NeurIPS 2026 Papers

Language model query generation is the task of using a language model to translate a natural-language request into a formal query, which is then executed to retrieve information from databases or knowledge graphs. Recent approaches rely on reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the model’s reasoning and improve query correctness. However, existing methods provide only sequence-level rewards, resulting in sparse feedback that is difficult to optimize. To address this limitation, we propose a reward shaping method that learns a token-level, and thus dense, reward function, providing fine-grained supervision to guide the language model toward correct queries. We formulate this problem as a bilevel optimization problem where the upper level learns a token-level shaping reward from ground truth sequence-level reward and the lower level optimizes the language model using the learned shaping reward. We propose a single-loop algorithm to solve this problem and theoretically guarantee that the algorithm converges at $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{K}})+O(\frac{\log K}{\sqrt{K}})$. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the baselines.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on Large Language Models (LLMs) require effective orchestration to coordinate specialized agents, yet training such orchestrators is hindered by limited supervision and high computational cost. We propose **Orch**estration **R**eward **M**odeling (**Orch-RM**), a self-supervised framework for evaluating orchestration quality without human annotations. Orch-RM leverages intermediate artifacts from multi-agent executions to construct win-lose pairs for Bradley-Terry reward model training. Unlike existing MAS test-time scaling and orchestrator training frameworks that rely on costly sub-agent rollouts, Orch-RM operates directly at the orchestration level, enabling efficient and high-performing reward-guided orchestrator training and MAS test-time scaling. As shown in Figure 1, Orch-RM improves training efficiency by up to 10$\times$ in token usage while improving MAS test-time scaling performance by up to 8\% in accuracy. These gains consistently transfer across multiple domains, including mathematical reasoning, web-based question answering, and multi-hop reasoning, demonstrating orchestration-level reward modeling as a scalable direction for robust multi-agent orchestration. Data, code, and trained models will be released upon publication.

A reward is not a universal RL interface: it becomes a valid update only through the probability object exposed by the policy branch. Autoregressive post-training works cleanly because token ratios are exact, but parallel discrete policies hide within-step dependence and flow/diffusion policies often lack cheap density ratios. We introduce MindRL, a reward-to-update interface controller that translates a shared reward through branch-native score objects while turning factorization, tractability, drift, and smoothness barriers into budgets over block size, serialization, anchors, clipping, reranking, and branch weights. As a closed-loop controller, MindRL makes the shared reward actionable for AR, parallel discrete, flow/diffusion, and AR+flow policies by selecting branch-native update objects and adapting their control budgets. Across language-side AR/parallel-discrete tests and matched flow/diffusion and AR+flow evaluations, MindRL improves task-quality or reward-risk tradeoffs while preserving each branch's native structure.

Reward serves as the primary learning signal in reinforcement learning (RL). However, while reward magnitudes are typically held fixed throughout training, their temporal modulation remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose reward inflation, a gradual scaling of rewards over the course of training, and show that it can act as a healthy stimulus for RL. Theoretically, reward inflation induces an implicit recency weighting that upweights recent transitions during policy updates, enabling faster adaptation. We further show that, by sustaining gradient signals as the policy saturates, reward inflation suppresses the emergence of dormant neurons and helps preserve plasticity. Empirical results on ALE games and MuJoCo tasks corroborate these findings, showing that an appropriate level of reward inflation benefits a broad range of tasks. Finally, we introduce Fed, an adaptive variant that adjusts the inflation level on the fly, and find that it often improves upon fixed inflation.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has enabled strong post-training gains in domains such as math and coding, though many open-ended settings rely on rubric-based rewards. We study reward hacking in rubric-based RL, where a policy is optimized against a training verifier but evaluated against a cross-family panel of three frontier judges, reducing dependence on any single evaluator. Our framework separates two sources of divergence: verifier failure, where the training verifier credits rubric criteria that reference verifiers reject, and rubric-design limitations, where even strong rubric-based verifiers favor responses that rubric-free judges rate worse overall. Across medical and science domains, weak verifiers produce large proxy-reward gains that do not transfer to the reference verifiers; exploitation grows over training and concentrates in recurring failures such as partial satisfaction of compound criteria, treating implicit content as explicit, and imprecise topical matching. Stronger verifiers substantially reduce, but do not eliminate, verifier exploitation. We also introduce a self-internalization gap, a verifier-free diagnostic based on policy log-probabilities, which tracks reference-verifier quality, detecting when the policy trained using the weak verifier stops improving. Finally, in our setting, stronger verification does not prevent reward hacking when the rubric leaves important failure modes unspecified: rubric-based verifiers prefer the RL checkpoint, while rubric-free judges prefer the base model. These disagreements coincide with gains concentrated in completeness and presence-based criteria, alongside declines in factual correctness, conciseness, relevance, and overall quality. Together, these results suggest that stronger verification reduces reward hacking, but does not by itself ensure that rubric gains correspond to broader quality gains.

Tiny object detection remains challenging because tiny instances occupy only a few pixels, and their fine-grained details are easily lost during feature downsampling. Although the highest-resolution feature preserves rich local details for tiny objects, DETR-like detectors often discard it due to its large computational cost, while directly reintroducing this feature also brings dense background noise. To address this problem, we propose \textbf{ReDHF}, a novel framework that \textbf{Re}vives the \textbf{D}iscarded \textbf{H}igh-resolution \textbf{F}eature for tiny object detection. ReDHF has three cooperative components. Cross-Scale Deformable Fusion (CSDF) first constructs a semantically enhanced highest-resolution feature and injects its fine-grained details into the shallow feature under a moderate cost. Ellipse-Guided Shallow Supervision (EGSS) then guides the enhanced feature to learn more reliable classification and localization priors by applying geometry-adaptive auxiliary supervision. Full-Scale Query Interaction (FSQI) further enables decoder queries to access both low-level details and high-level semantic information, allowing them to aggregate richer cues for tiny objects. Extensive experiments show that ReDHF consistently improves multiple baselines across different DETR variants and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the evaluated benchmarks. The best ReDHF variants surpass their baselines by \textbf{+1.4 AP} on AI-TOD-v2, \textbf{+1.6 AP} on VisDrone, and \textbf{+1.5 AP} on SODA-D, with especially notable gains on tiny and small objects.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, yet its scalability is limited by synchronization overhead. Asynchronous federated learning (AFL) alleviates this issue by allowing clients to communicate independently, thereby improving wall-clock efficiency in large-scale, hardware-heterogeneous environments. However, asynchrony introduces updates computed on outdated global models (staleness) that can destabilize optimization and hinder convergence. We propose FedRevive, an AFL framework that revives stale updates through data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD). FedRevive integrates parameter-space aggregation with a server-side DFKD process that transfers knowledge from stale client updates to the current global model without access to data. A meta-learned generator synthesizes pseudo-samples for multi-teacher distillation. A hybrid aggregation scheme combining raw with DFKD updates effectively mitigates staleness while retaining AFL scalability. Experiments on vision and text benchmarks show that FedRevive achieves faster training by up to 29.7\% and higher final accuracy by up to 11.4\% percentage points than baselines.

While Value Iteration (VI) is one of the most fundamental algorithms in Reinforcement Learning, its theoretical convergence guarantees still exhibit a persistent mismatch with empirical behavior. In the discounted-reward case, classical theory guarantees geometric convergence with rate $\gamma$, while in the average-reward case recent work suggests that only sublinear convergence can be expected. In practice, however, VI is often observed to converge significantly faster. In this work, we show through a unified geometry-based analysis that, under an assumption of a unique and unichain optimal policy, (i) convergence is geometric in *both* the discounted- and average-reward settings and (ii) the convergence rate is faster than previous analyses suggest.

We present a robust deep clustering framework for unsupervised visual discovery that bridges the gap between statistical robustness and mathematical tractability. Current generative approaches typically rely on either noise-prone Gaussian priors or computationally intensive diffusion models; however, neither paradigm simultaneously offers explicit latent structures and exact analytic optimization. While diffusion models generate strong priors, their reliance on iterative sampling and intractable likelihoods limits their scalability and interpretability in clustering tasks. Our approach addresses these limitations by constructing a latent space governed by a Student's $t$ distribution via a Bayesian scale-mixture formulation. This yields the first fully closed-form augmented evidence lower bound (ELBO) for this model class, effectively eliminating the biased variational approximations and high computational costs inherent in prior heavy-tailed or diffusion-based frameworks. By treating precision as a latent variable, our objective automatically modulates the influence of each data point; it downweights outliers to learn a data-dependent measure of trust. This mechanism leads to superior robustness and more stable manifold learning compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We demonstrate the resilience of our framework on standard vision benchmarks and complex neuroimaging tasks. In real-world brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-driven neurodegenerative disease analysis, our model successfully recovers clean and anatomically coherent clusters where clinical noise typically collapses rare subtypes. These results underscore the ability of our framework to preserve clinically crucial morphological subtypes, allowing precise discovery within clinical interventions.

Projected subgradient descent (PSD) has gained popularity for solving robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) because it applies to a broader class of uncertainty sets than traditional dynamic programming. Existing work claims that RMDPs with a general compact uncertainty set satisfy the subgradient dominance property, under which exact PSD converges to an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in a polynomial number of updates (e.g., Wang et al., 2023). We show that these claims are incorrect. Even when the uncertainty set has cardinality two, the RMDP objective is not subgradient-dominant and can admit suboptimal strict local minima. Moreover, we prove that finding an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy can be NP-hard even in settings where subgradients are efficiently computable: (i) finite transition uncertainty sets and (ii) $sa$-rectangular finite transition uncertainty sets with finite cost uncertainty sets. Finally, we identify two conditions under which RMDPs do satisfy subgradient dominance: when, for each policy, either the worst-case transition kernel or the worst-case action-value function is unique.

Black-box distillation is a practical route for transferring capabilities from API-accessible large language models that expose only text outputs into smaller student models. Recent on-policy adversarial methods such as GAD improve over SeqKD by forming an adversarial loop between a critic and a student, where the critic provides rewards for GRPO-based student policy optimization over the student's sampled responses. However, GRPO computes advantages from the within-group relative rewards of student samples for the same prompt, whereas the critic is trained primarily to distinguish teacher responses from student responses. This objective mismatch can produce reward groups with collapsed scale or fragile margins, leading to brittle grouped optimization signals. We propose Groupwise Reward Geometry Conditioning (GRGC), a two-stage framework that improves advantage construction by shaping student-side reward groups during both critic training and policy optimization. To improve critic-side conditioning, Gaussian groupwise Optimal Transport calibration regularizes the critic during training to produce reward groups with non-collapsed spread and smooth rank-wise gaps by matching sorted prompt-wise rewards to group-centered Gaussian quantiles. Building on this conditioned reward geometry, policy-side group power modulation reshapes the prompt-wise reward groups before they are converted into advantages, preserving the critic-induced ordering while increasing optimization-relevant margin separability. Extensive experiments across diverse teachers, student model families and scales, and training datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GRGC on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution evaluations, while introducing negligible overhead over GAD. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GRGC.

Incremental learning is usually evaluated through the final classifier or LM head, but this interface does not indicate where forgetting occurs. A drop in accuracy may reflect representation degradation in the backbone, readout mismatch in the head, or both. We argue that BWT and FWT should therefore be interpreted as interface-dependent quantities rather than as single model-level properties. We study three evaluation interfaces: the sequentially trained head, a newly optimized probing classifier, and a classifier-free backbone separability diagnostic based on clustering. These interfaces answer different questions: deployed performance, recoverable information under a new readout, and representation-level separability. Across CIL experiments with encoder and decoder language backbones, plus discriminative-backbone TIL sanity checks, we find that qualitative conclusions about forgetting and plasticity change substantially with the evaluation interface. Standard heads often indicate severe forgetting, probes often suggest near-complete recoverability, and backbone diagnostics suggest intermediate representation changes and a stability--plasticity pattern. This pattern is consistent across five clustering algorithms and three clustering metrics, suggesting that it is not an artifact of a single diagnostic choice. Finally, we use Just LM-Head Tuning (JLT) as a head-only intervention to quantify recoverable performance on a fixed incrementally trained backbone. The large gap between standard and head-realigned performance suggests that many failures attributed to catastrophic forgetting are better understood as head--backbone mismatch plus partial representation drift. Our results call for reporting where forgetting is measured, not only how much forgetting is observed.

Machine unlearning is becoming increasingly indispensable for meeting ever-stringent data compliance requirements, such as the ``right to be forgotten''. While Gradient Ascent (GA) based approximate methods have drawn attention for their conceptual simplicity, their practical deployment is severely constrained by three fundamental issues: first, the lack of feasibility analysis leads to divergent update directions; second, gradient conflict inevitably degrades the performance maintenance on retained data; and third, heavy reliance on the retain set restricts their applicability in real-world settings. To address these challenges, we conduct an in-depth investigation from a geometric perspective into the underlying root causes of instability in conventional GA methods. Our analysis reveals that the feasibility of unlearning intrinsically depends on specific geometric constraint relationships within the parameter space. Building upon this theoretical insight, we formally establish the methods governing unlearning feasibility. The first is the direction feasibility, which constrains the feasible update trajectory and keeps the model within reasonable parameter regions during unlearning. The second is the step-size feasibility, which further restricts the update magnitude along the feasible direction to prevent model collapse caused by large steps.Notably, we find that the direction feasibility does not rely on any information from the retain set. In light of this, we further explore viable approaches for effectively estimating the step-size feasibility under strict source-free scenarios.

Decentralized online convex optimization (D-OCO) is a popular framework for distributed applications with streaming data. To tackle the communication bottleneck, previous studies have investigated D-OCO with compressed communication and proposed several algorithms that are variants of online gradient descent (OGD). However, for D-OCO with exact communication, the best existing algorithms are variants of follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL). In this paper, for the first time, we propose two FTRL-type algorithms for D-OCO with compressed communication. Compared with OGD-type algorithms, our algorithms are more elegant in both algorithmic design and theoretical analysis. The key insight is that the dual update mechanism of FTRL allows us to make a simple application of the technique for average consensus with communication compression. More specifically, our first algorithm considers the full-information setting, and can match the existing regret bounds. Our second algorithm is designed for the bandit setting, and can significantly improve both the regret bounds and communication costs of existing algorithms.

Autoregressive (AR) Attention Models have become the dominant paradigm in neural solvers for vehicle routing problems (VRPs), while GCNs are almost exclusively paired with non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding and post-search algorithms. In this work, we revisit the role of decoding strategies and model properties in neural VRP solvers, and challenge the conventional pairing of NAR decoding with GCNs. We propose AR-GCN, an efficient and generalizable architecture for both Symmetric and Asymmetric VRPs (SVRPs and AVRPs). Extensive benchmarks across multiple tasks show that AR-GCN achieves advanced generalization performance, particularly on AVRPs (*e*.*g*, achieving an optimality gap of **1.71%** on ATSP-1K and **-4.46%** on ACVRP-1K). In particular, AR-GCN requires only **0.633M** learnable parameters and **3-epoch** training, providing new insights into the design of AR solvers for general VRPs.

Peer review at ML conferences increasingly relies on reviewer scores as the primary decision instrument. As submissions have scaled from thousands to tens of thousands per year, no systematic audit has examined whether this instrument functions uniformly across research areas, or whether acceptance outcomes are in practice shaped by forces that reviewer scores neither capture nor control. This position paper argues that acceptance outcomes are shaped by forces beyond reviewer scores, and that the underlying cause is a measurement design failure, not individual bias. When a fixed numerical scale aggregates quality judgments across communities with structurally non-uniform reviewer pools, absolute scores become incomparable across areas, and area chairs must substitute community priors for score-based decisions. Using ICLR 2021--2026 data covering 50,289 papers across 219 research topics, we show that at any given reviewer score, a paper's acceptance probability varies by up to 8$\times$ depending on its topic. We rule out scoring culture, expert reviewer standards, rational area chair reweighting, and quality dilution as alternative explanations. We call on program committees to adopt inherently calibrated review signals and publish topic-stratified, score-conditional acceptance rates as a first-class fairness metric.

Many scientific instruments produce structured noise that contaminates the signal of interest and cannot be observed in isolation, ruling out standard supervised denoising. We propose BEAM (Background Estimation via Additive Modeling), a generative framework for modeling complex noise in these settings. As ground truth noise observations are unavailable, BEAM learns a generative model of the clean signal and uses it to score candidate noise estimates by how plausible the underlying signal looks. Score matching on signal data turns this into a tractable likelihood that we sample from with Langevin dynamics, which refines a coarse classical estimate of the noise into a more accurate one. We further show that when metadata governing the noise is known in advance, a separate conditional flow model predicts the noise from that metadata alone, enabling pre-observation forecasting of the noise. We instantiate BEAM on stray light in NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), where contamination from the Earth and Moon obscures stellar signals. BEAM produces cleaner stray light estimates than the filtering tool used in current TESS pipelines and forecasts stray-light contamination across the observing window for the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS using only spacecraft--Earth--Moon geometry, supporting prospective scheduling of time-critical observations and a path to recovering faint signals that current pipelines discard.

High-quality teleoperation datasets are costly to collect, particularly for hard tasks. We observe that many tasks exhibit directional asymmetry: completing the forward hard task is difficult, whereas reversing it by relaxing or disrupting the environment is comparatively easy. This suggests that reversed easy-task trajectories can serve as a scalable supervision signal for the hard task, reducing the cost of manual demonstration collection. However, reversed data can be noisy, and directly training on it may yield suboptimal policies. To enable largely automated acquisition and effective use of reversed data, we propose a teleoperation-cost effective framework for hard policy learning via temporal reversal of easy tasks, consisting of three key components: a closed-loop data collection pipeline that alternates between hard-task and easy-task policies to autonomously reset the environment and generate diverse trajectories; a hierarchical data refinement pipeline that temporally inverts easy-task rollouts and filters low-quality motion using kinematic priors and a critic-guided advantage filter; and an iterative policy learning method that trains the hard-task policy using both initial reversed easy-task demonstrations and the filtered reversed data in a continuous online learning loop. By combining automated collection, hierarchical refinement, and iterative learning, our method enables scalable, reliable training of complex, high-precision manipulation tasks. Across two simulated benchmarks and real-robot experiments, we demonstrate that our method improves hard-task success rates with higher data efficiency and more stable training compared to reversal-based and reinforcement-learning baselines, without requiring extensive hard-task teleoperation.

For most of scientific history, researchers studying behavior could only infer hidden mechanisms from outward actions—an inverse problem that becomes more tractable when observation is augmented by targeted intervention. We pose a computational analogue: given only behavioral traces of an agent in a game environment, can a learner reconstruct the underlying decision program as executable code, and how much does this reconstruction improve with the ability to design controlled experiments? We introduce RevengeBench, a benchmark of 75 LLM generated, Elo-calibrated policies across five game environments, drawn from CodeClash tournament trajectories. The learner observes the hidden target policy play against sampled opponents and designs behavioral probes in the form of custom opponent policies that elicit informative behavior. It then submits an executable hypothesis, which is evaluated using continuous action-distance metrics. We further validate that recovered code carries informative signal in downstream player-versus-player tournaments. Across twelve frontier LLMs, recovery quality varies substantially (34–72\% of initial distance closed), with reconstructed policies yielding measurable competitive advantage, particularly for weaker models that otherwise struggle to design effective counter-strategies. Our benchmark positions behavioral recovery of programmatic policies as a tractable inverse problem in code-space, opening a path to opponent modeling, policy interpretability, and the broader question of inferring latent mechanisms from observations.