NeurIPS 2026 Papers

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Decision breakdown

6,437papers

Counted from the official paper list; may differ slightly from the number the conference announced.

  • Oral
    991.5%
  • Spotlight
    2403.7%
  • Poster
    6,09894.7%

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Aggregation Dispersion: An Information-Geometric Diagnostic of Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks

Abdessalam Ed-dib, Amine Aboussalah

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Message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) learn node representations by iteratively aggregating information from neighbors, but stacking too many layers causes all representations to converge, a phenomenon known as oversmoothing. We propose a geometric perspective on this phenomenon. At each depth $k$, the propagation operator assigns to every node $v$ a walk distribution $p_v^{(k)}$, a probability distribution over all nodes describing how $v$ distributes its attention across the graph. These walk distributions form a point cloud on the probability simplex, and oversmoothing is the contraction of this cloud to a single point. To measure this contraction, we exploit the intrinsic geometry of the simplex: the Fisher--Rao metric, the unique Riemannian metric invariant under sufficient statistics, whose chordal distance under the square-root embedding $p \mapsto \sqrt{p}$ is the Hellinger distance. The resulting diagnostic, the \emph{aggregation dispersion} $\mathcal{D}_k$, is the variance of the embedded point cloud on the unit sphere. We prove that: (i) $\mathcal{D}_k = 0$ if and only if the $k$-th step propagation matrix has rank one, providing a necessary and sufficient condition for representational collapse; (ii) $\mathcal{D}_k$ is monotonically non-increasing with depth, so each layer irreversibly spends a finite diversity budget; (iii) the spectral gap of the propagation matrix controls the rate of this decay; and (iv) for contractive MPNNs, the aggregation dispersion upper-bounds the representation dispersion up to architecture-dependent constants, connecting the geometry of the simplex to the geometry of the feature space. In experiments across 14 model configurations and 11 datasets, $\mathcal{D}_k$ achieves the highest average Pearson correlation with accuracy degradation among all training-free diagnostics ($|r| = 0.721$), outperforming the post-training effective rank ($|r| = 0.688$).

Poster
Adapting Vision Transformers to Organoid Imaging

Yu Takagi

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Organoids are an increasingly central scientific platform for drug screening, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine. Because organoid form is closely tied to function, AI-driven image analysis has drawn intense interest, yet every existing organoid imaging study evaluates representations on a single dataset and no work has quantitatively compared representations across the breadth of public organoid datasets. We close this gap with \textbf{OrgBench}, a benchmark of 12 vision foundation models (VFMs) on 13 public organoid-imaging datasets spanning detection, segmentation, classification, and temporal outcome prediction. The benchmark reveals a structured domain gap: task-family winners shift across the benchmark and parameter count is a poor predictor of transfer. Building on this, we introduce \textbf{OrgFM}, a small bottleneck adapter that we continually pre-train on unlabeled organoid images while keeping a general-purpose vision transformer frozen. On the OrgBench task-family aggregates, OrgFM improves over its frozen base backbone. Layer- and feature-level interventions localize the gains to a small set of late-layer morphology-sensitive features: the adapter sparsely supplements, rather than replaces, the base representation. Together, this is the first cross-task, cross-backbone study of organoid imaging at scale; the OrgBench/OrgFM pairing establishes that the parameter-efficient adapter direction is a promising path for organoid representations and clarifies why it works.

Poster
AEON: Unifying Video and 3D World Models

Weiqi Zhang, Wenyuan Zhang, Yu Shen Liu, Junsheng Zhou

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Current world models for explicit world simulation typically follow two distinct pathways: (1) video generative models (e.g., Sora), which simulate realistic appearances but fail to preserve 3D consistency; and (2) 3D generative models (e.g., Marble), which generate geometrically consistent scenes but often yield static, less realistic observations. We present AEON, a unified framework that bridges video-based and 3D-based world models and combines the benefits of both. The key insight of AEON lies in a generative model that operates within the video latent space while producing renderable 4D graphics primitives—specifically, 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS)—as the world modeler. We train a 4D reconstruction model to predict both 4DGS and camera poses from monocular videos, serving as our initialized 4D decoder. Furthermore, we design a domain adapter that translates generative video latents into reconstructive 4D latents through a distillation process on the video VAE. AEON naturally supports video-based world modeling by rendering 4DGS at predicted camera trajectories, and constructs a persistent 4D environment with scene dynamics for realistic world simulation. Consequently, AEON empowers a diverse range of world modeling applications and achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks.

Poster
ACD-GS: Asymmetric Curvature-aware Densification for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Houqiang Zhong, Tianchi Zhu, Qiang Hu, Xiaoyun Zhang, Li Song, Wenjun Zhang

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3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for real-time photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, its training-time densification remains largely heuristic, often resulting in redundant Gaussian proliferation and inaccurate geometric reconstruction. Existing methods predominantly rely on first-order screen-space gradients to trigger cloning and splitting, which fail to distinguish true geometric discontinuities from high-frequency textures or noisy residuals. To address this limitation, we propose ACD-GS, an Asymmetric Curvature-aware Densification framework for compact and geometry-aware 3D Gaussian optimization. Our key insight is that second-order depth responses provide a more reliable structural prior for density control, enabling asymmetric regulation of cloning and splitting to better capture geometric discontinuities. Building on this, we introduce a multi-view photometric consistency constraint to suppress transient single-view errors, together with a capacity-aware adaptive regulation strategy that balances densification and pruning during training. Unlike post-hoc compression or quantization-based approaches, ACD-GS directly prevents redundant Gaussian generation during training, yielding inherently compact representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces nearly 60\% of Gaussian count and storage while maintaining competitive rendering fidelity, consistently outperforming existing methods across multiple datasets. Our code is available in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ACD_GS-0E2C

Poster
A Dual-Domain Vision Transformer with Spectral Positional Bias

Abdulaziz Al Shamsi, Abdulla Alghfeli, Chenghua Lin, Hujun Yin

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Positional encoding in Vision Transformers presents a recurring trade-off: spatial relative-position tables (Swin) carry thousands of parameters per block and require ad-hoc interpolation to transfer across resolutions, while no-bias designs leave the attention logits geometry-agnostic. We propose a relative positional bias parameterized directly in the frequency domain. This parameterization yields three benefits over the standard spatial-table position encoding: (i) it expresses the same translation-equivariant bias with $3.25\times$ fewer parameters than Swin's spatial table at the same head count; (ii) it admits a closed-form, structurally exact transfer to a different patch grid, in contrast to bilinear interpolation of spatial tables which smooths the learned structure; and (iii) it shares the same parameterization style as a frequency-domain spectral mixer, enabling co-design of positional encoding and token mixing in a common substrate. We demonstrate the bias inside our **Dual-Domain Residual (DDR)** framework, in which a spectral mixer and a gated attention head act as parallel residuals within each block. Head-to-head, the frequency-domain bias recovers $+1.98$ pp over Swin RelPos and $+2.74$ pp over no positional bias; removing the entire attention branch (which carries the bias) drops accuracy by $5.35$ pp, while removing the spectral branch drops it by $2.22$ pp. On ImageNet-1K from scratch, DDR outperforms SpectFormer at every comparable parameter budget, by $+2.0$ pp at Tiny (DDR-Ti-SF, 10.7M, 78.9\%) and $+0.4$ pp at Base (DDR-B-Deep, 63.1M, 82.5\%); at sub-parity parameters, DDR-Ti+ (8.9M, 77.9\%) exceeds SpectFormer-Ti (9.0M, 76.9\%) by $+1.0$ pp. The learned per-layer gates concentrate spectral processing in early blocks and attention in late blocks, qualitatively matching the schedules that are hand-coded in the previous hybrid models.

Poster
3R-Adapter: Retrieval, Rewiring, and Refinement for Efficient Adaptation of 3D Reconstruction Model

Zixiang Ai, Zhenyu Cui, Xu Zou, Jiahuan Zhou

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Feed-forward 3D reconstruction models have demonstrated strong generalization under large-scale pre-training, yet they struggle in long-tail scenarios such as low-light reconstruction, joint human-scene reconstruction, and test-time adaptation. We observe relational attention structure collapse, manifested as the failure of cross-view correspondences, as a primary cause of these limitations. While adaptation offers a practical way to bridge this gap, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches mainly perform channel-wise feature adjustment and lack mechanisms to explicitly adapt relational structures, leaving correspondence failures unresolved. In this work, we formulate adaptation of 3D reconstruction models as a problem of correspondence recovery under domain shift and propose 3R-Adapter, a PEFT paradigm for long-tail 3D reconstruction scenarios. Our method consists of three components: Deformable Retrieval for task-adaptive relation candidate retrieval, Relational Rewiring for reconstructing cross-view relational structures, and Consistency Refinement for injecting the rewired relations into stable predictions. Extensive experiments on low-light reconstruction, joint human-scene reconstruction, and test-time adaptation demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness over existing PEFT methods while maintaining efficient lightweight adaptation.

Spotlight
3D-VITAL: Visibility-aware Identity Training from Artificial Liftings of 3D Reconstruction model for Cross-View Object Re-Identification

William Grolleau, Astrid Sabourin, Guillaume Lapouge, Catherine Achard

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In this paper, we address the Cross-View Object Re-Identification (ReID) task, aiming to match identities across drastically different viewpoints. We focus specifically on Single-View Aerial-Ground ReID (SV AG-ReID), where models train on one viewpoint and must generalize to another at inference. To bridge the viewpoint gap of Cross-View ReID, related work employs generative models to synthesize novel views from source images as additional training data. We leverage recent advances in large-scale single-view 3D mesh reconstruction to lift source images into textured meshes and to render them from new viewpoints. However, this pipeline produces unreliable data in two distinct ways, and addressing both is vital for synthetic data to serve as an effective training signal. First, the reconstruction may fail and produce geometrically incorrect meshes, resulting in severe corruption in rendered novel views. Second, even when the geometry is correct, the rendered novel views contain hallucinated textures in regions not visible in the source image, which may degrade training if used naively. We address both shortcomings by exploiting a signal that prior generative methods do not naturally expose. Indeed, the reconstructed mesh carries a per-pixel partition between regions visible from the source view and regions that the reconstruction model had to hallucinate, available as a deterministic byproduct of rendering. We introduce this per-pixel visibility map and exploit it in a two-stage design. Cross-View Consistency Filtering (CVCF) discards geometrically incorrect meshes by ensuring multi-view consistency between source and novel views over visible patches. Visibility-Aware Attention Supervision (VAAS) leverages the visibility map to guide the model's attention toward reliable regions of the rendered view during training. Combined, these two components enable our method, 3D-VITAL, to better leverage the synthetic signal from single-view 3D mesh reconstruction, benefiting from wider viewpoint augmentation. 3D-VITAL sets a new state-of-the-art on three SV AG-ReID benchmarks (AG-ReID, AG-ReID.v2, MOO). Code and data will be released at \url{url}

Poster
3D Gaussian Splatting within Self-Learned Neural View-Dependent Color Fields

Yixiao Yang, Yu Shen Liu, Zhizhong Han

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3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a vital tool in novel view synthesis. 3D Gaussian functions with attributes like color, opacity, and scale are stacked together to explicitly model a radiance field. However, discrete 3D Gaussians usually produce poor depth with few geometry details but lots of floaters, which makes modeling smooth radiance fields remain a challenge. To address this issue, we propose to learn a radiance field within a continuous view-dependent color field parameterized by neural networks. With the continuous constraints in color, the bias on low-frequency signals of neural networks highly encourages the geometry to contribute to high-frequency color variations on images, but not solely relying on the color attribute itself. Moreover, we impose a constraint to improve the Lipschitz continuity of the neural color field, making large changes of each Gaussian's color also match with large changes of its position in terms of a ratio. To this end, we additionally introduce novel self-learning strategies to learn neural view-dependent color fields without any external knowledge or priors, aiming for better generalization. Our numerical and visual comparisons on widely used benchmarks justify our idea and show better ability of high fidelity geometry recovery in 3DGS.

Poster
3D Consistency Tokens

Seungtae Nam, Jungwoo Kim, Gyeongjin Kang, Younggeun Lee, Seungkwon Yang, Eunbyung Park

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We present 3D consistency tokens, a compact set of 3D anchors that ground cross-view correspondence in explicit geometry. While feedforward Gaussian models amortize per-scene optimization into a single forward pass, their rendering quality still falls short of optimization-based pipelines. A primary cause lies in the relatively inaccurate correspondences they recover by comparing each image token to others across views based on appearance and semantic cues, which can be ambiguous in repetitive or semantically uniform regions. The proposed consistency tokens alleviate such ambiguity by routing image tokens that look alike but originate from different parts of the scene to distinct anchors, so that cross-view matches are established through shared 3D locations rather than appearance alone. We construct the consistency tokens from point clouds produced by either Structure-from-Motion or modern geometry foundation models, both of which can be noisy or incomplete. To address this, we adopt a bidirectional cross-attention architecture in which the two token sets co-refine one another, with image tokens gaining geometric grounding from the consistency tokens and the consistency tokens being corrected by the appearance cues of the images. On DL3DV-10K and in cross-dataset evaluations on Mip-NeRF 360 and Tanks \& Temples, our approach surpasses prior feedforward models and attains quality competitive with optimization-based pipelines, while preserving single-pass efficiency.

Poster
$\alpha$Depth: Learning Single-Pass Soft Boundary Decomposition for Stereo Conversion

Xiang Zhang, Yang Zhang, Lukas Mehl, Karlis M Briedis, Markus Gross, Christopher Schroers

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Accurately modeling soft boundaries, e.g., hair and defocus blur, is a fundamental challenge in stereo conversion due to the ambiguous blending of foreground and background. Existing depth models primarily predict single-layer depth, leading to ambiguity in depth correspondence at soft boundaries. While matting techniques can capture opacity for layered modeling, they often struggle in complex scenes with multiple targets and usually require user intervention. This paper introduces $\alpha$Depth, a layered representation that decomposes soft boundaries for high-fidelity stereo conversion. Specifically, we first resolve mixed color and depth ambiguity by estimating layered color and depth values at soft boundaries. Considering complex multi-target scenes, we design a Circular Alpha Representation (CAR) that shifts the paradigm from global target extraction to local boundary decomposition. Unlike prior matting methods restricted to a single foreground/background, CAR enables efficient scene-level inference without manual guidance. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that $\alpha$Depth achieves state-of-the-art performance in stereo conversion, eliminating background bleeding and structural distortions at soft boundaries.

Poster
$R^3$: 3D Reconstruction via Relative Regression

Congrong Xu, Huachen Gao, Xingyu Chen, Yuliang Xiu, Jun Gao, Anpei Chen

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Recent feed-forward geometry foundation models have demonstrated impressive generalization by recovering depth and poses in a single forward pass. However, these models are typically constrained by a global coordinate frame assumption. This dependency becomes a significant bottleneck for long-context and streaming reconstruction, as it forces the network to maintain an arbitrary temporal origin and handle translation magnitudes that grow unbounded over time. Our solution, which we call $R^3$, employs relative regression. We employ a lightweight MLP to predict confidence-weighted relative constraints. These confidences serve as a unified anchor: weighting losses during training and guiding pose aggregation during inference. $R^3$ supports both full-context offline reconstruction and causal, bounded-memory streaming. Our evaluation in both offline and streaming settings validates the effectiveness of our relative mechanism.

Poster