NeurIPS 2026 Papers

World-level image geolocalization is an increasingly important task, yet the biases of current models remain poorly understood. Prior work has identified coarse dataset imbalances noting, for instance, that some cities are absent from training sets and that models tend to perform better in wealthier regions. However no one has yet examined which visual cues drive these disparities. To do so, we introduce GeoBiaset, the first benchmark designed to measure how geolocalization models are influenced by the apparent race of a person inserted into the image foreground. The dataset consists of 9,541 images, pairing existing geotagged background images with counterfactual edits spanning seven races, holding the ground-truth coordinates fixed so that any shift in model predictions is attributable solely to the inserted subject. Alongside the benchmark, we introduce the Person-Origin Perturbation Indicators (POPI), novel metrics that quantify model resilience to these demographic perturbations by measuring whether predictions are pulled toward the region associated with the inserted group. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art geolocalization and multimodal large language models reveals a 16-47\% drop in continent-level performance when a subject from a demographically mismatched group is inserted. A landmark versus no-landamark analysis and gradient-weighted heatmaps show that models preferentially attend to geographic landmarks when present, but shift attention to facial features in their absence.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as highly effective planning models for end-to-end autonomous driving systems. However, current works mostly rely on imitation learning from sparse trajectory annotations and under-utilize their potential as generative models. We propose Generative Scenario Rollouts (GeRo), a plug-and-play framework for VLA models that jointly performs planning and generation of language-grounded future traffic scenes through an autoregressive rollout strategy. First, a VLA model is trained to encode ego vehicle and agent dynamics into latent tokens under supervision from planning, motion, and language tasks, facilitating text-aligned generation. Next, GeRo performs language-conditioned autoregressive generation. Given multi-view images, a scenario description, and ego-action questions, it generates future latent tokens and textual responses to guide long-horizon rollouts. A rollout-consistency loss stabilizes predictions using ground truth or pseudo-labels, mitigating drift and preserving text-action alignment. This design enables GeRo to perform temporally consistent, language-grounded rollouts that support long-horizon reasoning and multi-agent planning. On Bench2Drive, GeRo improves driving score and success rate by +15.7 and +26.2, respectively. By integrating reinforcement learning with generative rollouts, GeRo achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop and open-loop performance, demonstrating strong zero-shot robustness. These results highlight the promise of generative, language-conditioned reasoning as a foundation for safer and more interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving.

The success of generative molecular design hinges on a model's steerability toward high-reward samples. Because many molecular properties are intrinsically linked to molecular size, accurately capturing the joint distribution of properties and the number of atoms is essential. However, current diffusion and flow-based models fix the number of atoms, which ultimately limits their ability to navigate this complex relationship. To address this, we introduce Morph, a flexible-size generative model for conditional and unconditional 3D molecular design based on geometric graphs. By dynamically adapting size, Morph can seamlessly integrate existing structural priors, like scaffolds, and significantly enhances property steering. We show that Morph matches current fixed-size state-of-the-art models while offering the benefit of unparalleled sampling flexibility. We demonstrate out-of-distribution generation in regimes where previous models fail, paving the way for enhanced generative modeling for molecular design.

The prevalence of missing values in data science poses a substantial risk to any further analyses. Despite a wealth of research, principled nonparametric methods to deal with general non-monotone missingness are still scarce. Instead, ad-hoc imputation methods are often used, for which it remains unclear whether the correct distribution can be recovered. In this paper, we propose FLOWGEM, a principled iterative method for generating a complete dataset from a dataset with values Missing at Random (MAR). Motivated by convergence results of the ignoring maximum likelihood estimator, our approach minimizes the expected Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the observed data distribution and the distribution of the generated sample over different missingness patterns. To minimize the KL divergence, we employ a discretized particle evolution of the corresponding Wasserstein Gradient Flow, where the velocity field is approximated using a local linear estimator of the density ratio. This construction yields a data generation scheme that iteratively transports an initial particle ensemble toward the target distribution. Simulation studies and real-data benchmarks demonstrate that FLOWGEM achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of settings, including the challenging case of non-monotone MAR mechanisms. Together, these results position FLOWGEM as a principled and practical alternative to existing imputation methods, and a decisive step towards closing the gap between theoretical rigor and empirical performance.

Cross-entropy (CE) is the default training loss for supervised classification, but its sample efficiency is limited when labels are scarce. Existing remedies primarily act on the data side, via augmentation, synthesis, or transfer from pretrained models; the training objective itself is rarely revisited. We revisit it here. Drawing on the classical observation that generative classifiers reach their asymptotic error with fewer samples than discriminative ones, we propose Generative Cross-Entropy (GenCE), a drop-in replacement for CE that introduces a generative learning principle into a standard discriminative network without altering the architecture or fitting a separate density model. GenCE follows from a Bayesian rewrite of the class-conditional likelihood and, in the mini-batch approximation, reduces to normalizing each sample's softmax score against the model's predictions on the batch, coupling the training signal across examples sharing a class. We extend the proper-scoring-rule framework to such non-local losses and prove that GenCE is strictly proper under a mild completeness condition: its population risk is uniquely minimized at the true posterior. Across three datasets, on two architectures and in both balanced small-data and class-imbalanced regimes, GenCE outperforms CE and other widely used losses, while also producing better-calibrated probabilities and stronger out-of-distribution detection.

Diffusion and flow-based generators are increasingly used in robot policies to produce action chunks from visual observations, proprioception, and language instructions. However, closed-loop robot control requires solving action-generation problems of varying difficulty, whereas standard diffusion and flow-matching inference typically follows a fixed integration schedule. We introduce **Generative Control as Optimization (GeCO)**, a time-unconditional framework that turns action synthesis from fixed-time integration into iterative optimization. GeCO learns a stationary velocity field over action sequences, and refines actions until the field norm becomes small. This enables adaptive computation at each planning call: simple states can terminate early, while difficult states can use additional refinement. The same field norm also provides a lightweight signal for non-convergent action generation under distribution shift. GeCO can be instantiated in both diffusion-transformer policies and flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems without changing the surrounding policy interface. Across simulation benchmarks and real-world tasks, GeCO matches or improves task performance while enabling convergence-based inference as a plug-and-play replacement for standard time-conditioned action generators.

Conformal prediction provides model-agnostic uncertainty quantification with guaranteed coverage, but conventional methods often yield overly conservative uncertainty sets, particularly in multimodal or heterogeneous settings. This inefficiency arises from two sources: (i) limited expressiveness of the predictive model and (ii) simplistic nonconformity scores design. Most existing approaches advance only one of these axes, leaving the other underexplored. We propose generative conformal prediction with **O**ptimized **R**anking and **C**overage **A**llocation (ORCA), a three-stage framework that advances both aspects jointly. ORCA leverages generative models to capture the full conditional distribution and introduces a rank-dependent optimization procedure that adaptively allocates coverage for efficiency while maintaining validity. We cast this coverage allocation as an optimization problem, derive an exact mixed-integer linear programming formulation, and show that the solution converges asymptotically to the oracle density-level set. Across synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real datasets, ORCA produces substantially more efficient uncertainty sets than state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating robust gains in scenarios where conventional conformal prediction methods fail.

Expressive generative policies such as diffusion and flow models are appealing for maximum-entropy (MaxEnt) online reinforcement learning because of their ability to model multimodal and highly non-Gaussian action distributions. However, training effective soft generative policies faces two obstacles that often arise together. First, marginal action densities are often unavailable, so existing methods typically rely on entropy bounds, heuristic proxies or approximations. Second, iterative shared-parameter samplers raise inference cost and require backpropagation through time over repeated network evaluations, increasing memory cost and destabilizing policy optimization. These obstacles motivate us to seek a generative policy that exposes a tractable MaxEnt objective while requiring only a single sampled actor forward pass for action generation. To this end, we propose soft generative actor-critic (SoftGAC), whose actor defines a stochastic bridge from a fixed base latent to a terminal action latent in pre-tanh space. This structured bridge allows us to lift the MaxEnt objective as an analytically tractable path-wise relative-entropy objective against a high-entropy reference process. In practical finite-step implementation, this relative entropy reduces exactly to sampled transition control energy and thus provides principled soft regularization. Moreover, we keep the single-pass actor lightweight by using small step-specific bridge transitions, each evaluated only once per sampled action, while maintaining a parameter budget comparable to strong actor baselines. Extensive experiments on challenging continuous-control benchmarks show that \myalgo attains higher or competitive returns than strong generative policy baselines, including diffusion and flow-matching policies, while staying in the low-latency regime of one-pass actors and avoiding the much higher cost of many-step diffusion samplers, showing considerable improvements in the compute-return tradeoff.

Unlike real-world datasets, utilizing synthetic data from generative models as train dataset necessitates a rigorous consideration of the training data's informativeness. In this paper, we propose a novel framework designed to steer diffusion models based on Bayesian epistemic uncertainty to train the target model. To ensure computational tractability, we estimate the Bayesian Active Learning by Disagreement (BALD) score by applying the Laplace approximation specifically to the last-layer parameters of the downstream model. Furthermore, we incorporate Feynman-Kac Steering (FKS) for diffusion to enhance the structural diversity of the synthetic samples and mitigate the emergence of undesirable artifacts. Extensive experiments on Imagenette and ImageNet-100 for the classification task and MS-COCO for the object detection task demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines in downstream accuracy and OOD generalization. Furthermore, our analysis of pairwise distances between inter-class and intra-class confirms that our method effectively expands the downstream model's knowledge manifold by generating diverse and informative training signals.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as perception and reasoning modules for embodied intelligence, yet they remain brittle when understanding fine-grained physical processes in videos. While existing models often recognize the overall task, they frequently fail to recover the intermediate actions and result states that determine how an embodied interaction actually unfolds. We argue that this limitation stems in part from a supervision bottleneck: conventional video-language data is typically constructed through post-hoc annotation, where captions are written after video collection and often provide only coarse, loosely aligned descriptions of dynamic physical events. We propose **Gen4Understand**, a generation-for-understanding framework that reverses this data flow. Instead of captioning videos after they are observed, Gen4Understand first represents embodied interactions as structured action scripts composed of atomic events and state deltas, then synthesizes videos conditioned on these scripts and real start-end frame anchors. A verifier-calibrator scores each generated candidate using its conditioning script, endpoint anchors, and video content, filtering for semantic consistency, endpoint fidelity, physical plausibility, temporal coherence, and visual quality. The retained atomic clips are further merged into action-, subtask-, and task-level supervision and converted into captioning and question-answering data for VLM adaptation. Experiments across public embodied video splits, distractor-rich hallucination tests, simulated VLA benchmarks, and real-robot tasks show that Gen4Understand consistently improves fine-grained action understanding, result-state recognition, temporal ordering, hallucination resistance, and downstream embodied control. These results suggest that controllable video generation can serve not merely as data augmentation, but as a mechanism for creating calibrated process-level supervision for embodied intelligence.

Pruning reduces the model size and inference cost of large language models (LLMs), yet preserving performance across diverse downstream tasks remains challenging. Existing structured pruning methods commonly rely on local discrepancy measures or teacher-forced predictive criteria, such as Block Influence (BI) and perplexity (PPL). While these methods are effective on classification benchmarks, the resulting pruned models often degrade severely on generative reasoning tasks. We study redundancy in Transformer-based models and observe that pruning-induced generation drift is strongly correlated with the functional importance of modules, suggesting a more faithful criterion for identifying redundant modules. Based on this insight, we propose GDPruner, a calibration-free, generation-drift-guided block pruning method. GDPruner constructs lightweight self-generated probe trajectories, estimates module importance using tail-position generation drift, and removes redundant modules through adaptive search. Extensive experiments show that GDPruner surpasses state-of-the-art structured pruning baselines while better preserving overall performance and complex generative reasoning ability, offering a promising direction for generation-robust LLM deployment.

Despite rapid advances in text-to-image generation, faithfully realizing user intent remains challenging, often requiring manual multi-turn trial and error. To automate this process, existing systems rely on either simple prompt rewriting or closed-loop agents driven by hand-crafted rules, rather than learning to adapt actions to the evolving generation process. In this paper, we reformulate image generation as a state-conditioned action-making problem and propose Generation Navigator, a multi-turn T2I agent that learns to dynamically steer the generation trajectory and output the next action. However, training this agent via reinforcement learning introduces a critical credit assignment challenge: naively rewarding a trajectory based solely on a single state assigns equal credit to all actions in the rollout, ignores the quality dynamics across turns, and fails to distinguish actions that improve the trajectory from those that degrade it or waste turns without progress. We resolve this with PRE-GRPO (Peak-Retention-Efficiency Group Relative Policy Optimization), a trajectory-level reinforcement learning objective that explicitly rewards discovering a high-quality image (Peak), avoiding subsequent quality degradation across turns (Retention), and minimizing unnecessary turns (Efficiency). Experiments show substantial improvements across benchmarks, reaching a WISE score of 0.90 and 79.06% reasoning accuracy on T2I-ReasonBench.

Individual-level wildlife identification often suffers from data scarcity, as varying observations of the same animal under diverse poses, viewpoints, and motions are rarely available. Image-to-video (I2V) generation offers a promising way to mitigate this limitation by synthesizing additional observations from a single reference image. However, existing I2V models mainly emphasize global layout, semantics, and motion, and therefore often fail to preserve fine-grained local appearance cues that distinguish one wildlife individual from another, such as fur texture, stripe boundaries, spot configurations, and contour transitions. We observe that these identity-critical cues are closely related to high-frequency information, which is essential for distinguishing individuals. To address this challenge, we propose WildIcon, a high-frequency-guided I2V framework for wildlife individual consistency. Specifically, WildIcon introduces a frequency-aware identity encoding branch that extracts individual-specific high-frequency cues from the reference image. Combined with isolated foreground information, the resulting identity tokens are then injected into cross-attention blocks as identity conditioning. Building on a frozen backbone with lightweight identity adaptation, WildIcon strengthens fine-grained identity preservation while retaining the motion controllability and semantic fidelity of the base I2V model. In addition, to support the training and evaluation of wildlife individual-consistent I2V, we construct WildlifeVid, a wildlife-centric video dataset with high-quality, temporally coherent clips and individual-level identity labels. Experiments on both I2V and downstream animal re-identification (ReID) show that WildIcon achieves stronger individual consistency than existing baselines and provides useful, reliable synthetic data to improve downstream ReID performance.

What did an ancestral bird species sound like? Existing ancestral state reconstruction methods can infer low-dimensional traits such as morphological characters at internal nodes of a phylogenetic tree, but no one has tried to produce rich perceptual signals such as audio. Some of the challenges include inferred representations that are either too low-dimensional to decode or lie in non-generative feature spaces, so no method to date can produce ancestral audio. We introduce the first framework that generates plausible ancestral vocalizations. Our pipeline encodes bird recordings into a VAE latent space, learns a low-dimensional trait projection aligned with phylogenetic distances, performs ancestral inference in this trait space, and recovers decodable latents through an anchored inverse lift before emitting novel waveforms for each ancestral node. Because the entire pipeline stays within a decodable latent space, every internal node receives a genuinely new audio output representing plausible intermediate ancestral sounds unavailable to retrieval-based alternatives. Experiments on two phylogenetically distant bird clades, 21-species Tyrannidae and 19-species Paridae, show that our method is the only approach that simultaneously achieves genuine generation, phylogenetic consistency, and naturalistic audio quality across both datasets.

The classic paradigm of language identification in the limit models learning as a game between an adversary, who reveals strings from an unknown target language, and a learner tasked with identifying that language. The recently introduced framework of language generation in the limit shifted the objective to better reflect modern language modeling, requiring the learner to produce valid, unseen strings from the target language. Related work highlighted a fundamental tension: a broad coverage of the target often comes at the cost of validity. We introduce a new notion of precision and recast this problem as the classic recall--precision trade-off. We analyze generation in the limit under varying constraints on enumeration, novelty, and validity, aimed at reflecting settings closer to those encountered by large language models. A key contribution is our analysis of learners that are not eventually valid: we allow infinitely many mistakes, provided their frequency tends to zero so that precision remains $1$. We show this relaxation can strictly increase recall when the adversary permanently withholds a large portion of the target language. We also study a continuous relaxation of the novelty constraint, requiring only that a fixed fraction of outputs are novel. Taken together, our results move toward a more realistic model of language generation where occasional errors and repetitions are unavoidable, but their rates are controlled.

Generating realistic financial time series is challenging as training data is often limited to a single historical path. With such scarce data, overfitting is hard to avoid, especially under adversarial training where a trained discriminator can memorize the training samples. To mitigate this, recent approaches train generators to minimize the discrepancy between untrained feature representations of real and generated time series. In these works, the feature maps are based on path signatures, which can fail to capture relevant time series properties at tractable truncation depths. In this work, we instead train generators by matching random convolutional features of real and generated time series. Existing random convolutional feature maps, such as Rocket and Hydra, have been shown to provide informative representations of real-world time series, but cannot supervise generative models because they are non-differentiable. We introduce **SOCK** (***SO**ft **C**ompeting **K**ernels*), a fully differentiable random convolutional feature map, suited to train generative time series models. We show that generators trained by matching random SOCK features consistently outperform signature and diffusion baselines across a wide range of small-sample financial datasets. We further demonstrate SOCK's expressiveness on two-sample hypothesis testing and time series classification tasks, where SOCK matches or outperforms existing unsupervised feature maps.

Model merging aims to combine multiple models into one without additional training. Naïve parameter-space averaging can be fragile under architectural symmetries, as their geometry does not take them into account. In this work we show that not only the geometry, but also the averaging procedure itself, must be symmetry-invariant to achieve symmetry-aware merges. Consequently, we propose a general solution: merging as Fréchet averaging, i.e., selecting parameters that minimize a sum of geodesic distances on an appropriate manifold. In this view, the key design choice is the overall geometry, i.e., the choice of metric, manifold, and distance approximation, that determines what it means for two models to be “close.” We show that Fréchet averaging, combined with simplifying assumptions, contains Fisher merging. Building on this, we examine the particular case of low-rank adapters (LoRA), whose symmetries induce a distinct geometry: that of a quotient manifold. We outline the limitations of current LoRA merging methods, propose a practical algorithm for this setting, and show how they compare with other commonly used approaches.

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) improves large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computation during inference, typically through parallel, sequential, or hybrid scaling. However, prior studies often assume fixed collaboration architectures (e.g., topologies) and single-model usage, overlooking that optimal architectures and model combinations can vary across tasks. Therefore, we study the novel problem of \textit{searching for compute-optimal model combinations and architectures in TTS under a fixed budget.} We formalize it as a multi-LLM collaboration graph, where nodes encode roles, and LLM model assignments, and edges capture information flow. This problem is challenging because (i) the combinatorial search space is prohibitively large, and (ii) task-specific requirements demand tailored designs. To this end, we formulate the problem as probabilistic graph optimization and, via pilot experiments, derive three empirical insights into TTS collaboration graphs. Guided by these insights, we propose Agent-REINFORCE, an LLM-agent-augmented framework that mirrors the REINFORCE pipeline by mapping \emph{sampling–gradient–update} to \emph{sampling–feedback–update}, where feedback serves as a textual gradient to update the probabilistic graph and efficiently search for optimal multi-LLM collaboration graphs. Experiments show that Agent-REINFORCE outperforms both traditional and LLM-based baselines in sample efficiency and search performance, and effectively identifies optimal graphs under joint objectives of accuracy and inference latency.

Flow matching has recently emerged as a flexible and efficient framework for generative modelling by learning deterministic transport dynamics between probability measures. In this work, we extend flow matching to the space of probability measures over probability measures, introducing a Wasserstein-on-Wasserstein (WoW) formulation. Leveraging the nested Wasserstein geometry, we show that measures over transport plans naturally induce velocity fields that realize metameasure flows. This yields a principled generalization of Wasserstein flow matching via coupled outer and inner transport plans. To address the substantial computational cost of WoW transport, we propose scalable approximations based on sliced and linear Wasserstein distances, enabling efficient training while promoting numerically stable, near-straight trajectories. Our framework unifies and extends existing approaches to point cloud and set generation, providing a practical and theoretically grounded method for generative modelling in WoW spaces.