NeurIPS 2026 Papers

Computer-using agents are increasingly expected to complete realistic user goals rather than isolated GUI actions. However, existing evaluations are fragmented across web, mobile, and desktop settings, making it difficult to measure whether the same agent can sustain long-horizon workflows across heterogeneous software platforms while preserving final-state correctness. We introduce OS-Omni, a 1,200-task cross-platform benchmark and execution environment for evaluating computer-using agents across Windows, Ubuntu, macOS, iOS, Android, and Web environments. OS-Omni provides reproducible initialization, platform-specific adapters, trajectory logging, and executable final-state evaluators, and includes controlled service-backed applications for workflows involving account, cart, budget, calendar, message, and other persistent state. Human studies show that OS-Omni tasks require 67.54 interaction steps, substantially exceeding OSWorld references of 15.0 steps. Throughout our experiments, the strongest evaluated agent, GPT-5.5, reaches 47.1% average success, trailing the 88.1% human reference by 41.0 points; on hard workflows, it drops from 77.8% success on easy tasks to 16.4%, while humans remain at 76.3%. These results indicate that current agents remain far from platform-robust, long-horizon computer use, especially when success requires sustained state tracking and durable final-state changes.

Deep multi-view clustering often struggles with inter-view feature redundancy and dimensionality collapse during iterative representation fusion. To address these limitations, we propose Orthogonal Residual Consensus Alignment (ORCA). First, a Semantic Incremental Recurrent Fusion (SIRF) module explicitly separates shared redundancy from complementary residuals via geometric projection. By employing an adaptive halting mechanism, SIRF autonomously maximizes information gain while avoiding structural collapse. Second, a Consensus-Calibrated Hierarchical Contrastive Alignment (CCHA) module is introduced to preserve multi-scale semantics. It adaptively aligns view-level, local, and recurrent representations using the global consensus as a semantic anchor. Consequently, ORCA learns latent representations with robust structural integrity and highly discriminative semantics. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ORCA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with comprehensive ablations verifying its robustness.

Text-to-image diffusion models fail predictably on compositional prompts: attributes bind to the wrong objects, spatial relations invert, and multi-object scenes lose count. Recent architectures already augment CLIP with a T5 encoder precisely because CLIP's contrastive embedding loses compositional structure, yet these failures persist. We argue the binding problem is therefore not one of missing information but of misaligned information: a text encoder preserves compositional structure, but in a representation space shaped by language modelling rather than vision, and the denoising objective does not directly reward aligning the two. We show this correspondence can be supplied as an explicit training signal, that the relevant cross-modal information is concentrated in a low-rank subspace of self-supervised visual features, and that supplying it can be folded into diffusion training as a single auxiliary loss. Our method, ORCA, Orthogonal Residual Compositional Alignment, aligns the latent of a diffusion transformer with a low-rank target derived from a frozen visual encoder, through a predictor whose orthogonal basis is parameterised by a learned residual between T5 and CLIP embeddings, which provides a prompt-dependent signal for selecting the visual readout subspace. We prove that the cross-modal information recoverable at a given rank is bounded by the spectral mass of the visual encoder's covariance in the top components. Across three diffusion-transformer backbones, DiT-B/2, DiT-L/2, and U-ViT-L, ORCA improves FID and GenEval over both vanilla and REPA baselines at zero inference-time cost; on DiT-L/2 it reaches FID 16.65 and GenEval 0.291 at 200K steps, exceeding the strongest 400K baseline at half the training cost, with the largest gains concentrated on attribute binding, spatial relations, and multi-object prompts.

Recent advances in Video Foundation Models (VFMs) have revolutionized human-centric video synthesis, yet fine-grained and independent control of subjects and scenes remains a critical challenge. Recent attempts to achieve joint human-environment control often rely on explicit human-scene 3D alignment, improving geometric control but sacrificing generative flexibility and long-horizon consistency while requiring heavy 3D pre-processing. We present ONE-SHOT, a parameter-efficient framework for compositional human-environment video generation. Our key insight is to factorize the generative process into disentangled signals, separating human dynamics from scene cues. Specifically, our canonical-space motion injection and Dynamic-Grounded-RoPE map canonical human motion to the target video region, enabling accurate motion and placement control without heuristic human-scene 3D alignment. Hybrid Context Integration further maintains subject and scene consistency for minute-level synthesis. Experiments show that ONE-SHOT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in structural control, flexible composition, text-guided semantic control, and long-horizon consistency.

Cross-modal place recognition aims to retrieve a target 3D location from a spatial map using a natural language description. Most existing methods follow a global-descriptor matching paradigm, in which the text query and each 3D scene cell are independently compressed into single vectors and compared by global similarity. Although simple and widely adopted, this paradigm tends to discard the fine-grained object correspondences that are essential for language-guided localization. In this paper, we challenge the necessity of global descriptors and propose OLA-Place, an Object-Level Alignment framework for cross-modal place recognition without global descriptors. Instead of representing a query or a scene cell as a single holistic embedding, OLA-Place formulates place recognition as set-to-set semantic alignment between textual object mentions and 3D object instances. The framework contains three key modules: ObjectSet Encoder (OSE), which extracts object-level representations from both language descriptions and 3D scene cells; Object Message Encoder (OME), which injects intra-set object-context information while preserving object-level granularity; and Masked Max Alignment (MMA), which computes the query-cell matching score by aligning each textual object mention with its most similar valid 3D object. This formulation is permutation-invariant, naturally handles variable-size object sets, and requires no object-level correspondence annotations. Extensive experiments show that object-level alignment alone significantly outperforms global-descriptor-based methods, demonstrating that cross-modal place recognition is better understood as an object-level semantic correspondence problem rather than a global-embedding retrieval problem. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Anonymous09871745/OLA-Place.

Contrastive Learning (CL) has been widely used for Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD). However, existing augmentation techniques in such CL frameworks usually rely on random masking or structural alterations, which obliterates the irregularities that define anomalies and leads to *anomaly distortion*. Even improved methods using *multi-scale sampling* usually suffer from *blind contextual extraction*, which risks disrupting critical topological structures or introducing irrelevant information in the learned representations, thereby hardly capturing complex anomalies. In this paper, we propose Orthogonal-Hyperspherical Augmentation and Topology Perception (**OHATP**), a novel method that leverages the synergies at both the *feature* and *structure* levels to mitigate anomaly distortion and *blind sampling defects*. Specifically, during *feature-level* augmentation, we adapt projections and noise based on node *message-passing* influence to strengthen *feature diversity*, while utilizing projection orthogonality and hyperspherical noise constraints to preserve *feature discriminability*. To complement this feature-level augmentation, we design a *structure-level* topology perception module that leverages the high-quality representations learned from augmentation to screen abnormal dense substructures. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that OHATP substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of over 6\% in AUROC and 29\% in AUPRC. Code is available at [https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OHATP-83D7](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OHATP-83D7).

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong promise in robotic manipulation, yet their post-training still predominantly relies on trajectory-level supervised imitation over robot demonstrations. While effective for learning feasible actions, this paradigm supervises policies to reproduce expert actions at each step, biasing them toward demonstration-specific action paths and providing limited guidance for recovering toward task-progress states once execution deviates from demonstrated trajectories. To address this limitation, we propose OGPO, an Offline Goal-conditioned Policy Optimization framework for recoverable VLA post-training. Instead of treating offline demonstrations merely as step-wise action labels, OGPO adaptively relabels trajectories with semantic key states and constructs goal-conditioned process rewards to optimize the policy for reaching these task-progress states. In this way, OGPO shifts VLA post-training from trajectory-level action imitation to key-state reachability learning, enabling policies to acquire a more robust ability to complete goal states from feasible off-demonstration states without requiring additional online interaction. Experiments on LIBERO and MetaWorld show that OGPO consistently improves VLA policy performance over standard supervised fine-tuning. Moreover, evaluations on LIBERO-Plus and our proposed LIBERO-ReAct, a mid-execution perturbation benchmark, further demonstrate that OGPO achieves stronger robustness and goal-directed recoverability under distribution shifts and recoverable off-demonstration states.

In the physical world we inhabit, space and time are fundamentally continuous. However, existing machine learning paradigms for world modeling are largely confined to discrete-time prediction and inference, thereby exhibiting significant inefficiency in capturing the fundamental dynamics of the physical world. To bridge this gap, we introduce Physical-Time Flow (**PT-Flow**), a novel approach that learns a continuous latent velocity field operating in physical time. Crucially, the underlying dynamics of sequential data are parameterized by an ordinary differential equation (ODE) embedded in a well-structured dynamical representation space. Under this paradigm, the prediction of the future can be recast as temporal integration via an ODE solver in the compressed latent space. Building upon PT-Flow, we construct **ODEWorld**, a physics-grounded, continuous-time latent world model that is both efficient and versatile. By extracting time-variant features and enforcing ODE properties on both the dynamical representation space and the latent velocity field, ODEWorld effectively addresses the long-standing representation collapse issue in latent world model literature. This also enables high-quality image reconstruction with ODEWorld even after long-horizon prediction. Moreover, its continuous nature allows for arbitrary temporal resolution and even backward prediction, which is impossible for most discrete-time models. Lastly, benefiting from the learned dynamics-centric latent space, ODEWorld can provide rich planning-oriented information to facilitate downstream policy learning. Comprehensive experiments across multiple simulation and real-world datasets demonstrate that ODEWorld successfully reconciles planning-conducive dynamics abstraction with visual realism, excelling in both video generation and robotic control. More qualitative results can be found at [Project Website](https://anonymous-submission-16982.github.io/ODEWorld).

Recent advances in deep learning for shadow removal have significantly enhanced image quality and realism. However, most approaches rely on real-world paired datasets, which are costly to collect and often limited in scene diversity, leading to limited generalization. To address these limitations, we propose One-step Deshadow Diffusion via Reward guidance (ODDR), a new framework that achieves efficient and high-fidelity shadow removal without relying on real-world paired supervision. Our method begins with One-step Deshadow Diffusion (ODD), a baseline model trained on synthetic shadow data for efficient one-step shadow-free reconstruction. We further adapt ODD into ODDR using ShadowReward. In contrast to traditional, annotation-heavy approaches, ShadowReward is the first reward model for shadow removal trained entirely without human annotation. It learns to mimic human perceptual judgments by ranking synthetically generated images with controlled degradations, such as texture distortion and boundary artifacts. This reward-guided fine-tuning enables ODDR to close the synthetic-to-real domain gap. Extensive experiments show that ODD achieves strong performance without relying on real-world paired supervision, and ODDR further improves the results and achieves performance competitive with methods trained on real-world paired data, while maintaining higher computational efficiency as a single step model.

The key-value (KV) cache dominates memory bandwidth and footprint in long-context autoregressive inference. Recent rotation-preconditioned codecs (TurboQuant, PolarQuant) show that a structured random rotation followed by a per-coordinate scalar quantizer matched to an analytically tractable marginal is a near-optimal recipe for KV compression. OCTOPUS advances this paradigm through joint quantization of rotated coordinate triplets. Each triplet's direction is mapped to a square via an octahedral parameterization, and the two resulting coordinates and the triplet norm are Lloyd-Max quantized against implementation-matched marginals. Optimizing the per-triplet squared error gives a strictly non-uniform bit allocation depending only on the total dimensionality of the keys. We find the finite-dimensional quality optimum with sweeps to be constant on every real decoder we test. The codec is data-oblivious, online, and deterministic given a seed. Across text, video, and audio, OCTOPUS matches or beats every prior rotation codec at every reported bit width and metric, with a lead that grows as bits drop for extreme compression. Furthermore, a fused Triton implementation reconstructs keys on the fly without materializing the uncompressed key, so the codec adds no decode-time bandwidth or latency over the existing dequantization.

Retrieval benchmarks are increasingly saturating, but we argue that efficient search is far from a solved problem. We identify a class of queries we call *oblique*, which seek documents that *instantiate a latent pattern*, like finding all tweets that express an implicit stance, chat logs that demonstrate a particular failure mode, or transcripts that match an abstract scenario. We study three mechanisms through which obliqueness may arise and introduce OBLIQ-Bench, a suite of five oblique search problems over real long-tail corpora. OBLIQ-Bench exposes an overlooked asymmetry between retrieval and verification, where reasoning LLMs reliably recognize latent relevance whenever relevant documents are surfaced, but even sophisticated retrieval pipelines fail to surface most relevant documents in the first place. We hope that OBLIQ-Bench will drive research into retrieval architectures that efficiently capture latent patterns and implicit signals in large corpora.

Unified models for visual understanding and generation have made rapid progress, yet they still lack the ability to understand and manipulate the spatial states of object instances. Existing models can describe objects in natural language, but they struggle to precisely represent continuous object poses and generate geometrically consistent images under target viewpoints. To mitigate this, we propose \emph{Object-Uni}, a unified model for object-centric spatial understanding and controllable generation. Specifically, we formulate object-centric spatial intelligence as a unified problem connecting pose perception, spatial reasoning, pose-conditioned generation, and object-centric novel view synthesis. We treat object pose as an explicit geometric variable shared by understanding and generation, rather than merely a prediction label or control signal. To make pose usable by multimodal large language models, we propose a viewpoint-based orientation abstraction that maps orientation into structured viewpoint descriptions while preserving continuous geometric supervision. We further construct an object-centric spatial benchmark (UniSpatial-80K) and train a unified model with an object-token-grounded pose anchor to associate each instance with its pose state. Experiments show that our model improves object-level pose understanding and pose-controllable generation, moving unified models from describing objects toward manipulating spatial states.

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) are a powerful paradigm for time series analysis and are often enhanced by synthetic data augmentation to improve the training data quality. Existing augmentation methods, however, typically rely on heuristics and static paradigms. Motivated by dynamic data optimization, which shows that the contribution of samples varies across training stages, we propose OATS (Online Data Augmentation for Time Series Foundation Models), a principled strategy that generates synthetic data tailored to different training steps. OATS leverages valuable training samples as principled guiding signals and dynamically generates high-quality synthetic data conditioned on them. We further design a diffusion-based framework to produce realistic time series. Experiments on TSFMs demonstrate that OATS consistently outperforms regular training and yields substantial performance gains over static data augmentation baselines across six validation datasets and two TSFM architectures. The code is available at the link https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OATS-536E.

RNA function arises from a hierarchical folding process in which primary sequences form secondary structures that govern biological activity. While foundation models have proven effective for learning transferable RNA representations, most existing approaches rely on primary sequence alone or incorporate structural information only superficially during pre-training. Three problems limit current approaches: experimentally determined secondary structures are scarce, computational pseudo-labels are noisy, and no existing model integrates structure at multiple levels across masking, architecture, and supervision. Here, we present \textbf{N\"uwa.RNA}, a pre-trained foundation model built on a \emph{structure-driven multi-level pre-training framework} that integrates secondary structure at all three stages of pre-training simultaneously. N\"uwa.RNA introduces dual-granularity masking that combines single-token masking with structure motif masking, treating entire structural elements as indivisible units; a noisy structural attention bias that injects curriculum-corrupted contact maps into every Transformer layer to model pseudo-label uncertainty; and a structure denoising objective that recovers clean base-pairing states from corrupted input, completing a closed denoising loop. Pre-trained on a large-scale non-coding RNA corpus, N\"uwa.RNA achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 of 13 BEACON benchmark tasks, with up to $+$7.83 F1 improvement on structure prediction, and attains the highest zero-shot secondary structure prediction accuracy among single-sequence RNA foundation models.

BFloat16 weights of large language models carry only ${\sim}10.5$ bits of information per 16-bit value, yet exploiting this redundancy on GPUs, where weights bottleneck both per-token bandwidth and concurrent capacity, has not produced wall-clock speedup. Existing variable-length lossless codes are compute-bound on SIMT decode. We present NyoomFloat12 (NF12), a lossless 12-bit fixed-length format for BF16 weights that addresses both bottlenecks. Over $99.7\%$ of trained BF16 weights have the upper four exponent bits set to $\texttt{0111}$ after a per-matrix power-of-two scale; dropping them yields a fixed-length 12-bit format with 16-instruction SIMT-friendly decode. Out-of-range groups reuse the encoded slot to index a per-matrix verbatim BF16 buffer at zero per-group storage overhead. In the bandwidth-bound regime, fused NF12 GEMV achieves up to $1.21\times$ matched-BF16 and $1.35\times$ cuBLAS, $71\%$ of the entropy-bound optimum (a hypothetical implementation reading the joint entropy floor at full HBM bandwidth). In the capacity-bound regime on Qwen3-32B, NF12's smaller footprint opens $4.5\times$ more KV-cache room; with decode at near-peak HBM bandwidth ($3.3\times$ faster than prior lossless decoders), NF12 raises throughput up to $2.67\times$.

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by memory and deployment costs, motivating compression methods for practical deployment. Many state-of-the-art compression pipelines leverage the low-rank structure of trained weight matrices, a phenomenon often associated with the properties of popular optimizers such as Adam. In this context, Muon is a recently proposed optimizer that improves LLM pretraining via full-rank update steps, but its induced weight-space structure has not been characterized yet. In this work, we report a surprising empirical finding: despite imposing full-rank updates, Muon-trained models exhibit pronounced low-rank structure in their weight matrices and are readily compressible under standard pipelines. Motivated by this insight, we propose *NuMuon*, which augments Muon with a nuclear-norm constraint on the update direction, further constraining the learned weights toward low-rank structure. Across billion-parameter-scale models, we show that NuMuon increases weight compressibility and improves post-compression model quality under state-of-the-art LLM compression pipelines while retaining Muon's convergence behavior.

Adaptive decision-making in biological and artificial intelligence requires balancing the exploitation of known outcomes with the exploration of uncertain alternatives. Although prior work suggests that uncertainty generally promotes exploration, it has typically treated distinct sources of environmental uncertainty as equivalent. We consider environments with latent reward states that drift over time (volatility) and are observed through noisy outcomes (stochasticity). Both increase posterior uncertainty, yet we show they drive optimal exploration in opposite directions: volatility enhances it, stochasticity suppresses it. We establish this asymmetry formally by extending the Gittins index framework to Gaussian state-space bandits with latent dynamics. We further derive Cause-Aware Uncertainty-Sensitive Exploration (CAUSE), a closed-form exploration bonus obtained via control-as-inference that inherits the same monotonicities. CAUSE outperforms standard exploration strategies in environments with heterogeneous noise structure, and also improves on a Gittins-per-arm policy whose rested-bandit optimality does not transfer to restless settings. Learning and exploration are governed by the same noise-inference asymmetry, and the framework predicts that pathological noise inference produces reversed rather than merely impaired exploration, with implications for computational accounts of psychiatric conditions.

A central question in computational vision is whether human-like visual representations are better explained by discriminative or generative learning. Existing comparisons, however, often confound the learning objective with architecture, scale, and training data, leaving open whether the objective itself drives alignment. We address this confound using Joint Energy-Based Models (JEMs), which interpolate continuously between discriminative and generative training within a fixed architecture. By varying a single mixing coefficient, we isolate the effect of the learning objective and evaluate the resulting models across six human-alignment benchmarks spanning perceptual similarity, gloss perception, human response uncertainty, robustness, shape–texture cue conflict, and diagnostic feature attribution. Across this diverse suite, human alignment is consistently maximized at intermediate points of the generative–discriminative continuum, rather than at either endpoint. Hybrid JEMs combine the categorical structure induced by discriminative learning with the sensitivity to input structure induced by generative learning, yielding more human-like behavior across multiple levels of vision. These results suggest that the generative–discriminative dichotomy is the wrong axis for understanding human-aligned vision: alignment emerges not from choosing one objective over the other, but from balancing both.

Backdoored large language models (LLMs) can behave normally on benign inputs while producing attacker-specified outputs under hidden triggers. Existing defenses span four stages---prior-training, in-training, post-training, and inference-time---and share one of two underlying strategies: either *suppress backdoor learning* (by filtering poisoned data or interrupting its acquisition during optimization) or *learn, then purify* (by repairing model weights or gating inputs after a fully backdoored model has formed). We propose a third strategy, *learn, but channel*: allow backdoor formation during training but route it into a designated, quarantined component that can be disabled at deployment. To this end, we propose **Q**uarantined **E**xpert **S**hutdown (QES), a computationally efficient containment strategy built in a regularization-steered MoE-like setting. Specifically, given a poisoned dataset, QES augments a Transformer-based language model with routed expert-specific LoRA branches and lightweight routers, and uses auxiliary routing objectives to attract trigger-conditioned behavior into a designated expert while preserving benign capability elsewhere. At deployment, mitigation reduces to a single constant-time operation: zeroing the quarantined expert's routing weight, without trigger screening or further updating model weights. Empirically, our methods reduce the attack success rate (ASR) from 100\% to 0-10\% on most settings across two tasks, three attacks, and four model families, while downstream utility is often preserved or only modestly affected. These results establish *learn, but channel* as a previously unexplored regime for backdoor containment in generative LLMs.