Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

The use of Peres lattices in periodically driven systems

arXiv:2606.20009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate the strength of the method of Peres lattices in periodically driven quantum systems. The method, which has previously been used mostly in stationary systems, enables us to efficiently detect resonances in the driven system, to monitor the onset of chaos, and to recognize critical properties of the Floquet modes. It also allows quick comparisons of the spectra of Floquet modes for various driving Hamiltonians and transparent tests of the iterative approximation techniques based on effective stationary Hamiltonians.

02.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Placenta accreta spectrum in the 21st century: Challenging dogma and redefining disorder

Authors:

by Eric Jauniaux, Helena C. Bartels, Yalda Afshar Placenta accreta spectrum (PAS) is a serious pregnancy complication caused by abnormal placental attachment to the uterus. In this Perspective, Eric Jauniaux and colleagues discuss emerging evidence that challenges our long-held pathophysiological understanding of PAS, and argue that a critical reassessment of definition, diagnosis, and management is overdue. In this Perspective, Jonathan Evans and colleagues discuss why restricting access to joint replacement surgery based on BMI alone is not supported by evidence, and highlight how such rest rictions risk exacerbating stigma, inequity and avoidable harm to those who would benefit from surgery.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SegTME-UNI2: A Foundation Model-Based Framework for Generalisable Multiclass Cell Segmentation and LLM-Driven Tumour Microenvironment Characterisation in Histopathology

Characterising the tumour microenvironment (TME) from routine H&E-stained histology images requires simultaneous cell segmentation, feature extraction, and interpretable clinical reporting. We present SEGTME-UNI2, a unified framework addressing these requirements. Its core is UNI2-UPERHOVER, a dual-head segmentation model pairing the UNI2-H pathology foundation model (ViT-Giant, pretrained on >100M tiles from 100K slides) with two parallel UperNet decoders: one for six-class semantic segmentation and one for horizontal-vertical gradient regression enabling watershed-based nuclear instance separation. To address the lack of pixel-level annotations in large real-world repositories, UNI2-UPERHOVER undergoes a three-stage progressive pseudo-label curriculum. Each stage trains a fresh model without weight transfer, driving improvement entirely via increased pseudo-label quality: Stage 1: Uses human-annotated PanNuke (7,901 images, 189,744 nuclei, 0.25 um/pixel). Stage 2: Uses entropy-filtered pseudo-labels from the Stage 1 model on 271,711 TCGA-UT scale-0 patches (0.5 um/pixel). Stage 3: Uses pseudo-labels from the Stage 2 model on all 1,608,060 TCGA-UT patches across six resolution scales (0.5-1.0 um/pixel). Segmentation outputs feed a structured TME feature extraction pipeline computing 20+ per-patch compositional, morphological, spatial entropy, and intercellular distance metrics. These are encoded as JSON and passed to a fine-tuned NVIDIA BioNeMo GPT model to generate clinically interpretable TME narratives. Preliminary validation on held-out PanNuke and TCGA-UT partitions demonstrates framework feasibility and internal consistency. The pseudo-labelled TCGA-UT dataset and UNI2-UPERHOVER checkpoint are publicly released to support large-scale TME profiling and spatial biology research.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MODE: Modality-Decomposed Expert-Level Mixed-Precision Quantization for MoE Multimodal LLMs

arXiv:2606.17118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models (MoE-MLLMs) offer remarkable performance but incur prohibitive GPU memory costs, making compression essential. Among PTQ methods, expert-level mixed-precision quantization has proven effective for MoE-LLMs, yet suffers notable degradation on MoE-MLLMs due to two overlooked biases in expert importance estimation. (1) At the cross-modal level, the numerical dominance of vision tokens causes expert selection frequency to be dominated by vision tokens, masking experts that are critical to the text modality; (2) at the intra-vision level, the large proportion of redundant vision tokens further skew frequency statistics, obscuring experts critical for informative visual content. To bridge gaps, we propose MODE, a modality-decomposed expert-level mixed-precision quantization framework for MoE-MLLMs that decomposes expert selection frequency by modality, filters redundant vision tokens to obtain denoised visual frequency, and further evaluates quantization sensitivity per modality as a complementary signal to frequency-based estimation. These signals are integrated into an Integer Linear Programming formulation to assign per-expert bit-widths under a given budget. Extensive experiments show that MODE is particularly well-suited for MoE-MLLMs, limiting average performance loss to within 2.9% at W3A16, with larger gains at the extreme 2-bit setting.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VeriGeo: Controllable Geometry Question Generation with Numerical and Analytical Verification

arXiv:2606.14176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometry problem generation is useful for AI-assisted education and multimodal mathematical reasoning, but reliable synthesis remains difficult because the problem statement, diagram, constraints, and solution should be mutually consistent. Existing methods often trade off controllability and reliability: seed-based rewriting is flexible but weakly verifiable, whereas diagram-first construction improves validity but is less suited to arbitrary user-specified constraints. We introduce VeriGeo, a controllable geometry generation framework grounded in executable reasoning traces. Given user constraints such as target concepts and difficulty, an Author agent generates a problem and diagram, and a Solver agent produces a proof-aligned solution. Both agents use a shared action sequence that connects natural language, diagrams, geometric constraints, and proof steps into a verifiable representation. A three-stage pipeline checks numerical consistency, analytical realizability, and global consistency, using verification-guided reflection to repair recoverable failures and reject unrecoverable ones. Across five LLM backbones, raw generations frequently fail these checks, while VeriGeo repairs a substantial fraction of the invalid attempts. Supervised fine-tuning on 8.7k examples generated by VeriGeo achieves the best reported GeoQA performance among end-to-end multimodal LLM-based solvers, and obtains strong results on PGPS9K and MathVista-GPS, demonstrating the effectiveness of verified synthetic data for improving multimodal geometry reasoning.

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

Preparation of Fractional Quantum Hall States on Quantum Computers

arXiv:2606.16548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The realization of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states, characterized by fractional charge and intrinsic topological order, on quantum computers represents a central challenge at the interface of condensed matter physics and quantum information science. Current methods are grouped into two types: methods based on (quasi-)adiabatic evolution of complex parent Hamiltonians to yield target states, and circuit-based approaches for direct state preparation, which are confined to effectively one-dimensional systems near the thin cylinder or torus limit. We introduce a complementary scheme relying on direct quantum circuit construction, which works for arbitrary geometries. Specifically, we present a method to precisely prepare the $\nu=1/3$ Laughlin state on the sphere geometry and demonstrate that it significantly reduces the required number of two-qubit gates and circuit depth, compared to variational quantum circuit approaches. In addition, we employ optimal control techniques to design control pulses for both superconducting and Rydberg atom platforms, identifying experimentally feasible protocols for state preparation. Our results provide an efficient and hardware-relevant pathway for realizing generic FQH states on both noisy intermediate-scale and fault-tolerant quantum devices.

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

City landscape in sight: A crowdsourced framework for unlocking urban-scale window view perceptions from real estate imagery

City landscapes viewed through home windows influence quality of life, yet perceptions of actual window views at the urban scale remain understudied. This study presents an approach for large-scale mapping of perceptions using 12,334 window view images (WVIs) collected from actual residential properties listed on real estate platforms in Wuhan, China, representing a rarely explored form of urban view imagery that offers advantages over the rendered or simulated window views commonly examined in previous studies. Through a non-immersive virtual reality platform, we collected 27,477 pairwise comparisons across six perceptual dimensions (e.g.\ Vivid) from 304 participants based on 499 WVIs. A hybrid neural network model was trained to predict human perceptions of all crowdsourced WVIs and map their spatial distribution. Results reveal significant spatial autocorrelation with distinct hot and cold spots across the whole city. Floor level strongly influences human perceptions: while higher floors offer more preferred and extensive window views, lower-floor windows provide residents with quiet and vivid views. An inference model further shows that window view composition matters considerably: high ratios of sky, trees, and low-rise buildings enhance people's preferences and perceptions of vividness, whereas high ratios of high-rise buildings increase perceptions of monotony and oppression. Importantly, these effects are non-linear: the excessive presence of certain elements can alter their impact on human perception. This work advances urban-scale understanding of residents' visual experiences and provides evidence-based guidance for human-centric urban planning and real estate to optimise visual landscapes from windows.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EvTexture++: Event-Driven Texture Enhancement for Video Super-Resolution

Event-based vision has drawn increasing attention owing to its distinctive properties, including ultra-high temporal resolution and extreme dynamic range. Recent works have introduced it to video super-resolution (VSR) to enhance flow estimation and temporal alignment. In contrast, this paper shifts the focus of event signals from motion refinement to texture enhancement in VSR. We propose EvTexture++, the first event-driven framework dedicated to texture enhancement in VSR. It leverages high-frequency spatiotemporal details from events to improve texture recovery. EvTexture++ incorporates a customized texture enhancement branch, along with an iterative texture enhancement module that progressively exploits high-temporal-resolution event information for texture restoration. This enables gradual refinement of texture regions across iterations, yielding more accurate and detailed high-resolution outputs. Besides intra-frame texture recovery, large motions could degrade inter-frame temporal consistency, particularly in texture regions, leading to texture flickering. To mitigate this, we further exploit the continuous-time motion cues of events to enhance temporal consistency, introducing a temporal texture alignment module that estimates event-guided texture-aware flow for precise inter-frame texture alignment. Moreover, EvTexture++ is designed as a plug-and-play tool to flexibly boost the performance of existing VSR models. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate that EvTexture++ achieves state-of-the-art performance. When integrated into recent VSR models, it yields significant improvements, with gains of up to 1.55 dB in PSNR on the texture-rich Vid4 dataset. Code: https://github.com/DachunKai/EvTexture.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cardio Heart Connect: Protocol for a Randomized Trial of a Commercially Available mHealth Fitness Intervention for Cardiac Rehabilitation After Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement

Background: Despite ample evidence of the benefits of cardiac rehabilitation (CR), few transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) patients participate. Commercially available mobile health offers an opportunity to deliver activity-promotion content to populations that are challenged to participate in CR. This study aims to test the efficacy of clinically controlled, commercially available fitness programming for improving physical activity and cardiovascular health outcomes designed to be initiated while patients are on waitlists for traditional CR. Methods: The Cardio Heart Connect study is a hybrid type I effectiveness-implementation trial aiming to enroll N=200 patients who have been placed on a cardiac rehab waitlist following a TAVR procedure from the University of Colorado Hospital Heart and Vascular Center. Participants will be randomized 1:1 to the Cardio Heart Connect intervention with commercially available fitness or attention control, designed to control for technology access. At baseline, post-intervention (8 weeks), and follow-up (12 months), we will assess the primary outcome of participants? daily steps as measured by smartwatch accelerometer and secondary outcomes of interest including functional capacity (Duke Activity Status Index; VO2max), quality of life (Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire), and cardiovascular health status (Life Essential 8). In addition, we will use mixed methodologies to evaluate the implementation of intervention using the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) Framework. Conclusions: Commercially available fitness programs have the potential to provide more accessible opportunities for patients recovering from TAVR to engage in physical activity and may be preferred due to their customizability, convenience, and ease of scheduling. Overall, this study will provide insight into the use of commercial mHealth to promote activity following TAVR.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PrototypeNAS: Rapid Design of Deep Neural Networks for Microcontroller Units

arXiv:2603.15106v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference on edge devices with different hardware constraints is a challenging task that typically requires DNN architectures to be specialized for each device separately. To avoid the huge manual effort, one can use neural architecture search (NAS). However, many existing NAS methods are resource-intensive and time-consuming because they require the training of many different DNNs from scratch. Furthermore, they do not take the resource constraints of the target system into account. To address these shortcomings, we propose PrototypeNAS, a zero-shot NAS method to accelerate and automate the selection, compression, and specialization of DNNs to different target microcontroller units (MCUs). We propose a novel three-step search method that decouples DNN design and specialization from DNN training for a given target platform. First, we present a novel search space that not only cuts out smaller DNNs from a single large architecture, but instead combines the structural optimization of multiple architecture types, as well as optimization of their pruning and quantization configurations. Second, we explore the use of an ensemble of zero-shot proxies during optimization instead of a single one. Third, we propose the use of Hypervolume subset selection to distill DNN architectures from the Pareto front of the multi-objective optimization that represent the most meaningful tradeoffs between accuracy and FLOPs. We evaluate the effectiveness of PrototypeNAS on 12 different datasets in three different tasks: image classification, time series classification, and object detection. Our results demonstrate that PrototypeNAS is able to identify DNN models within minutes that are small enough to be deployed on off-the-shelf MCUs and still achieve accuracies comparable to the performance of large DNN models.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Artificial Intelligence-Based Detection of Airway Mucus Plugs on CT and Associations With Clinical Outcomes in COPDGene

RATIONALE: Airway mucus plugging is a clinically relevant manifestation of airway pathology in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is associated with increased mortality even in early disease; however, visual computed tomography (CT) assessment is subjective and labor intensive. OBJECTIVES: To develop an AI-based quantitative CT method for automated detection of airway mucus plugging and evaluate associations with physiologic impairment and clinical outcomes. METHODS: Inspiratory CT scans from 8,971 COPDGene Phase 1 (GOLD 0-4 and PRISm) participants were analyzed. An AI-based framework combining 3D airway segmentation discontinuities and convolutional neural network classification identified mucus plug obstructions, yielding mucus plug burden (total plug count). Associations with outcomes were evaluated using covariate-adjusted models. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS : Higher mucus plug burden was associated with lower post-bronchodilator FEV % predicted ({rho} = -0.41; P < 0.001), greater air trapping (LAA < -856 HU; {rho} = 0.33; P < 0.001), worse health status (SGRQ; {rho} = 0.31; P < 0.001), and shorter 6-minute walk distance ({rho} = -0.26; P < 0.001). Among GOLD 1-4 participants, mucus plug presence was independently associated with increased all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.28; P < 0.005) and exacerbation frequency (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 1.32; P < 0.005). Plug presence was also associated with increased respiratory mortality across GOLD categories and cardiovascular mortality in GOLD 1-2. CONCLUSIONS: AI-based quantitative CT assessment of airway mucus plugging provides a scalable, reproducible measure associated with physiologic impairment and adverse outcomes in COPD, supporting its role in risk stratification and future therapeutic studies.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Controlled ion-ion interactions and cavity-enhanced emission of a coherent dinuclear Eu$^{3+}$ complex

arXiv:2606.11947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular rare-earth-ion complexes offer unique opportunities for quantum technologies by combining the intrinsic coherence properties of rare-earth ions with chemically tunable molecular environments. A crucial capability is the realization of multi-qubit architectures with defined qubit couplings to enable two-qubit quantum gates. Here, we investigate the optical coherence properties and excitation-induced interactions of two Eu$^{3+}$-based molecular complexes, comparing a mononuclear reference system with a dinuclear analogue in which two Eu$^{3+}$ ions are positioned at a well-defined intramolecular distance of about 7 Angstrom. Using cryogenic ensemble spectroscopy, including spectral hole burning, free-induction decay, and photon echo measurements at temperatures down to 100 mK, we demonstrate long optical coherence times $T_{2,o}$ of up to 9 $\mu$s. As a key step toward scalable multi-qubit architectures, a control-target sequence was implemented to probe conditional ion-ion interactions, revealing a stronger interaction-induced dephasing in the dinuclear complex. Finally, we show the integration of the dinuclear complex into a fiber-based optical microcavity, and observe an 380-fold emission enhancement of the $\mathrm{}^5\mathrm{D}_0\rightarrow\mathrm{}^7\mathrm{F}_0$ transition. Together, these results position molecular rare-earth complexes as versatile and chemically tunable building blocks for scalable quantum technologies.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Discrete-Time Gaussian Process Mixtures for Robot Policy Learning

arXiv:2505.03296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation. MiDiGap enables learning from as few as five demonstrations using only camera observations and generalizes across a wide range of challenging tasks. It excels at long-horizon behaviors such as making coffee, highly constrained motions such as opening doors, dynamic actions such as scooping with a spatula, and multimodal tasks such as hanging a mug. MiDiGap learns these tasks on a CPU in less than a minute and scales linearly to large datasets. We also develop a rich suite of tools for inference-time steering using evidence such as collision signals and robot kinematic constraints. This steering enables novel generalization capabilities, including obstacle avoidance and cross-embodiment policy transfer. MiDiGap achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse few-shot manipulation benchmarks. On constrained RLBench tasks, it improves policy success by 76 percentage points and reduces trajectory cost by 67%. On multimodal tasks, it improves policy success by 48 percentage points and increases sample efficiency by a factor of 20. In cross-embodiment transfer, it more than doubles policy success. We make the code publicly available at https://midigap.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

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

Dropout Neural Network Training Viewed from a Percolation Perspective

arXiv:2512.13853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the existence and effect of percolation in training deep Neural Networks (NNs) with dropout. Dropout methods are regularisation techniques for training NNs, first introduced by G. Hinton et al. (2012). These methods temporarily remove connections in the NN, randomly at each stage of training, and update the remaining subnetwork with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The process of removing connections from a network at random is similar to percolation, a paradigm model of statistical physics. If dropout were to remove enough connections such that there is no path between the input and output of the NN, then the NN could not make predictions informed by the data. We study new percolation models that mimic dropout in NNs and characterise the relationship between network topology and this path problem. The theory shows the existence of a percolative effect in dropout. We also show that this percolative effect can cause a breakdown when training NNs without biases with dropout; and we argue heuristically that this breakdown extends to NNs with biases.

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

JetFlow: Breaking the Scaling Ceiling of Speculative Decoding with Parallel Tree Drafting

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel, but it faces a scaling limitation: increasing the draft budget improves speed only when acceptance remains high and drafting overhead stays low. This ceiling has been difficult to break because prior head-based SD methods face a causality-efficiency dilemma. Autoregressive drafters produce path-conditioned candidates that are effective for tree speculative decoding with higher acceptance length, but their drafting cost grows with tree depth. Bidirectional block-diffusion drafters generate all positions in one pass, but their branch-agnostic marginals can form individually plausible yet mutually inconsistent trees, wasting budget and reducing acceptance. We propose JetFlow, a head-based SD framework that combines one-forward drafting efficiency with branch-wise causal conditioning. JetFlow trains a causal parallel draft head over fused hidden states from the frozen target model, producing candidate trees whose scores align with the target model's autoregressive factorization. This enables JetFlow to convert larger draft budgets into longer accepted prefixes and higher end-to-end speedup. Across math, coding, and chat benchmarks on dense and MoE Qwen3 models, JetFlow consistently outperforms bidirectional-head and tree-based SD baselines. On H100 GPUs, JetFlow achieves up to 9.64x speedup on MATH-500 and 4.58x on open-ended conversational workloads, with further latency gains demonstrated through vLLM integration under realistic serving loads. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/JetFlow.

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

Bidirectional Tutoring for Developmental Motor Learning in Robots: Co-Developed Interaction Dynamics Support Stable Learning

arXiv:2606.19728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Infants are well known to develop their motor skills through dense interaction with caregivers. Although such social interaction is crucial for human development, motor-skill learning in robots is often treated as a unidirectional process in which robots passively receive demonstrations from tutors. This overlooks a key property of social interaction: it is inherently bidirectional, with tutor and learner dynamically adapting to each other. In such interactions, the robot's past experiences may function as prior constraints that shape the dynamics of their co-developed trajectories. We hypothesize that bidirectional tutoring allows such constraints to guide the formation of consistent behavioral patterns that preserve behavioral coherence and support generalization, whereas unidirectional interaction lacks such constraints and leads to broader, less consistent behavioral patterns. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments with a physical humanoid robot performing an object manipulation task: one involving human-robot interaction and another employing an AI tutor interacting with the real robot through an adaptive intervention mechanism designed to examine whether similar effects would emerge under more controlled conditions. We implement the developmental learning framework using a free-energy-principle-based neural network extended with generative replay, which supports stable sequence-by-sequence learning from single tutored episodes. Across both settings, bidirectional tutoring fostered consistent behaviors and stage-wise generalization, while the robot gradually required less tutor guidance. These results suggest that bidirectional tutoring, as an embodied and socially grounded approach, provides an effective scaffold for developmental motor learning in robots.

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

Classifying by Proxy: Explainable and Reproducible Ensemble of Proxy Tasks for Child Sexual Abuse Imagery Classification

Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) classification systems are needed solutions for lessening the psychological impacts often felt by law enforcement agents responsible for evaluating these materials and for efficient removal of these materials from the web. However, due to the nature of the task, researching and developing such systems is not a trivial endeavor. The images are highly sensitive, and the related datasets are under restrictive access regimes, which means most studies in the area are not reproducible or distributable and are therefore hard to compare and validate. More concerning still, most models for this task today lack an aspect often desired by law enforcement agents: explainability. In this paper, we apply an ensemble of Proxy Tasks – tasks that correlate to CSAI classification – yielding improvements in reproducibility, explainability, and security for distribution. This concept is applied for the first time to real CSAI, with a novel selection of relevant Proxy Tasks (selected from the CSAI literature) and training adaptations to the original framework. Our final model achieves competitive results, yielding 91.9% balanced accuracy on the RCPD dataset with the best Proxy Task combination. We furthermore contrast these results with the best-in-class representation learning model, DINO, and show that our ensemble improves accuracy and provides explanations for its classification results, a feature that a single deep learning model can seldom provide.

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

Discrimination-free Insurance Pricing with Privatized Sensitive Attributes

arXiv:2504.11775v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fairness has become an important concern in insurance pricing as insurers increasingly rely on machine learning models to predict expected losses. At the same time, regulatory and privacy constraints often restrict insurers' ability to access or use sensitive attributes such as gender or race. Recent actuarial research addresses fairness in this context through the concept of the discrimination-free premium, which removes both the direct and indirect effects of sensitive attributes while preserving actuarial consistency. However, implementing this approach typically requires access to the sensitive attributes themselves, which may not be available in practice. This paper studies the estimation of discrimination-free insurance premiums when sensitive attributes are observed only in privatized or noise-perturbed form. We consider a multi-party data setting in which insurers observe non-sensitive attributes and outcomes, while a trusted third party holds privatized sensitive attributes generated through a privacy mechanism. Within this framework, we develop statistical methods for estimating discrimination-free premiums using only the privatized attributes. We study two settings of practical relevance: when the privacy mechanism is known and when its noise level is unknown. For both cases, we establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed estimators. Numerical experiments and empirical applications demonstrate that the proposed approach enables fair insurance pricing while respecting privacy and regulatory constraints.

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

PromptShift-CRC: Drift-Aware Conformal Risk Control for Foundation Models Under Prompt and Domain Shift

arXiv:2606.15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

The Risk Shadow of Principal Component Analysis: When 99.9999% Variance Preservation Causes Catastrophic Decision Errors

arXiv:2606.14533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) preserves variance, not the information needed to detect rare catastrophic events. This paper proves the existence of a {\it Risk Shadow}: PCA can retain over 99.9999 percent of total variance while completely erasing all signal about rare, high-impact failures. When this happens, even the best possible classifier operating on the PCA representation reduces to a constant predictor. The root cause is a fundamental mismatch between variance maximization and tail risk awareness. To break the shadow, we introduce Expectile PCA (ExPCA) and Tail-Preserving PCA (TP-PCA), two methods that reweight the data covariance toward high-impact events. We prove theoretically that ExPCA strictly outperforms PCA in retaining rare-event information, and we validate our claims on synthetic data and a real-world credit card fraud detection benchmark. Our results call for a fundamental rethinking of variance-based dimensionality reduction in high-stakes decisions.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Linear algebra at exponential scale via tensor network dimension reduction

arXiv:2606.15350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many problems in modern scientific computing are challenging because of a curse of dimension, where their mathematical formulation involves objects whose dimension is exponential in the nominal "size" of the problem. Tensor networks can provide a compact representation for exponentially large vectors and matrices that arise in applications, but these representations do not always lead to reliable algorithms. This paper develops and analyzes techniques for randomized dimension reduction of tensor network data. These techniques support a suite of efficient algorithms for provably solving exponential-scale linear algebra problems, including trace estimation and eigenvalue approximation. The paper includes several stylized illustrations from quantum many-body physics with ambient dimension up to $2^{200}$.

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

Many-Body Protection of Topological Edge Memory in Strong Interacting Quenches

arXiv:2606.19437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum quenches drive edge states far from equilibrium, yet whether the memory of a topological initial state survives in a non-integrable, interacting system has remained largely unexplored. We study this question in the bond-alternating XXZ chain – an interacting Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model hosting symmetry-protected topological edge modes with markedly enhanced boundary magnetization – and analyze quenches across all combinations of single-particle and many-body initial and final Hamiltonians. The results organize by a single distinction as we rigorously establish in this work: whether the post-quench Hamiltonian is free or genuinely interacting. For a free post-quench Hamiltonian, the dynamics is solved exactly by a correlation-matrix approach; the boundary-mode return amplitude decays as $t^{-3/2}$, and initial interactions enter only through a dressed one-body density matrix. For a genuinely interacting post-quench Hamiltonian, finite-time stability bounds prove that away from local resonances the first-dimer magnetization remains stable on time windows growing as arbitrarily large powers of the inverse inter-dimer coupling. Matrix product state simulations across all four protocols show that interactions in the final Hamiltonian markedly extend finite-time boundary memory – with local suppression near the isotropic $SU(2)$ point – revealing a many-body protection mechanism in a non-integrable system where scrambling would otherwise wash out initial-state memory fast.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

arXiv:2606.12245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cold-start item recommendation remains a persistent challenge in real-world systems due to the absence of interaction histories. While prior models attempt to bridge this gap using item content features, they universally suffer from the seesaw dilemma: enhancing performance for cold items inevitably degrades performance for warm items, and vice versa. We identify that this dilemma stems from a fundamental distributional disparity: warm item embeddings occupy a complex ``behavioral manifold" shaped by rich interaction signals, whereas cold item embeddings are constrained to a ``semantic manifold" derived solely from auxiliary content. Existing methods often force a rigid mapping between these inconsistent spaces, causing the model to sacrifice the precision of warm representations to accommodate cold ones. To address this, we propose DiffCold, a diffusion-based generative model that unifies warm and cold representations. Unlike GANs or VAEs, DiffCold leverages conditional diffusion to reconstruct warm item embeddings from content, preserving the underlying manifold structure without degradation. We further tailor this paradigm with two specific designs: a Retrieval-enhanced Aggregator that initializes generation using semantically similar warm items to bypass inefficient noise, and a Simulation-based Representation Alignment module that enforces distribution consistency between generated and real embeddings via contrastive learning. Experiments on three benchmarks confirm that DiffCold resolves the seesaw dilemma, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Analysis of the asymmetric shelf shuffle

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