Large Language Models (LLMs) and causal learning each hold strong potential for clinical decision making (CDM). However, their synergy remains poorly understood, largely due to the lack of systematic benchmarks evaluating their integration in clinical risk prediction. In real-world healthcare, identifying features with causal influence on outcomes is crucial for actionable and trustworthy predictions. While recent work highlights LLMs' emerging causal reasoning abilities, there lacks comprehensive benchmarks to assess their causal learning and performance informed by causal features in clinical risk prediction. To address this, we introduce REACT-LLM, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether combining LLMs with causal features can enhance clinical prognostic performance and potentially outperform traditional machine learning (ML) methods. Unlike existing LLM-clinical benchmarks that often focus on a limited set of outcomes, REACT-LLM evaluates 7 clinical outcomes across 2 real-world datasets, comparing 15 prominent LLMs, 6 traditional ML models, and 3 causal discovery (CD) algorithms. Our findings indicate that while LLMs perform reasonably in clinical prognostics, they have not yet outperformed traditional ML models. Integrating causal features derived from CD algorithms into LLMs offers limited performance gains, primarily due to the strict assumptions of many CD methods, which are often violated in complex clinical data. While the direct integration yields limited improvement, our benchmark reveals a more promising synergy: LLMs serve effectively as knowledge-rich collaborators for identifying and optimizing causal features. Additionally, in-context learning improves LLM predictions when prompts are tailored to the task and model. Different LLMs show varying sensitivity to structured data encoding formats, for example, open-source models perform better with JSON, while smaller models benefit from narrative serialization. These findings highlight the need to match prompts and data formats to model architecture and pretraining.

Aging progresses unevenly across cells, making chronological age an incomplete measure of biological decline. Aging clocks, machine learning models trained on molecular features, offer a promising approach by capturing predictable molecular patterns. However, identifying cell-type-specific aging signals from high-dimensional and heterogeneous single-cell data remains challenging. Temporal causal learning provides a potential solution by uncovering causal relationships among gene features, enabling more stable and reliable feature selection. Despite its potential, its application to aging clocks is largely limited by the scarcity of longitudinal genetic data. Reconstructing continuous aging trajectories from sparse, unevenly distributed cross-sectional data poses a barrier to introduce causal learning to age clocks. To address these challenges, this study proposes LCANet, a novel causal knowledge distillation framework for lung cell aging prediction. LCANet constructs pseudo-temporal lung cell trajectories, performs causal discovery across adjacent pseudo-time slices, and distills the identified causal knowledge into a student model. Experiments on a popular lung cell dataset demonstrate that LCANet effectively identifies reliable causal genes and integrates them into the distillation process, enabling the lightweight student model to predict cellular age with high efficiency and accuracy.

BACKGROUND: Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play essential roles in various physiological and pathological processes. Inferring new lncRNA-disease associations (LDAs) not only promotes us to better understand these complex biological processes, but also provides new options for the diagnosis and prevention of diseases. RESULTS: A novel computational model, LDA-SCGB, is proposed to predict new LDAs. LDA-SCGB first extracts features of each lncRNA-disease pair with singular value decomposition. Next, it classifies unknown lncRNA-disease pairs through the condensed gradient boosting model. The results demonstrated that LDA-SCGB greatly outperformed the other four representative LDA inference methods (SDLDA, LDNFSGB, LDAenDL and LDASR) under 5-fold cross validations on lncRNAs, diseases, and lncRNA-disease pairs on three LDA datasets, which were from lncRNADisease v2.0, MNDR, and lncRNADisease v3.0, respectively. LDA-SCGB was further used to find potential lncRNAs for colorectal cancer, heart failure, and lung adenocarcinoma. The results demonstrated that CCDC26, MIAT, and CCDC26 had higher association probability with colorectal cancer, heart failure, and lung adenocarcinoma, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: We foresee that LDA-SCGB was capable of predicting potential lncRNAs for complex diseases and further assisting in cancer diagnosis and therapy.

Accurate prediction of unplanned readmissions allows healthcare systems to adopt preventive measures, reducing these occurrences. Creating a model that accurately predicts readmissions while simultaneously providing insights that are clinically interpretable is a complex and demanding task. This interpretability is vital, as it informs clinicians about the underlying reasons behind a model’s decisions, thus aiding in more informed clinical decision-making. In light of this, we introduce CARE-30 (Causal Analysis based Readmission Estimator within a 30-day time frame), a novel causal inference-based model, designed with clear cause-and-effect relationships, enhancing its potential acceptance and understanding among clinicians.In our approach, we generate a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to elucidate the latent causal relationships among pivotal clinical variables. Leveraging this causal graph, we can effectively apply the front-door criterion to construct the model and eliminate bias. By utilizing transformers, we integrate clinical texts, time-series data and categorical data into patient representation data as a robust input to the CARE-30 model. Our work signifies the effective application of knowledge from the field of causal inference in the domain of clinical medicine, and it also reflects the originality and impact of our research. CARE-30 unites causality and clinical prediction, unlocking new vistas in healthcare forecasting. Experiments demonstrated that our model outperforms all other methods in Accuracy and F1 scores.

Summary Various deep neural network (DNN) model watermarks have been proposed by researchers to verify copyrights for deep neural networks DNN. However, most DNN watermarking methods cannot prevent attackers from stealing and using the model. Unlike many existing approaches, this paper uses a channel pruning algorithm to protect DNN models, which verifies DNN models copyrights but also prevents the illegal use of DNN models. In this work, the pruning threshold or pruning rate is used as the secret key of a DNN model. After the secret key is distributed to multiple users, they prune the DNN model with the secret key, and the pruned and fine‐tuned model is provided to the users. The users can verify ownership of the model according to the pruning accuracy and fine‐tuning accuracy. If the secret key is incorrect, the accuracy of the model after fine‐tuning will be very low, and users will be unable to use the reasoning function of the fine‐tuned model. Based on the CIFAR‐10 and CIFAR‐100 datasets, we conducted experiments on five popular DNN models. The experimental results show that we can authorize multiple users by pruning very few channels in the convolution layers of the DNN model.

Summary Person re‐identification (Re‐ID) aims at identifying the same person across multiple non‐overlapping camera views. A number of existing methods have been presented for this task in a fully‐supervised manner that requires a large amount of training annotations. However, obtaining high quality labels is extremely time consuming and expensive. In this article, we focus on the semi‐supervised person Re‐ID and propose a one‐shot stepwise learning method to address the above issue. It exploits only one labeled data along with additional unlabeled samples to gradually but steadily improving the discriminative capability of the feature representation. Specifically, we first construct labeled data portion to train Re‐ID model. Then we fine‐tune the overall system by the following two steps iteratively: (1) assigning the estimated labels to the unlabeled portion; (2) updating the network parameters according to the selected data. During the propagation process, different from conventional sampling method, we propose a novel dynamic sampling strategy to enlarge the pseudo‐labeled subset step by step to make the pseudo labels more reliable. On Market‐1501, DukeMTMC‐ReID and MARS datasets, we conducted extensively experiments to demonstrate that our proposed method contributes indispensably and achieves a very competitive Re‐ID performance.

In order to improve the effective utilization of the radio resources, bit rate adaptation (BRA) is applied in the UMTS system, specifically for the best effort and interactive packet traffic. This paper presents investigation results on the optimization of bit rate adaptation (BRA) scheme for an efficient data support in the UMTS radio access network.