4.6ARJul 9
FPGN: Redefining Ultra-Fast Programmable Gate-based Neural Acceleration with Differentiable LUTsJiawei Liang, Haotong Qin, Linfeng Du et al.
Achieving nanosecond-scale inference latency for deep neural networks (DNNs) has become a primary architectural concern for latency-critical applications. While Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer a promising substrate for low-latency inference, conventional FPGA accelerators remain arithmetic-centric, using LUTs primarily as building blocks for numerical operators and peripheral logic. In contrast, recent LUT-native neural networks treat LUTs as learnable neurons, revealing promising theoretical potential to exploit their intrinsic logic expressivity. However, existing methods are largely confined to algorithmic optimizations, failing to translate this theoretical potential into high-performance FPGA accelerators. Specifically, their differentiable formulations do not faithfully match FPGA LUT primitives, their physically-unaware topologies compromise routability and timing closure, and their lack of automated optimization flow hinders systematic design space exploration (DSE) and efficient hardware implementation. In this paper, we propose FPGN, an end-to-end physically-aware framework that closes the gap between LUT-native learning and latency-optimized FPGA implementation. FPGN addresses these challenges through (i) a hardware-aligned differentiable formulation for training FPGA-native LUT neurons, (ii) a structured LUT-native topology with a streaming hardware architecture to improve routing locality and timing closure, and (iii) a latency-driven compiler that leverages high-fidelity analytical Quality of Results models to automate DSE and hardware generation. Experiments show that FPGN achieves up to 205$\times$ latency reduction compared to representative FPGA-based BNN accelerators and up to 30$\times$ higher LUT efficiency than prior differentiable LUT-native networks, while maintaining competitive inference accuracy.
24.4AIJul 9
Towards Precision Therapy in Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Clinical-Reasoning LLM for Risk Stratification and Treatment GuidancePeng Cui, Jitao Wang, Siyan Xue et al.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common malignancy and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Current guidelines and staging systems provide coarse categories, but often miss within-stage heterogeneity and the clinical context in electronic medical records (EMRs). We present HCC-STAR (Hepatocellular Carcinoma Staging, Treatment And pRognosis), a clinically aligned large language model that reads routine EMR narratives and jointly outputs risk score-based staging, ranked guideline-consistent treatments with evidence-based rationales, and individualized survival estimates. We curated about 30,000 HCC cases from SEER and expanded them into EMR-style narrative training data using a clinician-validated, prompt-based augmentation workflow. On this corpus, we developed a knowledge-aligned reasoning framework optimized with a step-verifiable composite reward, moving beyond text-level memorization of clinical guidelines. In a multi-center cohort of 6,668 patients from 12 hospitals in China, HCC-STAR achieved state-of-the-art performance in treatment recommendation and risk stratification compared with clinical guidelines and competitive models, including GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5 Pro. Hypothetical overall-survival analysis showed a median survival of 51 months under adherence to HCC-STAR recommendations, compared with 29 and 32 months under BCLC and CNLC. In clinician-centric evaluations, blinded hepatobiliary specialists rated HCC-STAR's reasoning and evidence-based justifications as trustworthy. The model surpassed resident and attending physicians in treatment accuracy and helped physicians make more accurate decisions faster when used as an assistant. These findings support HCC-STAR as a reliable and verifiable decision-support system for risk stratification and precision therapy in HCC.
16.4ROJul 9
FSD-VLN: Fast-Slow Dual-System Modeling for Aerial Long-Horizon Vision-Language NavigationXueke Zhu, Qingyan Meng, Liutao Yu et al.
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs. Compared with GPS-dependent or pre-programmed navigation, VLN supports intuitive human-machine interaction and stronger environmental adaptability, requiring tight integration of high-level semantic reasoning and low-latency flight control.Existing methods suffer from structural misalignment between global multimodal understanding and sequential action generation, causing jittery trajectories and severe decision latency for long-horizon aerial navigation. To solve this issue, we propose FSD-VLN, a fast-slow dual-system architecture disentangling semantic reasoning and low-latency flight command generation.The framework has two asynchronous branches: a slow stream extracting stable semantic priors from pre-trained vision-language models, and a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) fast stream modeling cross-temporal action distributions to produce consistent flight outputs. We further introduce a time-aware adaptive optimizer to stabilize long-sequence training and reduce gradient oscillation.Large-scale low-altitude simulation experiments show FSD-VLN achieves up to 2X higher navigation success rates on unseen scenes than SOTA methods, while cutting single-action inference delay and total task runtime by over 50%. Our work validates the benefit of decoupled semantic-control modeling and provides a practical paradigm for long-horizon aerial VLN.