PlanTRansformer: Unified Prediction and Planning with Goal-conditioned Transformer

Trajectory prediction and planning are fundamental yet disconnected components in autonomous driving. Prediction models forecast surrounding agent motion under unknown intentions, producing multimodal distributions, while planning assumes known ego objectives and generates deterministic trajectories. This mismatch creates a critical bottleneck: prediction lacks supervision for agent intentions, while planning requires this information. Existing prediction models, despite strong benchmarking performance, often remain disconnected from planning constraints such as collision avoidance and dynamic feasibility. We introduce Plan TRansformer (PTR), a unified Gaussian Mixture Transformer framework integrating goal-conditioned prediction, dynamic feasibility, interaction awareness, and lane-level topology reasoning. A teacher-student training strategy progressively masks surrounding agent commands during training to align with inference conditions where agent intentions are unavailable. PTR achieves 4.3%/3.5% improvement in marginal/joint mAP compared to the baseline Motion Transformer (MTR) and 15.5% planning error reduction at 5s horizon compared to GameFormer. The architecture-agnostic design enables application to diverse Transformer-based prediction models. Project Website: https://github.com/SelzerConst/PlanTRansformer

Visual Reasoning over Time Series via Multi-Agent System

Time series analysis underpins many real-world applications, yet existing time-series-specific methods and pretrained large-model-based approaches remain limited in integrating intuitive visual reasoning and generalizing across tasks with adaptive tool usage. To address these limitations, we propose MAS4TS, a tool-driven multi-agent system for general time series tasks, built upon an Analyzer-Reasoner-Executor paradigm that integrates agent communication, visual reasoning, and latent reconstruction within a unified framework. MAS4TS first performs visual reasoning over time series plots with structured priors using a Vision-Language Model to extract temporal structures, and subsequently reconstructs predictive trajectories in latent space. Three specialized agents coordinate via shared memory and gated communication, while a router selects task-specific tool chains for execution. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MAS4TS achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of time series tasks, while exhibiting strong generalization and efficient inference.

DiffLOB: Diffusion Models for Counterfactual Generation in Limit Order Books

Modern generative models for limit order books (LOBs) can reproduce realistic market dynamics, but remain fundamentally passive: they either model what typically happens without accounting for hypothetical future market conditions, or they require interaction with another agent to explore alternative outcomes. This limits their usefulness for stress testing, scenario analysis, and decision-making. We propose \textbf{DiffLOB}, a regime-conditioned \textbf{Diff}usion model for controllable and counterfactual generation of \textbf{LOB} trajectories. DiffLOB explicitly conditions the generative process on future market regimes--including trend, volatility, liquidity, and order-flow imbalance, which enables the model to answer counterfactual queries of the form: ``If the future market regime were X instead of Y, how would the limit order book evolve?'' Our systematic evaluation framework for counterfactual LOB generation consists of three criteria: (1) \textit{Controllable Realism}, measuring how well generated trajectories can reproduce marginal distributions, temporal dependence structure and regime variables; (2) \textit{Counterfactual validity}, testing whether interventions on future regimes induce consistent changes in the generated LOB dynamics; (3) \textit{Counterfactual usefulness}, assessing whether synthetic counterfactual trajectories improve downstream prediction of future market regimes.

MemCast: Memory-Driven Time Series Forecasting with Experience-Conditioned Reasoning

Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a critical role in decision-making for many real-world applications. Recently, LLM-based forecasters have made promising advancements. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods often lack explicit experience accumulation and continual evolution. In this work, we propose MemCast, a learning-to-memory framework that reformulates TSF as an experience-conditioned reasoning task. Specifically, we learn experience from the training set and organize it into a hierarchical memory. This is achieved by summarizing prediction results into historical patterns, distilling inference trajectories into reasoning wisdom, and inducing extracted temporal features into general laws. Furthermore, during inference, we leverage historical patterns to guide the reasoning process and utilize reasoning wisdom to select better trajectories, while general laws serve as criteria for reflective iteration. Additionally, to enable continual evolution, we design a dynamic confidence adaptation strategy that updates the confidence of individual entries without leaking the test set distribution. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MemCast consistently outperforms previous methods, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/MemCast-TS.

Lookahead Path Likelihood Optimization for Diffusion LLMs

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) support arbitrary-order generation, yet their inference performance critically depends on the unmasking order. Existing strategies rely on heuristics that greedily optimize local confidence, offering limited guidance for identifying unmasking paths that are globally consistent and accurate. To bridge this gap, we introduce path log-likelihood (Path LL), a trajectory-conditioned objective that strongly correlates with downstream accuracy and enables principled selection of unmasking paths. To optimize Path LL at inference time, we propose POKE, an efficient value estimator that predicts the expected future Path LL of a partial decoding trajectory. We then integrate this lookahead signal into POKE-SMC, a Sequential Monte Carlo-based search framework for dynamically identifying optimal unmasking paths. Extensive experiments across 6 reasoning tasks show that POKE-SMC consistently improves accuracy, achieving 2%--3% average gains over strong decoding-time scaling baselines at comparable inference overhead on LLaDA models and advancing the accuracy--compute Pareto frontier.

Entropy-Gated Selective Policy Optimization:Token-Level Gradient Allocation for Hybrid Training of Large Language Models

Hybrid training methods for large language models combine supervised fine tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) on model rollouts, typically at the sample level. We propose Entropy Gated Selective Policy Optimization (EGSPO), a three stage framework that extends sample level mixing with token level gradient modulation. Stage 1, SFT expert learning, establishes a reliable warm up policy using expert demonstrations with a pure SFT loss. Stage 2, RL rollout generation, samples trajectories from the current policy and computes per token predictive entropy. Stage 3, the EGSPO mechanism, applies entropy gated gradient allocation: a predictive entropy module routes high entropy tokens to full PPO updates to encourage exploration, and low entropy tokens to attenuated PPO updates to reduce variance and preserve knowledge. Critically, both branches incorporate the advantage function A_t, ensuring that incorrect trajectories receive consistent negative learning signals and preventing reinforcement of confident errors. EGSPO achieves consistent improvements on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, with gains of 3.8 percent on AIME and 2.9 percent on MATH over the CHORD phi baseline, while incurring only 3.4 percent additional computational overhead.

Efficient Variance-reduced Estimation from Generative EHR Models: The SCOPE and REACH Estimators

Generative models trained using self-supervision of tokenized electronic health record (EHR) timelines show promise for clinical outcome prediction. This is typically done using Monte Carlo simulation for future patient trajectories. However, existing approaches suffer from three key limitations: sparse estimate distributions that poorly differentiate patient risk levels, extreme computational costs, and high sampling variance. We propose two new estimators: the Sum of Conditional Outcome Probability Estimator (SCOPE) and Risk Estimation from Anticipated Conditional Hazards (REACH), that leverage next-token probability distributions discarded by standard Monte Carlo. We prove both estimators are unbiased and that REACH guarantees variance reduction over Monte Carlo sampling for any model and outcome. Empirically, on hospital mortality prediction in MIMIC-IV using the ETHOS-ARES framework, SCOPE and REACH match 100-sample Monte Carlo performance using only 10-11 samples (95% CI: [9,11]), representing a ~10x reduction in inference cost without degrading calibration. For ICU admission prediction, efficiency gains are more modest (~1.2x), which we attribute to the outcome's lower "spontaneity," a property we characterize theoretically and empirically. These methods substantially improve the feasibility of deploying generative EHR models in resource-constrained clinical settings.

Conditional Flow Matching for Visually-Guided Acoustic Highlighting

Visually-guided acoustic highlighting seeks to rebalance audio in alignment with the accompanying video, creating a coherent audio-visual experience. While visual saliency and enhancement have been widely studied, acoustic highlighting remains underexplored, often leading to misalignment between visual and auditory focus. Existing approaches use discriminative models, which struggle with the inherent ambiguity in audio remixing, where no natural one-to-one mapping exists between poorly-balanced and well-balanced audio mixes. To address this limitation, we reframe this task as a generative problem and introduce a Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) framework. A key challenge in iterative flow-based generation is that early prediction errors -- in selecting the correct source to enhance -- compound over steps and push trajectories off-manifold. To address this, we introduce a rollout loss that penalizes drift at the final step, encouraging self-correcting trajectories and stabilizing long-range flow integration. We further propose a conditioning module that fuses audio and visual cues before vector field regression, enabling explicit cross-modal source selection. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method consistently surpasses the previous state-of-the-art discriminative approach, establishing that visually-guided audio remixing is best addressed through generative modeling.

Multipath Extended Target Tracking with Labeled Random Finite Sets

High-resolution radar sensors are critical for autonomous systems but pose significant challenges to traditional tracking algorithms due to the generation of multiple measurements per object and the presence of multipath effects. Existing solutions often rely on the point target assumption or treat multipath measurements as clutter, whereas current extended target trackers often lack the capability to maintain trajectory continuity in complex multipath environments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the multipath extended target generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli (MPET-GLMB) filter. A unified Bayesian framework based on labeled random finite set theory is derived to jointly model target existence, measurement partitioning, and the association between measurements, targets, and propagation paths. This formulation enables simultaneous trajectory estimation for both targets and reflectors without requiring heuristic post-processing. To enhance computational efficiency, a joint prediction and update implementation based on Gibbs sampling is developed. Furthermore, a measurement-driven adaptive birth model is introduced to initialize tracks without prior knowledge of target positions. Experimental results from simulated scenarios and real-world automotive radar data demonstrate that the proposed filter outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior state estimation accuracy and robust trajectory maintenance in dynamic multipath environments.

Deep-Learning-Based Control of a Decoupled Two-Segment Continuum Robot for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Manual endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) is technically demanding, and existing single-segment robotic tools offer limited dexterity. These limitations motivate the development of more advanced solutions. To address this, DESectBot, a novel dual segment continuum robot with a decoupled structure and integrated surgical forceps, enabling 6 degrees of freedom (DoFs) tip dexterity for improved lesion targeting in ESD, was developed in this work. Deep learning controllers based on gated recurrent units (GRUs) for simultaneous tip position and orientation control, effectively handling the nonlinear coupling between continuum segments, were proposed. The GRU controller was benchmarked against Jacobian based inverse kinematics, model predictive control (MPC), a feedforward neural network (FNN), and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. In nested-rectangle and Lissajous trajectory tracking tasks, the GRU achieved the lowest position/orientation RMSEs: 1.11 mm/ 4.62° and 0.81 mm/ 2.59°, respectively. For orientation control at a fixed position (four target poses), the GRU attained a mean RMSE of 0.14 mm and 0.72°, outperforming all alternatives. In a peg transfer task, the GRU achieved a 100% success rate (120 success/120 attempts) with an average transfer time of 11.8s, the STD significantly outperforms novice-controlled systems. Additionally, an ex vivo ESD demonstration grasping, elevating, and resecting tissue as the scalpel completed the cut confirmed that DESectBot provides sufficient stiffness to divide thick gastric mucosa and an operative workspace adequate for large lesions.These results confirm that GRU-based control significantly enhances precision, reliability, and usability in ESD surgical training scenarios.