NeurIPS 2025 Papers

Machine unlearning has become a focal point in recent research, yet the specific area of feature unlearning has not been thoroughly explored. Feature unlearning involves the elimination of specific features' effects from an already trained model, presenting distinct challenges that are still not comprehensively addressed. This paper presents a novel and straightforward approach to feature unlearning that employs a tactical shuffling of the features designated for removal. By redistributing the values of the features targeted for unlearning throughout the original training dataset and subsequently fine-tuning the model with this shuffled data, our proposed method provides a theoretical guarantee for effective feature unlearning. Under mild assumptions, our method can effectively disrupt the established correlations between unlearned features and the target outcomes, while preserving the relationships between the remaining features and the predicted outcomes. Our empirical studies across various datasets,validate that our approach not only successfully removes the effects of specified features but also maintains the informational integrity of the remaining features while achieving a faster convergence rate.

Seasonal-scale climate prediction plays a critical role in supporting agricultural planning, disaster prevention, and long-term decision making. In particular, reliable forecasts issued 1-6 months in advance are essential for early warning of flood and drought risks associated with precipitation during the East Asian summer monsoon season. However, while the use of machine learning techniques has advanced rapidly in weather and subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasting, partly driven by the availability of benchmark datasets, their application to seasonal-scale prediction remains limited. Existing seasonal prediction primarily relies on ensemble forecasts from numerical models, which, while physically grounded, are subject to biases and uncertainties at long lead times. Motivated by these challenges, we propose SeasonBench-EA, a benchmark dataset for seasonal prediction in East Asia region. It features multi-resolution, multi-source data with both regional and global coverage, integrating ERA5 reanalysis data and ensemble forecasts from multiple leading forecast centers. Beyond key atmospheric fields, the dataset also includes boundary-related variables, such as ocean state, soil and solar radiation, that are essential for capturing seasonal-scale atmospheric variability. Two tasks are defined and evaluated: 1) machine learning-based seasonal prediction using ERA5 reanalysis, and 2) post-processing of seasonal forecasts from numerical model ensembles. A suite of deterministic and probabilistic metrics is provided for tasks evaluation, along with a hindcast assessment focused on precipitation during the East Asian summer monsoon, aligned with model evaluation protocols used in operations. By offering a unified data and evaluation framework, SeasonBench-EA aims to promote the development and application of data-driven methods for seasonal prediction, a challenging yet highly impactful task with board implications for society and public well-being. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/SauryChen/SeasonBench-EA.

Participating in efforts to endow generative AI with the 3D physical world perception, we propose I2-NeRF, a novel neural radiance field framework that enhances isometric and isotropic metric perception under media degradation. While existing NeRF models predominantly rely on object-centric sampling, I2-NeRF introduces a reverse-stratified upsampling strategy to achieve near-uniform sampling across 3D space, thereby preserving isometry. We further present a general radiative formulation for media degradation that unifies emission, absorption, and scattering into a particle model governed by the Beer–Lambert attenuation law. By matting direct and media-induced in-scatter radiance, this formulation extends naturally to complex media environments such as underwater, haze, and even low-light scenes. By treating light propagation uniformly in both vertical and horizontal directions, I2-NeRF enables isotropic metric perception and can even estimate medium properties such as water depth. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves both reconstruction fidelity and physical plausibility compared to existing approaches. The source code will be released.

In this work, we present a novel level-of-detail (LOD) method for 3D Gaussian Splatting that enables real-time rendering of large-scale scenes on memory-constrained devices. Our approach introduces a hierarchical LOD representation that iteratively selects optimal subsets of Gaussians based on camera distance, thus largely reducing both rendering time and GPU memory usage. We construct each LOD level by applying a depth-aware 3D smoothing filter, followed by importance-based pruning and fine-tuning to maintain visual fidelity. To further reduce memory overhead, we partition the scene into spatial chunks and dynamically load only relevant Gaussians during rendering, employing an opacity-blending mechanism to avoid visual artifacts at chunk boundaries. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both outdoor (Hierarchical 3DGS) and indoor (Zip-NeRF) datasets, delivering high-quality renderings with reduced latency and memory requirements.

Understanding the inductive bias and generalization properties of large overparametrized machine learning models requires to characterize the dynamics of the training algorithm. We study the learning dynamics of large two-layer neural networks via dynamical mean field theory, a well established technique of non-equilibrium statistical physics. We show that, for large network width $m$, and large number of samples per input dimension $n/d$, the training dynamics exhibits a separation of timescales which implies: $(i)$ The emergence of a slow time scale associated with the growth in Gaussian/Rademacher complexity of the network; $(ii)$ Inductive bias towards small complexity if the initialization has small enough complexity; $(iii)$ A dynamical decoupling between feature learning and overfitting regimes; $(iv)$ A non-monotone behavior of the test error, associated `feature unlearning' regime at large times.

Recovering the dynamics from a few snapshots of a high-dimensional system is a challenging task in statistical physics and machine learning, with important applications in computational biology. Many algorithms have been developed to tackle this problem, based on frameworks such as optimal transport and the Schrödinger bridge. A notable recent framework is Regularized Unbalanced Optimal Transport (RUOT), which integrates both stochastic dynamics and unnormalized distributions. However, since many existing methods do not explicitly enforce optimality conditions, their solutions often struggle to satisfy the principle of least action and meet challenges to converge in a stable and reliable way. To address these issues, we propose Variational RUOT (Var-RUOT), a new framework to solve the RUOT problem. By incorporating the optimal necessary conditions for the RUOT problem into both the parameterization of the search space and the loss function design, Var-RUOT only needs to learn a scalar field to solve the RUOT problem and can search for solutions with lower action. We also examined the challenge of selecting a growth penalty function in the widely used Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao metric and proposed a solution that better aligns with biological priors in Var-RUOT. We validated the effectiveness of Var-RUOT on both simulated data and real single-cell datasets. Compared with existing algorithms, Var-RUOT can find solutions with lower action while exhibiting faster convergence and improved training stability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZerooVector/VarRUOT.

Calibration is a fundamental concept that aims at ensuring the reliability of probabilistic predictions by aligning them with real-world outcomes. There is a surge of studies on new calibration measures that are easier to optimize compared to the classical $\ell_1$-Calibration while still having strong implications for downstream applications. One recent such example is the work by Fishelson et al. (2025) who show that it is possible to achieve $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ pseudo $\ell_{2}$-Calibration error via minimizing pseudo swap regret of the squared loss, which in fact implies the same bound for all bounded proper losses with a smooth univariate form. In this work, we significantly generalize their result in the following ways: (a) in addition to smooth univariate forms, our algorithm also simultaneously achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ swap regret for any proper loss with a twice continuously differentiable univariate form (such as Tsallis entropy); (b) our bounds hold not only for pseudo swap regret that measures losses using the forecaster's distributions on predictions, but also hold for the actual swap regret that measures losses using the forecaster's actual realized predictions. We achieve so by introducing a new stronger notion of calibration called (pseudo) KL-Calibration, which we show is equivalent to the (pseudo) swap regret with respect to log loss. We prove that there exists an algorithm that achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ KL-Calibration error and provide an explicit algorithm that achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ pseudo KL-Calibration error. Moreover, we show that the same algorithm achieves ${\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3} (\log T) ^ {-\frac{1}{3}}\log (T/{\delta}))$ swap regret with probability at least $1-\delta$ for any proper loss with a smooth univariate form, which implies $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ $\ell_2$-Calibration error. A technical contribution of our work is a new randomized rounding procedure and a non-uniform discretization scheme to minimize the swap regret for log loss.

Text-guided 3D editing aims to locally modify 3D objects based on editing prompts, which has significant potential for applications in 3D game and film domains. Existing methods typically follow a view-agnostic paradigm: editing 2D view images indiscriminately and projecting them back into 3D space. However, the view-agnostic paradigm neglects view consistency and view-specific characteristics, resulting in spatial inconsistencies and imprecise control over edited regions. In this study, we argue that progressive view-oriented paradigm can effectively address these issues, which projects the editing information from a editing-sensitive view to other editing-insensitive views. Based on this paradigm, we design Pro3D-Editor, a new framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in terms of editing accuracy and spatial consistency.

Pseudo-label learning is widely used in semantic segmentation, particularly in label-scarce scenarios such as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and semi-supervised learning (SSL). Despite its success, this paradigm can generate erroneous pseudo-labels, which are further amplified during training due to utilization of one-hot encoding. To address this issue, we propose ECOCSeg, a novel perspective for segmentation models that utilizes error-correcting output codes (ECOC) to create a fine-grained encoding for each class. ECOCSeg offers several advantages. First, an ECOC-based classifier is introduced, enabling model to disentangle classes into attributes and handle partial inaccurate bits, improving stability and generalization in pseudo-label learning. Second, a bit-level label denoising mechanism is developed to generate higher-quality pseudo-labels, providing adequate and robust supervision for unlabeled images. ECOCSeg can be easily integrated with existing methods and consistently demonstrates significant improvements on multiple UDA and SSL benchmarks across different segmentation architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/Woof6/ECOCSeg.

Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML) has successfully integrated mechanistic understanding into machine learning, particularly in domains governed by well-known physical laws. This success has motivated efforts to apply PIML to biology, a field rich in dynamical systems but shaped by different constraints. Biological modeling, however, presents unique challenges: multi-faceted and uncertain prior knowledge, heterogeneous and noisy data, partial observability, and complex, high-dimensional networks. \textbf{In this position paper, we argue that these challenges should not be seen as obstacles to PIML, but as catalysts for its evolution. We propose Biology-Informed Machine Learning (BIML): a principled extension of PIML that retains its structural grounding while adapting to the practical realities of biology.} Rather than replacing PIML, BIML retools its methods to operate under softer, probabilistic forms of prior knowledge. We outline four foundational pillars as a roadmap for this transition: uncertainty quantification, contextualization, constrained latent structure inference, and scalability. Foundation Models and Large Language Models will be key enablers, bridging human expertise with computational modeling. We conclude with concrete recommendations to build the BIML ecosystem and channel PIML-inspired innovation toward challenges of high scientific and societal relevance.

Condensing large datasets into smaller synthetic counterparts has demonstrated its promise for image classification. However, previous research has overlooked a crucial concern in image recognition: ensuring that models trained on condensed datasets are unbiased towards protected attributes (PA), such as gender and race. Our investigation reveals that dataset distillation fails to alleviate the unfairness towards minority groups within original datasets. Moreover, this bias typically worsens in the condensed datasets due to their smaller size. To bridge the research gap, we propose a novel fair dataset distillation (FDD) framework, namely FairDD, which can be seamlessly applied to diverse matching-based DD approaches (DDs), requiring no modifications to their original architectures. The key innovation of FairDD lies in synchronously matching synthetic datasets to PA-wise groups of original datasets, rather than indiscriminate alignment to the whole distributions in vanilla DDs, dominated by majority groups. This synchronized matching allows synthetic datasets to avoid collapsing into majority groups and bootstrap their balanced generation to all PA groups. Consequently, FairDD could effectively regularize vanilla DDs to favor biased generation toward minority groups while maintaining the accuracy of target attributes. Theoretical analyses and extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that FairDD significantly improves fairness compared to vanilla DDs, with a promising trade-off between fairness and accuracy. Its consistent superiority across diverse DDs, spanning Distribution and Gradient Matching, establishes it as a versatile FDD approach.

AI-generated videos have achieved near-perfect visual realism (e.g., Sora), urgently necessitating reliable detection mechanisms. However, detecting such videos faces significant challenges in modeling high-dimensional spatiotemporal dynamics and identifying subtle anomalies that violate physical laws. In this paper, we propose a physics-driven AI-generated video detection paradigm based on probability flow conservation principles. Specifically, we propose a statistic called Normalized Spatiotemporal Gradient (NSG), which quantifies the ratio of spatial probability gradients to temporal density changes, explicitly capturing deviations from natural video dynamics. Leveraging pre-trained diffusion models, we develop an NSG estimator through spatial gradients approximation and motion-aware temporal modeling without complex motion decomposition while preserving physical constraints. Building on this, we propose an NSG-based video detection method (NSG-VD) that computes the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) between NSG features of the test and real videos as a detection metric. Last, we derive an upper bound of NSG feature distances between real and generated videos, proving that generated videos exhibit amplified discrepancies due to distributional shifts. Extensive experiments confirm that NSG-VD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16.00\% in Recall and 10.75\% in F1-Score, validating the superior performance of NSG-VD. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZSHsh98/NSG-VD}.

For classical PDE solvers, adjusting the spatial resolution and time step offers a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Neural emulators often achieve better speed-accuracy trade-offs by operating accurately on a compact representation of the PDE system. Coarsened PDE fields are a simple and effective representation, but cannot exploit fine spatial scales in the high-fidelity numerical solutions. Alternatively, unstructured latent representations provide efficient autoregressive rollouts, but cannot enforce local interactions or physical laws as inductive biases. To overcome these limitations, we introduce hybrid representations that augment coarsened PDE fields with spatially structured latent variables extracted from high-resolution inputs. Hybrid representations provide efficient rollouts, can be trained on a simple loss defined on coarsened PDE fields, and support hard physical constraints. When predicting fine- and coarse-scale features across multiple PDE emulation tasks, they outperform or match the speed-accuracy trade-offs of the best convolutional, attentional, Fourier operator-based and autoencoding baselines.

Pre-training large language models (LLMs) on vast text corpora enhances natural language processing capabilities but risks encoding social biases, particularly gender bias. While parameter-modification methods like fine-tuning mitigate bias, they are resource-intensive, unsuitable for closed-source models, and lack adaptability to evolving societal norms. Instruction-based approaches offer flexibility but often compromise general performance on normal tasks. To address these limitations, we propose $\textit{FaIRMaker}$, an automated and model-independent framework that employs an $\textbf{auto-search and refinement}$ paradigm to adaptively generate Fairwords, which act as instructions to reduce gender bias and enhance response quality. $\textit{FaIRMaker}$ enhances the debiasing capacity by enlarging the Fairwords search space while preserving the utility and making it applicable to closed-source models by training a sequence-to-sequence model that adaptively refines Fairwords into effective debiasing instructions when facing gender-related queries and performance-boosting prompts for neutral inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $\textit{FaIRMaker}$ effectively mitigates gender bias while preserving task integrity and ensuring compatibility with both open- and closed-source LLMs.

The very challenging task of learning solution operators of PDEs on arbitrary domains accurately and efficiently is of vital importance to engineering and industrial simulations. Despite the existence of many operator learning algorithms to approximate such PDEs, we find that accurate models are not necessarily computationally efficient and vice versa. We address this issue by proposing a geometry aware operator transformer (GAOT) for learning PDEs on arbitrary domains. GAOT combines novel multiscale attentional graph neural operator encoders and decoders, together with geometry embeddings and (vision) transformer processors to accurately map information about the domain and the inputs into a robust approximation of the PDE solution. Multiple innovations in the implementation of GAOT also ensure computational efficiency and scalability. We demonstrate this significant gain in both accuracy and efficiency of GAOT over several baselines on a large number of learning tasks from a diverse set of PDEs, including achieving state of the art performance on three large scale three-dimensional industrial CFD datasets. Our project page for accessing the source code is available at https://camlab-ethz.github.io/GAOT.

Model merging has emerged as a promising technique for enhancing large language models, though its application in large-scale pre-training remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation of model merging techniques during the pre-training process. Through extensive experiments with both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures ranging from millions to over 100 billion parameters, we demonstrate that merging checkpoints trained with constant learning rates not only achieves significant performance improvements but also enables accurate prediction of annealing behavior. These improvements lead to both more efficient model development and significantly lower training costs. Our detailed ablation studies on merging strategies and hyperparameters provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms while uncovering novel applications. Through comprehensive experimental analysis, we offer the open-source community practical pre-training guidelines for effective model merging.

Designing analog circuits from performance specifications is a complex, multi-stage process encompassing topology selection, parameter inference, and layout feasibility. We introduce FALCON, a unified machine learning framework that enables fully automated, specification-driven analog circuit synthesis through topology selection and layout-constrained optimization. Given a target performance, FALCON first selects an appropriate circuit topology using a performance-driven classifier guided by human design heuristics. Next, it employs a custom, edge-centric graph neural network trained to map circuit topology and parameters to performance, enabling gradient-based parameter inference through the learned forward model. This inference is guided by a differentiable layout cost, derived from analytical equations capturing parasitic and frequency-dependent effects, and constrained by design rules. We train and evaluate FALCON on a large-scale custom dataset of 1M analog mm-wave circuits, generated and simulated using Cadence Spectre across 20 expert-designed topologies. Through this evaluation, FALCON demonstrates >99\% accuracy in topology inference, <10\% relative error in performance prediction, and efficient layout-aware design that completes in under 1 second per instance. Together, these results position FALCON as a practical and extensible foundation model for end-to-end analog circuit design automation.

Riemannian symmetric spaces (RSS) such as hyperbolic spaces and symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifolds have become popular spaces for representation learning. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for building discriminative neural networks on Siegel spaces, a family of RSS that is largely unexplored in machine learning tasks. For classification applications, one focus of recent works is the construction of multiclass logistic regression (MLR) and fully-connected (FC) layers for hyperbolic and SPD neural networks. Here we show how to build such layers for Siegel neural networks. Our approach relies on the quotient structure of those spaces and the notation of vector-valued distance on RSS. We demonstrate the relevance of our approach on two applications, i.e., radar signal classification and node classification. Our results successfully demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all datasets.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in scientific machine learning is increasingly critical as neural networks are widely adopted to tackle complex problems across diverse scientific disciplines. For physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), a prominent model in scientific machine learning, uncertainty is typically quantified using Bayesian or dropout methods. However, both approaches suffer from a fundamental limitation: the prior distribution or dropout rate required to construct honest confidence sets cannot be determined without additional information. In this paper, we propose a novel method within the framework of extended fiducial inference (EFI) to provide rigorous uncertainty quantification for PINNs. The proposed method leverages a narrow-neck hyper-network to learn the parameters of the PINN and quantify their uncertainty based on imputed random errors in the observations. This approach overcomes the limitations of Bayesian and dropout methods, enabling the construction of honest confidence sets based solely on observed data. This advancement represents a significant breakthrough for PINNs, greatly enhancing their reliability, interpretability, and applicability to real-world scientific and engineering challenges. Moreover, it establishes a new theoretical framework for EFI, extending its application to large-scale models, eliminating the need for sparse hyper-networks, and significantly improving the automaticity and robustness of statistical inference.