Code refactoring is a fundamental software engineering practice aimed at improving code quality and maintainability. Despite its importance, developers often neglect refactoring due to the significant time, effort, and resources it requires, as well as the lack of immediate functional rewards. Although several automated refactoring tools have been proposed, they remain limited in supporting a broad spectrum of refactoring types. In this study, we explore whether instruction strategies inspired by human best-practice guidelines can enhance the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform diverse refactoring tasks automatically. Leveraging the instruction-following and code comprehension capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g., GPT-mini and DeepSeek-V3), we draw on Martin Fowler's refactoring guidelines to design multiple instruction strategies that encode motivations, procedural steps, and transformation objectives for 61 well-known refactoring types. We evaluate these strategies on benchmark examples and real-world code snippets from GitHub projects. Our results show that instruction designs grounded in Fowler's guidelines enable LLMs to successfully perform all benchmark refactoring types and preserve program semantics in real-world settings, an essential criterion for effective refactoring. Moreover, while descriptive instructions are more interpretable to humans, our results show that rule-based instructions often lead to better performance in specific scenarios. Interestingly, allowing models to focus on the overall goal of refactoring, rather than prescribing a fixed transformation type, can yield even greater improvements in code quality.

Modern robotic platforms need a reliable localization system to operate daily beside humans. Simple pose estimation algorithms based on filtered wheel and inertial odometry often fail in the presence of abrupt kinematic changes and wheel slips. Moreover, despite the recent success of visual odometry, service and assistive robotic tasks often present challenging environmental conditions where visual-based solutions fail due to poor lighting or repetitive feature patterns. In this work, we propose an innovative online learning approach for wheel odometry correction, paving the way for a robust multi-source localization system. An efficient attention-based neural network architecture has been studied to combine precise performances with real-time inference. The proposed solution shows remarkable results compared to a standard neural network and filter-based odometry correction algorithms. Nonetheless, the online learning paradigm avoids the time-consuming data collection procedure and can be adopted on a generic robotic platform on-the-fly.

Recent development in data-driven decision science has seen great advances in individualized decision making. Given data with individual covariates, treatment assignments and outcomes, researchers can search for the optimal individualized treatment rule (ITR) that maximizes the expected outcome. Existing methods typically require initial estimation of some nuisance models. The double robustness property that can protect from misspecification of either the treatment-free effect or the propensity score has been widely advocated. However, when model misspecification exists, a doubly robust estimate can be consistent but may suffer from downgraded efficiency. Other than potential misspecified nuisance models, most existing methods do not account for the potential problem when the variance of outcome is heterogeneous among covariates and treatment. We observe that such heteroscedasticity can greatly affect the estimation efficiency of the optimal ITR. In this paper, we demonstrate that the consequences of misspecified treatment-free effect and heteroscedasticity can be unified as a covariate-treatment dependent variance of residuals. To improve efficiency of the estimated ITR, we propose an Efficient Learning (E-Learning) framework for finding an optimal ITR in the multi-armed treatment setting. We show that the proposed E-Learning is optimal among a regular class of semiparametric estimates that can allow treatment-free effect misspecification. In our simulation study, E-Learning demonstrates its effectiveness if one of or both misspecified treatment-free effect and heteroscedasticity exist. Our analysis of a Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) observational study also suggests the improved efficiency of E-Learning.