The Serializable and Cloneable interfaces in Java are examples of empty interfaces that are used as type tags to indicate how classes should implement serialization and cloning functionality. The Cloneable interface indicates that the clone() method should be overridden to make a copy of the object. For classes with mutable instance variables, clone() must first call the superclass's clone() and then make copies of the mutable fields. Inner classes in Java can access private members of their outer class and vice versa, and make the outer class more self-contained. Inner classes are often used as helper classes.