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

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Energy Distribution of the Galactic Center Excess' Sources

arXiv:2507.17804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) may yet herald the discovery of annihilating dark matter. Weighing against that conclusion are analyses showing evidence for dim point sources within the spatial structure of the emission. Due to technical limitations these analyses are purely spatial with all spectral information that could disentangle the excess from astrophysical backgrounds discarded. Here, we demonstrate that a neural network simulation-based inference approach can jointly analyze the spatial and spectra data. The addition is profound: energy information drives the putative point sources to be significantly dimmer, indicating either the GCE is truly diffuse in nature or made of an exceptionally large number of sources. Quantitatively, for our best fit background model, the excess is essentially consistent with Poisson emission as predicted by dark matter. If due to point sources, our median prediction is $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$ sources, or more than 35,000 at 90\% confidence, both orders of magnitude larger than the hundreds preferred by earlier point-source analyses of the GCE, although variations allowed by background systematics could reduce the required number of sources by roughly an order of magnitude.

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

Learning Topology-Aware Implicit Field for Unified Pulmonary Tree Modeling with Incomplete Topological Supervision

Pulmonary trees extracted from CT images frequently exhibit topological incompleteness, such as missing or disconnected branches, which substantially degrades downstream anatomical analysis and limits the applicability of existing pulmonary tree modeling pipelines. Current approaches typically rely on dense volumetric processing, explicit graph reasoning, or generic point cloud completion priors, leading to limited efficiency, weak structural awareness, and reduced robustness under realistic structural corruption. We propose TopoField, a topology-aware implicit modeling framework that treats topology repair as a first-class modeling problem and enables unified multi-task inference for pulmonary tree analysis. TopoField represents pulmonary anatomy using sparse surface and skeleton point clouds and learns a continuous implicit field that supports topology repair without relying on complete or explicit disconnection annotations, by training on synthetically introduced structural disruptions over already incomplete trees. Building upon the repaired implicit representation, anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction are jointly inferred through task-specific implicit functions within a single forward pass. Extensive experiments on the Lung3D+ dataset demonstrate that TopoField consistently improves topological completeness and achieves accurate anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction under challenging incomplete scenarios. We further validate TopoField on real incomplete outputs from an external segmentation model, demonstrating its applicability to realistic segmentation pipelines. Owing to its implicit formulation, TopoField attains high computational efficiency, completing all tasks in just over one second per case, highlighting its practicality for large-scale and time-sensitive clinical applications.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs

Political bias in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly significant, but difficult to measure reproducibly across political and linguistic contexts. We introduce Polar, a 4,026-instance multiple-choice benchmark that measures political bias through option-level likelihoods rather than prompt-based generation. Polar covers two ideological axes and eight issue categories derived from the Manifesto Project, and evaluates models in parallel across U.S. and South Korean political contexts. Across 38 LLMs, measured bias varies systematically with political context, issue category, model group, and presentation language. All models lean left-progressive on U.S. political content, but show more centered and mixed patterns on South Korean content. Translation experiments further show that presentation language alone can shift measured bias. These findings highlight the need for multilingual and cross-contextual evaluation of political bias in LLMs.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DivQuant: Estimation of Species Richness and Entropy from Small Samples

Estimating diversity properties of discrete distributions from a small observed sample is a fundamental problem in algorithmic statistics that has applications in many fields, in particular bioinformatics, but also in ecology or linguistics. The two most common diversity measures are the number of distinct elements in a multiset, also referred to as species richness in ecology or alpha diversity in microbial analysis, and the Shannon entropy, also referred to as evenness. Estimating these properties from a small sample is particularly challenging for distributions with many rare elements. Thus, many estimators have been proposed in the past that, in practice, work well for different types of distributions. We present DivQuant, an optimization-based, extrapolating richness and entropy estimator with three contributions. First, we formulate the upsampling problem as a convex quadratic program with a Neyman {chi}2 objective. Unlike the linear program of its predecessor RichnEst, DivQuant admits confidence intervals via {chi}2 test inversion that are empirically well-calibrated. Second, we replace RichnEst's fixed-threshold fingerprint truncation with the rare/abundant fingerprint split of Valiant and Valiant, which strongly reduces problem size and preserves enough degrees of freedom for the confidence-interval program to remain valid and feasible. Third, we plug the optimal population fingerprint returned by the program into Shannon's entropy formula to obtain an entropy estimate. DivQuant attains close-to-nominal 95% confidence intervals in essentially all tested regimes, including six simulated distribution families, Tara Oceans microbiome data, and 10X Genomics scRNA-seq data, while competing state-of-the-art methods (RichnEst, iNext, PreSeq) miss the true richness in up to 80% of instances, well above the nominal 5%. In addition, DivQuant outperforms classical asymptotic entropy estimators (Miller-Madow, CAE) and the extrapolating iNext estimator. Running times remain competitive, with DivQuant typically completing in seconds. DivQuant is available as a command-line tool at https://gitlab.com/rahmannlab/divquant.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ADMETron: An AI-driven SaaS platform for comprehensive ADMET prediction and compound prioritisation

ONTOSIGHT(R) ADMETron is an AI-driven platform designed for rapid prediction and visualization of Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET) properties to support modern drug discovery. The platform integrates an interactive web interface with a scalable predictive engine, enabling high-throughput virtual screening and batch analysis of chemical compounds. Its core architecture combines recurrent neural network (RNN)-derived molecular embeddings from SMILES representations with physicochemical descriptors, which are subsequently modeled using gradient boosting machines (GBMs). This framework provides predictions across 34 ADMET endpoints, including physicochemical properties, absorption, CYP450 interactions, hERG liability, and mutagenicity. The predictive performance of ADMETron was evaluated using benchmark datasets from the Therapeutics Data Commons (TDC), demonstrating strong performance and generalizability across both classification and regression tasks. Beyond predictive modeling, the platform introduces an interactive radar graph-based structure-activity relationship (SAR) visualization framework that enables real-time comparison of multiple compounds and reference drugs across selected ADMET parameters. This feature facilitates intuitive interpretation of multidimensional molecular profiles and supports lead optimization and compound prioritization. Comparative assessment against widely used online ADMET tools further demonstrated broad endpoint coverage spanning pharmacokinetic, physicochemical, toxicity, and medicinal chemistry properties within a unified environment. Together, these capabilities establish ADMETron as a comprehensive platform for ADMET assessment and data-driven decision-making in drug discovery. (https://admetron.partex.ai/).

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

RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets

LLMs are powerful generators of synthetic data, which are used for training smaller, specific models. This is especially valuable for low-resource languages, where human-labelled data is scarce but LLMs can still produce high-quality text. However, LLMs differ in how useful their outputs are for training. Selecting the best LLM as a generator is challenging because extrinsic evaluation requires costly human annotations (which are often unavailable for low-resource languages), while intrinsic metrics correlate poorly with downstream performance. We introduce Round robin Synthetic data Evaluation (RoSE), a proxy metric for selecting the best LLM generator without human test sets. RoSE trains a small model on the outputs of a candidate generator (LLM) and then evaluates it on generated synthetic examples from all other candidate LLMs. The final RoSE score is the mean performance of this small model. Across six LLMs, eleven languages, and three tasks (sentiment, topic, intent), RoSE identifies the optimal generator more often than any other intrinsic heuristics. RoSE outperforms intrinsic heuristics and comes within 0.76 percentage points of the optimal generator baseline. This result is measured in terms of downstream performance, obtained by training a small model on the chosen generator's outputs (optimal vs. proxy metric selected) and evaluating it on human-labelled test data. Additionally, RoSE is the only metric to achieve a positive correlation with performance on human test data.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

On the Position Bias of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers. In the standard KL objective of OPD, token-level losses are uniformly averaged, implying equal weights for all tokens. However, we discover that not all tokens are created equal: as student rollouts grow longer, they deviate further from the teacher's distribution, leading to degraded supervision quality at later positions. As a result, OPD using only the first 30% of tokens can perform comparably to using all tokens, whereas OPD using only the last 30% of tokens barely learns anything. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of this issue through the lens of constrained optimization. Based on these insights, we derive Importance-Weighted On-Policy Distillation (IW-OPD), in which the weight assigned to each token depends on the accumulated discrepancy between the student's and teacher's distributions, naturally upweighting earlier tokens and downweighting later ones with larger deviations. We show that IW-OPD converges significantly faster than OPD, with better learning efficiency, and achieves better final performance than standard OPD in both same-size and cross-scale settings, improving performance up to 6.9 points on AIME-2025.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Test-Time Adaptation in Optical Coherence Tomography Using Trajectory-Aligned Time-Independent Flow

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is essential in ophthalmology, but inconsistent image quality especially in low-cost devices hinders automated analysis. To address this, we introduce a flow-matching-based test-time adaptation method that generates high-quality surrogate images from noisy inputs. Typically, domain gaps between test and training data cause pixel distribution mismatches during the denoising process. We overcome this by matching the test image's histogram to synthetic reference trajectories, successfully aligning the input with expected distributions. Additionally, we remove the network's time conditioning to account for slight deviations in real-world noise distributions. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in segmenting critical biomarkers for two stages of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Code is available: https://github.com/Veit21/tta-flow.

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

KANLib – An Modular, Extensible and Fast Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Implementation

arXiv:2606.17927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional multilayer perceptrons by replacing linear weights with learnable univariate functions. Despite their theoretical advantages in interpretability and expressiveness, practical research of KANs remains difficult due to high computational costs and inconsistent feature support across existing frameworks. This paper introduces KANLib, a modular, extensible, and computationally efficient framework for developing and evaluating KAN architectures. KANLib unifies core concepts from existing implementations, including PyKAN, EfficientKAN, and FastKAN, within a consistent software architecture that emphasizes flexibility, feature parity, and high performance. The framework supports two basis function types, adaptive grid rescaling, grid extension, and fine-grained architectural customization while maintaining compatibility with standard PyTorch workflows. Experimental evaluation on the California Housing benchmark demonstrates that KANLib reproduces the predictive behavior of established reference KAN implementations while achieving competitive computational efficiency. Furthermore, the framework enables the exploration of architectural variations beyond standard KAN formulations with only minor impacts on predictive performance. Overall, KANLib provides a robust foundation for future research on scalable and extensible KAN architectures.

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

Estimating carbon pools in the European Shelf sea environment: replacing reanalysis by model-informed machine learning?

Authors:

arXiv:2508.10178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Shelf seas are important for the economy and the carbon cycle, but shelf sea observations for carbon pools are often sparse, or highly uncertain. An alternative can be provided by carbon reanalyses (whether assimilating proxy variables, such as chlorophyll-$a$, or directly carbon), but these are often expensive to run. We propose to use a computationally cheap ensemble of neural networks (i.e. deep ensemble) to learn the relationship between the directly observable (atmospheric, riverine and ocean) variables and marine carbon pools from a coupled physics-biogeochemistry model. The deep ensemble was trained on a North-West European Shelf (NWES) physical-biogeochemistry model free run simulation. After training, the deep ensemble was run using inputs from the NWES reanalysis instead of the free run, demonstrating that it can efficiently predict several NWES carbon pools (e.g., detritus, zooplankton, heterotrophic bacteria) in much better agreement with the reanalysis than the free run, while also providing uncertainty information. We further show that the deep ensemble performs similarly well when it is driven directly by the observations assimilated into the reanalysis, with the limitation that carbon pools can then be predicted only at the observed locations and times. We focus on explainability of the results and demonstrate potential use of the deep ensembles for future climate what-if scenarios. We suggest that model-informed machine learning presents a viable alternative to expensive reanalyses and could complement observations, wherever they are missing and/or highly uncertain.

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

Diffusion Flow Matching: Dimension-Improved KL Bounds and Wasserstein Guarantees

arXiv:2606.16610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) has recently emerged as a versatile framework for generative modeling, yet its theoretical convergence properties remain only partially understood. In this work, we provide refined and novel convergence guarantees for Brownian motion based DFMs, focusing on the discretization error. Our analysis is conducted under the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the 2-Wasserstein distance. Under finite-moment conditions and a mild score integrability assumption, we derive KL convergence bounds with improved dimensional dependence compared to prior work, achieving, up to our knowledge, state-of-the-art scaling under minimal conditions. We further extend the analysis to the 2-Wasserstein distance: under an additional first-order score integrability assumption and a weak log-concavity condition, we obtain convergence guarantees with dimensional dependence consistent with the KL case.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Entity Resolution via Batched Oracle Queries

arXiv:2606.24407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider an oracle that processes a limited batch of records at a time and clusters those that refer to the same real-world entity. We study how to interrogate such an oracle to resolve entities in a dataset whose size is far larger than a single batch, and where no batch is guaranteed to contain all records of any given entity. We aim at a pay-as-you-go approach, to have full control over the costs (the number of oracle consults), while achieving the highest possible recall at every step. We formally cast this problem as batched entity resolution, prove that selecting optimal batches is NP-hard, and provide an optimal solution under a natural condition on entity sizes. Finally, we evaluate our approach on six datasets and show its superiority over state-of-the-art baselines.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Instrumental and Proximal Causal Inference with Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2603.02159v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Instrumental variable (IV) and proximal causal learning (Proxy) methods are central frameworks for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. Despite substantial methodological advances, existing approaches rarely provide reliable epistemic uncertainty (EU) quantification. We address this gap through a Deconditional Gaussian Process (DGP) framework for uncertainty-aware causal learning. Our formulation recovers popular kernel estimators as the posterior mean, ensuring predictive precision, while the posterior variance yields principled and well-calibrated EU. Moreover, the probabilistic structure enables systematic model selection via marginal log-likelihood optimization. Empirical results demonstrate strong predictive performance alongside informative EU quantification, evaluated via empirical coverage frequencies and decision-aware accuracy rejection curves. Together, our approach provides a unified, practical solution for causal inference under unobserved confounding with reliable uncertainty.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

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

Optimal Coarse Correlated Equilibria in Mean Field Games: Linear Programming and No-Regret Learning

arXiv:2606.20062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce optimal coarse correlated equilibria for continuous-time mean field games. A coarse correlated equilibrium is a randomized recommendation scheme from which no player can gain by ignoring the recommendation and switching to an alternative strategy. The problem is as follows: a moderator selects, among all mean-field coarse correlated equilibria, one that optimizes a prescribed performance criterion, which may differ from the representative player's objective. After formulating the problem, we develop a linear programming (LP) formulation, prove the existence of optimal LP coarse correlated equilibria, and relate the LP characterization to the original probabilistic setting. Building on this characterization, we design a no-regret primal-dual algorithm, based on an equivalent Lagrangian formulation of the external-regret constraint, for learning such equilibria. We provide explicit convergence rates for the learning algorithm, and numerical examples illustrate the method.

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

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision – are the stated claims supported? – and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness – absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks – lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 157 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). Fine-tuning small models (1B-7B) on the complete oracle closes the precision-recall gap entirely (F1 ~0.98), beating every zero-shot frontier system regardless of scale. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HierSVA: A Data Synthesis Pipeline, Dataset, and Benchmark for LLM-Driven Hierarchical Hardware Formal Verification

arXiv:2606.13706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HierSVA, an integrated suite that combines a pipeline, dataset, and benchmark for LLM-driven hierarchical hardware formal verification. HierSVA-SP pairs an RTL preprocessing toolchain with an LLM-in-the-loop formal verification flow to produce reference SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) on hierarchical RTL. Applying it to BaseJump STL yields HierSVA-DS, a dataset of 342 modules, with hierarchy metadata and depths 0–9, accompanied by a deep subset of 28 module-bug pairs with natural-language specifications and bug variants. HierSVA-B decomposes assertion quality into six metric axes: syntax correctness, assertion proof success rate, vacuity, specification faithfulness, mutation coverage, and formal core coverage. Applying HierSVA-B to twelve recent LLMs reveals three findings. First, the module-level compile rate is 67.1\%; among generated assertions in evaluable runs, 82.1\% prove non-vacuously, but the corresponding assertion sets detect only 70.2\% of eligible injected faults and cover 36.2\% of the formal core. Second, on 211 evaluable model–module entries in the deep subset, assertion sets flag buggy RTL with 0.87 recall, but 40\% of predicted-buggy outcomes are false positives on correct RTL, limiting precision to 0.60. Third, agentic mode improves S1-style provability and strength metrics, but gains plateau and oscillate. Codes and artifacts are available at \href{https://github.com/HierSVAAnon/HierSVACodeAndArtifacts}{https://github.com/HierSVAAnon/HierSVACodeAndArtifacts}. Dataset is available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonymousHierSVA/HierSVA}{https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonymousHierSVA/HierSVA}.

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

Optimizing resource allocation for accuracy in noisy variational quantum algorithms

arXiv:2606.20153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For quantum algorithms to achieve their full potential, we need methodologies to optimize them, such as reaching a given output accuracy with minimal resource costs. Here, we develop such a methodology for a class of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms. We leverage simulations of a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to propose a phenomenological model of such algorithms that captures the complex relationship between algorithmic accuracy, algorithmic resource costs, and the noise that exists in realistic quantum hardware. For this, we take the algorithmic resource cost to be the total number of quantum gate-operations in the algorithm; minimizing this cost typically makes the algorithm faster and more energy-efficient. We consider the subtle trade-off between quantum circuit size (small circuits are too imprecise, but large ones are too noisy), and the number of iterations of that quantum circuit for the full algorithm to sufficiently converge. Using a noise-metric-resource methodology, we identify the sweet spot (of circuit size versus iterations) that minimizes the algorithmic resource costs for a desired algorithm accuracy. It also gives the circuit size that maximizes algorithm accuracy for a fixed resource cost. Our methodology provides a practical guideline for near-term deployment of variational algorithms on realistic noisy hardware, including hardware that uses error mitigation.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When English Isn't the Best Teacher: Source Language Effects in Cross-Lingual In-Context Learning

Cross-lingual transfer in multilingual NLP has been widely explored in supervised fine-tuning contexts, where factors like data availability and linguistic similarity largely determine transfer quality. As the field shifts toward few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), it is often presumed that insights from fine-tuning carry over unchanged. Yet this assumption has not been rigorously evaluated, leaving open the question of how to choose source languages for cross-lingual ICL. We conduct a broad empirical study of cross-lingual transfer in ICL spanning seven tasks, six models, and a typologically diverse set of languages. We further analyze language confusion, a key obstacle for generative tasks in cross-lingual ICL. Our results show that conventional fine-tuning-based expectations do not consistently apply in the ICL regime and point to alternative heuristics for selecting source languages effectively.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Fidelity bounds for adiabatic gates and other quantum operations with time-dependent dissipation

arXiv:2606.20501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum-computing platforms are susceptible to noise, the fidelity of quantum operations is limited by decoherence. Understanding this limitation is crucial for building utility-scale quantum processors. In previous works [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 150504 (2022); Quantum 9, 1684 (2025)], we presented analytical formulae for the average gate fidelity of multi-qubit operations under static Markovian noise processes, including operations that temporarily leave the computational subspace. However, some quantum-computing architectures dynamically modulate qubit or coupler frequencies to implement two-qubit gates, e.g., baseband flux gates; such modulation can lead to dissipation rates varying in time. In this Letter, we therefore generalize the fidelity-reduction formulae to encompass time-dependent dissipation. Applying our generalized formula, we obtain a fidelity bound for adiabatic operations and demonstrate that flux-dependent noise sensitivity, combined with qubit-coupler hybridization, significantly reduces the fidelity of adiabatic controlled-Z (CZ) gates in superconducting quantum computers. Our work thus provides essential theoretical tools for evaluating error budgets and optimizing the design of quantum operations in tunable quantum-computing architectures, and may also find applications in quantum-sensing and quantum-communication protocols that are affected by time-dependent dissipation.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Pulmonary extracellular vesicles drive alveolar macrophage dysfunction via microRNA transfer in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Background: Alveolar macrophage (AM) dysfunction contributes to Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) pathogenesis. We investigated the role of extracellular vesicles (EVs) in mediating this dysfunction. Methods: Pulmonary EVs were isolated from broncho-alveolar lavage and non-directed bronchial lavage samples of ventilated sepsis patients with and without ARDS, and post-operative control patients via ultracentrifugation. AMs were isolated from lung tissue resections of lobectomy patients. AMs were treated with pooled EVs for 24 hours prior to functional, metabolic and autophagy profiling. EV cargo was profiled via small RNA transcriptomics and proteomics. Mechanistic role of EV microRNAs was assessed via mimic / antagomir transfection. Results: Pulmonary EVs from sepsis patients with ARDS impaired AM efferocytosis, and control EVs had no effect. ARDS EV treatment enhanced AM mitochondrial-linked respiration, but not glycolysis. ARDS EV treatment impaired LC3B-II and LAMP1 expression, indicating dysregulated AM autophagy-lysosomal machinery. Proteomics revealed downregulation of innate immune pathways in ARDS EVs. Transcriptomics revealed enrichment of 24 microRNAs in ARDS EVs; miR-652-3p was the most enriched, validated by RT-qPCR. EV miR-652-3p was associated with 90-day mortality (9.20 vs 0.59 RQ, p=0.0295) and inversely correlated with oxygenation (PaO2/FiO2). AM transfection with miR-652-3p mimic induced similar dysregulation of function and autophagy as ARDS EVs. Transfection of ARDS EVs with antagomirs to miR-652-3p prior to AM treatment partially rescued efferocytosis and autophagy. Conclusions: Targeting EV miR-652-3p may restore alveolar macrophage function and reduce excessive inflammation, thus offering a novel therapeutic strategy for patients with ARDS.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Discriminative Span as a Predictor of Synthetic Data Utility via Classifier Reconstruction

In many real-world computer vision applications, including medical imaging and industrial inspection, binary classification tasks are characterized by a severe scarcity of positive samples. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic positive data using image-to-image transformations applied to negative samples. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how can we reliably assess whether such synthetic data will improve downstream model performance? In this work, we propose a geometry-driven metric that predicts the utility of synthetic data without requiring model training. Our approach operates in the embedding space of a pre-trained foundation model and represents the dataset through difference vectors between samples. We evaluate whether the weight vector of a linear classifier can be expressed within the subspace spanned by these variations by measuring the relative projection error. Intuitively, if the variations induced by synthetic data capture task-relevant directions, their span can approximate the classifier, resulting in low projection error. Conversely, poor synthetic data fails to span these directions, leading to higher error. Across multiple datasets and architectures, we show that this metric exhibits strong correlation with downstream classification performance of CNNs trained on mixtures of real negative and synthetic positive data. These findings suggest that the proposed metric serves as a practical and informative tool for evaluating synthetic data quality in data-scarce settings.