Back

Disentangling Confounders from Pathology in Long-COVID Trajectory Prediction for Women: An Interpretable Large-Language-Model Approach

Wang, J.; Galis, Z.; Zhang, T.; Luo, Y.; Sra, A.; Niu, X.; Shen, J.; Xie, Q.; Weiss, J. C.

2026-06-12 infectious diseases
10.64898/2026.06.10.26355420 medRxiv
Show abstract

Objective. Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, "Long COVID") dispropor- tionately affects women, in whom hallmark symptoms--insomnia, fatigue, palpitations, cogni- tive difficulty--overlap with comorbidities and hormonal transitions such as menopause. This diagnostic overlap is a confounding problem: models that forecast future symptom severity risk attributing baseline physiological noise to viral pathology. We ask whether an interpretable, causally disentangled language model can separate true pathological signal from such con- founders while remaining competitive with strong predictors of future PASC severity

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.