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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Topic: Multimodal LLMs · 1,366 papers · Reset filters

ImmuVis: Hyperconvolutional Foundation Models for Imaging Mass Cytometry

Dawid Uchal, Marcin Mozejko, Krzysztof Gogolewski, Piotr Kupidura, Fabian Ozga, Szymon Łukasik, Jakub Giezgała, Tomasz Nocoń, Kacper Pietrzyk, Robert Pieniuta, Mateusz Sulimowicz, Michał Zmysłowski, Michał Orzyłowski, Tomasz Siłkowski, Karol Zagródka, Eike Staub, Ewa Szczurek

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We present ImmuVis, a family of efficient foundation models for imaging mass cytometry (IMC), a high-throughput multiplex imaging technology that handles molecular marker measurements as image channels and enables large-scale spatial tissue profiling. Unlike natural images, multiplex imaging lacks a fixed channel space, as real-world marker sets vary across studies, violating a core assumption of standard vision backbones. To address this, ImmuVis introduces marker-adaptive hyperconvolutions that generate convolutional kernels from learned marker embeddings, enabling a single model to operate on arbitrary measured marker subsets without retraining. We pretrain ImmuVis on the largest IMC dataset to date, IMC17M (28 cohorts, 24,405 images, 265 markers, over 17M patches), using self-supervised masked reconstruction. ImmuVis outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and ablations in virtual staining and downstream classification tasks at substantially lower compute cost than transformer-based alternatives, and is the sole model that provides calibrated uncertainty via a heteroscedastic likelihood objective. These results position ImmuVis as a practical framework for real-world IMC modeling.

Poster
Illusory Pattern Perception Drives Spurious Inference in Large Language Models

Peihua Mai, Zhuoyan Shao, Xinbao Qiao, Meng Zhang, Xinyue Zhou, Yan Pang

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Illusory pattern perception is a well-documented human cognitive tendency to infer meaningful relationships in data that is actually random. Such a tendency, often described as “connecting the dots” where none exist, can result in systematic reasoning errors. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit such perceptual tendencies, which can lead to systematic errors in downstream applications. To our knowledge, this work presents the first systematic study of illusory pattern perception in LLMs, adapting classic psychological paradigms to three tasks with direct empirical comparison to human behaviors. We find that LLMs frequently exhibit stronger illusory pattern perception than humans. In particular, models tend to over-associate frequent positive attributes with majority groups or large organizations, and show increased tendencies to construct causal narratives from ambiguous events. To uncover the mechanism behind these behaviors, we develop a feature interpretability framework based on Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to analyze internal representations. Our results reveal that holistic frequency perception and analytic cognitive orientation are linked to the emergence of illusory perceptions. These findings highlight a previously underexplored cognitive-like illusion that may affect the reliability of LLM reasoning. Code available at [Anonymous Github](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/illusory-8E27/).

Poster
ITO: Multi-View Alignment and Training-Time Fusion for Image-Text Pretraining

Hanpeng Liu, Yaqian Li, Zidan Wang, Shuoxi Zhang, Zonglin Zhao, Zi-Hao Bo, Rinyoichi Takezoe, Kaiwen Long, Kun He

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Image--text contrastive pretraining has become a dominant paradigm for visual representation learning, yet existing methods often yield representations that remain partially organized by modality rather than by semantics. We propose \textbf{ITO}, a framework addressing this limitation through two complementary mechanisms with distinct roles. \emph{Multimodal multiple alignment} enriches supervision by constructing diverse cross-modal correspondences from multi-view image augmentations, providing the primary source of discriminative gain. A lightweight \emph{training-time multimodal fusion} module then acts as a geometric regularizer, encouraging the encoders to produce features that are compatible under fusion and thereby reducing modality-induced separation. Crucially, the fusion module is discarded at inference, preserving the efficiency of standard dual-encoder architectures while incurring training-time overhead only. Extensive experiments across pretraining scales from millions to billions of image--text pairs show that ITO consistently outperforms strong baselines on classification, retrieval, and multimodal benchmarks. Our analysis further reveals that beyond accuracy gains, training-time fusion plays a stabilizing role in optimization, mitigating the late-stage overfitting commonly observed in aggressive contrastive learning.

Poster
INFUSER: Influence-Guided Self-Evolution Improves Reasoning

Siyu Chen, Miao Lu, Beining Wu, Heejune Sheen, Fengzhuo Zhang, Shuangning Li, Zhiyuan Li, Jose Blanchet, Tianhao Wang, Zhuoran Yang

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Self-evolution offers a scalable path to stronger reasoning: a pretrained language model improves itself with only minimal external supervision. Yet existing methods either depend on extensively curated or teacher-generated training data, or, when the generator runs unsupervised, reward it by a difficulty heuristic that need not improve the solver. We introduce **INFUSER**, an iterative co-training framework with two co-evolving roles: a *Generator* that drafts questions and reference golden answers from a pool of unstructured, automatically collected documents, and a *Solver* that improves by training on them. The solver is trained with standard correctness rewards against the generator-provided answers, while the generator is rewarded by an *optimizer-aware influence score* that measures whether each proposed question would actually improve the solver on the target distribution. Because this continuous, noisy influence score is poorly served by standard GRPO, we propose **DuGRPO**, a dual-normalized variant of GRPO, for generator training. Together, these turn the document pool into an *adaptive curriculum* that favors questions useful to the current solver, not just hard ones. On Qwen3-8B-Base, INFUSER outperforms strong self-evolution baselines with over 20% relative improvement on Olympiad and SuperGPQA benchmarks, and an 8B INFUSER co-evolving generator outperforms a frozen 32B thinking generator on math and coding. Ablations confirm each design choice is necessary. Code is available at

Poster
IGGT4D: Streaming 4D Instance-Grounded Geometry Transformer

Zhengyu Zou, Hao Li, Kuixuan Jiao, Liu Liu, TingyangXiao, Xiaolin Zhou, Fangzhou Hong, Zhizhong Su, Dingwen Zhang, Ziwei Liu

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Real-world spatial intelligence requires agents to understand scenes from continuous video streams, where objects move, persist, disappear, and reappear over time. While recent spatial foundation models have enabled generalizable feed-forward 3D reconstruction, most streaming methods remain geometry-centric and lack temporally consistent object-level understanding. Meanwhile, existing semantic reconstruction and 3D-aware vision-language methods largely rely on externally extracted 2D semantic cues or loosely coupled geometry inputs, limiting unified geometry-instance learning in long dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose IGGT4D, a streaming instance-grounded geometry Transformer for online 4D scene understanding. IGGT4D processes video frames sequentially, reuses historical context through causal spatial-temporal modeling, and incrementally updates a unified representation of camera motion, geometry, and object identity. This enables long-sequence feed-forward reconstruction with geometry-instance consistency in dynamic environments. To address the lack of high-quality 4D supervision, we further construct InsScene4D-147K, a large-scale dataset spanning real/synthetic and static/dynamic scenes, with RGB images, depth, poses, and temporally consistent instance masks generated by an automated geometry-guided annotation pipeline. Experiments on 3D reconstruction, pose estimation, instance spatial tracking, and open-vocabulary segmentation demonstrate that IGGT4D outperforms existing streaming baselines while maintaining scalable online inference for long dynamic sequences.

Poster
IDEAFix: Evaluation Framework for Creative Defixation Prompting in LLMs

Florian Carichon, Soumya Sharma, Meaghan J. Girard, Romain Rampa, Golnoosh Farnadi

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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks involving creative problem solving and idea generation. However, However, there is a lack of consensus concerning their creative capabilities:: some studies report superior performances compared to humans, while others highlight structural limitations such as fixation and the homogenization of outputs. Existing evaluation approaches either rely on narrow, decontextualized tasks that do not capture goal-oriented generation or on broader settings that confound multiple aspects of the creative process, making it difficult to isolate the effects of task formulation, prompting, and evaluation design. Significantly, the role of structured prompting strategies in shaping idea generation remains underexplored. Therefore, we introduce IDEAFix, an evaluation framework for analyzing divergent thinking in open-ended idea generation tasks. We prompt models to generate multiple original solutions to controlled variations of short design scenarios, task attributes, and defixation prompting strategies. This design enables systematic analysis of how structured guidance influences LLMs' idea generation. Our results show that both task formulation and attribute selection significantly affect models' performance, and that simple prompting strategies can boost the originality of solutions. However, we also observe persistent output homogenization across models, confirming inherent limits in their ability to generate diverse solutions. Overall, IDEAFix provides a controlled, extensible framework for studying the mechanisms underlying LLMs' creativity.

Poster
I-Perceive: A Foundation Model for Vision-Language Active Perception

Yongxi Huang, Wang, Wenjing Tang, Xinyu He, Cewu Lu, Panpan Cai

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Active perception—the ability of a robot to proactively select viewpoints to acquire task-relevant information—is essential for robust operation in real-world environments. However, existing approaches are typically limited to fixed objectives or constrained settings, and struggle to generalize to open-ended perception intents specified in natural language. We propose I-Perceive, a foundation model for language-conditioned active perception in large-scale indoor environments. Given a query image, a set of context images, and a natural language instruction, I-Perceive predicts a 6D camera pose that fulfills the specified perception intent. The model integrates a vision-language pathway for semantic grounding with a geometric reasoning pathway for multi-view 3D understanding, connected via multi-layer semantic fusion to enable language-conditioned geometric reasoning. To support scalable training, we construct a large-scale dataset of language-viewpoint pairs from both real-world scene-scanning data and simulated environments using an automated pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that I-Perceive significantly outperforms strong baselines on prediction accuracy, viewpoint feasibility, and instructions alignment. The model exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen scenes and instructions, and enables closed-loop active perception, progressively refining viewpoints over sequential interactions.

Poster
HyrCap: Hybrid Rank-Calibration of Action Proposals for Temporal Event Understanding

Rui Chen, Xingyu Chen, Pengxin Xu, Kai Chen, Junzhi Yu

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Temporal action detection in long untrimmed videos still suffers from inaccurate temporal localization and low-quality proposals, especially under sparse temporal annotations and ambiguous event boundaries. In the context of open-ended video understanding and LLM-driven event analysis, reliable temporal action proposals have emerged as a critical interface bridging temporal localization, event annotation, and semantic understanding. However, conventional temporal action detection (TAD) pipelines lack explicit modeling of proposal localization quality, cross-representation support, and inter-proposal relations, making it difficult to consistently provide high-quality proposals. We propose Hybrid Rank-Calibration of Action Proposals (HyrCap), a proposal-centric query-based TAD framework for temporal event understanding. In HyrCap, Hybrid denotes the use of complementary video features that provide different temporal localization cues, while Rank-Calibration refers to calibrating the ranking confidence of dense action proposals so that it better reflects proposal localization reliability and candidate competition. HyrCap treats dense query-based predictions as an over-complete temporal event hypothesis space and improves the ranking reliability, localization quality, and candidate discrimination of action proposals through modules such as Cross-Representation Consensus Calibration, Localization Quality Estimation, and Proposal Duplication Suppression. Furthermore, inspired by the strong capability of LLMs in fine-grained semantic recognition, event description, and reasoning, we introduce HyrCap for Semantic Action Understanding: calibrated proposals can be used for standard TAD detection and as inputs for LLM-based semantic understanding. We further define a staged evaluation protocol to separately measure event localization ability, segment-level semantic understanding, and their combined event understanding performance. Experiments on public benchmarks show that HyrCap achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics and provides a more fine-grained paradigm and evaluation protocol for query-based event segmentation and annotation.

Poster
Hypernetworks for Dynamic Feature Selection

Javier Fumanal Idocin, Raquel Fernandez-Peralta, Javier Andreu-Perez

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Dynamic feature selection (DFS) is a machine learning framework in which features are acquired sequentially for individual samples under budget constraints. The exponential growth in the number of possible feature acquisition paths forces a DFS model to balance fitting specific scenarios against maintaining general performance, even when the feature space is moderate in size. In this paper, we study the structural limitations of existing DFS approaches to achieve an optimal solution. Then, we propose \textsc{Hyper-DFS}, a hypernetwork-based DFS approach that generates feature subset-specific classifier parameters on demand. We show that the use of hypernetworks compared to mask-embedding methods results in a smaller structural complexity bound. We also use a Set Transformer encoding to create a smooth conditioning space for the hypernetwork, so that functionally similar tasks are also geometrically close. In our benchmarks, \textsc{Hyper-DFS} outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches on synthetic and real-life tabular data. It is also competitive or superior across all image datasets tested, and shows substantially stronger zero-shot generalisation to feature subsets never seen during training than existing DFS approaches.

Poster
Hyperbolic Displacement-Constrained Adaptation for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning

Quan Cheng, Zhenhao Wen, Lan Li, Da-Wei Zhou, Lijun Zhang

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Class-incremental learning aims to learn a stream of new classes while preserving knowledge from prior tasks, but suffers from catastrophic forgetting when the model is adapted across sessions. Recently, approaches leveraging vision-language pretrained models such as CLIP have gained increasing popularity in this setting, due to the strong transferable representations of foundation models. Most CLIP-based approaches resist forgetting by retaining data-derived class memory such as replay samples, visual prototypes, or class distribution information. In contrast, we ask whether stable adaptation can be achieved by constraining adapter-induced feature displacement without retaining any data-derived class memory. We propose \textbf{H}yperbolic \textbf{D}isplacement-\textbf{C}onstrained \textbf{A}daptation (HDCA), which treats forgetting as a consequence of uncontrolled residual displacement induced by sequential adapter updates. HDCA keeps the direction of each adapter update but compresses its radial magnitude, so small updates remain almost unchanged while large or accumulated updates are suppressed. At the per-task level, a hyperbolic low-rank adapter makes each task residual grow sublinearly. At the multi-task level, a cumulative compression stage further suppresses the summed residual across sessions. On the classifier side, HDCA introduces a parameter-free Poincar\'e distance classifier that preserves cosine-based ranking for fixed adapted features but reshapes the training gradient in high-similarity regions. We conduct experiments on five standard class-incremental datasets, and the results comprehensively validate the effectiveness of HDCA without retaining any data-derived class memory during training and inference.

Poster
HyperVQ: Enabling Hyperprior Entropy Modeling for VQ-Based Generative Image Compression

Yi Niu, Tianyi Xu, Mingming Ma, Xinkun Wang

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Vector Quantization (VQ) based generative image compression has achieved remarkable perceptual quality. However, existing VQ codecs suffer from two fundamental limitations. First, they lack efficient content-adaptive entropy modeling and rely on static frequencies, leading to low coding efficiency. Second, the inherent conflict between discrete indices and continuous priors prevents true end-to-end joint Rate-Distortion (RD) optimization. To resolve these issues, we propose HyperVQ, a principled framework that establishes a high-performance hyperprior entropy foundation for VQ-based codecs. The core insight of HyperVQ is to shift probability modeling entirely into the continuous embedding space. Instead of directly predicting probabilities for discrete symbols, HyperVQ predicts a high-dimensional continuous multivariate Gaussian distribution for the continuous latents. By treating the discrete codebook entries as fixed "anchors" in this space, we convert the continuous Gaussian density into categorical index probabilities based on relative distances. This elegant formulation provides a powerful, spatially-adaptive entropy engine and renders the cross-entropy rate objective fully differentiable, empowering the network to actively and dynamically optimize the RD trade-off during training. To ensure practicality, we design the lightweight H Block and the Probability Estimation Engine (PEE) to facilitate highly parallel, millisecond-level inference. Experiments demonstrate that HyperVQ acts as a universal module across diverse VQ architectures (single-scale, large-codebook, RVQ), achieving an average bitrate saving of 18.5%, which is 7.28x the saving achieved by conventional Huffman coding. This establishes a robust, RD-controllable foundation for next-generation generative image compression.

Poster
HyperVAttention: Efficient Sparse Attention with Spatio-Temporal Clustering for Video Diffusion

Dongyeun Lee, Amir Zandieh, Vahab Mirrokni, Junmo Kim, Insu Han

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Video Diffusion Transformers (VDiTs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in high-fidelity video generation. However, their ability to produce long-duration videos is fundamentally constrained by the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. Recent clustering-based sparse attention methods improve the quality-speed trade-off by grouping semantically similar tokens, but their practical efficiency remains limited by two bottlenecks: substantial clustering overhead and low CTA utilization caused by irregular cluster-induced blocks. We propose HyperVAttention (HVA), a training-free sparse attention framework that addresses both bottlenecks jointly. To reduce clustering overhead, we introduce 3D local-window clustering, which exploits the spatio-temporal locality of video tokens to restrict centroid search to fixed local neighborhoods, and implement it with a custom Triton kernel for efficient execution. We further propose a hybrid clustering strategy that performs full clustering only at anchor steps and updates only subset tokens at intermediate steps, leveraging the temporal stability of cluster assignments across denoising steps. To improve CTA utilization, we present hardware-aware cluster merging that minimizes CTA-aligned execution cost through parallel agglomerative merging, improving block density and approximation fidelity by utilizing idle tile capacity. Together, these components reduce clustering overhead, avoid redundant updates, and better align sparse attention with the fixed tile structure of modern GPU kernels. Experiments on Text-to-Video generation show that HVA establishes a new Pareto frontier for training-free sparse attention in video diffusion, reducing end-to-end latency by up to $2.13\times$ while improving fidelity over existing training-free sparse attention baselines.

Poster
HyperTransport: Amortized Conditioning of T2I Generative Models

Valentino Maiorca, Eleonora Gualdoni, Xavier Suau, marco cuturi, Luca Zappella, Pau Rodriguez

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As foundation models grow in capability, the ability to efficiently and reliably control their behavior becomes critical. Fine-tuning these models can be costly, and while prompting can be practical for controllability, it remains fragile due to models' high sensitivity to exact prompt wording and structure. This brittleness has driven interest in activation steering techniques that offer more stable and predictable control over model behavior. However, existing activation steering methods require per-concept optimization, which makes them ill-suited to deployment scenarios where the concept set is large, evolving, or only specified at request time: each new concept incurs at least minutes of optimization on the target model. We propose HyperTransport, a hypernetwork framework that amortizes this cost by mapping embeddings from a pretrained encoder (CLIP in our instantiation) directly to intervention parameters, trained end-to-end using an optimal transport loss. Once trained, HyperTransport produces each new intervention in a single hypernetwork forward pass, 3600–7000x faster than per-concept fitting. On concepts unseen during training, it matches the strongest per-concept baselines at inducing the target concept. By decoupling concept representation from intervention prediction, HyperTransport combines three capabilities that no existing approach offers as a set: amortized steering for open-ended concept sets, continuous interpretable strength control, and cross-modal conditioning where reference images can directly steer text-based generation. We validate HyperTransport on DMD2 and Nitro-1-PixArt across 167 held-out test concepts via CLIP-based metrics, a VLM-as-a-judge evaluation, and a user study. In pairwise comparisons, both human and VLM judges prefer HyperTransport over prompting ~2x as often.

Poster
Hyper Input Convex Neural Networks for Shape Constrained Learning and Optimal Transport

Shayan Hundrieser, Insung Kong, Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

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We introduce Hyper Input Convex Neural Networks (HyCNNs), a novel neural network architecture designed for learning convex functions. HyCNNs combine the principles of Maxout networks with input convex neural networks (ICNNs) to create a neural network that is always convex in the input, theoretically capable of leveraging depth, and performs reliable when trained at scale compared to ICNNs. Concretely, we prove that HyCNNs require exponentially fewer parameters than ICNNs to approximate quadratic functions up to a given precision. Throughout a series of synthetic experiments, we demonstrate that HyCNNs outperform existing ICNNs and MLPs in terms of predictive performance for convex regression and interpolation tasks. We further apply HyCNNs to learn high-dimensional optimal transport maps for synthetic examples and for single-cell RNA sequencing data, where they oftentimes outperform ICNN-based neural optimal transport methods and other baselines across a wide range of settings.

Poster
HybridCache: Enhancing Prefix Caching for Linear–Softmax Language Models

Xin Wang, Hao Yu, Yi Zhang, Jianwei Zhang, Huiqiang Jiang, Bo Zheng, Mi Zhang, Dayiheng Liu

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The efficiency of Large Language Model (LLM) serving has been significantly improved by prefix caching, which enables reuse of previously computed activations. However, extending prefix caching to hybrid linear–softmax language models remains challenging due to the presence of large recurrent states in linear attention modules. In practice, these states cannot be stored at every token position due to their substantial memory footprint, and are instead saved periodically (e.g., at chunk boundaries). This leads to a fundamental mismatch between token-level KV caching and coarse-grained state caching, resulting in reduced effective cache hit rates and additional recomputation overhead. In this work, we propose \sysname, a system designed to address the limitations of prefix caching in hybrid linear–softmax LLMs. \sysname is built on two key observations: (1) recurrent state naturally exhibit different effective memory ranges across heads, and (2) the distribution of state values presents structured outliers that hinder effective compression. Based on these insights, \sysname introduces two novel designs. First, we develop a recurrent-aware state reuse mechanism that selectively stores short-range head states, while reuse previously cached long-range head states, enabling fine-grained alignment with KV caching without incurring prohibitive memory cost. Second, we propose a dual-scale state quantization method that applies independent scaling along row and column dimensions to effectively compress states with structured outliers. We evaluate \sysname on hybrid linear–softmax LLMs under realistic serving workloads. Experimental results show that \sysname significantly improves effective prefix cache utilization, reduces recomputation overhead, and achieves substantial throughput gains without sacrificing model accuracy. These results highlight \sysname as an effective system-level solution for efficient LLM serving in hybrid architectures.

Poster
Humanoid Horizon: Extending Task Horizon in Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Parallel Training, Dynamic Starting, and Reward Gating

Haozhuo Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Jian Tang, Mingzhe Ni, Michele Caprio, Angelo Cangelosi, Wei Pan

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Cluttered indoor environments, where large and heavy objects are scattered across diverse surfaces, require humanoid robots to sequentially navigate, grasp, transport, and accurately place each item at its target location within a single uninterrupted episode. This long-horizon, whole-body loco-manipulation task remains a significant challenge for current methods. Previous approaches often suffer from two main issues: easy-reward bias, where training overemphasizes early transport stages at the expense of later ones, and catastrophic forgetting, where focusing on later stages leads to a decline in earlier-stage performance. In this work, we introduce Humanoid Horizon, a unified policy framework designed to overcome these limitations through three interrelated mechanisms. The Parallel Training Strategy expands $N$ scenes into $S \times N$ concurrent stage streams governed by a shared policy, ensuring all transport stages receive continuous gradient updates and removing the bottleneck of sequential optimization. The Dynamic Starting Mechanism updates each environment's initial state with terminal states from upstream rollouts, gradually broadening transition coverage and enhancing robustness at stage boundaries. Reward Gating sets the reward to zero in later-stage streams if any previously placed object is displaced beyond a set threshold, thus maintaining object placement throughout the episode without extra reward terms. Collectively, these strategies achieve per-stage success rates exceeding 80\% on the LHM-Humanoid benchmark (350 training scenes, 66 held-out scenes), with performance remaining stable even as the number of sequentially transported objects increases beyond two—unlike the sharp drop seen in all baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate that the RL teacher policy can be distilled into a Vision-Language-Action student via DAgger. When provided only with egocentric RGB or depth observations and natural language instructions, the student successfully replicates the teacher's long-horizon, multi-object behaviors, highlighting the potential for perception-driven deployment on real humanoid robots.

Poster
How to Instruct Your Robot: Dense Language Annotations Power Robot Policy Learning

Bosung Kim, Ruiyi Wang, David Acuna, Jaehun Jung, Alex Trevithick, Brandon Cui, Yejin Choi, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

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Scaling robot policy learning is bottlenecked by the cost of collecting demonstrations: datasets at modern scale require thousands of skilled-operator hours on dedicated robot hardware. The language description paired with these demonstrations does not face the same bottleneck---a single short task label is cheap, but it also leaves implicit spatial relations, object interactions, embodiment state, and subgoal structure that the pixels already contain. We treat \emph{language density} as a cheap lever for amplifying signal in a fixed demonstration corpus; whereas prior dense-language work in robotics commits to a single caption style, we instead ask which kind of dense language helps each task and learn to deliver it at deployment. We realize this as \textbf{DeMiAn} (\textbf{De}nse \textbf{M}ult\textbf{i}-aspect \textbf{A}nnotatio\textbf{n}) in two stages. First, an automatic VLM pipeline re-labels each segment of an existing demonstration along four complementary aspects---\emph{physical motion}, \emph{scene composition}, \emph{arm pose}, and segment-level \emph{reasoning}---each surfacing a distinct kind of structure that a one-line task label omits. Second, a small learned \emph{instructor}, trained via supervised fine-tuning, maps the natural language task description and an initial scene snapshot to a task-appropriate annotation and runs asynchronously alongside the action policy, hiding generation latency behind the rollout. Applied to over 1M robot manipulation and 50K EgoVerse human-egocentric videos, with no new demonstrations collected, DeMiAn delivers four findings on a VLA action policy and a video-based world-action model: i) the learned instructor lifts RoboCasa success by 5 points over the no-annotation baseline, within 3 points of a per-task oracle; (ii) that oracle is non-trivial---no fixed aspect dominates, and peak performance requires selecting the right annotation aspect per task; (iii) the trained system extends usefully to composite tasks under subgoal-driven prompt switching, and to OOD scenes and objects; and (iv) dense annotation improves the compute-performance frontier in both mid-training and post-training, making re-annotation a practical scaling lever for robot policy learning.

Poster
How You Move Tells What You'll Do: Trajectory-Conditioned Egocentric Prediction

SeJoon Jun, Hai Nguyen-Truong, Luigi Seminara, Lorenzo Torresani

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Predicting how a person's first-person view will evolve (what action will follow, what plan completes a task, whether an in-progress shot will score) is fundamentally under-specified: the same context admits many plausible futures, and a model trained to minimize prediction error is forced to hedge or average across them, getting it wrong either way. Two findings shape our approach. First, the future camera trajectory, the path the head carves through space, lets the model commit to one of those futures: it carries the operator's intent in a form fine enough to determine how an action will unfold, substantially outperforming language as a conditioning signal. Second, this same intent makes the trajectory itself partially predictable from the context at hand, enough that trajectory need not be observed at test time to recover most of the gain. We instantiate these findings as TrajPilot, a model that predicts candidate future trajectories from egocentric context and uses them to pilot action prediction in an action-aligned embedding space where language shapes the structure but is never used as a conditioning input. TrajPilot beats VLM and structured-planner baselines on procedural planning across Ego-Exo4D atomic, Ego-Exo4D Keystep, Ego4D GoalStep, and EgoPER, with the trajectory advantage widening with horizon (exactly where prior planners collapse) and holding under RGB-only camera-pose estimation. With the goal masked at inference, the same model performs goal-free anticipation, beating VLM baselines on Ego-Exo4D atomic and extending to EPIC-Kitchens-100 and basketball shot-outcome prediction.

Poster
How Private is Private? A Comparative Study for Face De-Identification

Hui Wei, Hao Yu, Hui Kuurila-Zhang, Guoying Zhao

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Face de-identification (FDeID) has emerged as a critical privacy-preserving technology, yet its evaluation remains fundamentally fragmented. Existing protocols rely on inconsistent metrics, heterogeneous datasets, and partial annotation coverage, so methods targeting different utility dimensions, such as landmark versus expression preservation, are reported on different benchmarks under different metrics, rendering cross-method comparison infeasible. We revisit FDeID evaluation from both the data and metric perspectives. On the data side, we introduce UTILFACE, a curated, demographically balanced benchmark with high identity diversity, assembled from four large-scale face datasets through identity-aware cleaning, resolution enhancement, and stratified filtering. On the metric side, we propose HiFD, a Hierarchical Face De-identification metric that unifies identity suppression, multi-level utility preservation, and image quality under a single consistency-based paradigm: every component is computed from pretrained estimators’ outputs on the original face and its de-identified counterpart, directly quantifying how much identity is suppressed and how much downstream-perceivable utility survives. HiFD organizes facial signals into a three-level utility hierarchy spanning macro cues (L1), micro cues (L2), and imperceptible cues (L3), and aggregates the five resulting components into a single interpretable score via weighted harmonic mean, with configurable application-specific profiles. Using this unified protocol, we conduct a comprehensive comparative study spanning adversarial, GAN-based, and diffusion-based methods, surfacing trade-offs and failure modes that remain invisible under existing protocols. We will release the benchmark and evaluation toolkit to foster reproducible research in privacy-preserving face analysis (anonymous codebase: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HiFD).

Poster
How Much of a Model Do We Need? Redundancy and Slimmability in Remote Sensing Foundation Models

Leonard Hackel, Begum Demir, Tom Burgert

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Large-scale foundation models (FMs) in remote sensing (RS) (denoted as RS FMs) are developed following paradigms established in computer vision (CV), yet the validity of transferring CV scaling laws to RS has not been systematically examined. We hypothesize that RS FMs enter an overparameterized regime at substantially smaller scales than their CV counterparts, with task-relevant information encoded redundantly across model dimensions. To test this hypothesis, we apply post-hoc slimmability, uniform width reduction of pretrained encoder transformer blocks, as a tool to measure representational redundancy across eight state-of-the-art RS FMs on classification, segmentation, and change detection tasks. RS FMs retain 69% to 109% relative accuracy on RS datasets under aggressive width reduction, while masked autoencoder (MAE) and DINOv2 pretrained on natural images (denoted as CV MAE and CV DINOv2) degrade sharply on ImageNet subsets of matched class count over the same range of computational requirements. A CV MAE evaluated directly on the same RS datasets narrows but does not close the gap, indicating that both dataset characteristics and domain-specific pretraining contribute to the differences between the models. Mechanistic analyses such as feature correlation, explained variance, and effective dimensionality indicate that task-relevant variance concentrates in few principal components and is redundantly encoded across model dimensions. We further show that learned slimmable training improves over post-hoc slimmability for contrastive objectives, while reconstruction-based objectives do not benefit from current slimmable training protocols. Our findings establish post-hoc slimming as a practical deployment strategy for resource-constrained RS applications and as a diagnostic tool for representational redundancy in RS FMs. Upon acceptance, we will publish all code.

Poster