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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Modality-Aware Expert Pruning for MoE-Based Multimodal Large Language Models

Donggeun Kim

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Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to scale capacity efficiently, but expert parameters dominate memory—accounting for over 90% of model size in modern MoE-MLLMs (e.g., 54 GB out of ∼58 GB in BF16 for InternVL3.5-30B-A3B and Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B)—even though only a few experts are activated per token. Expert pruning has emerged as an effective compression strategy, but existing methods aggregate importance uniformly across tokens, ignoring that the same expert may serve different roles for vision versus language processing. To address this, we propose MAEP (Modality-Aware Expert Pruning), a training-free framework that decomposes expert importance by modality in a single forward pass. MAEP introduces (1) Delta-H Output (∆H), a redistribution-aware metric measuring the MoE output change when an expert is removed, and (2) low-attention vision tokens as a vision-side pruning signal that is dataset-stable: its expert-importance ranking remains stable across different datasets. Text-side importance serves as a preservation signal while vision-side importance serves as a pruning signal, and experts are ranked globally across layers. Experiments on three MoE-based MLLMs across multimodal and text benchmarks show that MAEP outperforms modality-agnostic baselines on the majority of multimodal benchmarks while remaining competitive on text-only tasks, reducing the BF16 expert weight footprint by ∼27 GB (∼47% of total memory) so that the expert-weight footprint fits within a single 40 GB GPU.

Poster
MobileWan: Closing the Quality Gap for Mobile Video Diffusion

Mohsen Ghafoorian, Denis Korzhenkov, Adil Karjauv, Ioannis Lelekas, Noor Fathima, Spyridon Stasis, Animesh Karnewar, Amirhossein Habibian

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Recent advances in video diffusion have been driven by scaling transformer-based architectures to billions of parameters, substantially improving visual fidelity and motion coherence. In contrast, existing mobile video diffusion models remain limited to relatively small parameter budgets, typically 0.4–1.8B, restricting generation quality. In this work, we show that high-quality mobile video generation does not require small models. Instead, we demonstrate that a server-scale 5B-parameter video diffusion transformer can be deployed efficiently on memory-constrained mobile hardware through recurrent reformulation and structured compression. Starting from Wan2.2-5B, we rely on a recurrent distillation framework that converts video generation into a chunk-wise autoregressive process with constant-memory attention computation. Combined with causal linear attention, the model operates as an RNN at inference time while preserving temporal coherence across chunks. We further propose a learnable attention head pruning method based on binary per-head gates optimized end-to-end using a noise-biased sparsity objective and distillation-based finetuning. Together with sampling-step distillation and memory-optimized VAE decoding, MobileWan becomes the first 5B-scale video diffusion model deployable on a commercial mobile device. Our system generates 5-second 480x832 videos at 16 FPS in 20 seconds end-to-end latency, achieving a VBench score of 83.79 and establishing a new state of the art in mobile video generation. The model checkpoint will be released.

Poster
MobileMoE: Scaling On-Device Mixture of Experts

Yanbei Chen, Hanxian Huang, Ernie Chang, Jacob Szwejbka, Digant Desai, Zechun Liu, Vikas Chandra, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi

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Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become the de facto architecture for hundred-billion-parameter language models, yet its advantages at sub-billion scales for on-device deployment remain largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present MobileMoE, a family of on-device MoE language models with sub-billion active parameters (0.3-0.9B active and 1.3-5.3B total) that establish a new Pareto frontier for on-device LLMs. We first formulate an on-device MoE scaling law that jointly optimizes MoE architecture under mobile memory and compute constraints, identifying an on-device sweet spot -- moderate sparsity with fine-grained and shared experts -- that is simultaneously memory and compute-optimal. Building on the derived architectures, we train MobileMoE with a four-stage recipe covering pre-training, mid-training, instruction fine-tuning, and quantization-aware training, all on open-source datasets. Across 14 benchmarks, MobileMoE matches or exceeds leading on-device dense LLMs with 2-4$\times$ fewer inference FLOPs, and matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art MoE OLMoE-1B-7B with up to 60\% fewer parameters. To bridge the last mile to mobile deployment, we provide the first efficient MoE inference on commodity smartphones with comprehensive on-device profiling. At comparable total parameters, MobileMoE delivers 2-4$\times$ faster prefill and decode, and $\sim$30\% lower runtime peak RAM than the dense baseline MobileLLM-Pro.

Poster
MobTA: Bus-Conditioned Zero-Shot Trajectory Generation via Task Arithmetic

Shuai Liu, Ning Cao, YUE JIANG, Gao Cong

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Mobility trajectory data provide essential support for smart city applications. However, such data are often difficult to obtain. Meanwhile, most existing trajectory generation methods implicitly assume that at least a subset of real mobility data from target city is available, which limits their applicability in data-inaccessible scenarios. In this work, we propose a new problem setting, called bus-conditioned zero-shot trajectory generation, where no mobility trajectories from a target city are accessible. The generation process relies solely on source city mobility data and publicly available bus timetables from both cities. Under this setting, we propose MobTA, the first approach to introduce task arithmetic into trajectory generation. MobTA models the parameter shift from bus-timetable-based trajectory generation to mobility trajectory generation in source city, and applies this shift to target city through arithmetic operations on task vectors. This enables trajectory generation that reflects target-city mobility patterns without requiring any real mobility data from it. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze MobTA's stability across base and instruction-tuned LLMs. Extensive experiments show that MobTA significantly outperforms existing methods, and achieves performance close to models finetuned using target city mobility trajectories.

Poster
MoT3DVG: A Benchmark for Outdoor 3D Visual Grounding with Motion-Aware Descriptions and Temporal Cues

Shijia Zhao, Xusheng Guo, Qiming Xia, Xun Huang, KeZheng Xiong, Zhihong Liu, Chenglu Wen

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3D visual grounding (3DVG) localizes language-referred objects in 3D scenes, with broad applicability in both indoor and outdoor environments. However, existing 3DVG research focuses on static indoor objects, limiting its use in dynamic outdoor autonomous driving. Motion descriptions, which capture the temporal dynamics of moving objects, offer a promising way to address this challenge. We therefore introduce MoT3DVG, a large-scale dataset for dynamic-aware outdoor 3DVG with temporally evolving motion descriptions. It contains 850 scenarios with 31,128 frames from nuScenes dataset, and provides 144,568 language prompts with motion-aware descriptions for dynamic objects across time. We further propose DynaVG, a novel framework that effectively leverages temporal cues for outdoor 3DVG. In addition to the standard modality-specific encoders, DynaVG introduces a Short-Long Integrated Dynamic Encoding (SLIDE) module before the language-point cloud alignment. SLIDE models both local motion cues and global temporal context via short-term window encoding and long-term window shifting. Extensive experiments demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on MoT3DVG, validating the effectiveness of motion-aware encoding. Our work reveals open challenges and promising directions for future research in outdoor 3DVG.

Poster
MoRe: Modular Representations for Principled Continual Representation Learning on Sequential Data

Jiaqi Sun, Boyang Sun, Rasmy M. H., Xiangchen Song, Kun Zhang

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Continual learning requires models to adapt to new data while preserving previously acquired knowledge. At its core, this challenge can be viewed as principled one-step adaptation: incorporating new information with minimal interference to existing representations. Most existing approaches address this challenge by modifying model parameters or architectures in a supervised, task-specific manner. However, the underlying issue is representational: tasks require distinct yet structured representations that can be selectively updated without disrupting representations, while structure should reflect intrinsic organization in the data rather than task boundaries. In sequential data, time-delayed dependencies provide a natural signal for uncovering this organization, revealing how fundamental representations give rise to more specific ones. Inspired by the modular organization of the human brain, we propose MoRe, a framework that identifies modularity in the representation itself rather than allocating it at the architectural level. MoRe decomposes knowledge into a hierarchy of fundamental and specific modules with identifiability guarantees, enabling principled module reuse, alignment, and expansion during adaptation while preserving old modules by construction. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real-world LLM activations demonstrate interpretable hierarchical structure, improved plasticity-stability trade-offs, suggesting MoRe as a principled foundation for continual adaptation.

Poster
MoRe-DVC: Motion Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Detailed Video Captioning

Vipul Baghel, Ravi Hegde

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Despite significant advances in large vision-language models (Video-LLMs) for general video understanding, accurately narrating fine-grained, highly dynamic human activities remains a formidable challenge. Existing approaches typically rely on global sequence embeddings or isolated part-level retrieval, lacking the precise relational kinematic grounding required to prevent physical hallucinations. To address this, we introduce Motion Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Detailed Video Captioning (MoRe-DVC). Our algorithmic novelty centers on two core contributions: an event-boundary-aware graph-conditioned retrieval mechanism that captures hierarchical and chronological motion dependencies, and a symbolic physical faithfulness reward that explicitly constrains generation to grounded physical reality. Specifically, MoRe-DVC integrates a Pose-Orientation Encoding Module (POEM) to extract symbolic descriptors, an Event Calibration and Refinement Module (ECRM) to dynamically adjust coarse action boundaries into an event graph, and a Graph-Conditioned Hybrid Retriever (GCHR) to select relationally relevant evidence. By coupling graph-level retrieval with a strict symbolic reward, our framework reduces motion-language inconsistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoRe-DVC achieves robust outperformance across three motion-centric datasets (BoFiT, HumanML3D, and FineMotion), establishing a new standard for physically faithful action narration.

Poster
MoMHa: Multi-Objective Optimization of LLM Harnesses over Accuracy, Safety, and Tokens

Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Mehrab Tanjim

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Most work on improving large language models treats accuracy as the sole objective. We argue that the harness — the Python code surrounding the model that constructs prompts, routes calls, and parses outputs — is a first-class design surface whose quality is inherently multi-objective: an accurate harness that refuses no unsafe request, or that consumes an order of magnitude more tokens, is not a good harness. We present Meta-Harness, a system that casts harness design as search over three per-domain objectives — accuracy, behavioural safety, and token cost — solved by an agentic proposer (Claude Code) with full filesystem access to prior harness source, execution traces, and scoring artifacts. Our central finding is that a single-phase joint-reward proposer (MoMHa) outperforms every alternative, including a two-phase "accuracy then tokens" ablation, scalar-only feedback, and an accuracy-only baseline. We evaluate on seventeen domains: seven synthetic capability suites, seven real-world public benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, Spider, FEVER, MMLU-Pro, LawBench, NuminaMath), and three U-SafeBench-derived user-specific safety domains, using a 12-model fleet spanning four families. On the synthetic track MoMHa achieves a joint mean of 0.482 versus 0.198–0.422 for ten baselines, winning 7/10 per-domain columns; on the real-world track it scores 0.461 versus 0.377 for the strongest baseline (DSPy), winning 5/7 columns — demonstrating that harness strategies transfer to unseen benchmarks without retraining on 8 of 12 target models. MoMHa attains the highest measured behavioral safety composite (U-SafeBench, 0.781) and uses 95 fewer tokens per example than the two-phase alternative. We will release all harness code, evaluation infrastructure, and cross-model logs.

Poster
MoME: Mixture-of-Memory Embeddings for Context-Aware Sparse Lookup

Muchen Li, Leonid Sigal, Renjie Liao

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Scaling large language models efficiently has motivated sparse capacity mechanisms such as Mixture-of-Experts and, more recently, conditional memory: token-indexed embedding tables that augment the backbone with cheap parametric lookups. Existing memory-embedding methods retrieve via a deterministic function of the surface form, which collapses different contextual senses of the same token (\eg, \emph{python} the language vs.\ the animal) into a single fixed entry. We introduce Mixture of Memory Embeddings (MoME), a context-aware memory mechanism that replaces each token's single memory row with a mixture of $M$ slots and uses a learned gate over the hidden state to choose which slots to read at each position. In controlled pretraining experiments across nanochat, Llama-3/MobileLLM, and Qwen3 backbones from $125$M to $0.6$B parameters, MoME consistently outperforms Value Embedding, Engram, and STEM baselines at matched memory \& training budgets, shows a more favorable memory-size scaling trend than Engram on the nanochat backbone, and remains compatible with Engram-style memory under compound scaling. Qualitative routing analyses on polysemous tokens further suggest that the learned mixture exhibits a degree of semantic interpretability, dispatching the same surface token to distinct memory slots under different senses rather than collapsing them into a single fixed entry. All Code and model checkpoint will be open sourced.

Poster
MoEZip: Routing-Aware KV Cache Compression for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

Minsang Kim, Seung Baek

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Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models scale model capacity efficiently by activating a small subset of parameters per token. However, in long-context inference, memory remains a major bottleneck because the KV cache grows linearly with sequence length. Existing KV cache compression methods reduce this cost for dense transformers, but overlook a problem specific to MoE: KV eviction can change which experts are selected during answer generation, degrading the generation quality. We propose MoEZip, a routing-aware KV cache compression for sparse MoE language models. To estimate the sensitivity of expert routing to perturbation, we propose a novel metric based on the Fisher information matrix of routing distributions. MoEZip combines this metric with attention weights for routing-aware scoring of contexts. Finally, we compose a complementary scoring system that combines eviction methods for dense and sparse-MoE architectures. Experiments show that MoEZip achieves robust performance under aggressive cache compression on various benchmarks. At a KV retention ratio of 10\%, MoEZip improves over the SoTA baseline by +24 and +20 points on average on LongBench and RULER, corresponding to 2.3$\times$ and 4.9$\times$ higher scores, respectively.

Poster
MoE-SpAc: Efficient MoE Inference Based on Speculative Activation Utility in Heterogeneous Edge Scenario

Shuhuai Li, Jianghao Lin, Dongdong Ge, Yinyu Ye

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Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable scalable performance but face severe memory constraints on edge devices. Existing offloading strategies struggle with I/O bottlenecks due to the dynamic, low-information nature of autoregressive expert activation. In this paper, we propose to repurpose Speculative Decoding (SD) not merely as a compute accelerator, but as an informative lookahead sensor for memory management, supported by our theoretical and empirical analyses. Hence, we introduce MoE-SpAc, an MoE inference framework that integrates a training-free Speculative Utility Estimator to track expert demand, a Heterogeneous Workload Balancer to dynamically partition computation via online integer optimization, and an Asynchronous Execution Engine to unify the prefetching and eviction in the same utility space. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that MoE-SpAc achieves a 42% improvement in TPS over the SOTA SD-based baseline, and an average 4.04 speedup over all standard baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SpAc_MoE.

Poster
MoCAR: Motion-code Coordinate-aware AutoRegression for Continuous Trajectory Forecasting

Yiming Xu, Hao Cheng, Monika Sester

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Autoregressive generation is natural for language, where predicted tokens can be directly reused as the next prediction state, but trajectory forecasting lacks such a clean token: motion is continuous, multimodal, and expressed in local coordinate frames that evolve with the predicted trajectory. We present $\textbf{MoCAR}$ ($\textbf{Mo}$tion-code $\textbf{C}$oordinate-aware $\textbf{A}$uto$\textbf{R}$egression), a decoder-only framework that casts trajectory forecasting as next-code prediction in a coordinate-aware continuous latent space. MoCAR learns a continuous motion-code space for endpoint-normalized trajectory segments, where each code jointly captures local trajectory geometry and the reference-frame transition induced by that segment. Historical motion codes are used as a teacher-forced prefix, future codes are generated autoregressively under temporal, map, agent, and mode interactions, and predicted codes persist in latent memory while decoded endpoints update the local scene context. This enables rollout without trajectory-space re-tokenization, trajectory queries, goal candidates, or proposal-and-refinement pipelines. On Argoverse (AV) benchmarks, MoCAR achieves top-tier performance with a simple single-stage architecture, transfers strongly from AV2 to AV1 in zero-shot evaluation, and improves on turn-heavy scenarios. Ablations confirm that the learned continuous motion-code space, latent alignment, weak KL regularization, and joint tokenizer-predictor optimization are essential for stable latent autoregression.

Poster
MoCA: Mixture-of-Components Attention for Scalable Compositional 3D Generation

Zhiqi Li, Wenhuan Li, Tengfei Wang, Zhenwei Wang, Junta Wu, Haoyuan Wang, Yunhan Yang, Zehuan Huang, Yang Li, Chunchao Guo, Peidong Liu

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Compositionality is critical for 3D object and scene generation, but existing part-aware 3D generation methods suffer from poor scalability due to quadratic global attention costs when increasing the number of components. In this work, we present MoCA, a compositional 3D generative model based on a novel component-level sparse attention that explicitly models inter-component dependencies. The attention mechanism features two key designs: 1) importance-based component routing that utilizes a lightweight router module for cross-component importance estimation and selects top-k relevant components for fine-grained interaction, and 2) distant components compression that preserves spatial priors while reducing computational complexity of global attention, by including compressed distant components into attention calculation instead of discarding them. With these designs, MoCA enables intricate compositional 3D asset creation with scalable number of components. Extensive experiments show MoCA outperforms baselines on both compositional object and scene generation tasks. Code and models will be made publicly available.

Poster
MoBiQuant: Mixture-of-Bits Quantization for Token-Adaptive Any-Precision LLM

Dongwei Wang, Jinhee Kim, Seokho Han, Denis Gudovskiy, Yohei Nakata, Tomoyuki Okuno, KhayTze Peong, Kang E Jeon, Jong Hwan Ko, Yiran Chen, Huanrui Yang

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Dynamic runtime latency and memory constraints necessitate flexible large language model (LLM) deployment, where an LLM can be inferred with various quantization precisions based on available computational resources. Recent work on such any-precision quantization either relies on hardware-inefficient vector quantization or induces additional scaling factors when switching between bit-widths. Meanwhile, existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods calibrated for a fixed low precision show poor generalizability under runtime precision change. In this work, we attribute the source of poor generalization across bit-widths to a precision-dependent \textit{outlier migration} phenomenon where the distribution of PTQ-sensitive tokens changes across precisions. Motivated by this observation, we propose \texttt{MoBiQuant}, a novel any-precision Mixture-of-Bits quantization framework that adjusts weight precision for flexible LLM inference based on token sensitivity. Specifically, we propose a many-in-one recursive residual quantization that can iteratively reconstruct higher-precision weights at runtime and mitigates \textit{outlier migration} with a token-aware router to dynamically select the optimal inference precision of each token. Extensive experiments show that \texttt{MoBiQuant} matches or surpasses frontier single-precision PTQ while exhibiting strong elasticity, achieving significant memory savings and throughput gains of up to $1.34\times$ over state-of-the-art any-precision methods. Source code is provided in the supplementary material.

Poster
Mixture-of-Top-$k$ Attention: Efficient Attention as Scalable Fast Weights

Qishuai Wen, Zhiyuan Huang, meng xianghan, Wei He, Chunguang Li

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The vanilla self-attention mechanism in Transformers can be viewed as a two-layer fast-weight MLP, whose weights are dynamically induced by inputs and whose hidden dimension is equal to the sequence length $N$. As the context extends, the expressive capacity of such an $N$-width MLP increases, but it becomes unscalable for extremely long sequences. Recently, this fast-weight perspective has motivated the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) attention, which partitions the sequence into rigid blocks, treats them as fast-weight experts, and sparsely routes the tokens to them. In this paper, we elevate this perspective to a unifying framework for efficient attention mechanisms, interpreting them as making fast weights scalable through either routing or compression, and organizing them into a five-dimensional taxonomy. Then, we propose \textbf{Mi}xture-of-\textbf{T}op-$k$ \textbf{A}ttention (\textbf{MiTA}), which employs a small set of landmark queries to gather top-$k$ attended key-value pairs as query-aware and deformable routed experts, while compressing the $N$-width MLP into a narrower shared expert. Consequently, MiTA improves the flexibility of prior MoE attention, from rigid to deformable fast-weight experts, as well as the scalability of prior top-$k$ attention, from query-specific set to reusable top-$k$ set. Our experiments on vision tasks demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of MiTA, while also uncovering intriguing properties such as an emergent token-pruning effect and easy generalization from standard attention.

Poster
Mixture-of-Hierarchical Experts: Optimized Mamba Architecture for Vision Diffusion

Yejun Jung, Dongyun Kim, Jinsun Park

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Existing Mamba-based diffusion backbones struggle to achieve competitive performance in vision tasks, as purely sequential propagation lacks an explicit spatial inductive bias and relies on a fixed computation pattern across timesteps. We address this limitation by proposing \textbf{Mixture-of-Hierarchical Experts (MoH)}, a Mamba-based diffusion backbone that performs timestep-conditioned routing over architectural components. MoH dynamically selects representation levels by its hierarchical expert space, adapts feature transformations, and adjusts Mamba scan depth according to the denoising state, enabling flexible modeling of spatial structure and multi-scale dependencies. This design leads to substantial performance gains. On unconditional CelebA-HQ $256 \times 256$, MoH reduces FID from 14.27 to 7.99, and on MS-COCO, it improves FID from 41.80 to 20.00, significantly outperforming prior Mamba-based models while improving training efficiency. These results suggest that routing over architectural components can provide an effective mechanism for improving Mamba-based diffusion backbones.

Poster
Mixture-of-Experts for Online Matrix Completion on a Drifting Union of Subspaces

Renpu Liu, Jing Yang

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Many partially observed data streams are globally high-rank yet locally low-rank: user–item interactions in recommender systems span multiple preference groups, distinct operating regimes in sensor and network monitoring induce different low-dimensional structures, and the active latent subspace in adaptive systems shifts over time. We formalize this as online matrix completion on a drifting union of subspaces: each sample lies in one of K low-dimensional subspaces, only a random subset of its coordinates is observed, and the subspaces drift across epochs. We propose MoSAIC (MoE Subspace Adaptation via Incremental Completion), a method based on a routed mixture of low-rank experts trained in two phases. A base model is first pre-trained on samples from a fixed source distribution. It is then adapted on the non-stationary stream by routing each incoming sample to a single expert and updating only that expert. Our analysis identifies sufficient conditions under which the router remains correct with high probability throughout learning, while within each epoch the routed experts contract toward the current subspaces at a sublinear rate. The technical core is a uniform routing concentration argument that converts the random time steps on which each expert is updated into a deterministic time scale, reducing the per-expert analysis to a tractable stochastic recursion. Experiments on streams with repeated non-stationary changes corroborate the theory and show clear improvements over competitive baselines.

Poster
Mixture of Probes: Learning with Privileged Modalities in Multimodal LLMs Through Probing

Dominick Reilly, Qiyu Wu, Hiromi Wakaki, Srijan Das, Yuki Mitsufuji

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Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are typically designed under the assumption that all modalities available during training will also be accessible at inference. However, many real-world settings violate this assumption, requiring models to operate under a privileged modality setting, where auxiliary modalities are available only during training. While these modalities contain valuable information, existing MLLMs largely fail to leverage them effectively, as they treat modalities as interchangeable inputs rather than sources of complementary supervision. We propose Mixture of Probes (MoP), a novel framework that disentangles modality-specific and modality-general signals within the MLLM, allowing the model to preserve modality-dependent structure while learning transferable representations across modalities. At its core, MoP achieves this through a structured probing mechanism that extracts and organizes information from intermediate representations of a shared modality encoder, rather than relying only on final-layer alignment as done in existing MLLMs. To support this disentanglement, we further introduce MoP Cross-modal Probe Training (MoP-X), a training strategy for MoP centered around a probe disentanglement loss that prevents probe collapse and encourages cross-modal learning. We evaluate MoP across two domains spanning eight tasks and four modalities under a comprehensive evaluation protocol tailored to the privileged modality setting, where each modality is independently treated as the sole input at inference time. MoP consistently outperforms strong MLLM baselines, achieving up to 65% relative improvement, demonstrating that auxiliary modalities, even when unavailable at inference, can provide substantial gains when effectively leveraged during training.

Poster
Mixture of Layers: Dynamic Layer Routing for Visual Reasoning

Jeonghwan Kim, Sofia Stoica, Jiwan Chung, Ansel Blume, Hyeonjeong Ha, Zhenhailong Wang, Xin Dong, Heng Ji

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Pre-trained vision encoders contain layer-wise visual representations that differ in spatial granularity, semantic abstraction, and sensitivity to local details. However, most Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely only on the final or penultimate vision encoder representations or fixed aggregation rules, making visual abstraction largely query-agnostic and limiting access to fine-grained cues such as small objects, spatial details, text, and subtle visual attributes. In this work, we propose **Mixture of Layers (MoL)**, an instruction-conditioned layer routing approach that dynamically aggregates query-relevant latent representations from intermediate vision encoder layers. Given a text query, **MoL** predicts routing probabilities over vision encoder layers and aggregates selected hidden states at either the image level, patch level, or through a hybrid routing mechanism. Our proposed **MoL** is a vision encoder-agnostic framework for layer-wise routing that selectively samples visual features useful for fine-grained visual reasoning tasks. Experiments across seven fine-grained visual reasoning benchmarks demonstrate substantial performance improvements, including +18.9% on V* overall accuracy, +4.5% on HRBench4K, and +16.3% on CharXiv compared to baseline MLLMs, *without* requiring multi-resolution inputs, simple interleaving of multiple vision encoders, or additional patch tokens. We further analyze receptive field scales and routing behaviors across vision encoder layers to explain why adaptive layer selection improves perception and reasoning. Our results suggest that conditional intermediate-layer representations are a key step toward stronger visual perception and reasoning in MLLMs. Code will be open-sourced.

Poster
Mixture of Attribute-Aware Attention Experts for Fine-grained E-Commerce Composed Image Retrieval

Yufei Ma, Zihan Liang, Zhipeng Qian, Huangyu Dai, Lingtao Mao, Ben Chen, Chenyi Lei, Wenwu Ou

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Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables users to express specific search intent by combining a reference image with manipulation text. Despite its promise for e-commerce, existing methods ignore readily available item textual descriptions, suffer from multi-attribute confounding where samples exhibit uncontrolled variations in unrelated attributes, and lack explicit fine-grained attribute modeling. We propose $\textbf{MoA}^{3}\textbf{CIR}$, featuring an asymmetric five-tower architecture that incorporates item descriptions on both query and target sides, a self-reflective data augmentation pipeline generating controlled attribute modifications through LVLM-driven refinement, and a Mixture of Attribute-Aware Attention mechanism with grouped multi-head attention and dynamic routing coupled with a two-phase training strategy. Besides, we contribute ECCIR, the first dual-modal e-commerce CIR benchmark with 110K samples featuring authentic item descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \method~achieves SoTA performance on ECCIR, FashionIQ, and Shoes datasets, with substantial improvements over existing methods. Code and datasets will be made publicly available.

Poster