ASSCG: Just-Right Gating over Chattering for Fast-Slow LLM Planning in Autonomous Driving

Large language models (LLMs) can improve autonomous driving planning but are costly to query online, and existing fast-slow planners often rely on hand-designed triggering rules that either over-call the slow system or call it at the wrong times. We formulate slow-system invocation as a resource-aware sequential decision problem and propose the Adaptive Slow-System Control Gate (ASSCG), which makes frame-level Query/Cache/Drop decisions to refresh, reuse, or suppress slow guidance. ASSCG uses an RWKV backbone for efficient long-horizon gating and is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO-style compute-aware reinforcement fine-tuning. We apply ASSCG to two different fast-slow architectures: (i) AsyncDriver on nuPlan Hard20 closed-loop evaluation, where ASSCG improves score to 67.28 (+2.28) while reducing average end-to-end inference latency by 60%; and (ii) a RecogDrive-based dual system that we build by replacing its original VLM-2B module with a lightweight ViT-based fast planner and adding an LLM slow planner, evaluated on NAVSIM, where ASSCG achieves 91.4 PDMS (+0.6) and increases average speed by 25%. The project page, including video visualizations and additional results, is available at https://williamxuanyu.github.io/asscg/.

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

FSS-Net: Frequency-Spatial Synergy Network with Wavelet Attention for Carotid Artery Ultrasound Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of carotid arteries in ultrasound imaging is critical for stroke risk assessment. However, speckle noise, low contrast, and blurred boundaries remain major challenges. In this paper, we propose a Frequency-Spatial Synergy Network (FSS-Net) to achieve noise-robust and high-precision carotid artery segmentation. The network integrates wavelet transform, multi-domain attention, and edge enhancement into a unified encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, a Channel-Spatial-Wavelet Attention (CSWA) module is designed to suppress noise and purify semantic features in the frequency domain. A Wavelet-Enhanced Bottleneck (WEB) module is introduced to capture long-range global dependencies efficiently. Furthermore, a Laplacian-Guided Adaptive Edge Fusion (LAEF) module compensates high-frequency details and maintains boundary continuity. Extensive experiments on carotid ultrasound datasets show that FSS-Net achieves a Dice score (DSC) of 96.46% and strong robustness under low SNR conditions, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods. This method realizes accurate segmentation of carotid artery in ultrasonic imaging, effectively identifies carotid atherosclerotic plaque, and is verified by other task (such as segmentation of breast cancer), suggesting that it has good clinical application potential in identifying abnormal tissue masses in ultrasonic images.

Context-Aware Deep Learning for Defect Classification in Atomic-Resolution STEM

Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing materials characterization, yet most applications in electron microscopy rely solely on image contrast, overlooking the chemical and experimental context that shapes image formation. This limitation makes defect classification inherently ambiguous, as similar contrasts can arise from different materials or imaging conditions. Here we develop a context-aware learning framework that integrates image-derived contrast with metadata describing composition, beam energy, and detector geometry. Using a systematically constructed dataset of ~55 million simulated patches spanning 576 cases across 96 doped monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides, we show that conditioning on contextual variables transforms defect classification from an ill-posed image-only task into a well-posed, physically grounded problem. The framework achieves over 98% accuracy on simulations and near-human agreement on experimental data, with a 94% reduction in posterior entropy. By emphasizing contextual grounding over architectural complexity, this approach links experimental image contrast to the underlying chemical and imaging conditions, supporting physically grounded defect assignments and a general pathway toward multimodal AI models for autonomous materials characterization.

Robust Secure Beamforming for Movable Antenna Enhanced Integrated Sensing and Communications

In this letter, we investigate robust beamforming design for a movable antenna (MA)-enhanced secure integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system with imperfect eaves?dropping channel state information (CSI). To improve radar sensing performance, we formulate a radar signal-to-interference?plus-noise ratio (SINR) maximization problem by jointly opti?mizing the transmit beamforming and antenna placement while ensuring communication data security. However, the resulting op?timization problem is inherently intractable due to the nonlinea mapping from antenna positions to channel coefficients, as well as the eavesdropper (Eve) channel uncertainty. To handle these challenges, we propose a block coordinate descent (BCD)-based algorithm incorporating successive convex approximation (SCA) and fractional programming (FP) techniques. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm exhibits fast convergence and achieves a significant improvement in the radar SINR while guaranteeing communication security.

Spreadsheet Modeling Experiments Using GPTs on Small Problem Statements and the Wall Task

This paper investigates how GPT-based tools can assist in building reusable analytical spreadsheet models. After a screening, we evaluate five GPT extensions and select Excel AI by pulsrai.com for detailed testing. Through structured experiments on simple problem statements, we assess Excel AI's performance against the ERFR criteria (each input in a cell; cell formulas; no hardwired numbers; labels; accurate). Results show that while Excel AI can produce well-structured models, it is inconsistent and often non-reproducible. We identify two central challenges - "the problem of confidence" and "the problem of workflow" - which highlight the need for skilled users to verify and adapt GPT-generated spreadsheets. Though GPTs show promise for generating draft models that may reduce development time or lower skill requirements, current tools remain unreliable for professional use. We conclude with recommendations for future research into prompt engineering, reproducibility, and larger-scale modeling tasks.

Disentangling to Re-couple: Resolving the Similarity-Controllability Paradox in Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

Subject-Driven Text-to-Image (T2I) Generation aims to preserve a subject's identity while editing its context based on a text prompt. A core challenge in this task is the "similarity-controllability paradox", where enhancing textual control often degrades the subject's fidelity, and vice-versa. We argue this paradox stems from the ambiguous role of text prompts, which are often tasked with describing both the subject and the desired modifications, leading to conflicting signals for the model. To resolve this, we propose DisCo, a novel framework that first Disntangles and then re-Couples visual and textual information. First, our textual-visual decoupling module isolates the sources of information: subject identity is extracted exclusively from the reference image with the entity word of the subject, while the text prompt is simplified to contain only the modification command, where the subject refers to general pronouns, eliminating descriptive ambiguity. However, this strict separation can lead to unnatural compositions between the subject and its contexts. We address this by designing a dedicated reward signal and using reinforcement learning to seamlessly recouple the visually-defined subject and the textually-generated context. Our approach effectively resolves the paradox, enabling simultaneous high-fidelity subject preservation and precise textual control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing highly realistic and coherent images.

DSH-Bench: A Difficulty- and Scenario-Aware Benchmark with Hierarchical Subject Taxonomy for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

Significant progress has been achieved in subject-driven text-to-image (T2I) generation, which aims to synthesize new images depicting target subjects according to user instructions. However, evaluating these models remains a significant challenge. Existing benchmarks exhibit critical limitations: 1) insufficient diversity and comprehensiveness in subject images, 2) inadequate granularity in assessing model performance across different subject difficulty levels and prompt scenarios, and 3) a profound lack of actionable insights and diagnostic guidance for subsequent model refinement. To address these limitations, we propose DSH-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that enables systematic multi-perspective analysis of subject-driven T2I models through four principal innovations: 1) a hierarchical taxonomy sampling mechanism ensuring comprehensive subject representation across 58 fine-grained categories, 2) an innovative classification scheme categorizing both subject difficulty level and prompt scenario for granular capability assessment, 3) a novel Subject Identity Consistency Score (SICS) metric demonstrating a 9.4\% higher correlation with human evaluation compared to existing measures in quantifying subject preservation, and 4) a comprehensive set of diagnostic insights derived from the benchmark, offering critical guidance for optimizing future model training paradigms and data construction strategies. Through an extensive empirical evaluation of 19 leading models, DSH-Bench uncovers previously obscured limitations in current approaches, establishing concrete directions for future research and development.

Locally Interpretable Individualized Treatment Rules for Black-Box Decision Models

Individualized treatment rules (ITRs) aim to optimize healthcare by tailoring treatment decisions to patient-specific characteristics. Existing methods typically rely on either interpretable but inflexible models or highly flexible black-box approaches that sacrifice interpretability; moreover, most impose a single global decision rule across patients. We introduce the Locally Interpretable Individualized Treatment Rule (LI-ITR) method, which combines flexible machine learning models to accurately learn complex treatment outcomes with locally interpretable approximations to construct subject-specific treatment rules. LI-ITR employs variational autoencoders to generate realistic local synthetic samples and learns individualized decision rules through a mixture of interpretable experts. Simulation studies show that LI-ITR accurately recovers true subject-specific local coefficients and optimal treatment strategies. An application to precision side-effect management in breast cancer illustrates the necessity of flexible predictive modeling and highlights the practical utility of LI-ITR in estimating optimal treatment rules while providing transparent, clinically interpretable explanations.

IPCV: Information-Preserving Compression for MLLM Visual Encoders

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deliver strong vision-language performance but at high computational cost, driven by numerous visual tokens processed by the Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder. Existing token pruning strategies are inadequate: LLM-stage token pruning overlooks the ViT's overhead, while conventional ViT token pruning, without language guidance, risks discarding textually critical visual cues and introduces feature distortions amplified by the ViT's bidirectional attention. To meet these challenges, we propose IPCV, a training-free, information-preserving compression framework for MLLM visual encoders. IPCV enables aggressive token pruning inside the ViT via Neighbor-Guided Reconstruction (NGR) that temporarily reconstructs pruned tokens to participate in attention with minimal overhead, then fully restores them before passing to the LLM. Besides, we introduce Attention Stabilization (AS) to further alleviate the negative influence from token pruning by approximating the K/V of pruned tokens. It can be directly applied to previous LLM-side token pruning methods to enhance their performance. Extensive experiments show that IPCV substantially reduces end-to-end computation and outperforms state-of-the-art training-free token compression methods across diverse image and video benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Perkzi/IPCV.