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Two-step clinical care pathway to predict MASLD-related advanced fibrosis and long-term outcomes in type 2 diabetes

Gut. 2026 Feb 9;75(3):576-587. doi: 10.1136/gutjnl-2025-337506.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Current guidelines recommend a two-step approach for risk stratification of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), starting with Fibrosis-4 index (FIB-4) followed by liver stiffness measurement (LSM) using vibration-controlled transient elastography (VCTE).

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate this approach for predicting advanced fibrosis and liver-related events (LREs) in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D).

DESIGN: A prospective liver biopsy cohort of T2D patients with histologically confirmed MASLD from seven centres in China was used to assess diagnostic performance for advanced fibrosis. The international VCTE-Prognosis cohort, including T2D patients with MASLD who underwent VCTE at 16 centres in the USA, Europe and Asia, with longitudinal follow-up, was used to assess LREs, defined as hepatic decompensation or hepatocellular carcinoma.

RESULTS: 4781 participants were included. In the liver biopsy cohort (n=352; 22.2% with advanced fibrosis), applying LSM thresholds of <8 kPa and >12 kPa after FIB-4 classified patients into 63.4% low-risk, 9.4% intermediate-risk and 27.3% high-risk, with a correct classification rate of 71%. In the VCTE-Prognosis cohort (n=4429; median follow-up 51.3 (IQR 27.4-70.7) months), 140 (3.2%) patients developed LREs (110 (2.5%) with hepatic decompensation and 59 (1.3%) with hepatocellular carcinoma). The two-step approach classified 72.6%, 6.8% and 20.6% of patients into low-risk, intermediate-risk and high-risk groups, with corresponding 5-year cumulative LRE incidences of 0.7%, 0.9% and 11.8%. Refining classification of intermediate FIB-4 patients using LSM <10 kPa (low-risk) and >15 kPa (high-risk) reduced the intermediate-risk group to 5.6% while preserving predictive accuracy.

CONCLUSION: The non-invasive two-step approach of FIB-4 followed by LSM effectively stratifies MASLD-related advanced fibrosis and LREs risk in T2D. Applying LSM cut-offs of 10 and 15 kPa further optimises risk stratification for future LREs.

PMID:41911049 | DOI:10.1136/gutjnl-2025-337506

Effect of a Digital-Driven Physician-Pharmacist Collaborative Model for Diabetes in Primary Health Care: Cluster Randomized Trial

Background: Evidence-based physician-pharmacist collaborative clinics have demonstrated significant short-term benefits for patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D), but their long-term effectiveness remains unclear, especially in primary health care settings. Objective: This study aimed to explore the long-term effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a novel, digital-driven, multifaceted physician-pharmacist collaborative model for managing patients with T2D in underresourced settings. Methods: We conducted a 12-month cluster randomized controlled trial from May 2021 to December 2022 across 6 primary health care settings in China. Guided by the theory of planned behavior, the intervention involved routine therapy from physicians along with pharmaceutical interventions from pharmacists. These were delivered through a combination of face-to-face visits and mobile health care. The intervention group received 4 face-to-face visits and biweekly remote education sessions over the 12 months. We conducted intention-to-treat analyses to estimate differences in clinical and behavior indicators between the intervention and control groups. Primary outcomes included glycosylated hemoglobin and 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk. Data were analyzed using adjusted generalized estimation equations. Results: This study included 574 patients (291 in the intervention group and 283 in the control group). Over 12 months, patients in the intervention group had significant reductions in hemoglobin A1c (–2.57 vs –1.96, respectively; P<.001; 95% CI –1.027 to –0.238) and 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk (–1.35 vs 0.01, respectively; P<.001; 95% CI –1.690 to –0.630) compared with the control group. Substantial improvements were also observed in several secondary outcomes, including fasting blood glucose, 2-hour postprandial blood glucose, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, triglyceride, and total cholesterol. Total diabetes-related costs decreased, and patient satisfaction improved significantly in the intervention group. There were no significant differences in BMI, high-density lipoprotein, or low-density lipoprotein. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the physician-pharmacist collaborative model could improve the long-term quality and efficiency of T2D management and reduce medical costs in underresourced areas globally. Patients with T2D, especially those with central obesity or high cardiovascular risk, may benefit more from collaborative clinics. Trial Registration: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2000031839; https://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=51910

Towards Realistic Personalization: Evaluating Long-Horizon Preference Following in Personalized User-LLM Interactions

arXiv:2603.04191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as personal assistants, where users share complex and diverse preferences over extended interactions. However, assessing how well LLMs can follow these preferences in realistic, long-term situations remains underexplored. This work proposes RealPref, a benchmark for evaluating realistic preference-following in personalized user-LLM interactions. RealPref features 100 user profiles, 1300 personalized preferences, four types of preference expression (ranging from explicit to implicit), and long-horizon interaction histories. It includes three types of test questions (multiple-choice, true-or-false, and open-ended), with detailed rubrics for LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. Results indicate that LLM performance significantly drops as context length grows and preference expression becomes more implicit, and that generalizing user preference understanding to unseen scenarios poses further challenges. RealPref and these findings provide a foundation for future research to develop user-aware LLM assistants that better adapt to individual needs. The code is available at https://github.com/GG14127/RealPref.

Boosting Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Text Classification via Label-guided Distance Scaling

arXiv:2603.02267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot text classification aims to recognize unseen classes with limited labeled text samples. Existing approaches focus on boosting meta-learners by developing complex algorithms in the training stage. However, the labeled samples are randomly selected during the testing stage, so they may not provide effective supervision signals, leading to misclassification. To address this issue, we propose a \textbf{L}abel-guided \textbf{D}istance \textbf{S}caling (LDS) strategy. The core of our method is exploiting label semantics as supervision signals in both the training and testing stages. Specifically, in the training stage, we design a label-guided loss to inject label semantic information, pulling closer the sample representations and corresponding label representations. In the testing stage, we propose a Label-guided Scaler which scales sample representations with label semantics to provide additional supervision signals. Thus, even if labeled sample representations are far from class centers, our Label-guided Scaler pulls them closer to their class centers, thereby mitigating the misclassification. We combine two common meta-learners to verify the effectiveness of the method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. All datasets and codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Label-guided-Text-Classification.

xLLM Technical Report

arXiv:2510.14686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce xLLM, an intelligent and efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference framework designed for high-performance, large-scale enterprise-grade serving, with deep optimizations for diverse AI accelerators. To address these challenges, xLLM builds a novel decoupled service-engine architecture. At the service layer, xLLM-Service features an intelligent scheduling module that efficiently processes multimodal requests and co-locates online and offline tasks through unified elastic scheduling to maximize cluster utilization. This module also relies on a workload-adaptive dynamic Prefill-Decode (PD) disaggregation policy and a novel Encode-Prefill-Decode (EPD) disaggregation policy designed for multimodal inputs. Furthermore, it incorporates a distributed architecture to provide global KV Cache management and robust fault-tolerant capabilities for high availability. At the engine layer, xLLM-Engine co-optimizes system and algorithm designs to fully saturate computing resources. This is achieved through comprehensive multi-layer execution pipeline optimizations, an adaptive graph mode and an xTensor memory management. xLLM-Engine also further integrates algorithmic enhancements such as optimized speculative decoding and dynamic EPLB, collectively serving to substantially boost throughput and inference efficiency. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that xLLM delivers significantly superior performance and resource efficiency. Under identical TPOT constraints, xLLM achieves throughput up to 1.7x that of MindIE and 2.2x that of vLLM-Ascend with Qwen-series models, while maintaining an average throughput of 1.7x that of MindIE with Deepseek-series models. xLLM framework is publicly available at https://github.com/jd-opensource/xllm and https://github.com/jd-opensource/xllm-service.

Behavior Learning (BL): Learning Hierarchical Optimization Structures from Data

arXiv:2602.20152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inspired by behavioral science, we propose Behavior Learning (BL), a novel general-purpose machine learning framework that learns interpretable and identifiable optimization structures from data, ranging from single optimization problems to hierarchical compositions. It unifies predictive performance, intrinsic interpretability, and identifiability, with broad applicability to scientific domains involving optimization. BL parameterizes a compositional utility function built from intrinsically interpretable modular blocks, which induces a data distribution for prediction and generation. Each block represents and can be written in symbolic form as a utility maximization problem (UMP), a foundational paradigm in behavioral science and a universal framework of optimization. BL supports architectures ranging from a single UMP to hierarchical compositions, the latter modeling hierarchical optimization structures. Its smooth and monotone variant (IBL) guarantees identifiability. Theoretically, we establish the universal approximation property of BL, and analyze the M-estimation properties of IBL. Empirically, BL demonstrates strong predictive performance, intrinsic interpretability and scalability to high-dimensional data. Code: https://github.com/MoonYLiang/Behavior-Learning ; install via pip install blnetwork.
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