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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Open-SWE-Traces: Advancing Dual-Mode Multilingual Distillation for Software Engineering Agents

arXiv:2606.16038v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The path toward autonomous software engineering is currently bottlenecked by a severe deficit of diverse, large-scale trajectory data. We address this by introducing \ourdataset, an expansive dataset of 207,489 agentic trajectories spanning nine programming languages (Python, Go, TS, JS, Rust, Java, PHP, C, C++). Sourced from 20,000 real-world PRs via OpenHands and SWE-agent harnesses, the dataset utilizes a hybrid-reasoning synthesis: Minimax-M2.5 generates trajectories with explicit "thinking" processes, while Qwen3.5-122B provides high-quality "non-thinking" traces. Filtered for permissive licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD) from SWE-rebench-V2, this data facilitates the training of models capable of long-horizon reasoning. We validate the dataset by fine-tuning the Qwen3-30B-A3B series (Thinking, Instruct, and Coder). The best performing model achieves resolve rates of 61.7% on SWE-bench Verified, 57.1% on SWE-bench Multilingual, and 36.8% on SWE-bench Pro. These results establish Open-SWE-Traces as a premier resource for distilling human-level software engineering capabilities into efficient, open-source agentic LLMs.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A risk-of-contagion index using a Bayesian based model for the COVID-19 epidemic in Mexico

During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited testing capacity and reporting delays complicated epidemic surveillance and decision-making in Mexico. We calibrated textit{covidestim}, a Bayesian nowcasting model, to estimate the total SARS-CoV-2 infections from reported cases and deaths using Mexican surveillance data. Disease-progression distribution priors were calibrated using Mexico City records and validated through comparisons with national seroprevalence surveys, hospitalization data, and annual reported severe-case rates across all states. Using the reconstructed estimates of active infections, we implemented an event-based risk framework that quantifies the probability of encountering at least one infectious individual in gatherings of different sizes. This probability was subsequently translated into a four-level epidemiological traffic-light indicator and computed at both state and municipality levels. The resulting estimates revealed substantial spatial heterogeneity that is obscured by state-level aggregation, particularly in states with marked differences between urban and rural municipalities. To evaluate consistency with public-health indicators, we compared the proposed risk classification with the official Mexican epidemiological traffic-light system, considering interpretable gathering sizes relevant to public-health decision making. Weekly reports derived from this framework were delivered to policymakers in the State of Queretaro in Mexico, as an anticipation tool for school reopening and public-space management. This demonstrates that this Bayesian reconstruction of infections combined with event-based risk metrics can provide an interpretable and generalizable municipality-level complement to routine surveillance systems, particularly in regions with limited testing capacity and heterogeneous local transmission dynamics.

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

Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivoting

作者:

Visual perception of urban streetscapes underpins evidence-based decisions in landscape planning, public health, and place-making. Yet models trained on a few well-photographed metropolises systematically misjudge underrepresented districts, propagating geographic bias into downstream policy. We address this gap with HVSP-LL, a lifelong learning framework that couples a stratified visual-semantic pivoting module with an equity-aware rehearsal mechanism. The pivoting module organises landscape concepts along a three-tier ontology (macro structure, meso composition, micro element) and aligns image features to learnable semantic anchors at each tier, providing transferable representations that resist distributional drift. The lifelong adaptation component sequentially absorbs new urban regions while constraining inter-region perception gaps through a worst-region sample-reweighting objective and a structurally-aware exemplar buffer. We evaluate HVSP-LL on a panoramic streetscape benchmark assembled from twelve cities across four continents and seven perceptual dimensions. The framework attains 0.834 Spearman correlation on the held-out city sequence, an absolute 6.1 point improvement over the strongest continual baseline, and shrinks the inter-city perception gap to 0.094 – a 38% reduction relative to the strongest continual baseline (0.151) and a 57% reduction relative to a representative regularisation baseline (0.218). Ablations confirm that each tier of the pivoting hierarchy contributes monotonically, and the equity-aware rehearsal converts mean backward transfer from -0.038 (without retention) to +0.013, eliminating catastrophic forgetting on the held-out sequence. Our results indicate that hierarchical anchoring is a practical pathway toward geographically equitable streetscape inference at city scale.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Fermionic Hamiltonian engineering with local control

arXiv:2606.17158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum simulators enable the exploration of complex quantum phenomena in condensed-matter systems by reproducing their dynamics on controllable quantum devices. However, experimental constraints often restrict the class of Hamiltonians that can be realized natively. Hamiltonian engineering addresses this limitation by expanding the set of accessible target Hamiltonians from a fixed system Hamiltonian defined by the hardware. We introduce a new framework for fermionic Hamiltonian engineering based on conjugating free evolution under the system Hamiltonian with sequences of experimentally feasible local fermionic unitaries. The required sequences and free-evolution times are obtained efficiently via a linear program. By interleaving system evolution with these local unitaries, our method realizes effective time evolution under a broad class of target Hamiltonians, with intrinsic robustness to finite-pulse-time errors. In particular, we demonstrate that arbitrary complex tunnelling coefficients can be realized, constrained only by the connectivity of the underlying system Hamiltonian. We illustrate this capability by engineering the dynamics of the non-interacting Harper-Hofstadter model on a 1088-mode lattice and an interacting Fermi-Hubbard chain with complex tunnelling coefficients. By construction, our approach avoids the continuous energy absorption inherent to Floquet engineering.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Effectiveness of Stress Management to Reduce Stress Eating for Women: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Intervention Studies

Objective: This systematic review and meta-analysis examined 1) the effects of stress management interventions on changes in stress eating for women, and 2) the longevity of these effects, by summarizing and assessing evidence from controlled and non-equivalent pretest-posttest intervention studies. Method: Five databases (PsycINFO, PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, CINAHL), existing sources, and grey literature were searched (February - June 2025). Studies that assessed stress eating or emotional eating, included a stress management intervention, and comprised at least 70% women were included. The primary outcome was reduction in stress eating. Data were pooled in meta-analyses using multi-level random-effects models and subset by follow-up period. Risk of bias was assessed via funnel plots and sensitivity analyses. Results: Sixty studies with 119 effect size estimates were included in the primary analysis. Pooled estimates indicated that stress management interventions significantly reduced stress eating (Hedges g = -0.4174, p < 0.001), with pre-post designs having larger effects than controlled trials. Subgroup analyses of follow-up periods found small effects in the short-term (before 3 months; Hedges g = -0.4202, p < 0.0001) and moderate effects for mid-term (3-6 months; Hedges g = -0.5886, p < 0.0001). Effects beyond 6 months were small and nonsignificant (Hedges g = -0.4370, p = 0.0660). Conclusion and Relevance: Stress management interventions appear to be effective for reducing stress eating for women, suggesting the potential to incorporate stress management in interventions targeting obesity. Effects may be only sustained 6 months post-intervention, suggesting the need for strategies to bolster long-term effectiveness.

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

OptEMA: Adaptive Exponential Moving Average for Stochastic Optimization with Zero-Noise Optimality

作者:

arXiv:2603.09923v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Exponential moving averages (EMAs) are a central component of widely used adaptive optimizers such as Adam. However, existing analyses of Adam-style methods often yield suboptimal guarantees in the zero-noise regime, rely on open-loop parameter schedules, or require prior knowledge of smoothness constants. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce OptEMA and analyze two complementary variants: OptEMA-M, which applies an adaptive, decreasing EMA coefficient to the first moment with a fixed second-moment decay, and OptEMA-V, which swaps these roles. At the heart of these variants is a Corrected AdaGrad-Norm coefficient schedule. This formulation renders OptEMA algorithmically closed-loop and Lipschitz-free, meaning its effective stepsizes are trajectory-dependent and require no parameterization via the Lipschitz constant. Under lower-boundedness, unbiasedness, bounded variance, average smoothness, and a bounded stochastic-gradient condition used to control the adaptive normalizers, we prove that both variants achieve the unified noise-adaptive rate $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} \left(T^{-1/2}+\sigma^{1/2}T^{-1/4}\right)$ for the averaged gradient norm. In the zero-noise regime, these bounds automatically reduce to the nearly optimal deterministic rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/2})$ without manual hyperparameter retuning.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Patcher: Post-Hoc Patching of Backdoored Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.02995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison safety alignment data to embed hidden triggers that bypass safety mechanisms. Existing defenses often require comprehensive attack information or multiple triggered examples, making them impractical when defenders only observe a single reported failure case without knowing whether it stems from a backdoor attack or a natural alignment bug. This paper presents Patcher, a post-hoc defense framework that repairs backdoored language models using only a single reported failure case and the model parameters. Patcher operates in two stages. First, it localizes backdoor triggers by computing response-conditioned gradient-based saliency scores and applying adaptive clustering to separate triggers from benign context. Second, it patches the model through a constrained fine-tuning objective that breaks the trigger-response association while preserving benign-task utility and robustness to non-triggered jailbreak attacks through KL-divergence constraints. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple backdoor attack strategies and demonstrate that Patcher successfully localizes triggers and neutralizes backdoors while maintaining model utility. We further show robustness against adaptive attacks designed to evade our defense. This work represents a significant step toward practical defenses against training-time attacks in deployed language models.

08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Environmental “knees” and “wiggles” as strong stabilizers of species’ range limits set by interspecific competition

by Farshad Shirani, Benjamin G. Freeman Whether interspecific competition is a major contributing factor to setting species’ range limits has been debated for a long time. Theoretical studies have proposed that the interactions between interspecific competition and disruptive gene flow along an environmental gradient can halt range expansion of ecologically similar species where they meet. However, the stability of such range limits has not been well addressed. We use a deterministic mathematical model of adaptive range evolution over a continuous habitat to show that the range limits set by interspecific competition are unlikely to be evolutionarily stable if the environmental optima for fitness-related traits vary (almost) linearly in space. That is, in a linear environment without a dispersal barrier or a third (or more) species, the range borders formed between two competing species constantly move towards the weaker species. We demonstrate that environmental nonlinearities such as “knees” and “wiggles”—wherein an isolated sharp change or a step-like change occurs in the steepness of a trait optimum—can strongly stabilize competitively formed range limits. The stabilization mechanism relies on the contrast that such nonlinearities create in the level of disruptive gene flow to the peripheral population of each species, and succeeds when an additional process, such as Allee effects, prevents the establishment of an infinitesimal population in the presence of an abundant competitor. We show that the stability of the range limits at these nonlinearities is robust against moderate environmental disturbances. Whether strong disturbances such as rapid high-amplitude climate changes can destabilize such range limits depends on how the competitive dominance of the species changes across the nonlinearity. Therefore, our findings underscore the importance of assessing species’ competitive ability when predicting responses to climate change, and identify geographic regions where established range limits are likely to persist as well as regions where shifting limits may eventually stabilize.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Scalable estimation of temporal clustering in accelerometry: a kernel-independent dispersion index grounded in the Hawkes process

Background. Self-exciting (Hawkes) point processes are a natural model for the temporal clustering of human physical activity (PA) recorded by accelerometers, yet they have seldom been used in this setting—in part because the usual maximum-likelihood fitting is challenging due to potential estimation bias and convergence failures on these data. A moment-based alternative—estimating the Hawkes branching ratio from the dispersion index, the variance-to-mean ratio of event counts—is kernel-independent and computationally trivial, but it has not been evaluated for accelerometry or adapted to the intensity-marked recordings accelerometers provide. Methods. Treating each minute above a sedentary threshold as an event, we estimated the Hawkes branching ratio $n$ by maximum likelihood and, as a kernel-independent and far cheaper alternative, from the dispersion index. We compared four dispersion-based estimators—event-count-based, intensity-mark-weighted using the mark-moment ratio, and time-of-day (TOD) adjusted variants of each—against the marked and unmarked maximum-likelihood estimates. Estimators were evaluated for mutual agreement, goodness of fit, and finite-window results in two National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) accelerometry cohorts (hip-worn, $n=2{,}560$; wrist-worn, $n=3{,}132$). We related the resulting temporal clustering measures to all-cause mortality using survey-weighted Cox models, adjusting for PA frequency, Peak30 (the average of the 30 highest PA values), and demographic covariates. Results. Event-count-based dispersion estimates agreed strongly with maximum-likelihood branching ratios ($rapprox0.74$ in both cohorts); the intensity-marked variant incorporating PA intensity variability agreed less well. Marked and unmarked Hawkes models yielded similar excitation and decay parameters, suggesting PA intensity added little clustering information beyond event timing. In the survival analysis, temporal clustering was associated with all-cause mortality independently of PA frequency and Peak30; the direction of association differed between the hip- and wrist-worn cohorts. Conclusions. A scalable dispersion-index estimator recovers the Hawkes branching ratio and matches maximum-likelihood estimates without requiring kernel specification or iterative optimization. It offers a practical tool for quantifying temporal clustering in accelerometry, enabling decomposition of temporal PA patterns into its exogenous initiation and endogenous persistence. Such temporal patterns carry health-relevant information beyond PA intensity and volume. Keywords: dispersion index; Hawkes process; branching ratio; temporal clustering; point process estimation; accelerometry; mortality

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Graph Reduction in Multirelational Networks: A Spreading-Oriented Reduction Benchmark

arXiv:2606.12581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world networks are inherently incomplete, noisy, and dynamically evolving, making it difficult to capture all actors and their relationships. Their scale often renders direct analysis computationally demanding. While influence maximisation (IM) has been widely studied, the role of graph reduction as a preprocessing step, and its impact on IM accuracy, remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce the Spreading-Oriented Reduction Benchmark (SORB), an open-source, standardised framework for systematically evaluating IM models across diverse task settings. SORB provides an extensible pipeline operating on a representative collection of real-world networks, including single- and multilayer structures, and accounts for graph reduction directly into the evaluation process. This design shifts the focus from analysing IM algorithms in isolation to quantifying how graph reduction alters predictive performance. Using SORB, we study the effects of sparsification and coarsening across multiple IM scenarios. Our results show that the impact of reduction is strongly dependent on both the network type (single-layer vs. multirelational) and the downstream task ($Gain@k$ vs. $\mathrm{AUC}_{\mathrm{cutoff}}$): sparsification preserves seed set quality on single-layer networks, whereas flattened multilayer networks exhibit systematic ranking degradation regardless of reduction strategy. These findings highlight the importance of reduction-aware, multi-task evaluation when studying spreading processes in complex networks.

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

PPDM: Pixel Puzzling Diffusion Model for Speed and Memory Efficient Volumetric Medical Image Translation

Diffusion models have demonstrated superior fidelity for medical image-to-image translation, but their extension to high-resolution 3D volumes is severely constrained by prohibitive computational cost and GPU memory requirements. Existing memory-efficient strategies often compromise global volumetric consistency or fine anatomical detail. In this work, we propose the Pixel Puzzling Diffusion Model (PPDM), a simple and effective framework for memory- and speed-efficient 3D medical image translation. PPDM introduces a reversible pixel puzzle-unpuzzle operator that trades spatial resolution for channel dimensionality, substantially reducing activation memory while preserving global context. To further improve efficiency and stability, we adopt a direct bridge diffusion formulation that starts from the conditional input rather than pure noise, enabling the model to focus on task-relevant residuals. In addition, a puzzle-gradient loss is incorporated to enforce spatial coherence and suppress grid-like artifacts introduced by spatial rearrangement. We evaluate PPDM on multiple challenging 3D medical image translation tasks, including low-count PET denoising, joint PET denoising and attenuation correction, and cross-modal MRI translation. Across all tasks, PPDM consistently matches or outperforms full 3D diffusion models while reducing training GPU memory usage by up to an order of magnitude and significantly accelerating inference, and it outperforms existing memory-efficient diffusion approaches based on latent compression or frequency decomposition. These results demonstrate that PPDM provides a practical and scalable solution for high-fidelity 3D diffusion-based medical image translation under limited computational resources.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

OracleScreen-LILRB4: Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Myeloid Immune Checkpoint Binders Validated in Patient-Derived Cells

The identification of small molecule modulators of immune checkpoint proteins remains a significant challenge in drug discovery due to the flat, featureless nature of protein-protein interaction interfaces and the characteristically low hit rates observed in conventional high-throughput screening campaigns. Here we report OracleScreen-LILRB4, an ensemble machine learning framework trained on quantitative biophysical screening data from two structurally diverse compound libraries (19,800 compounds total) screened against the myeloid immune checkpoint leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptor B4 (LILRB4/ILT3). By formulating binding prediction as a regression task targeting continuous {Delta}Fnorm values rather than binary hit classifications, OracleScreen-LILRB4 achieved a mean Spearman R of 0.61 and ROC-AUC of 0.86 under scaffold-aware cross-validation. Prospective virtual screening of a 45,760-member compound library and experimental validation of the top 200 predictions yielded a 28.5% hit rate, representing a 15.0-fold enrichment over baseline, with 16 compounds demonstrating nanomolar-affinity LILRB4 (ILT3) engagement. Lead compounds ORS-22 and ORS-14 restored anti-tumor immune activity across patient-derived colorectal cancer and acute myeloid leukemia co-culture systems, reversing SCG2-mediated immunosuppression and recovering cytotoxic T-cell function. These findings establish OracleScreen-LILRB4 as an effective computational framework for accelerating small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Review of Machine Learning Models for Solar Energetic Particle Prediction

arXiv:2606.19539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Solar energetic particle (SEP) events have attracted increasing attention due to their significant radiation hazards for aviation, spacecraft electronics, and human missions beyond Earth's magnetosphere. From a scientific perspective, SEP events are intriguing because they arise from a set of physical processes extending from the solar surface and corona through the heliosphere, offering insight into particle acceleration and transport mechanisms that are widely applicable across astrophysics. Therefore, advancing our ability to understand and predict SEP events is essential both for deepening our knowledge of such mechanisms and for safeguarding space technologies and exploration. Traditionally, researchers have modeled SEPs using physics-based simulations and empirical methods. More recently, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a new tool for understanding and predicting SEP events. The purpose of this manuscript is to review the currently available ML models for SEP prediction, identify the datasets used for training, compare their architectures, inputs, and outputs, and, based on these insights, outline good practices and recommendations for future research.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

OpenTie: Open-vocabulary Sequential Rebar Tying System

Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackling complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on the collection of large amounts of data with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary rebar detection on the real-world test. We implement the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantee a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our proposed post-processing procedure for the image-to-point-cloud generation framework. Our pipeline requires no training efforts and outperforms the training-based object detection, i.e., YOLO-based method, with the verification on the real-world sequential rebar tying test. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and holds the potential application to the real construction site with possibility of commercialization.

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

Trust Without Trusting: A Recomputable Trust Protocol for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2605.06738v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents already transact at production scale – 69,000 bots, 165 million transactions, $50 million in volume on a single marketplace – and any party can verify a signed credential without a central service. In an open agent world that covers most of what trust requires: there are no universal borders, and each party chooses for itself whom to deal with. Borders appear only where a closed space draws one – a marketplace, a platform, or a consortium sets house rules. Whoever draws the border holds the authority to apply it, and may apply it as they choose, behind closed doors. This paper addresses the gap that opens there: when you rely on someone else's border, how do you check that they applied their own published rules – taking no one's word for it, and handing the check to no new trusted party? Our answer is the Combined Evidence Protocol (CEP): a five-condition predicate any party recomputes from anchored data, turning "did the boundary-owner follow its own admission rules" into a fact anyone verifies rather than a claim anyone believes. The move that secures optimistic rollups secures this – correctness rests on recomputation, so the measurement belongs to everyone and the oracle problem dissolves. Its load-bearing setting is a consortium of co-equal, mutually distrusting peers under a shared charter, each able to verify, independently, that the rules they jointly agreed are the rules being applied. CEP belongs to the family of trustless systems – optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups, verifiable ML, self-sovereign-identity predicates. The infrastructure beneath it is live: a W3C VC + DID trust layer running since March 2026, anchored on Base L2, continuing arXiv:2605.06738 and standing on its own.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ParaScale: Scale-Calibrated Camera-Motion Transfer via a Gauge-Invariant Parallax Number

作者:

arXiv:2606.19805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transferring the camera motion of a reference video to a freshly generated one lets creators reuse cinematic moves. Yet reference and target often live at incompatible scales – a sweep across a galaxy versus a nudge across a desk – and naively reusing the recovered trajectory yields either imperceptible or violently exaggerated motion. We trace this to a geometric fact: translation-induced image motion scales as ||T||/Z, so a monocular trajectory is meaningful only up to a depth-scale gauge. We distill this into the Parallax Number Pi = ||Delta T|| / Zbar, a dimensionless, gauge-invariant descriptor of how strongly a camera move is felt, and prove that it – not the raw trajectory – is the quantity that scale-faithful transfer must preserve. ParaScale is a plug-and-play module that reads Pi off any reference video and re-realizes it against the target scene's own depth, per frame, leaving rotation untouched. Sitting between pose extraction and pose injection, it requires no retraining and drops into any pose-conditioned generator. We further introduce the Parallax Consistency Error (PCE), a scale-symmetric metric that – unlike the similarity-aligned TransErr – exposes scene-scale mismatch. Across scale regimes spanning four orders of magnitude and multiple backbones, ParaScale keeps the realized parallax on the identity line and cuts PCE by more than 3x over uncalibrated transfer with no loss of visual fidelity.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

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

Mapping AI Programs in the U.S: A Status Report from Early 2026 and an Analysis of AI Majors and Minors

arXiv:2606.12428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a report on the status of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the United States in Spring 2026. In so doing, we 1) describe our scraping and mapping tools, which dynamically update to track the state of AI education in the U.S., and 2) create a historic record at a time of great upheaval. The tool we developed, available at https://cicmap.ai, detects, scrapes, and displays data from more than 350 undergraduate AI programs–majors, minors, concentrations, and certificates–at 4-year universities. Our tool searched over 560 institutions to locate these programs, a sample that represents 86\% of all undergraduate Computer Science (CS) graduates in the U.S. This tool allows prospective students, guidance counselors, administrators, and faculty to easily access AI program requirements and is designed to continually update as new programs emerge. To the best of our knowledge, this survey represents the most comprehensive snapshot of the state of AI programs in the U.S. to date. With this work we offer three important contributions: 1) a record of AI programs in the U.S. at a time of great upheaval; 2) a tool to explore AI programs and their requirements; and 3) an analysis of the courses required for 66 AI majors and 87 AI minors. Our analysis of majors and minors shows great variability in the size and the requirements of these degrees, but we note two takeaways. First, not all majors require a general AI course, but if they don't, they do require a Machine Learning (ML) course. Second, while more than a third of majors require an Ethics in AI course, just under a quarter of AI minors do.

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

MambaH-Fit: Rethinking Hyper-surface Fitting-based Point Cloud Normal Estimation via State Space Modelling

We present MambaH-Fit, a state space modelling framework tailored for hyper-surface fitting-based point cloud normal estimation. Existing normal estimation methods often fall short in modelling fine-grained geometric structures, thereby limiting the accuracy of the predicted normals. Recently, state space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have demonstrated strong modelling capability by capturing long-range dependencies with linear complexity and inspired adaptations to point cloud processing. However, existing Mamba-based approaches primarily focus on understanding global shape structures, leaving the modelling of local, fine-grained geometric details largely under-explored. To address the issues above, we first introduce an Attention-driven Hierarchical Feature Fusion (AHFF) scheme to adaptively fuse multi-scale point cloud patch features, significantly enhancing geometric context learning in local point cloud neighbourhoods. Building upon this, we further propose Patch-wise State Space Model (PSSM) that models point cloud patches as implicit hyper-surfaces via state dynamics, enabling effective fine-grained geometric understanding for normal prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms existing ones in terms of accuracy, robustness, and flexibility. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of the proposed components.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Active Learning with Low-Rank Structure for Data Selection

arXiv:2606.16045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the data selection problem, the objective is to choose a small, representative subset of data that can be used to efficiently train a machine learning model. Sener and Savarese [ICLR 2018] showed that, given an embedding representation of the data and suitable geometric assumptions, heuristics based on $k$-center clustering can be used to perform data selection. This perspective was further explored by Axiotis et. al. [ICML 2024], who proposed a data selection approach based on $k$-means clustering and sensitivity sampling. However, these methods rely on the assumption that the dataset exhibits intrinsic geometric structure that can be effectively captured by clustering, whereas many modern datasets instead possess global algebraic structure that is better exploited by low-rank approximation or principal component analysis. In this paper, we introduce a new data selection framework based on low-rank approximation and residual-based sampling, formulated through the lens of row subset selection and loss-preserving coreset construction. Given an embedding representation of the data satisfying mild regularity conditions, which can be interpreted as algebraic or angular notions of Lipschitz continuity, we show that it is possible to select a weighted subset of $\tilde{O}\left(k + \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$ data points whose average loss approximates the average loss over the full dataset within a $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative error, up to an additive $\varepsilon \Phi_k$ term, where $\Phi_k$ denotes the optimal rank-$k$ approximation cost of the embedding matrix. We complement these theoretical guarantees with empirical evaluations, demonstrating that on a range of real-world datasets, our data selection approach achieves improved performance over prior strategies based on uniform sampling or clustering-based sensitivity sampling.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reward hacking in physical reinforcement learning revealed by turbulent drag reduction

arXiv:2606.06227v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A reinforcement-learning agent maximises its reward, which can diverge from the outcome its designer intended. In physical control the reward rarely closes that gap, and drag reduction in wall turbulence makes it concrete. A mass-conservation projection couples agents' outputs and erases the per-agent credit the policy gradient needs; a memoryless policy cannot resolve the slow near-wall cycle it acts on; and a pressure-gradient reward pays for nominal drag reduction by pumping power through the wall. Two degenerate controllers achieve large drag reductions while total dissipation rises, so the reported figure can mask a more wasteful flow. We trace each fault to its cause and fix it: a differentiable projection that restores credit, a recurrent policy with a widened sensing stencil, and a reward scored on the true wall power. The corrected controller acts on the flow within a closed energy budget, earning a conservative $17\%$ under honest accounting.

23.
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.

24.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-09

Hybrid solid−liquid optics enable scalable, high-resolution light-sheet microscopy across diverse immersion media

作者:

Many data-driven approaches rely on scalable and affordable three-dimensional (3D) imaging across subcellular to organ scales. Although advances in tissue clearing, expansion microscopy and light-sheet microscopy (LSM) have enabled high-resolution imaging of intact specimens, scalability in sample size, throughput and accessibility remains fundamentally limited by detection optics. Here we introduce hybrid solid−liquid optics (HySIL), a flexible refractive design framework in which a solid optical element and a refractive index (RI)-matched liquid function as a continuous optical system for wavefront correction and numerical aperture enhancement. We implement this framework as SCOPE and Super-SCOPE, enabling submicron-resolution, aberration-corrected LSM using long-working-distance air objectives. We demonstrate high-resolution volumetric imaging across diverse biological contexts, including cleared and expanded mouse, salamander and cavefish brains, human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived brain organoids and large intact human tissues for 3D histopathology. By combining enhanced optical performance with low-cost, long-working-distance and multi-immersion compatibility, HySIL provides an accessible and scalable foundation for next-generation volumetric imaging and data-driven biological discovery. Hybrid solid–liquid optics improve light-sheet imaging of intact biological samples.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Augmenting Molecular Language Models with Local $n$-gram Memory

Transformer-based language models for SMILES strings suffer from a locality gap: standard character-level tokenization fragments chemically meaningful motifs, forcing models to repeatedly learn local syntax at the expense of long-range dependencies. To address this without disrupting standard tokenizers, we propose MolGram, which integrates a conditional $n$-gram memory module into molecular language models. MolGram maps local string patterns to learned embeddings via scalable hash lookups and dynamically injects this regional context into hidden states. Evaluations across three tasks, including unconditional molecule generation, forward reaction prediction, and single-step retrosynthesis, show that MolGram consistently improves performance. Crucially, our analyses demonstrate that MolGram outperforms baselines with 3$\times$ more parameters, establishing explicit local pattern memory as a highly efficient inductive bias.