InceptionMamba: An Efficient Hybrid Network with Large Band Convolution and Bottleneck Mamba

Within the family of convolutional neural networks, InceptionNeXt has shown excellent competitiveness in image classification and a number of downstream tasks. Built on parallel one-dimensional strip convolutions, however, it suffers from limited ability of capturing spatial dependencies along different dimensions and fails to fully explore spatial modeling in local neighborhood. Besides, inherent locality constraints of convolution operations are detrimental to effective global context modeling. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel backbone architecture termed InceptionMamba in this study. More specifically, the traditional one-dimensional strip convolutions are replaced by orthogonal band convolutions in our InceptionMamba to achieve cohesive spatial modeling. Furthermore, global contextual modeling can be achieved via a bottleneck Mamba module, facilitating enhanced cross-channel information fusion and enlarged receptive field. Extensive evaluations on classification and various downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed InceptionMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior parameter and computational efficiency. The source code will be available at https://github.com/Wake1021/InceptionMamba.

SlideCoder: Layout-aware RAG-enhanced Hierarchical Slide Generation from Design

Manual slide creation is labor-intensive and requires expert prior knowledge. Existing natural language-based LLM generation methods struggle to capture the visual and structural nuances of slide designs. To address this, we formalize the Reference Image to Slide Generation task and propose Slide2Code, the first benchmark with difficulty-tiered samples based on a novel Slide Complexity Metric. We introduce SlideCoder, a layout-aware, retrieval-augmented framework for generating editable slides from reference images. SlideCoder integrates a Color Gradient-based Segmentation algorithm and a Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation method to decompose complex tasks and enhance code generation. We also release SlideMaster, a 7B open-source model fine-tuned with improved reverse-engineered data. Experiments show that SlideCoder outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 40.5 points, demonstrating strong performance across layout fidelity, execution accuracy, and visual consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/vinsontang1/SlideCoder.

StepSearch: Igniting LLMs Search Ability via Step-Wise Proximal Policy Optimization

Efficient multi-hop reasoning requires Large Language Models (LLMs) based agents to acquire high-value external knowledge iteratively. Previous work has explored reinforcement learning (RL) to train LLMs to perform search-based document retrieval, achieving notable improvements in QA performance, but underperform on complex, multi-hop QA resulting from the sparse rewards from global signal only. To address this gap in existing research, we introduce StepSearch, a framework for search LLMs that trained with step-wise proximal policy optimization method. It consists of richer and more detailed intermediate search rewards and token-level process supervision based on information gain and redundancy penalties to better guide each search step. We constructed a fine-grained question-answering dataset containing sub-question-level search trajectories based on open source datasets through a set of data pipeline method. On standard multi-hop QA benchmarks, it significantly outperforms global-reward baselines, achieving 11.2% and 4.2% absolute improvements for 3B and 7B models over various search with RL baselines using only 19k training data, demonstrating the effectiveness of fine-grained, stepwise supervision in optimizing deep search LLMs. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/zxh20001117/StepSearch.

Thinking Short and Right Over Thinking Long: Serving LLM Reasoning Efficiently and Accurately

Recent advances in test-time scaling suggest that Large Language Models (LLMs) can gain better capabilities by generating Chain-of-Thought reasoning (analogous to human thinking) to respond a given request, and meanwhile exploring more reasoning branches (i.e., generating multiple responses and ensembling them) can improve the final output quality. However, when incorporating the two scaling dimensions, we find that the system efficiency is dampened significantly for two reasons. Firstly, the time cost to generate the final output increases substantially as many reasoning branches would be trapped in the over-thinking dilemma, producing excessively long responses. Secondly, generating multiple reasoning branches for each request increases memory consumption, which is unsuitable for LLM serving since we can only batch a limited number of requests to process simultaneously. To address this, we present SART, a serving framework for efficient and accurate LLM reasoning. The essential idea is to manage the thinking to be short and right, rather than long. For one thing, we devise a redundant sampling with early stopping approach based on empirical observations and theoretic analysis, which increases the likelihood of obtaining short-thinking responses when sampling reasoning branches. For another, we propose to dynamically prune low-quality branches so that only right-thinking branches are maintained, reducing the memory consumption and allowing us to batch more requests. Experimental results demonstrate that SART not only improves the accuracy of LLM reasoning but also enhances the serving efficiency, outperforming existing methods by up to 28.2 times and on average 15.7 times in terms of efficiency when achieving the same level of accuracy.

Empirical Performance Evaluation of Lane Keeping Assist on Modern Production Vehicles

Leveraging a newly released open dataset of Lane Keeping Assist (LKA) systems from production vehicles, this paper presents the first comprehensive empirical analysis of real-world LKA performance. Our study yields three key findings: (i) LKA failures can be systematically categorized into perception, planning, and control errors. We present representative examples of each failure mode through in-depth analysis of LKA-related CAN signals, enabling both justification of the failure mechanisms and diagnosis of when and where each module begins to degrade; (ii) LKA systems tend to follow a fixed lane-centering strategy, often resulting in outward drift that increases linearly with road curvature, whereas human drivers proactively steer slightly inward on similar curved segments; (iii) We provide the first statistical summary and distribution analysis of environmental and road conditions under LKA failures, identifying with statistical significance that faded lane markings, low pavement laneline contrast, and sharp curvature are the most dominant individual factors, along with critical combinations that substantially increase failure likelihood. Building on these insights, we propose a theoretical model that integrates road geometry, speed limits, and LKA steering capability to inform infrastructure design. Additionally, we develop a machine learning-based model to assess roadway readiness for LKA deployment, offering practical tools for safer infrastructure planning, especially in rural areas. This work highlights key limitations of current LKA systems and supports the advancement of safer and more reliable autonomous driving technologies.

Bridging Human Oversight and Black-box Driver Assistance: Vision-Language Models for Predictive Alerting in Lane Keeping Assist Systems

Lane Keeping Assist systems, while increasingly prevalent, often suffer from unpredictable real-world failures, largely due to their opaque, black-box nature, which limits driver anticipation and trust. To bridge the gap between automated assistance and effective human oversight, we present LKAlert, a novel supervisory alert system that leverages VLM to forecast potential LKA risk 1-3 seconds in advance. LKAlert processes dash-cam video and CAN data, integrating surrogate lane segmentation features from a parallel interpretable model as automated guiding attention. Unlike traditional binary classifiers, LKAlert issues both predictive alert and concise natural language explanation, enhancing driver situational awareness and trust. To support the development and evaluation of such systems, we introduce OpenLKA-Alert, the first benchmark dataset designed for predictive and explainable LKA failure warnings. It contains synchronized multimodal inputs and human-authored justifications across annotated temporal windows. We further contribute a generalizable methodological framework for VLM-based black-box behavior prediction, combining surrogate feature guidance with LoRA. This framework enables VLM to reason over structured visual context without altering its vision backbone, making it broadly applicable to other complex, opaque systems requiring interpretable oversight. Empirical results correctly predicts upcoming LKA failures with 69.8% accuracy and a 58.6\% F1-score. The system also generates high-quality textual explanations for drivers (71.7 ROUGE-L) and operates efficiently at approximately 2 Hz, confirming its suitability for real-time, in-vehicle use. Our findings establish LKAlert as a practical solution for enhancing the safety and usability of current ADAS and offer a scalable paradigm for applying VLMs to human-centered supervision of black-box automation.

Playing Non-Embedded Card-Based Games with Reinforcement Learning

Significant progress has been made in AI for games, including board games, MOBA, and RTS games. However, complex agents are typically developed in an embedded manner, directly accessing game state information, unlike human players who rely on noisy visual data, leading to unfair competition. Developing complex non-embedded agents remains challenging, especially in card-based RTS games with complex features and large state spaces. We propose a non-embedded offline reinforcement learning training strategy using visual inputs to achieve real-time autonomous gameplay in the RTS game Clash Royale. Due to the lack of a object detection dataset for this game, we designed an efficient generative object detection dataset for training. We extract features using state-of-the-art object detection and optical character recognition models. Our method enables real-time image acquisition, perception feature fusion, decision-making, and control on mobile devices, successfully defeating built-in AI opponents. All code is open-sourced at https://github.com/wty-yy/katacr.

Bootstrapped Model Predictive Control

Model Predictive Control (MPC) has been demonstrated to be effective in continuous control tasks. When a world model and a value function are available, planning a sequence of actions ahead of time leads to a better policy. Existing methods typically obtain the value function and the corresponding policy in a model-free manner. However, we find that such an approach struggles with complex tasks, resulting in poor policy learning and inaccurate value estimation. To address this problem, we leverage the strengths of MPC itself. In this work, we introduce Bootstrapped Model Predictive Control (BMPC), a novel algorithm that performs policy learning in a bootstrapped manner. BMPC learns a network policy by imitating an MPC expert, and in turn, uses this policy to guide the MPC process. Combined with model-based TD-learning, our policy learning yields better value estimation and further boosts the efficiency of MPC. We also introduce a lazy reanalyze mechanism, which enables computationally efficient imitation learning. Our method achieves superior performance over prior works on diverse continuous control tasks. In particular, on challenging high-dimensional locomotion tasks, BMPC significantly improves data efficiency while also enhancing asymptotic performance and training stability, with comparable training time and smaller network sizes. Code is available at https://github.com/wertyuilife2/bmpc.

Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking

Panoramic imagery, with its 360{\deg} field of view, offers comprehensive information to support Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) in capturing spatial and temporal relationships of surrounding objects. However, most MOT algorithms are tailored for pinhole images with limited views, impairing their effectiveness in panoramic settings. Additionally, panoramic image distortions, such as resolution loss, geometric deformation, and uneven lighting, hinder direct adaptation of existing MOT methods, leading to significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose OmniTrack, an omnidirectional MOT framework that incorporates Tracklet Management to introduce temporal cues, FlexiTrack Instances for object localization and association, and the CircularStatE Module to alleviate image and geometric distortions. This integration enables tracking in large field-of-view scenarios, even under rapid sensor motion. To mitigate the lack of panoramic MOT datasets, we introduce the QuadTrack dataset--a comprehensive panoramic dataset collected by a quadruped robot, featuring diverse challenges such as wide fields of view, intense motion, and complex environments. Extensive experiments on the public JRDB dataset and the newly introduced QuadTrack benchmark demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed framework. OmniTrack achieves a HOTA score of 26.92% on JRDB, representing an improvement of 3.43%, and further achieves 23.45% on QuadTrack, surpassing the baseline by 6.81%. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xifen523/OmniTrack.

Near-infrared Image Deblurring and Event Denoising with Synergistic Neuromorphic Imaging

The fields of imaging in the nighttime dynamic and other extremely dark conditions have seen impressive and transformative advancements in recent years, partly driven by the rise of novel sensing approaches, e.g., near-infrared (NIR) cameras with high sensitivity and event cameras with minimal blur. However, inappropriate exposure ratios of near-infrared cameras make them susceptible to distortion and blur. Event cameras are also highly sensitive to weak signals at night yet prone to interference, often generating substantial noise and significantly degrading observations and analysis. Herein, we develop a new framework for low-light imaging combined with NIR imaging and event-based techniques, named synergistic neuromorphic imaging, which can jointly achieve NIR image deblurring and event denoising. Harnessing cross-modal features of NIR images and visible events via spectral consistency and higher-order interaction, the NIR images and events are simultaneously fused, enhanced, and bootstrapped. Experiments on real and realistically simulated sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and indicate better accuracy and robustness than other methods in practical scenarios. This study gives impetus to enhance both NIR images and events, which paves the way for high-fidelity low-light imaging and neuromorphic reasoning.