLM agent-based framework that enables hierarchical control of the affective trajectory in narrative generation for emotional healing. To ensure that the generated narratives strictly follow the given emotional patterns, EC-Script establishes overall narrative direction through Emotion-Trajectory Planning, propels scene-level plot development with Character-Driven Scene Generation, and regulates local emotional changes of characters via Emotion-Controlled Script Writing. Ultimately, it outputs scene-by-scene script content that remains highly consistent with the preset affective trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that EC-Script significantly outperforms baseline methods in affective trajectory adherence, exhibiting excellent and reliable emotional controllability, thereby providing effective technical support for AI-assisted emotional healing scenarios.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Detecting undisclosed LLM-generated content in parliamentary texts

In this paper, we evaluate the extent of undisclosed LLM-generated content in texts from the parliaments of the United Kingdom and Sweden. In many areas, such as in journalism or in academic writing, there are often requirements to clearly disclose whether AI tools, such as LLMs, have been used. In the case of parliamentary texts, the guidelines on disclosure of AI use are more vague. However, in order to maintain transparency and retain public trust, it is generally recommended that parliamentarians should state whether or not they have used AI when writing texts, such as parliamentary motions. Here, we train an interpretable (glass-box) text classifier using pre-LLM parliamentary texts and LLM-generated versions of such texts. We then apply the classifier to a test set containing recent parliamentary texts, finding a steady increase in undisclosed LLM use, in both parliaments, from 2022 onwards.

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

Quantum speedup from nonclassical polarization

arXiv:2603.23124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a framework for identifying nonclassical speedups in systems with polarization, likewise spin degrees of freedom. By confining the dynamics to the manifold of angular momentum coherent states, which act as the classical reference in this case, we compute the speed limit that bounds the rate of change of the state achievable without generating quantum coherence. A comparison with the unrestricted quantum speed limit enables the quantitative identification of speedups arising from polarization nonclassicality. We apply this framework to the cross-Kerr interaction, demonstrating a persistent speedup scaling as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N})$ with the photon number $N$ with a parity effect in favour of even photon numbers. The results establish polarization nonclassicality as a genuine dynamical resource, linking quantum coherence to quantum-enhanced evolution speeds in nonlinear photonic systems.

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

Anomaly Detection for Sparse and Irregular Multivariate Time Series with Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.18898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) is critical for a wide range of application areas, such as industrial monitoring, cybersecurity, or healthcare. Real-world data is often sparse, irregularly sampled or partially observed, yet existing methods assume uniformly sampled time series. We propose a generative approach based on Latent SDEs that projects the observed time series on a continuous-time stochastic dynamical system, directly being able to handle missing observations and irregular sampling, while also naturally capturing possible cyclic behavior that many real-world use cases inherently possess. Experiments on six anomaly benchmark datasets show that our proposed method ranks first among state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate that our method remains robust under severe data sparsity, while performance significantly degrades for the tested baseline methods. These results highlight latent SDEs as a natural inductive bias for anomaly detection in multivariate time series, especially in presence of real-world irregularities.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Explosion and non-explosion in pure birth Crump–Mode–Jagers branching processes

arXiv:2601.06850v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this short note, we provide an explicit sufficient condition for non-explosion of Crump–Mode–Jagers branching processes with pure birth reproduction. It shows that the standard sufficient condition for explosion, namely the convergence of the series of reciprocals of the birth rates, is – at least for rate sequences without excessive oscillations – remarkably close to being necessary. At the same time, it is not necessary in full generality: we construct a counterexample which also yields a general preferential attachment tree without fitness with an infinite path and no vertices of infinite degree, thereby answering an open question previously raised in the literature.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, focal aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require to include a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features also for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, providing also substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Physics-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling for AI-Generated Video Detection

AI-generated videos have achieved near-perfect visual realism (e.g., Sora), urgently necessitating reliable detection mechanisms. However, detecting such videos faces significant challenges in modeling high-dimensional spatiotemporal dynamics and identifying subtle anomalies that violate physical laws. In this paper, we propose the first physics-driven AI-generated video detection paradigm based on probability flow conservation principles. Specifically, we propose a statistic called Normalized Spatiotemporal Gradient (NSG), which quantifies the ratio of spatial probability gradients to temporal density changes, explicitly capturing deviations from natural video dynamics. Leveraging pre-trained diffusion models, we develop an NSG estimator through spatial gradients approximation and motion-aware temporal modeling without complex motion decomposition while preserving physical constraints. Building on this, we propose an NSG-based video detection method (NSG-VD) that computes the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) between NSG features of the test and real videos as a detection metric. Last, we derive an upper bound of NSG feature distances between real and generated videos, proving that generated videos exhibit amplified discrepancies due to distributional shifts. Extensive experiments confirm that NSG-VD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16.00% in Recall and 10.75% in F1-Score, validating the superior performance of NSG-VD. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZSHsh98/NSG-VD.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SpikeDecoder: Realizing the GPT Architecture with Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.12287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Transformer architecture is widely regarded as the most powerful tool for natural language processing, but due to a high number of complex operations, it inherently faces the issue of high energy consumption. To address this issue, we consider Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their naturally event-driven approach to processing information. However, this inherently makes them difficult to train. Often, many SNN-based models circumvent this issue by converting pre-trained ANNs. More recently, attempts have been made to design directly trainable SNN-based adaptations of the Transformer model structure. Although the results showed great promise, the application field was computer vision. Moreover, the proposed model incorporates only encoder blocks. In this paper, we propose SpikeDecoder, a fully SNN-based implementation of the Transformer decoder block, for applications in natural language processing. In a series of experiments, we analyze the impact of exchanging different blocks of the ANN model with spike-based alternatives to identify trade-offs and significant sources of performance loss. We further investigate the role of residual connections and the selection of SNN-compatible normalization techniques. Besides the work on the model architecture, we formulate and compare different embedding methods to project text data into spikes. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based decoder block reduces the theoretical energy consumption by 87% to 93% compared to the ANN baseline.

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

MEAL: A Benchmark for Continual Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2506.14990v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmarks play a central role in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet their computational constraints often shape what is studied. Despite the motivation of lifelong learning, most continual RL papers consider only 3-10 sequential tasks, as CPU-bound environments make longer sequences impractical. Meanwhile, continual learning in cooperative multi-agent settings remains largely unexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce MEAL (Multi-agent Environments for Adaptive Learning), the first benchmark for continual multi-agent RL. By leveraging JAX and GPU acceleration, MEAL enables training on sequences of 100 tasks in a few hours on a single GPU. We find that long task sequences reveal failure modes that do not appear at smaller scales.

22.
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 ([&ge;]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.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian for Projective Quantum Feature Maps

arXiv:2606.13641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projected quantum feature maps provide a strategy for using quantum processors as feature generators for classical machine-learning models. Building on counterdiabatic Ising-glass and one-dimensional Heisenberg PQFMs, we introduce a generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian-based PQFM that provides a unified way to encode classical features through local Pauli fields and pairwise two-qubit Pauli interactions. This construction allows distinct classical variables to be embedded along different Pauli axes of the same qubit, increasing the information density of shallow circuits while remaining compatible with hardware constraints. We develop and implement these methods in pqfmlib, a publicly available Python library for constructing, executing, and benchmarking Hamiltonian-based PQFMs.We then benchmark the generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs against reference PQFMs on four biomedical classification datasets under a nested cross-validation protocol with paired statistical tests. Quantum features are generated using both IBM quantum processors with up to 156 qubits and statevector simulations. Our results show that the generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian family provides the most consistent pattern of statistically supported gains over matched classical baselines, although the performance of all methods depends on the dataset, encoding strategy, measured observables, and hardware conditions. These findings support generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs as a promising route toward near-term quantum utility.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Querying an astronomical database using large language models: the ALeRCE text-to-SQL system

arXiv:2606.18108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a text-to-SQL (structured query language) system based on large language models (LLMs) using in-context learning and apply it to the Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events (ALeRCE) astronomical database. ALeRCE is a community broker for the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The system enables users to query the database in natural language (NL) and generates executable SQL queries. To develop and evaluate the system, we constructed a dataset of 110 NL/SQL pairs. We propose a step-by-step generation framework comprising four modules: schema linking, query classification, prompt decomposition, and self-correction. The performance of thirteen LLMs is evaluated using in-context learning and prompt engineering techniques. Text-to-SQL performance is assessed using the perfect-match (PM) rate for row identifiers (e.g., object identifiers) and column identifiers (i.e., column names). The proposed step-by-step framework consistently outperforms a direct-inference baseline, while the self-correction module consistently reduces execution errors. For Claude Opus 4.6, PM performance on row (column) identifiers is high for simple queries, reaching 0.97 (0.94), and decreases with query complexity to 0.44 (0.72) for medium queries and 0.59 (0.49) for hard queries. Among the thirteen evaluated models, the best-performing LLMs for the text-to-SQL task are Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, and GPT-5.2-Codex.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tripartite entanglement of remote atomic qubits

arXiv:2606.17173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed entanglement across multi-node quantum networks is essential for a wide range of quantum technologies, including modular quantum computers, distributed sensing and metrology, and multi-party secure communication protocols. Such large-scale quantum networks will require photonic interconnects to generate and sustain entangled states across localized nodes. Previously, three-node distributed Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states have been generated between solid-state qubits and atomic ensembles, but not yet in the platform of individual atomic qubits, which can be replicated, detected, and individually controlled with high fidelity. Here we report the first fully-distributed GHZ state of qubits across a three-node quantum network of single atomic memories, using photonic interconnects. We achieve a bounded fidelity of $0.841(17) \leq \mathcal{F} \leq 0.881(17)$ at an entanglement generation rate of 0.095(5)/sec and measure a clear violation of Mermin's inequality while closing the detection loophole for the first time in a fully-distributed multipartite entangled state.