Psychiatric clinical interviewing is a core yet challenging skill for psychiatric residents, requiring clinicians to navigate open-ended dialogue, interpret emotional cues, and manage diagnostic uncertainty. However, existing simulation-based education (SBE) tools often fail to provide sufficient opportunities for realistic and autonomous interview practice, largely due to their reliance on scripted and rigid interactions. In this paper, we explore how large language model (LLM) agents can be leveraged to support SBE systems for psychiatric clinical interview training. We first conducted a formative study to identify the psychiatry-specific learning needs and interactional challenges that should shape system design. Based on these insights, we developed PsyMooc, an LLM-enhanced SBE system designed to support open-ended interview interactions and deliver context-aware, competency-oriented feedback through LLM-driven agents. We then evaluated PsyMooc through a small-scale between-subjects user study to examine usability and learning-related outcomes. The results provide preliminary evidence that PsyMooc was perceived as usable and engaging, and was associated with improvements in residents’ clinical confidence, interview performance proxies, and patient-centered communication behaviors.

Approximate Logic Synthesis (ALS) is an automated technique designed for error-tolerant applications, optimizing delay, area, and power under specified error constraints. However, existing methods typically focus on either delay reduction or area minimization, often leading to local optima in multi-objective optimization. This paper proposes a rankbased multi-objective ALS framework using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). It develops non-dominated circuit ranking, to guide MCTS in exploring local approximate changes (LACs) across the entire circuit and generate approximate circuit sets with great optimization potential. Additionally, a Rank-Transformer model is introduced to predict pathdomain ranks, enhancing the application of high-quality LACs within circuit paths. Experimental results show that our framework achieves faster and more efficient optimization in delay and area simultaneously compared to state-of-the-art methods.

With the shrinking technology nodes, timing optimization becomes increasingly challenging. Approximate logic synthesis (ALS) can perform local approximate changes (LACs) on circuits to optimize timing with the cost of slight inaccuracy. However, existing ALS methods that focus solely on critical path depth reduction or area minimization are not optimal in timing optimization. This paper proposes an effective timing-driven ALS framework, where we employ a double-chase grey wolf optimizer to explore and apply LACs, simultaneously bringing excellent critical path shortening and area reduction under error constraints. Subsequently, it utilizes post-optimization under area constraints to convert area reduction into further timing improvement, thus achieving maximum critical path delay reduction. According to experiments on open-source circuits with 28nm technology, compared to the SOTA method, our framework can generate approximate circuits with greater critical path delay reduction under different error and area constraints.

Visual recognition in low-data regimes requires deep neural networks to learn generalized representations from limited training samples. Recently, CLIP-based methods have shown promising few-shot performance benefited from the contrastive language-image pre-training. We then question, if the more diverse pre-training knowledge can be cascaded to further assist few-shot representation learning. In this paper, we propose CaFo, a Cascade of Foundation models that incorporates diverse prior knowledge of various pretraining paradigms for better few-shot learning. Our CaFo incorporates CLIP's language-contrastive knowledge, DINO's vision-contrastive knowledge, DALL-E's vision-generative knowledge, and GPT-3's language-generative knowledge. Specifically, CaFo works by ‘Prompt, Generate, then Cache’. Firstly, we leverage GPT-3 to produce textual inputs for prompting CLIP with rich downstream linguistic semantics. Then, we generate synthetic images via DALL-E to expand the few-shot training data without any manpower. At last, we introduce a learnable cache model to adaptively blend the predictions from CLIP and DINO. By such collaboration, CaFo can fully unleash the potential of different pre-training methods and unify them to perform state-of-the-art for few-shot classification. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/CaFo.