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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

Lysophosphatidylcholine acyltransferase 1 promotes head and neck squamous cell carcinoma progression by enhancing COX17-dependent oxidative phosphorylation

Cell Death Discovery, Published online: 06 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41420-026-02994-3

Lysophosphatidylcholine acyltransferase 1 promotes head and neck squamous cell carcinoma progression by enhancing COX17-dependent oxidative phosphorylation

Pretrained Vision-Language-Action Models are Surprisingly Resistant to Forgetting in Continual Learning

arXiv:2603.03818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning is a long-standing challenge in robot policy learning, where a policy must acquire new skills over time without catastrophically forgetting previously learned ones. While prior work has extensively studied continual learning in relatively small behavior cloning (BC) policy models trained from scratch, its behavior in modern large-scale pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains underexplored. In this work, we found that pretrained VLAs are remarkably resistant to forgetting compared with smaller policy models trained from scratch. Simple Experience Replay (ER) works surprisingly well on VLAs, sometimes achieving zero forgetting even with a small replay data size. Our analysis reveals that pretraining plays a critical role in downstream continual learning performance: large pretrained models mitigate forgetting with a small replay buffer size while maintaining strong forward learning capabilities. Furthermore, we found that VLAs can retain relevant knowledge from prior tasks despite performance degradation during learning new tasks. This knowledge retention enables rapid recovery of seemingly forgotten skills through finetuning. Together, these insights imply that large-scale pretraining fundamentally changes the dynamics of continual learning, enabling models to continually acquire new skills over time with simple replay. Code and more information can be found at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/continual-vla

Preference Leakage: A Contamination Problem in LLM-as-a-judge

arXiv:2502.01534v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) as judges and LLM-based data synthesis have emerged as two fundamental LLM-driven data annotation methods in model development. While their combination significantly enhances the efficiency of model training and evaluation, little attention has been given to the potential contamination brought by this new model development paradigm. In this work, we expose preference leakage, a contamination problem in LLM-as-a-judge caused by the relatedness between the synthetic data generators and LLM-based evaluators. To study this issue, we first define three common relatednesses between the data generator LLM and the judge LLM: being the same model, having an inheritance relationship, and belonging to the same model family. Through extensive experiments, we empirically confirm the bias of judges towards their related student models caused by preference leakage across multiple LLM baselines and benchmarks. Further analysis suggests that preference leakage is a pervasive and real-world problem that is harder to detect compared to previously identified biases in LLM-as-a-judge scenarios. All of these findings imply that preference leakage is a widespread and challenging problem in the area of LLM-as-a-judge. We release all codes and data at: https://github.com/David-Li0406/Preference-Leakage.

Boolean Satisfiability via Imitation Learning

arXiv:2509.25411v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose ImitSAT, a branching policy for conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) solvers based on imitation learning for the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT). Unlike previous methods that predict instance-level signals to improve CDCL branching indirectly, or rely on reinforcement learning and insufficient CDCL information to enhance branching, ImitSAT learns from expert KeyTrace that collapses a full run into the sequence of surviving decisions. Replaying a KeyTrace on the same instance is nearly conflict-free, providing dense decision-level supervision and directly reducing propagations -- the dominant contributor to wall-clock time. This prefix-conditioned supervision enables ImitSAT to reproduce high-quality branches without exploration, yielding faster convergence, stable training, and seamless integration into CDCL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ImitSAT reduces propagation counts and runtime, outperforming state-of-the-art learned approaches. We released the source code and trained model at https://github.com/zewei-Zhang/ImitSAT
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