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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

VGGHeads: 3D Multi Head Alignment with a Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset

Human head detection, keypoint estimation, and 3D head model fitting are essential tasks with many applications. However, traditional real-world datasets often suffer from bias, privacy, and ethical concerns, and they have been recorded in laboratory environments, which makes it difficult for trained models to generalize. Here, we introduce \method – a large-scale synthetic dataset generated with diffusion models for human head detection and 3D mesh estimation. Our dataset comprises over 1 million high-resolution images, each annotated with detailed 3D head meshes, facial landmarks, and bounding boxes. Using this dataset, we introduce a new model architecture capable of simultaneous head detection and head mesh reconstruction from a single image in a single step. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that models trained on our synthetic data achieve strong performance on real images. Furthermore, the versatility of our dataset makes it applicable across a broad spectrum of tasks, offering a general and comprehensive representation of human heads.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A non-asymptotic bound on the TV distance between a Wishart matrix and an appropriately scaled GOE matrix

arXiv:2606.16018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this note, we prove a non-asymptotic version of a theorem by Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Rácz, showing that a Wishart matrix is close in total variation to an affine transformation of a GOE matrix. The proof mirrors the proof given by Bubeck et al., with some changes made to make it non-asymptotic.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Density Ridge Selective Prediction for LLM and VLM Hallucination Detection under Calibration Label Scarcity

Hallucination detection in large language and vision-language models is increasingly framed as selective prediction, where a detector assigns a confidence score and abstains when confidence is low. Unsupervised sampling detectors (Semantic Entropy) avoid labels but plateau in quality, while supervised probes attain stronger in-distribution scores yet degrade sharply when calibration labels are scarce. We recover the response manifold of an LLM as the density ridge of a kernel density estimate built on a six-dimensional kinematic feature map of hidden state generation trajectories. A test generation is scored by the negated Euclidean distance from its projected feature point to the nearest ridge vertex, yielding a low-dimensional geometric skeleton of the stochastic output distribution. We evaluate against Semantic Entropy, topological methods, and log-probability on six QA benchmarks (HaluEval-QA, TriviaQA, GSM8K, POPE, ScienceQA, A-OKVQA) using eight text and vision LLMs in a deliberately label-scarce protocol ($n_{cal}{=}200$ queries, $N{=}5$ generations). Our ridge-based score beats on AUROC with 5-20 points gain, while demonstrating tempered degradation under calibration-label scarcity.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Mitigating Heterogeneity-Induced Drift in Hierarchical Sign-Based Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.02355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is well suited for large-scale wireless and Internet of Things systems, where devices communicate with nearby edge servers before reaching the cloud. In these environments, uplink bandwidth and latency impose strict communication constraints, making aggressive gradient compression essential. One-bit sign-based stochastic gradient descent methods provide an attractive solution in flat federated settings, but their behavior in hierarchical edge–cloud architectures remains insufficiently understood, especially under inter-cluster data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we develop a sign-based HFL framework in which devices transmit binary stochastic-gradient signs to edge servers, edge servers apply majority voting, and the cloud periodically aggregates edge models. Our analysis reveals that inter-cluster heterogeneity induces a persistent bias term in the convergence bound, reflecting the drift of edge models toward local objectives. This term cannot be removed by increasing the number of training rounds or by tuning standard hyperparameters alone. We therefore propose \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\), a drift-corrected sign-based HFL algorithm in which devices apply a cloud-assisted gradient correction before taking the sign. We show that this pre-sign correction mitigates the non-vanishing heterogeneity-induced bias while preserving binary device–edge communication during the repeated local sign-update steps. Experiments under severe inter-cluster heterogeneity demonstrate that \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\) improves the stability and accuracy of sign-based HFL and achieves performance comparable to full-precision hierarchical SGD with substantially lower device–edge communication.

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

AI Pluralism and the Worlds It Misses

arXiv:2606.16167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI pluralism is often framed as a problem of representing diverse values, preferences, users, or outputs. This paper argues that this framing is incomplete because AI systems also impose ontologies: they define what counts as an entity, relation, feature, harm, benefit, and valid form of evidence. We define ontological flattening as the conversion of situated, contested, and historically specific meanings into a restricted technical category, proxy, aggregation rule, or benchmark target that is treated as neutral and difficult to contest. The paper develops a bounded conceptual and qualitative synthesis across value pluralism, pluralistic alignment, participatory and democratic AI, procedural justice, science and technology studies, accountability research, aggregate themes from 11 expert interviews, and three urban AI companion cases. The cases illustrate how pluralistic methods can improve or structure model behavior while still compressing categories, proxies, aggregation rules, and revision rights before affected actors have procedural standing. We introduce Pluralistic Lifecycle Governance (PLG) as a preliminary qualitative audit scaffold for documenting ontological openness, epistemic inclusion, procedural authority, evaluation pluralism, and lifecycle accountability. PLG is not presented as a validated scoring instrument; it is a framework for making the evidence and governance conditions of pluralistic AI explicit.

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

Adaptive generative moment matching networks for improved learning of dependence structures

arXiv:2508.21531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adaptive bandwidth selection procedure for the mixture kernel in the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) for fitting generative moment matching networks (GMMNs) is introduced, and improved learning of copula random number generators is demonstrated. Based on the relative error of the training loss, the number of kernels is increased during training; additionally, the relative error of the validation loss is used as an early stopping criterion. While training time remains similar, adaptively training GMMNs (AGMMNs) significantly increases training performance, which is shown based on validation MMD trajectories, samples and validation MMD values. Superiority of AGMMNs over GMMNs and parametric copula models is also demonstrated in terms of three applications. First, convergence rates of estimators based on quasi-random versus pseudo-random samples from copulas are investigated in dimensions as large as 100 for the first time. Second, replicated validation MMDs, as well as Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo applications demonstrate the improved training of AGMMNs for a copula model implied by the 50 constituents of the S&P 500 index after deGARCHing. Last, both the latter dataset and 50 constituents of the FTSE 100 are used to demonstrate that the improved training of AGMMNs indeed translates to an improved model prediction.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Brep2Shape: Boundary and Shape Representation Alignment via Self-Supervised Transformers

arXiv:2602.07429v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Boundary representation (B-rep) is the industry standard for computer-aided design (CAD). While deep learning shows promise in processing B-rep models, existing methods suffer from a representation gap: continuous approaches offer analytical precision but are visually abstract, whereas discrete methods provide intuitive clarity at the expense of geometric precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce Brep2Shape, a novel self-supervised pre-training method designed to align abstract boundary representations with intuitive shape representations. Our method employs a geometry-aware task where the model learns to predict dense spatial points from parametric Bézier control points, enabling the network to better understand physical manifolds derived from abstract coefficients. To enhance this alignment, we propose a Dual Transformer backbone with parallel streams that independently encode surface and curve tokens to capture their distinct geometric properties. Moreover, the topology attention is integrated to model the interdependencies between surfaces and curves, thereby maintaining topological consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that Brep2Shape offers significant scalability, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and faster convergence across various downstream tasks.Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Brep2Shape.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Any2Any: Efficient Cross-Embodiment Transfer for Humanoid Whole-Body Tracking

arXiv:2605.23733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whole-body tracking (WBT) models have become a key foundation for humanoid robots, enabling them to imitate diverse motions with high fidelity. Training such models from scratch requires large-scale data and computation, making rapid deployment on new humanoid platforms costly. This raises a natural question: Can pretrained WBT models transfer across embodiments with minimal adaptation? To answer this question, we propose Any2Any, a paradigm that efficiently transfers an existing WBT specialist to a new humanoid embodiment with only a small amount of data and compute. Any2Any first performs kinematic alignment between source and target humanoids, aligning their input and output spaces so that the pretrained source policy can be meaningfully reused on the target embodiment.Any2Any then performs dynamics adaptation by applying lightweight parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) components to selected dynamics-sensitive modules, preserving useful behavioral priors while enabling targeted adaptation to the target robot. Extensive experiments on multiple humanoid platforms and pretrained backbones show that Any2Any substantially accelerates convergence and reduces training cost compared with training from scratch, while achieving competitive or superior tracking performance. Notably, using only 1% of the compute and data required for full training, Any2Any successfully transfers Sonic models pre-trained on Unitree G1 to LimX Oli and LimX Luna. These results suggest that pretrained WBT specialists can be efficiently reused across embodiments, providing a scalable path toward deploying humanoid whole-body control on new robots.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Online Learning for Supervisory Switching Control

arXiv:2603.14762v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study supervisory switching control for partially-observed linear dynamical systems. The objective is to identify and deploy a suitable controller for the unknown system by periodically selecting among a collection of $N$ candidate controllers, some of which may destabilize the underlying system. While classical estimator-based supervisory control guarantees asymptotic stability, it lacks quantitative finite-time performance bounds. Conversely, current non-asymptotic methods in both online learning and system identification require restrictive assumptions that are incompatible in a control setting, such as system stability, which preclude testing potentially unstable controllers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel, non-asymptotic analysis of supervisory control that adapts multi-armed bandit algorithms to a control-theoretic setting. The proposed data-driven algorithm evaluates candidate controllers via scoring criteria that leverage system observability to isolate the effects of state history, enabling both detection of destabilizing controllers and accurate system identification. We present two algorithmic variants with dimension-free, finite-time guarantees, where each identifies the matching controller in $O(N \log^2 N)$ steps, while simultaneously achieving finite $L_2$-gain with respect to system disturbances.

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

Structured Spectral Graph Representation Learning for Multi-label Abnormality Analysis from 3D CT Scans

With the growing volume of CT examinations, there is an increasing demand for automated tools such as organ segmentation, abnormality detection, and report generation to support radiologists in managing their clinical workload. Multi-label classification of 3D Chest CT scans remains a critical yet challenging problem due to the complex spatial relationships inherent in volumetric data and the wide variability of abnormalities. Existing methods based on 3D convolutional neural networks struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Vision Transformers often require extensive pre-training on large-scale, domain-specific datasets to perform competitively. In this work, we propose a 2.5D alternative by introducing a new graph-based framework that represents 3D CT volumes as structured graphs, where axial slice triplets serve as nodes processed through spectral graph convolution, enabling the model to reason over inter-slice dependencies while maintaining complexity compatible with clinical deployment. Our method, trained and evaluated on 3 datasets from independent institutions, achieves strong cross-dataset generalization, and shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art visual encoders. We further conduct comprehensive ablation studies to evaluate the impact of various aggregation strategies, edge-weighting schemes, and graph connectivity patterns. Additionally, we demonstrate the broader applicability of our approach through transfer experiments on automated radiology report generation and abdominal CT data.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Classical Explanations in (and of) General Probabilistic Theories

arXiv:2603.05627v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a notion of the ``explanation" of one (generalized) probabilistic model by another as particular kind of span in the category $\Prob$ of probabilistic models and morphisms. We show that explanations compose under a standard pullback construction (notwithstanding that $\Prob$ does not support arbitrary pullbacks). We then show that every locally-finite probabilistic model has a canonical, sharp classical explanation. The construction is functorial, so every locally-finite probabilistic theory has a canonical, sharp classical (though of course, usually non-local) representation.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Majorana bound states in a hybrid Kitaev ladder with long-range pairing

arXiv:2606.19963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate an inter-leg coupled hybrid Kitaev ladder composed of two parallel superconducting chains with distinct pairing interactions. The upper chain of the ladder hosts conventional $p$-wave pairing, while the lower chain exhibits long-range pairing that decays algebraically with distance. We demonstrate that the mutual influence of long-range pairing exponent, chemical potential, and inter-leg coupling strength gives rise to a rich topological phase diagram characterized by multiple Majorana zero modes and massive Dirac modes. In particular, we show that the inter-leg coupling renormalizes the effective energy scales, leading to a systematic shift of the topological phase boundaries and enabling controlled tuning of the Majorana modes. Furthermore, we identify a transition from a two Majorana zero mode phase to a phase encapsulating four Majorana zero modes, as the long-range pairing exponent is varied. This transition is accompanied by a crossover regime in which Majorana zero modes coexist with massive Dirac modes, reflecting hybridization between edge and bulk excitations. This ladder thus provides a minimal and attractive platform for realizing the impact of a long-range pairing on topological phases. Our results highlight the potential of long-range hybrid systems for engineering tunable topological states relevant for quantum information applications.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The ancestors of eukaryotic cells contained a mix of genes from various microbes

Authors: Unknown Author

Reconstruction of the ancestral gene repertoire of eukaryotic cells reveals traces of a series of close, long-term interactions with diverse microorganisms, and a role of viruses in gene exchange. The findings challenge the view that eukaryotic cells evolved from a simple merger of just two organisms. A series of gene-transfer events might have taken place in complex microbial communities.

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

Deep-Unfolded Coordination

arXiv:2606.19920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed optimization is a highly scalable and structurally transparent technique to solve multi-agent robotics problems; however, such methods often suffer from the need for highly-specialized, problem-specific hyperparameter tunings. In this work, we propose Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework that learns to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of ADMM-DDP, a popular distributed solver for robotics tasks, at solve-time in response to optimizer performance. Our architecture consists of unrolling a fixed number of ADMM-DDP iterations into a neural network with learnable functions between layers mapping the optimizer state to the next hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, Deep Coordinator is the first deep-unfolding framework to adapt the penalty parameters of a non-convex optimizer at solve-time; we show that the mainstream supervised approach can yield degenerate solutions when training such models, and propose an unsupervised learning scheme. On simulations with fleets of cars and quadrotors, Deep Coordinator produces trajectories of comparable quality 6.18-9.44x faster than conventional solvers. Furthermore, Deep Coordinator retains its performance benefits when deployed to systems up to 8x larger than trained on.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Creating squeezed and non-classical collective motional many-body states through stroboscopic Rydberg dressing

arXiv:2606.17849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing conditional quantum operations, e.g., quantum gates, for quantum computing and simulation requires controlled interactions between particles. Often, these interactions depend on the interparticle distance, and accordingly, an uncertainty of the relative particle position may translate into gate infidelities. We consider here a quantum computing platform based on an array of neutral atoms and present a method that allows to reduce the uncertainty of all interatomic distances. Our approach exploits the coupling between atomic motion and stroboscopically excited atomic Rydberg states. It allows to collectively squeeze the modes corresponding to interatomic displacements, thereby reducing distance fluctuations down to a fraction of the motional vacuum state. Furthermore, the method permits the creation of non-classical states with substantial Wigner negativity. These correlated states may allow reducing motional decoherence, increasing gate fidelity, and potentially yield a resource for quantum-enhanced metrology.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Molecular glue degraders of HuR suppress BRAF-mutant colorectal cancer

Authors:

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.

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

Communication-Efficient Verifiable Attention for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.16352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computation integrity of remote large language model (LLM) serving can be questionable. For conventional deep neural networks (DNNs), the existing TEE-shielded DNN partitioning (TSDP) approach uses Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to compute non-linear components and verify the integrity of linear components offloaded to an untrusted GPU. However, directly applying TSDP to Transformer-based LLMs incurs significant TEE computation and TEE-GPU communication overhead. This paper presents Communication-efficient TEE-GPU Attention (\textsc{VeriAttn}) for accelerating verifiable LLM inference. \textsc{VeriAttn} offloads both linear and non-linear computations of attention to the GPU, while TEE performs verification. Moreover, for prefill, \textsc{VeriAttn} uses a two-level pipeline to overlap data movement, TEE pre-/post-processing, and GPU computation. For decoding, when the key-value cache exceeds available GPU memory, \textsc{VeriAttn} partitions attention across TEE and GPU to reduce repeated key-value transfers. Evaluation on an Intel TDX platform shows that \textsc{VeriAttn} achieves 2.60-3.38$\times$ and 3.86-5.42$\times$ acceleration over TSDP for 6k-token prompts and 10k-token outputs during prefill and decoding, respectively.

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

Fantastic Scientific Agents and How to Build Them: AgentBuild for Rietveld Refinement

arXiv:2606.12834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As scientific workflows shift from deterministic executables to LLM-based agents, the development practices on offer, such as fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and prompt-and-go, bury the scientist's judgment. We propose treating agent construction as a workflow stage and introduce AgentBuild, which builds a scientific agent from a contract the scientist authors. The contract is a version-controlled rubric, a difficulty-graded curriculum, and a curated external knowledge base. A rubric-driven judge gates a meta-optimizer coding agent that edits the agent within a declared boundary, so the build compiles the agent, not the scientist's judgment. We instantiate this for Rietveld refinement of X-ray diffraction data through GSAS-II behind MCP and A2A, where a blank-harness construction run progresses through a lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO) signal-to-noise ladder, reaches the 4 hour scan as a frontier case, and exposes the workflow-scope limits that remain. The same rubric that rewards credible fits also scores trajectory scope, making the frontier a contract failure rather than a pattern-fitting failure. As base models evolve, re-running AgentBuild is a re-tune, not a rebuild, and the scientist's authored contract remains the durable asset.

20.
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.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Beyond the Unruh vacuum: multi-time correlations in black hole collapse and evaporation

arXiv:2606.13383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The black hole information paradox originates from the thermal character of Hawking radiation, which appears to erase information about the collapsing matter. However, thermality constrains only observables defined at a single time and leaves the structure of temporal quantum correlations largely unexplored. Here we show that multi-time quantum-field correlations provide a concrete mechanism for the survival of pre-collapse information in black hole evaporation. Using a two-dimensional model of gravitational collapse and evaporation, we demonstrate that late-time multi-time correlations are not fully reproduced by the Unruh vacuum. In particular, they contain a contribution that depends explicitly on parameters characterizing the pre-collapse state, despite the thermal character of the asymptotic radiation. Our results identify measurable multi-time correlations as carriers of information in Hawking radiation and suggest that formulations of the black hole information paradox based solely on single-time observables are incomplete.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Subsystem Quantum Error Correction for Noisy Quantum Metrology

arXiv:2606.19628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction has been successfully applied to enhance the precision of parameter estimation in the presence of noise. Nonetheless, existing methods require a number of noiseless, controllable ancillae and lack efficient encoding and decoding procedures. In this Letter, we demonstrate that subsystem error correction provides a new direction that can substantially simplify the metrological protocol. We derive general conditions under which subsystem stabilizer codes achieve the Heisenberg limit and show that, for broad classes of noise, this can be realized by syndrome-free protocols using at most a single ancilla qubit. Furthermore, we extend this framework to dynamical error correction and show that Floquet codes can protect time-dependent metrological signals in reaching the Heisenberg limit.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Super-Arrhenius relaxation of the triangular plaquette model in any dimension

arXiv:2606.16259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the following plaquette model from statistical physics: a lamp lies at every vertex of the triangular lattice and a switch lies at every even vertex of the (bipartite) dual hexagonal lattice. Each switch toggles the three lamps on its face. The energy of a configuration is the number of ON lamps. For the Glauber dynamics associated with the Gibbs measure defined by this Hamiltonian at any inverse temperature $\beta>0$, we show that, in any dimension $d\ge 2$, the infinite volume relaxation time satisfies \[e^{\beta^2/C}/C \le T_{\mathrm{rel}}\le Ce^{e^{C\beta}}\] for some $C>0$. Our result entails that the Gibbs measure is unique. The $e^{\beta^2}$ scaling was conjectured by Newman and Moore in 1999 and matches the behaviour of supercritical rooted kinetically constrained models such as the East model, thus recovering fragile glass phenomenology in the absence of kinetic constraints. More precisely, we show that, on a torus of side length $2^k$, when $\beta\to\infty$ and $k/\beta\to0$, we have $T_{\mathrm{rel}}=e^{2\beta k(1+o(1))}$. Quite surprisingly, however, we also prove that, on non-periodic finite domains of size $n\le e^{\beta/C}$ for large $C>0$, we have the much larger asymptotics $\ln T_{\mathrm{rel}}=\beta n^{\Theta(1)}$. The main ingredients of the proofs are new results in extremal and enumerative combinatorics and rely on renormalisation ideas for the dynamics and its groundstates also known as the Ledrappier subshift. We note consequences of our results to geometric group theory (more precisely to the complexity of the word problem for the Baumslag finitely presented group) and to ergodic theory.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Prevalence and Correlates of Ideal Cardiovascular Health among Ugandan Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors often emerge during adolescence and track into adulthood, yet data on cardiovascular health (CVH) in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of ideal CVH among Ugandan adolescents. Methods: We analysed baseline data of adolescents enrolled in a cluster-randomised controlled trial being conducted in urban (Kampala) and rural (Jinja) districts of Uganda. In this study, Ideal CVH was defined as meeting "ideal" status of 5-7 of the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics. Random-effects logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ideal CVH, accounting for village-level clustering. Results: We recruited 1316 participants with a mean age of 13.2 years, of whom 58.1% were female. Overall, the prevalence of ideal CVH was 66.8% (95% CI: 64.2% - 69.3%). The prevalence was higher in Jinja (74.4%, 95%CI: 70.9% - 77.7%) than Kampala (59.6%, 95%CI: 55.8%-63.2%) and the difference was evident (p