2.3OTJan 9
Immunological Density Shapes Recovery Trajectories in Long COVIDJing Wang, Tong Zhang, Xing Niu et al.
Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (Long COVID) frequently persists for months, yet drivers of clinical remission remain incompletely defined. Here we analyzed 97,564 longitudinal PASC assessments from 13,511 participants with linked vaccination histories to disentangle passive temporal progression from vaccine-associated change. Using a clinically validated threshold (PASC $\geq 12$), trajectories separated into three phenotypes: Protected (persistently sub-threshold), Refractory (persistently symptomatic), and Responders (transitioning from symptomatic to recovered). Across the full cohort, symptom severity increased modestly with elapsed time ($r=0.0521$, $P=1.26\times10^{-59}$), whereas cumulative vaccination showed an inverse association with severity ($r=-0.0434$, $P=5.95\times10^{-42}$). In summary, baseline Long COVID severity appears clinically deterministic. In the absence of intervention, symptoms typically persist without spontaneous resolution. Recovery is primarily associated with repeated immunization.
1.4LGJan 13
Taxon: Hierarchical Tax Code Prediction with Semantically Aligned LLM Expert GuidanceJihang Li, Qing Liu, Zulong Chen et al.
Tax code prediction is a crucial yet underexplored task in automating invoicing and compliance management for large-scale e-commerce platforms. Each product must be accurately mapped to a node within a multi-level taxonomic hierarchy defined by national standards, where errors lead to financial inconsistencies and regulatory risks. This paper presents Taxon, a semantically aligned and expert-guided framework for hierarchical tax code prediction. Taxon integrates (i) a feature-gating mixture-of-experts architecture that adaptively routes multi-modal features across taxonomy levels, and (ii) a semantic consistency model distilled from large language models acting as domain experts to verify alignment between product titles and official tax definitions. To address noisy supervision in real business records, we design a multi-source training pipeline that combines curated tax databases, invoice validation logs, and merchant registration data to provide both structural and semantic supervision. Extensive experiments on the proprietary TaxCode dataset and public benchmarks demonstrate that Taxon achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines. Further, an additional full hierarchical paths reconstruction procedure significantly improves structural consistency, yielding the highest overall F1 scores. Taxon has been deployed in production within Alibaba's tax service system, handling an average of over 500,000 tax code queries per day and reaching peak volumes above five million requests during business event with improved accuracy, interpretability, and robustness.