In a recent paper in collaboration with  Dai, Mallick, and Taniguchi we developed an invariant based on instanton Floer homology aimed at studying strong corks and equivariant bounding.  Our construction utilizes the Chern-Simons filtration and is qualitatively different from previous Floer-theoretic methods used to address these questions.  I will discuss various topological applications of these methods and outline the main ideas behind this machinery.