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Anonymization of Portuguese Clinical Notes Using Large Language Models and Quantum-Enhanced Hybrid Architectures: Comparative Evaluation Study

Background: The widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has generated large-scale repositories of highly sensitive clinical information, emphasizing the need for robust anonymization strategies to enable secondary use for research while safeguarding patient privacy. Conventional rule-based and machine learning approaches for deidentifying medical text face limitations with the linguistic complexity, variability, and context dependence inherent to clinical documentation. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), combined with emerging quantum computing paradigms, present novel opportunities to enhance the accuracy, scalability, and resilience of health care data anonymization. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of LLM-based and quantum-enhanced hybrid architectures for medical text anonymization, assessing the effectiveness and computational efficiency across multiple entity types in Portuguese clinical notes. Methods: We constructed a gold-standard corpus of 1000 Portuguese outpatient clinical notes, manually annotated by 5 trained researchers for 5 protected-entity categories: patient names, dates, identifiers, organizations, and geographic locations. Four anonymization strategies were evaluated: 2 stand-alone LLMs (Llama-3.1-8B-instruct and Llama-3.3-70B-instruct) and 2 quantum-enhanced hybrid models (Dynex-QML with 8B and 70B base models) incorporating quantum optimization via Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) formulations. The quantum-enhanced approach transforms the final attention layer of the LLM into a global constraint satisfaction problem solved via neuromorphic quantum annealing. Model performance was measured on a held-out test set of 500 notes using precision, recall, and -score metrics. Computational efficiency was quantified through end-to-end processing time. Results: The quantum-enhanced Dynex-QML-70B model achieved the highest overall performance with a macro-score of 0.855 (95% CI 0.823‐0.880), outperforming the stand-alone Llama-3.3-70B (0.726, 95% CI 0.704‐0.747), Dynex-QML-8B (0.733, 95% CI 0.709‐0.756), and Llama-3.1-8B (0.602, 95% CI 0.588‐0.615). Compared with Llama 3.3 70B, Dynex-QML (Llama 70B) improved macro-score by 0.128 (95% CI 0.091‐0.163; empirical 2-sided bootstrap

Reproducing and Evaluating the Generalizability of Subliminal Learning in Open-Weight Models

arXiv:2609.12586v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this reproduction paper we investigate subliminal learning, a consequence of distillation where teacher models transmit behavioral preference traits through semantically unrelated data. The original paper explores two types of traits (animal preferences and misalignment), three data modalities (number sequences, code, and chain of thought), and several model families. We reproduce their experiments and extend the setup along three axes: new preference categories (actors and politicians), a new task (chess move generation), and an additional open-weight model (Ministral8B). We also run a controlled ablation on the numbers task's answer-space size (1-, 2-, and 3-digit sequences). We focus on open-weight models with accessible checkpoints on HuggingFace, since the original paper's GPT-4.x fine-tuning is no longer available. Our reproduction supports the original paper's claims, but our extensions show they are not universal as transmission strength varies across traits and tasks, and one model shows almost no effect at all.

4D Parallelism Unlocks Exascale Bayesian Neural Networks for High-Fidelity Atmospheric Modeling

arXiv:2609.12815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present BEAST, the first-ever Bayesian Swin Transformer for atmospheric forecasting on 0.25$^\circ$ global resolution able to accurately quantify both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. To overcome the associated computational bottlenecks, we devise an orthogonal 4D-parallelization scheme that introduces a unique domain-tensor-parallelism strategy and a novel uncertainty parallel method, enabling us to fully leverage GPU capacity and efficiently scale model training. For a 2.4-billion-parameter model, we achieve a peak performance of 3.96 EFLOP/s on 20,480 NVIDIA GH200 GPUs on the JUPITER supercomputer. We train BEAST as a 700-million-parameter model with 96 random weight samples on 384 nodes on 40 years of data for nearly one million gradient updates. This model achieves predictive skill scores competitive with state-of-the-art probabilistic atmospheric AI models and numerical models, and can predict extreme events with exceptional skill, while generating large ensembles 3 to 4 times faster than the current-best AI model. Our contribution unlocks the potential of high-fidelity uncertainty quantification in atmospheric AI models, heralding a new era for AI-based models in climate and Earth system sciences.

PACE: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Plausible and Actionable Counterfactual Explanations

arXiv:2607.01306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Counterfactual explanations explain machine learning predictions by identifying minimal input changes that would alter a model's decision. Although many existing methods successfully generate prediction-changing alternatives, they often produce unrealistic or infeasible recommendations due to a lack of explicit mechanisms for incorporating domain knowledge and intervention constraints. Neuro-symbolic AI offers a promising direction by combining data-driven predictive models with symbolic reasoning capable of representing human-understandable rules and feasible actions. This paper presents PACE, a modular neuro-symbolic framework for generating feasibility-aware counterfactual explanations. The framework separates prediction and reasoning into two components: a neural predictive model for classification and a symbolic reasoning layer that enforces domain-specific constraints during counterfactual generation. By explicitly modeling feasible interventions, the framework produces explanations consistent with domain knowledge while remaining interpretable and actionable. The approach is model-agnostic and adaptable to domains requiring realistic decision support. A case study is conducted on the Adult Income dataset, combining a multilayer perceptron classifier with Answer Set Programming (ASP) rules encoding feasible modifications to education, occupation, and working hours while preserving immutable attributes. Results highlight the trade-off between counterfactual validity and plausibility and show that symbolic constraints yield explanations that better satisfy domain-specific feasibility requirements, illustrating the potential of neuro-symbolic methods for transparent, feasibility-aware counterfactual explanation in explainable AI.

The Vienna 4G/5G Drive-Test Dataset

arXiv:2603.02638v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning for mobile network analysis, planning, and optimization is often limited by the lack of large, comprehensive real-world datasets. This paper introduces the Vienna 4G/5G Drive-Test Dataset, a city-scale open dataset of georeferenced Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G New Radio (NR) measurements collected across Vienna, Austria. The dataset combines passive wideband scanner observations with active handset logs, providing complementary network-side and user-side views of deployed radio access networks. The measurements cover diverse urban and suburban settings and are aligned with time and location information to support consistent evaluation. For a representative subset of base stations (BSs), we provide inferred deployment descriptors, including estimated BS locations, sector azimuths, and antenna heights. The release further includes high-resolution building and terrain models, enabling geometry-conditioned learning and calibration of deterministic approaches such as ray tracing. To facilitate practical reuse, the data are organized into scanner, handset, estimated cell information, and city-model components, and the accompanying documentation describes the available fields and intended joins between them. The dataset enables reproducible benchmarking across environment-aware learning, propagation modeling, coverage analysis, and ray-tracing calibration workflows.

ETHOS: Towards a Modular Ethics Framework for Clinical Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2608.15424v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of large language models has enabled the development of clinical multi-agent systems (MAS) capable of integrating multimodal patient data and supporting increasingly complex clinical decision-making. However, the deployment of these systems in real-world healthcare settings raises critical ethical concerns related to safety, fairness, accountability, transparency, and patient trust. While numerous organizations, including the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Medicine, and the FUTURE-AI consortium, have proposed ethical frameworks and governance principles for healthcare AI, these efforts remain largely conceptual. To address this challenge, we present ETHOS (Ethics and Trust through Hierarchical Oversight System), a modular ethics framework designed as a governance meta-agent that can be integrated with any existing multi-agent system without requiring changes to its underlying architecture. ETHOS translates stakeholder-informed ethical requirements into executable runtime oversight through a layered governance approach consisting of deterministic checks, contextual reviews, and a final ethics critic. These components continuously evaluate intermediate reasoning steps and final outputs, enabling the system to identify ethical risks, request revisions, or suppress responses that fail predefined safety and trustworthiness criteria. We demonstrate ETHOS within a hepatology clinical decision-support MAS. Results show that ETHOS improves decision reliability by detecting incomplete, inconsistent, or out-of-scope evidence and appropriately increasing abstention when safe recommendations cannot be supported. By embedding ethical governance directly into system operation, ETHOS provides a practical and auditable mechanism for transforming high-level AI ethics principles into deployable safeguards.

Clinical usability of an explainable AI decision support tool and evaluation of multimodal models in NSCLC

Nature Medicine, Published online: 13 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04488-2

In a large international real-world study of non-small cell lung cancer, a multimodal explainable AI model outperformed established biomarkers for immunotherapy outcome prediction and improved physician decision-making.

The effect of unique molecular identifier family size using tumor-informed circulating tumor-DNA analysis in childhood cancers

J Mol Diagn. 2026 Sep 11:S1525-1578(26)00156-X. doi: 10.1016/j.jmoldx.2026.08.002. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Analysis of circulating tumor-DNA (ctDNA) provides a molecular assessment that can complement routine imaging in childhood cancer management. Detailed monitoring of ctDNA levels may provide information on treatment efficacy and resistance, minimal residual disease and allows for early detection of relapse. Here, tumor-informed ctDNA analysis was applied to 90 blood plasma samples collected from eight children with malignant tumors. Four to ten tumor-specific mutations per patient were assessed using SiMSen-Seq, a digital sequencing approach utilizing unique molecular identifiers (UMIs). The effects of individual SiMSen-Seq assays and plasma samples were evaluated in relation to their impact on background error rate, number of detected target molecules and mutant calling using different UMI family size cutoff settings. The use of at least two sequencing reads per UMI provided the best overall performance by generating the highest number of detected target molecules and hence the optimal chance to detect low-frequent mutations. Data were consistent between SiMSen-Seq assays and plasma samples, providing robust ctDNA profiling over time for all patients. In conclusion, the results show that optimal use of UMIs in tumor-informed ctDNA analysis enables sensitive molecular readout that can assist in management of childhood cancers.

PMID:42727690 | DOI:10.1016/j.jmoldx.2026.08.002

Clinical Immunogenicity in rAAV Gene Therapy: Insights and Implications

Recombinant AAV gene therapies deliver durable clinical benefit but face immune-mediated challenges that vary by vector, dose, route, and patient. Gulve and colleagues synthesize the clinical manifestations, temporal patterns, and mechanisms of rAAV immunogenicity, highlighting risk assessment and emerging mitigation strategies to support safer, more effective gene therapy development.

C-terminal CD28 phosphorylation, pY218, modulates IL-2 secretion and therapeutic effect of CAR-T cells

This study identifies the interleukin-2-inducible T cell Kinase (ITK)-mediated phosphorylation of Y218 in the CD28 cytoplasmic domain as key for CAR-T cell function and demonstrates that engineering a synthetic ITK-binding motif into the CAR enhances IL-2 production and antitumor efficacy in vivo.

ACC1 inhibition enhances BCG-induced trained immunity by reprogramming acetyl-CoA metabolism

The efficacy of vaccines remains suboptimal in many settings, underscoring the need for new strategies. Baydemir and colleagues show that modulation of acetyl-CoA metabolism reshapes metabolic and epigenetic programs underlying Bacille Calmette-Guérin-induced trained immunity, enhancing cellular innate immune responses and identifying immunometabolic targeting as a promising approach to improve vaccine efficacy.
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