NeurIPS 2025 Papers

Model editing has become a *de-facto* practice to address hallucinations and outdated knowledge of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods are predominantly evaluated in isolation, i.e., one edit at a time, failing to consider a critical scenario of compositional model editing, where multiple edits must be integrated and jointly utilized to answer real-world multifaceted questions. For instance, in medical domains, if one edit informs LLMs that COVID-19 causes "fever" and another that it causes "loss of taste", a qualified compositional editor should enable LLMs to answer the question "What are the symptoms of COVID-19?" with both "fever" and "loss of taste" (and potentially more). In this work, we define and systematically benchmark this compositional model editing (CME) task, identifying three key undesirable issues that existing methods struggle with: *knowledge loss*, *incorrect preceding* and *knowledge sinking*. To overcome these issues, we propose A$^3$E, a novel compositional editor that (1) ***a**daptively combines and **a**daptively regularizes* pre-trained foundation knowledge in LLMs in the stage of edit training and (2) ***a**daptively merges* multiple edits to better meet compositional needs in the stage of edit composing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that A$^3$E improves the composability by at least 22.45\% without sacrificing the performance of non-compositional model editing.

Matrix preconditioning is a critical technique to accelerate the solution of linear systems, where performance heavily depends on the selection of preconditioning parameters. Traditional parameter selection approaches often define fixed constants for specific scenarios. However, they rely on domain expertise and fail to consider the instance-wise features for individual problems, limiting their performance. In contrast, machine learning (ML) approaches, though promising, are hindered by high inference costs and limited interpretability. To combine the strengths of both approaches, we propose a symbolic discovery framework—namely, **Sym**bolic **Ma**trix **P**reconditioning (**SymMaP**)—to learn efficient symbolic expressions for preconditioning parameters. Specifically, we employ a neural network to search the high-dimensional discrete space for expressions that can accurately predict the optimal parameters. The learned expression allows for high inference efficiency and excellent interpretability (expressed in concise symbolic formulas), making it simple and reliable for deployment. Experimental results show that SymMaP consistently outperforms traditional strategies across various benchmarks.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and audio language models have significantly improved music generation, particularly in lyrics-to-song generation. However, existing approaches still struggle with the complex composition of songs and the scarcity of high-quality data, leading to limitations in audio quality, musicality, instruction following, and vocal-instrument harmony. To address these challenges, we introduce LeVo, a language model based framework consisting of LeLM and Music Codec. LeLM is capable of parallel modeling of two types of tokens: mixed tokens, which represent the combined audio of vocals and accompaniment to achieve better vocal-instrument harmony, and dual-track tokens, which separately encode vocals and accompaniment for high-quality song generation. It employs two decoder-only transformers and a modular extension training strategy to prevent interference between different token types. To further enhance musicality and instruction following ability, we introduce a multi-preference alignment method based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This method handles diverse human preferences through a semi-automatic data construction process and post-training. Experimental results demonstrate that LeVo significantly outperforms existing open-source methods in both objective and subjective metrics, while performing competitively with industry systems. Ablation studies further justify the effectiveness of our designs. Audio examples and source code are available at https://levo-demo.github.io and https://github.com/tencent-ailab/songgeneration.

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative modeling framework for discrete data with successful applications spanning from text generation to image synthesis. However, their deployment faces challenges due to the high dimensionality of the state space, necessitating the development of efficient inference algorithms. Current inference approaches mainly fall into two categories: exact simulation and approximate methods such as $\tau$-leaping. While exact methods suffer from unpredictable inference time and redundant function evaluations, $\tau$-leaping is limited by its first-order accuracy. In this work, we advance the latter category by tailoring the first extension of high-order numerical inference schemes to discrete diffusion models, enabling larger step sizes while reducing error. We rigorously analyze the proposed schemes and establish the second-order accuracy of the $\theta$-Trapezoidal method in KL divergence. Empirical evaluations on GSM8K-level math-reasoning, GPT-2-level text, and ImageNet-level image generation tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior sample quality compared to existing approaches under equivalent computational constraints, with consistent performance gains across models ranging from 200M to 8B. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuchen-zhu-zyc/DiscreteFastSolver

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in reasoning, exemplified by the success of OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. However, integrating reasoning with external search processes remains challenging, especially for complex multi-hop questions requiring multiple retrieval steps. We propose ReSearch, a novel framework that trains LLMs to Reason with Search via reinforcement learning without using any supervised data on reasoning steps. Our approach treats search operations as integral components of the reasoning chain, where when and how to perform searches is guided by text-based thinking, and search results subsequently influence further reasoning. We train ReSearch on Qwen2.5-7B(-Instruct) and Qwen2.5-32B(-Instruct) models and conduct extensive experiments. Despite being trained on only one dataset, our models demonstrate strong generalizability across various benchmarks. Analysis reveals that ReSearch naturally elicits advanced reasoning capabilities such as reflection and self-correction during the reinforcement learning process.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) integrate visual knowledge with the analytical capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through supervised visual instruction tuning, using image-question-answer triplets. However, the potential of VLMs trained without supervised instruction remains largely unexplored. This study validates that VLMs possess inherent self-refinement capabilities, enabling them to generate high-quality supervised data without external inputs and thereby learn autonomously. Specifically, to stimulate the self-refinement ability of VLMs, we propose a self-refinement framework based on a Triangular Consistency principle: within the image-query-answer triangle, any masked elements should be consistently and accurately reconstructed. The framework involves three steps: (1) We enable the instruction generation ability of VLMs by adding multi-task instruction tuning like image$\rightarrow$question-answer or image-answer$\rightarrow$question. (2) We generate image-query-answer triplets from unlabeled images and use the Triangular Consistency principle for filtering. (3) The model is further updated using the filtered synthetic data. To investigate the underlying mechanisms behind this self-refinement capability, we conduct a theoretical analysis from a causal perspective. Using the widely recognized LLaVA-1.5 as our baseline, our experiments reveal that the model can autonomously achieve consistent, though deliberately modest, improvements across multiple benchmarks without any external supervision, such as human annotations or environmental feedback. We expect that the insights of this study on the self-refinement ability of VLMs can inspire future research on the learning mechanism of VLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/dengyl20/SRF-LLaVA-1.5.

Graphs are complex, non-Euclidean structures that require specialized models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), Graph Transformers, or kernel-based approaches, to effectively capture their relational patterns. This inherent complexity makes explaining GNNs decisions particularly challenging. Most existing explainable AI (XAI) methods for GNNs focus on identifying influential nodes or extracting subgraphs that highlight relevant motifs. However, these approaches often fall short of clarifying how such elements contribute to the final prediction. To overcome this limitation, logic-based explanations aim to derive explicit logical rules that reflect the model's decision-making process. Current logic-based methods are limited to post-hoc analyzes and are predominantly applied to graph classification, leaving a significant gap in intrinsically explainable GNN architectures. In this paper, we explore the potential of integrating logic reasoning directly into graph learning. We introduce LogiX-GIN, a novel, self-explainable GNN architecture that incorporates logic layers to produce interpretable logical rules as part of the learning process. Unlike post-hoc methods, LogiX-GIN provides faithful, transparent, and inherently interpretable explanations aligned with the model's internal computations. We evaluate LogiX-GIN across several graph-based tasks and show that it achieves competitive predictive performance while delivering clear, logic-based insights into its decision-making process.

Graph Machine Learning is essential for understanding and analyzing relational data. However, privacy-sensitive applications demand the ability to efficiently remove sensitive information from trained graph neural networks (GNNs), avoiding the unnecessary time and space overhead caused by retraining models from scratch. To address this issue, Graph Unlearning (GU) has emerged as a critical solution to support dynamic graph updates while ensuring privacy compliance. Unlike machine unlearning in computer vision or other fields, GU faces unique difficulties due to the non-Euclidean nature of graph data and the recursive message-passing mechanism of GNNs. Additionally, the diversity of downstream tasks and the complexity of unlearning requests further amplify these challenges. Despite the proliferation of diverse GU strategies, the absence of a benchmark providing fair comparisons for GU, and the limited flexibility in combining downstream tasks and unlearning requests, have yielded inconsistencies in evaluations, hindering the development of this domain. To fill this gap, we present OpenGU, the first GU benchmark, where 16 SOTA GU algorithms and 37 multi-domain datasets are integrated, enabling various downstream tasks with 13 GNN backbones when responding to flexible unlearning requests. Through extensive experimentation, we have drawn $10$ crucial conclusions about existing GU methods, while also gaining valuable insights into their limitations, shedding light on potential avenues for future research. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/bwfan-bit/OpenGU}{https://github.com/bwfan-bit/OpenGU}.

In this paper, we re-introduce the Curse of Depth, a concept that re-introduces, explains, and addresses the recent observation in modern Large Language Models (LLMs) where deeper layers are much less effective than expected. We first confirm the wide existence of this phenomenon across the most popular families of LLMs, such as Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Qwen. Our analysis, theoretically and empirically, identifies that the underlying reason for the ineffectiveness of deep layers in LLMs is the widespread usage of Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN). While Pre-LN stabilizes the training of Transformer LLMs, its output variance exponentially grows with the model depth, which undesirably causes the derivative of the deep Transformer blocks to be an identity matrix, and therefore barely contributes to the training. To resolve this training pitfall, we propose LayerNorm Scaling, which scales the variance of output of the layer normalization inversely by the square root of its depth. This simple modification mitigates the output variance explosion of deeper Transformer layers, improving their contribution. Our experimental results, spanning model sizes from 130M to 7B, demonstrate that \ours significantly enhances LLM pre-training performance compared to Pre-LN. Moreover, this improvement seamlessly carries over to supervised fine-tuning. All these gains can be attributed to the fact that LayerNorm Scaling enables deeper layers to contribute more effectively during training.

Matrix factorization is a fundamental method in statistics and machine learning for inferring and summarizing structure in multivariate data. Modern data sets often come with "side information" of various forms (images, text, graphs) that can be leveraged to improve estimation of the underlying structure. However, existing methods that leverage side information are limited in the types of data they can incorporate, and they assume specific parametric models. Here, we introduce a novel method for this problem, *covariate-moderated empirical Bayes matrix factorization* (cEBMF). cEBMF is a modular framework that accepts any type of side information that is processable by a probabilistic model or a neural network. The cEBMF framework can accommodate different assumptions and constraints on the factors through the use of different priors, and it adapts these priors to the data. We demonstrate the benefits of cEBMF in simulations and in analyses of spatial transcriptomics and collaborative filtering data. A PyTorch-based implementation of cEBMF with flexible priors is available at https://github.com/william-denault/cebmf_torch.

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art results for accelerated MRI reconstruction. Most research on deep learning based imaging focuses on improving neural network architectures trained and evaluated on fixed and homogeneous training and evaluation data. In this work, we investigate data curation strategies for improving MRI reconstruction. We assemble a large dataset of raw k-space data from 18 public sources consisting of 1.1M images and construct a diverse evaluation set comprising 48 test sets, capturing variations in anatomy, contrast, number of coils, and other key factors. We propose and study different data filtering strategies to enhance performance of current state-of-the-art neural networks for accelerated MRI reconstruction. Our experiments show that filtering the training data leads to consistent, albeit modest, performance gains. These performance gains are robust across different training set sizes and accelerations, and we find that filtering is particularly beneficial when the proportion of in-distribution data in the unfiltered training set is low.

We present in this paper a novel post-training quantization (PTQ) method, dubbed AccuQuant, for diffusion models. We show analytically and empirically that quantization errors for diffusion models are accumulated over denoising steps in a sampling process. To alleviate the error accumulation problem, AccuQuant minimizes the discrepancies between outputs of a full-precision diffusion model and its quantized version within a couple of denoising steps. That is, it simulates multiple denoising steps of a diffusion sampling process explicitly for quantization, accounting the accumulated errors over multiple denoising steps, which is in contrast to previous approaches to imitating a training process of diffusion models, namely, minimizing the discrepancies independently for each step. We also present an efficient implementation technique for AccuQuant, together with a novel objective, which reduces a memory complexity significantly from $\mathcal{O}(n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, where $n$ is the number of denoising steps. We demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of AccuQuant across various tasks and diffusion models on standard benchmarks.

Most existing transfer learning algorithms for high-dimensional models employ a two-step regularization framework, whose success heavily hinges on the assumption that the pre-trained model closely resembles the target. To relax this assumption, we propose a co-regularization process to directly exploit beneficial knowledge from the source domain for high-dimensional generalized linear models. The proposed method learns the target parameter by constraining the source parameters to be close to the target one, thereby preventing fine-tuning failures caused by significantly deviated pre-trained parameters. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that the proposed method accommodates a broader range of sources than existing two-step frameworks, thus being more robust to less similar sources. Its effectiveness is validated through extensive empirical studies.

Most multimodal models treat every negative pair alike, ignoring the ambiguous negatives that differ from the positive by only a small detail. We propose Boundary-A ware Curriculum with Local Attention(BACL), a lightweight add-on that turns these borderline cases into a curriculum signal. A Boundary-aware Negative Sampler gradually raises difficulty, while a Contrastive Local Attention loss highlights where the mismatch occurs. The two modules are fully differentiable and work with any off-the-shelf dual encoder. Theory predicts a fast $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/n)$ error rate; practice shows up to +32 \% R@1 over CLIP and new SOTA on four large-scale benchmarks, all without extra labels.

Modern AI systems struggle most in environments where reliability is critical - scenes with smoke, poor visibility, and structural deformation. Each year, tens of thousands of firefighters are injured on duty, often due to breakdowns in situational perception. We introduce Fire360, a benchmark for evaluating perception and reasoning in safety-critical firefighting scenarios. The dataset includes 228 360° videos from professional training sessions under diverse conditions (e.g., low light, thermal distortion), annotated with action segments, object locations, and degradation metadata. Fire360 supports five tasks: Visual Question Answering, Temporal Action Captioning, Object Localization, Safety-Critical Reasoning, and Transformed Object Retrieval (TOR). TOR tests whether models can match pristine exemplars to fire-damaged counterparts in unpaired scenes, evaluating episodic memory under irreversible visual transformations. While human experts achieve 83.5% on TOR, models like GPT-4o lag significantly, exposing failures in reasoning under degradation. By releasing Fire360 and its evaluation suite, we aim to advance models that not only see, but also remember, reason, and act under uncertainty. The dataset is available at https://uofi.box.com/v/fire360dataset

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in mathematical problem-solving, but evaluation has largely focused on problems that have exact analytical solutions or involve formal proofs, often overlooking approximation-based problems ubiquitous in applied science and engineering. To fill this gap, we build on prior work and present $\textbf{HARDMath2}$, a dataset of 211 original problems covering the core topics in an introductory graduate applied math class, including boundary-layer analysis, WKB methods, asymptotic solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations, and the asymptotics of oscillatory integrals. This dataset was designed and verified by the students and instructors of a core graduate applied mathematics course at Harvard. We build the dataset through a novel collaborative environment that challenges students to write and refine difficult problems consistent with the class syllabus, peer-validate solutions, test different models, and automatically check LLM-generated solutions against their own answers and numerical ground truths. Evaluation results show that leading frontier models still struggle with many of the problems in the dataset, highlighting a gap in the mathematical reasoning skills of current LLMs. Importantly, students identified strategies to create increasingly difficult problems by interacting with the models and exploiting common failure modes. This back-and-forth with the models not only resulted in a richer and more challenging benchmark but also led to qualitative improvements in the students' understanding of the course material, which is increasingly important as we enter an age where state-of-the-art language models can solve many challenging problems across a wide domain of fields.

In this paper, we study an online strategic classification problem, where a principal aims to learn an accurate binary linear classifier from sequentially arriving agents. For each agent, the principal announces a classifier. The agent can strategically exercise costly manipulations on his features to be classified as the favorable positive class. The principal is unaware of the true feature-label distribution, but observes all reported features and only labels of positively classified agents. We assume that the true feature-label distribution is given by a halfspace model subject to arbitrary feature-dependent bounded noise (i.e., Massart Noise). This problem faces the combined challenges of agents' strategic feature manipulations, partial label observations, and label noises. We tackle these challenges by a novel learning algorithm. We show that the proposed algorithm yields classifiers that converge to the clairvoyant optimal one and attains a regret rate of $ O(\sqrt{T})$ up to poly-logarithmic and constant factors over $T$ cycles.

Existing interpolation methods use pre‑trained video diffusion priors to generate intermediate frames between sparsely sampled keyframes. In the absence of 3D geometric guidance, these methods struggle to produce plausible results for complex, articulated human motions and offer limited control over the synthesized dynamics. In this paper, we introduce PoseFuse3D Keyframe Interpolator (PoseFuse3D-KI), a novel framework that integrates 3D human guidance signals into the diffusion process for Controllable Human-centric Keyframe Interpolation (CHKI). To provide rich spatial and structural cues for interpolation, our PoseFuse3D, a 3D‑informed control model, features a novel SMPL‑X encoder that encodes and aggregates 3D geometry and shape into the 2D latent conditioning space, alongside a fusion network that integrates these 3D cues with 2D pose embeddings. For evaluation, we build CHKI-Video, a new dataset annotated with both 2D poses and 3D SMPL‑X parameters. We show that PoseFuse3D-KI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CHKI-Video, achieving a 9\% improvement in PSNR and a 38\% reduction in LPIPS. Comprehensive ablations demonstrate that our PoseFuse3D model improves interpolation fidelity.

Event cameras offer unique advantages in scenarios involving high speed, low light, and high dynamic range, yet their asynchronous and sparse nature poses significant challenges to efficient spatiotemporal representation learning. Specifically, despite notable progress in the field, effectively modeling the full spatiotemporal context, selectively attending to salient dynamic regions, and robustly adapting to the variable density and dynamic nature of event data remain key challenges. Motivated by these challenges, this paper proposes EventMG, a lightweight, efficient, multilevel Mamba-Graph architecture designed for learning high-quality spatiotemporal event representations. EventMG employs a multilevel approach, jointly modeling information at the micro (single event) and macro (event cluster) levels to comprehensively capture the multi-scale characteristics of event data. At the micro-level, it focuses on spatiotemporal details, employing State Space Model (SSM) based Mamba, to precisely capture long-range dependencies among numerous event nodes. Concurrently, at the macro-level, Component Graphs are introduced to efficiently encode the local semantics and global topology of dense event regions. Furthermore, to better accommodate the dynamic and sparse characteristics of data, we propose the Spatiotemporal-aware Event Scanning Technology (SEST), integrating the Adaptive Perturbation Network (APN) and Multidirectional Scanning Module (MSM), which substantially enhances the model's ability to perceive and focus on key spatiotemporal patterns. By employing this novel collaborative paradigm, EventMG demonstrates the ability to effectively capture multi-level spatiotemporal characteristics of event data while maintaining a low parameter count and linear computational complexity, suggesting a promising direction for event representation learning.