SCoder: Iterative Self-Distillation for Bootstrapping Small-Scale Data Synthesizers to Empower Code LLMs

Existing code large language models (LLMs) often rely on large-scale instruction data distilled from proprietary LLMs for fine-tuning, which typically incurs high costs. In this paper, we explore the potential of small-scale open-source LLMs (e.g., 7B) as synthesizers for high-quality code instruction data construction. We first observe that the data synthesis capability of small-scale LLMs can be enhanced by training on a few superior data synthesis samples from proprietary LLMs. Building on this, we propose a novel iterative self-distillation approach to bootstrap small-scale LLMs, transforming them into powerful synthesizers that reduce reliance on proprietary LLMs and minimize costs. Concretely, in each iteration, to obtain diverse and high-quality self-distilled data, we design multi-checkpoint sampling and multi-aspect scoring strategies for initial data selection. Furthermore, to identify the most influential samples, we introduce a gradient-based influence estimation method for final data filtering. Based on the code instruction datasets from the small-scale synthesizers, we develop SCoder, a family of code generation models fine-tuned from DeepSeek-Coder. SCoder models achieve state-of-the-art code generation capabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

HealthSLM-Bench: Benchmarking Small Language Models for Mobile and Wearable Healthcare Monitoring

Mobile and wearable healthcare monitoring play a vital role in facilitating timely interventions, managing chronic health conditions, and ultimately improving individuals' quality of life. Previous studies on large language models (LLMs) have highlighted their impressive generalization abilities and effectiveness in healthcare prediction tasks. However, most LLM-based healthcare solutions are cloud-based, which raises significant privacy concerns and results in increased memory usage and latency. To address these challenges, there is growing interest in compact models, Small Language Models (SLMs), which are lightweight and designed to run locally and efficiently on mobile and wearable devices. Nevertheless, how well these models perform in healthcare prediction remains largely unexplored. We systematically evaluated SLMs on health prediction tasks using zero-shot, few-shot, and instruction fine-tuning approaches, and deployed the best performing fine-tuned SLMs on mobile devices to evaluate their real-world efficiency and predictive performance in practical healthcare scenarios. Our results show that SLMs can achieve performance comparable to LLMs while offering substantial gains in efficiency and privacy. However, challenges remain, particularly in handling class imbalance and few-shot scenarios. These findings highlight SLMs, though imperfect in their current form, as a promising solution for next-generation, privacy-preserving healthcare monitoring.

InverTwin: Solving Inverse Problems via Differentiable Radio Frequency Digital Twin

Digital twins (DTs), virtual simulated replicas of physical scenes, are transforming various industries. However, their potential in radio frequency (RF) sensing applications has been limited by the unidirectional nature of conventional RF simulators. In this paper, we present InverTwin, an optimization-driven framework that creates RF digital twins by enabling bidirectional interaction between virtual and physical realms. InverTwin overcomes the fundamental differentiability challenges of RF optimization problems through novel design components, including path-space differentiation to address discontinuity in complex simulation functions, and a radar surrogate model to mitigate local non-convexity caused by RF signal periodicity. These techniques enable smooth gradient propagation and robust optimization of the DT model. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate InverTwin's versatility and effectiveness in augmenting both data-driven and model-driven RF sensing systems for DT reconstruction.

Progressive Bird's Eye View Perception for Safety-Critical Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perception has become a foundational paradigm in autonomous driving, enabling unified spatial representations that support robust multi-sensor fusion and multi-agent collaboration. As autonomous vehicles transition from controlled environments to real-world deployment, ensuring the safety and reliability of BEV perception in complex scenarios - such as occlusions, adverse weather, and dynamic traffic - remains a critical challenge. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of BEV perception from a safety-critical perspective, systematically analyzing state-of-the-art frameworks and implementation strategies across three progressive stages: single-modality vehicle-side, multimodal vehicle-side, and multi-agent collaborative perception. Furthermore, we examine public datasets encompassing vehicle-side, roadside, and collaborative settings, evaluating their relevance to safety and robustness. We also identify key open-world challenges - including open-set recognition, large-scale unlabeled data, sensor degradation, and inter-agent communication latency - and outline future research directions, such as integration with end-to-end autonomous driving systems, embodied intelligence, and large language models.

Failure Forecasting Boosts Robustness of Sim2Real Rhythmic Insertion Policies

This paper addresses the challenges of Rhythmic Insertion Tasks (RIT), where a robot must repeatedly perform high-precision insertions, such as screwing a nut into a bolt with a wrench. The inherent difficulty of RIT lies in achieving millimeter-level accuracy and maintaining consistent performance over multiple repetitions, particularly when factors like nut rotation and friction introduce additional complexity. We propose a sim-to-real framework that integrates a reinforcement learning-based insertion policy with a failure forecasting module. By representing the wrench's pose in the nut's coordinate frame rather than the robot's frame, our approach significantly enhances sim-to-real transferability. The insertion policy, trained in simulation, leverages real-time 6D pose tracking to execute precise alignment, insertion, and rotation maneuvers. Simultaneously, a neural network predicts potential execution failures, triggering a simple recovery mechanism that lifts the wrench and retries the insertion. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that our method not only achieves a high one-time success rate but also robustly maintains performance over long-horizon repetitive tasks.

HAC-LOCO: Learning Hierarchical Active Compliance Control for Quadruped Locomotion under Continuous External Disturbances

Despite recent remarkable achievements in quadruped control, it remains challenging to ensure robust and compliant locomotion in the presence of unforeseen external disturbances. Existing methods prioritize locomotion robustness over compliance, often leading to stiff, high-frequency motions, and energy inefficiency. This paper, therefore, presents a two-stage hierarchical learning framework that can learn to take active reactions to external force disturbances based on force estimation. In the first stage, a velocity-tracking policy is trained alongside an auto-encoder to distill historical proprioceptive features. A neural network-based estimator is learned through supervised learning, which estimates body velocity and external forces based on proprioceptive measurements. In the second stage, a compliance action module, inspired by impedance control, is learned based on the pre-trained encoder and policy. This module is employed to actively adjust velocity commands in response to external forces based on real-time force estimates. With the compliance action module, a quadruped robot can robustly handle minor disturbances while appropriately yielding to significant forces, thus striking a balance between robustness and compliance. Simulations and real-world experiments have demonstrated that our method has superior performance in terms of robustness, energy efficiency, and safety. Experiment comparison shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art RL-based locomotion controllers. Ablation studies are given to show the critical roles of the compliance action module.

Quantum Reinforcement Learning Trading Agent for Sector Rotation in the Taiwan Stock Market

We propose a hybrid quantum-classical reinforcement learning framework for sector rotation in the Taiwan stock market. Our system employs Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as the backbone algorithm and integrates both classical architectures (LSTM, Transformer) and quantum-enhanced models (QNN, QRWKV, QASA) as policy and value networks. An automated feature engineering pipeline extracts financial indicators from capital share data to ensure consistent model input across all configurations. Empirical backtesting reveals a key finding: although quantum-enhanced models consistently achieve higher training rewards, they underperform classical models in real-world investment metrics such as cumulative return and Sharpe ratio. This discrepancy highlights a core challenge in applying reinforcement learning to financial domains -- namely, the mismatch between proxy reward signals and true investment objectives. Our analysis suggests that current reward designs may incentivize overfitting to short-term volatility rather than optimizing risk-adjusted returns. This issue is compounded by the inherent expressiveness and optimization instability of quantum circuits under Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) constraints. We discuss the implications of this reward-performance gap and propose directions for future improvement, including reward shaping, model regularization, and validation-based early stopping. Our work offers a reproducible benchmark and critical insights into the practical challenges of deploying quantum reinforcement learning in real-world finance.

Training-Free Motion Customization for Distilled Video Generators with Adaptive Test-Time Distillation

Distilled video generation models offer fast and efficient synthesis but struggle with motion customization when guided by reference videos, especially under training-free settings. Existing training-free methods, originally designed for standard diffusion models, fail to generalize due to the accelerated generative process and large denoising steps in distilled models. To address this, we propose MotionEcho, a novel training-free test-time distillation framework that enables motion customization by leveraging diffusion teacher forcing. Our approach uses high-quality, slow teacher models to guide the inference of fast student models through endpoint prediction and interpolation. To maintain efficiency, we dynamically allocate computation across timesteps according to guidance needs. Extensive experiments across various distilled video generation models and benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves motion fidelity and generation quality while preserving high efficiency. Project page: https://euminds.github.io/motionecho/

Let Your Video Listen to Your Music!

Aligning the rhythm of visual motion in a video with a given music track is a practical need in multimedia production, yet remains an underexplored task in autonomous video editing. Effective alignment between motion and musical beats enhances viewer engagement and visual appeal, particularly in music videos, promotional content, and cinematic editing. Existing methods typically depend on labor-intensive manual cutting, speed adjustments, or heuristic-based editing techniques to achieve synchronization. While some generative models handle joint video and music generation, they often entangle the two modalities, limiting flexibility in aligning video to music beats while preserving the full visual content. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient framework, termed MVAA (Music-Video Auto-Alignment), that automatically edits video to align with the rhythm of a given music track while preserving the original visual content. To enhance flexibility, we modularize the task into a two-step process in our MVAA: aligning motion keyframes with audio beats, followed by rhythm-aware video inpainting. Specifically, we first insert keyframes at timestamps aligned with musical beats, then use a frame-conditioned diffusion model to generate coherent intermediate frames, preserving the original video's semantic content. Since comprehensive test-time training can be time-consuming, we adopt a two-stage strategy: pretraining the inpainting module on a small video set to learn general motion priors, followed by rapid inference-time fine-tuning for video-specific adaptation. This hybrid approach enables adaptation within 10 minutes with one epoch on a single NVIDIA 4090 GPU using CogVideoX-5b-I2V as the backbone. Extensive experiments show that our approach can achieve high-quality beat alignment and visual smoothness.

Revisiting Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Zero-shot Can Be Stronger than Few-shot

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an essential emergent ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), and recent studies introduce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to exemplars of ICL to enhance the reasoning capability, especially in mathematics tasks. However, given the continuous advancement of model capabilities, it remains unclear whether CoT exemplars still benefit recent, stronger models in such tasks. Through systematic experiments, we find that for recent strong models such as the Qwen2.5 series, adding traditional CoT exemplars does not improve reasoning performance compared to Zero-Shot CoT. Instead, their primary function is to align the output format with human expectations. We further investigate the effectiveness of enhanced CoT exemplars, constructed using answers from advanced models such as \texttt{Qwen2.5-Max} and \texttt{DeepSeek-R1}. Experimental results indicate that these enhanced exemplars still fail to improve the model's reasoning performance. Further analysis reveals that models tend to ignore the exemplars and focus primarily on the instructions, leading to no observable gain in reasoning ability. Overall, our findings highlight the limitations of the current ICL+CoT framework in mathematical reasoning, calling for a re-examination of the ICL paradigm and the definition of exemplars.