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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A Communication-Theoretic Framework for LLM Agents: Cost-Aware Adaptive Reliability

Hamed Omidvar, Vahideh Akhlaghi

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Agents built on large language models (LLMs) rely on a range of reliability techniques, including retry, majority voting, and self-consistency, that have been developed in parallel rather than within a common analytical framework. We observe that an LLM sampled at temperature $T$ is a discrete stochastic channel $p(y \mid x)$ in the sense of Shannon's coding theory, and use this identity as the entry point for such a framework grounded in communication theory. Each of these techniques is a special case of one of six classical reliability operators: diversity combining, hybrid retransmission, iterative generator-critic decoding, rateless sampling, structured redundant verification, and difficulty-adaptive routing. Within the framework we give two closed-form results: a noise-variance threshold above which uniform averaging beats quality-weighted averaging, and a contractivity criterion for generator-critic refinement, consistent with a contractive-to-divergent transition we observe between 3B- and 14B-parameter models. We further introduce a cost-aware semantic-nearest-neighbor router whose single Lagrangian knob traverses the quality-cost frontier without retraining. Across six channel configurations spanning local and cloud models on 69 hard tasks, no fixed model-technique-budget choice dominates, motivating per-task allocation. On a 300-item hard split of MMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval, our router occupies the full empirical Pareto frontier: at matched quality, its normalized cost is ${\approx}56$\% lower than the strongest fixed technique; at matched normalized cost, it improves quality by ${\approx}7$\% ($26$\% over single-shot decoding). These results argue for consolidating these reliability techniques into a single tunable layer informed by channel coding.

Poster
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
$\boldsymbol{f}$-OPD: Stabilizing Long-Horizon On-Policy Distillation with Freshness-Aware Control

Xianwei Chen, Shimin Zhang, Jibin Wu

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Scaling on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models (LLMs) confronts a fundamental tension: asynchronous execution is necessary for system efficiency but structurally deviates from the ideal on-policy objective. To address this challenge, we theoretically decompose the objective discrepancy into rollout drift and supervision drift, capturing staleness in student occupancy and teacher context, respectively. Building on this, we introduce a sample-level freshness score that quantifies the reliability of buffered sample with respect to the on-policy objective. Guided by this signal, we further propose $\boldsymbol{f}$**-OPD**, a novel framework that adaptively regulates stale-sample influence and constrains policy drift accumulated under asynchronous optimization. Across reasoning, tool-use, and coding-agent tasks of increasing interaction horizon, $f$-OPD consistently achieves task performance comparable to synchronous training while retaining the throughput advantages of asynchronous execution. Our results establish the first recipe that seeks to achieve a performance–efficiency trade-off in OPD, paving the way for long-horizon agentic post-training at scale.

Poster