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Search papers from 30+ top conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ACL and AAAI. Filter by keyword, then open any paper for its abstract, authors and links.

NeurIPS 2026

SETA: Scaling Environments for Terminal Agents

Qijia Shen, Zhiqi Huang, Vamsidhar Kamanuru, Aznaur Aliev, Jay Rainton, Ahmed Awelkair, Boyuan Ma, Qizheng Zhang, Jiwei Fu, Yuzhen Mao, Wendong Fan, Ping Nie, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Changran Hu, Jonathan Li, Urmish Thakker, Guohao Li

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly shifting toward agents that solve tasks through diverse interfaces, including web and graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Among these, the terminal command line provides a text-based, general-purpose interface, covering tasks from system operations to data science and machine learning. However, scaling terminal-agent training remains challenging, as it requires diverse and coherent task instructions, executable environments, and reliable verification, while lacking naturally grounded supervision data. In this work, we propose SETA, a scalable framework for generating verifiable terminal environments for reinforcement learning (RL). The framework consists of two pipelines sharing a unified verification mechanism: SETA-Synth converts diverse sources into standardized RL environments, and SETA-Evol further expands from existing environments with adaptive control of difficulty and diversity. Together, we construct and release SETA-Env, the largest open-source verifiable terminal RL dataset to date, containing over $4{,}500$ environments. We evaluate our dataset by training a Qwen3-8B model with GRPO on SETA-Env, achieving $12$\% pass rate on Terminal-Bench 2.0, the best reported result for an RL-trained model at the 8B scale. The results demonstrate that SETA-Env provides high-quality training environments for terminal agents and serves as a valuable resource for advancing research on terminal-based agent learning.

NeurIPS 2026

SENSE: Semantic Neural Speech Synthesis from Brain Dynamics via Spatial Graph Encoding

Jisoo Park, Seonghak Lee, Hyojin Park, Junseok Kwon

Reconstructing speech from non-invasive brain signals offers a promising pathway for restoring communication in individuals who are cognitively intact but unable to speak. Existing EEG-to-speech approaches formulate this task as \emph{acoustic reconstruction}, optimizing waveform fidelity while ignoring whether the generated speech preserves high-level semantic content. In this work, we revisit this formulation and argue that EEG signals carry not only acoustic but also semantic information. We identify two key limitations of prior methods: (1) the neglect of spatial relationships between EEG electrodes, and (2) the failure to exploit the semantic structure of the N400 paradigm, where congruent and incongruent trials reflect distinct semantic processing. We propose \textbf{SENSE} (\textbf{S}emantic-\textbf{E}EG \textbf{N}eural \textbf{S}peech Synth\textbf{E}sis), which combines a graph-based EEG encoder over electrode geometry with EEG Semantic Conditioning (ESC), aligning EEG to a pretrained semantic space using only congruent trials. On the N400 dataset, SENSE consistently outperforms prior methods on both acoustic and semantic metrics, and model-internal channel attribution suggests distributed reliance on auditory, sensorimotor, and centro-parietal regions, consistent with known speech-perception neuroscience. In the unseen-subject setting, SENSE trained on only two subjects already surpasses the strongest baseline trained on all eighteen subjects in word error rate, and matches it on acoustic metrics with as few as eight subjects.

NeurIPS 2026

SEISMOS: A Statistical Signal Detection Framework for Semantic Chunking

Ishtiak M Saad, Mominul Islam, Shahriyar Z Ridoy, Md Manjurul Ahsan, Azmine Toushik Wasi

Chunking is a hidden bottleneck in dense retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation: it determines the units that can be indexed, retrieved, and ultimately used as evidence. Yet most systems still segment documents using fixed token windows or globally thresholded semantic similarity drops, treating chunking as an engineering heuristic rather than a statistical decision. We propose **SEISMOS**, a statistical signal detection framework for semantic chunking. **SEISMOS** models consecutive sentence-embedding cosine similarities as a document-level signal and derives boundary decisions from the null hypothesis of no semantic transition. Across four development BEIR corpora, we establish three corpus-invariant properties: bimodal document structure, rapid survival decay of shallow local minima, and positive lag-1 autocorrelation. These properties show that semantic boundaries should be detected by variance-normalized deviations, not by document means or global similarity thresholds. Accounting for autocorrelation leads to a normalized discrete Laplacian detector that identifies significant semantic valleys through a single interpretable decision rule. Evaluated on five BEIR benchmarks, **SEISMOS** consistently improves over fixed-length, recursive, and production semantic chunking baselines under one fixed operating configuration. Without corpus-specific retuning, the same detector transfers to a held-out TREC-COVID corpus. Our results suggest that the boundaries needed for effective retrieval are already encoded in embedding-similarity signals, and that principled, efficient, LLM-free chunking can be obtained by detecting them statistically.

NeurIPS 2026

SEGA: Spectral-Energy Guided Attention for Resolution Extrapolation in Diffusion Transformers

Javad Rajabi, Kimia Shaban, Koorosh Roohi, David Lindell, Babak Taati

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) have emerged as a dominant architecture for text-to-image generation, yet their performance drops when generating at resolutions beyond their training range. Existing training-free approaches mitigate this by modifying inference-time attention behavior, often through Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) extrapolation combined with attention scaling. However, these strategies apply a uniform and content-agnostic scaling across RoPE components with distinct frequency characteristics, inducing a trade-off between preserving global structure and recovering fine detail. We introduce \textbf{SEGA}, a training-free method that dynamically scales attention across RoPE components according to the latent’s spatial-frequency structure at each denoising step. This adaptive scaling improves both structural coherence and fine-detail fidelity. Experiments show that SEGA consistently improves high-resolution synthesis across multiple target resolutions, outperforming state-of-the-art training-free baselines.

NeurIPS 2026

SEEK-VAU: Towards Evidence-Faithful Video Anomaly Understanding via Agentic Search

Minghe Wang, Weijun Zeng, Dapeng Luo, Xinyue Wang, Nong Sang

Most video anomaly understanding (VAU) systems still infer anomaly judgments from evidence collected in a feed-forward way under predefined rules, typically sampled frames, or events clustered from such frames. This protocol fails when the collected evidence is incomplete under imperfect predefined rules, because once reasoning begins the model can no longer search for the missing evidence. We address this limitation with SEEK-VAU, which reframes VAU as an agentic search-and-verify interaction protocol under a bounded search budget: instead of passively reasoning over pre-collected evidence, the policy actively gathers evidence across the three stages of an anomaly event chain (precursor, trigger, and aftermath) and verifies its sufficiency before finalization, turning event-chain completeness into an explicit design rather than an outcome of predefined rules. Although search-and-verify spans multiple interaction turns, the bounded search budget caps both the per-turn input tokens and the cumulative visual context, keeping inference efficient. To make this behavior learnable, we introduce evidence-faithful counterfactual verification (EFCV), which rewards selected evidence that remains supportive, compact, and necessary under counterfactual verification. We further introduce SEEK-Bench, featuring video-level episodes with temporal interval annotations, semantic QA and event-chain stage labels. Together, SEEK-VAU and SEEK-Bench establish a strong foundation for evidence-faithful and actively verifiable VAU. The code and data will be released.

NeurIPS 2026

SEAR: Sample Efficient Action Chunking Reinforcement Learning

C. F. Maximilian Nagy, Onur Celik, Emiliyan Gospodinov, Florian Seligmann, Weiran Liao, Aryan Kaushik, Gerhard Neumann

Action chunking improves exploration and accelerates value propagation in long-horizon reinforcement learning, but naively applying off-policy methods to the temporally extended action space at reduced decision frequency offsets these gains, leading to poor sample efficiency. Existing action chunking methods address these issues through computationally expensive critic-only approaches or by relying on offline data. We introduce SEAR, a sample-efficient off-policy algorithm that enables online reinforcement learning with action chunks by addressing both challenges. To handle high-dimensional action sequences, SEAR employs a causal transformer critic trained with multi-horizon targets that provide a training signal for every prefix of an action chunk, effectively increasing the useful gradients per sample. To restore decision frequency, SEAR operates with a receding horizon and random replanning, ensuring uniform state coverage while combining the fast value propagation of large chunks with the reactivity of small ones. SEAR outperforms state-of-the-art online reinforcement learning methods including SimbaV2 on challenging Metaworld manipulation tasks. Beyond online RL, applying SEAR to the offline-to-online method QC improves its performance on the demanding OGBench cube-triple tasks.

NeurIPS 2026

SDS-LoRA: Overcoming Anisotropic Gradient Scaling in Low-Rank Adaptation

Junghun Oh, Sungyong Baik, Kyoung Mu Lee

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by parameterizing weight updates with low-rank matrices. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of the LoRA parameterization from a geometric perspective. Specifically, we show that when a full fine-tuning gradient is backpropagated to the low-rank matrices, it undergoes anisotropic scaling driven by their singular values. We argue that this phenomenon is undesirable because it distorts the full fine-tuning gradient by skewing it toward dominant singular directions while suppressing others. Our analyses demonstrate that anisotropic gradient scaling reduces the effective rank of the low-rank matrices' gradients and results in suboptimal alignment between the full fine-tuning gradient and its low-rank approximation in LoRA, thereby exacerbating the gap to full fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose a new low-rank parameterization, SDS-LoRA, which structurally decouples singular values from the backward pass. Our method ensures that the full fine-tuning gradient backpropagates only through the orthonormal bases of the low-rank matrices' subspaces, independent of their scales. Convergence analysis demonstrates that while LoRA’s convergence rate degrades with the condition number of the low-rank matrices, SDS-LoRA remains independent of it. Experimental results across natural language and vision benchmarks show that SDS-LoRA improves loss convergence and reduces the gap to full fine-tuning, significantly enhancing adaptation performance.

NeurIPS 2026

SDHilb: Schrödinger Dynamics-Guided Neural Network with Adaptive Multi-Scale Hilbert Transform for Time Series Forecasting

Caihua He, Weiyang Ding

Conventional real-valued neural networks struggle to explicitly capture phase-frequency coupling, while long-horizon time series forecasting requires models to characterize non-stationary amplitude variations, phase shifts, and frequency-dependent temporal evolution. This mismatch limits the stability and expressiveness of neural models on complex forecasting tasks. To address this challenge, we propose SDHilb, a structure-preserving forecasting framework that lifts real-valued observations into an adaptive complex state space and models temporal evolution as a process jointly governed by amplitude and phase information. Through the Hilbert transform, phase-related structures are explicitly encoded, leading to a coupled evolution of real and quadrature components that motivates Schrödinger-Hamiltonian structured dynamics in the lifted complex space. Based on this formulation, SDHilb integrates Schrödinger-guided linear dynamics with an adaptive multi-scale Hilbert transform and introduces three key components: (1) a structure-preserving linear dynamic module with symplectic discretization, (2) an adaptive multi-scale Hilbert module for constructing data-dependent quadrature components and refined time-frequency decomposition, and (3) a theoretically grounded parameter reuse mechanism derived from the closed-form recurrence structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDHilb achieves competitive or superior performance on both short- and long-term forecasting tasks while reducing horizon-specific parameterization through recurrence-guided parameter reuse.

NeurIPS 2026

SDFlow: Similarity-Driven Flow Matching for Time Series Generation

Wei Li, FENG SHIBO, Pengcheng Wu, Xingyu Gao, Min Wu, Peilin Zhao

Vector quantization (VQ) with autoregressive (AR) token modeling is a widely adopted and highly competitive paradigm for time-series generation. However, such models are fundamentally limited by exposure bias: during inference, errors can accumulate across sequential predictions, leading to pronounced quality degradation in long-horizon generation. To address this, we propose **SDFlow** (**S**imilarity-**D**riven **Flow** Matching), a non-autoregressive framework that operates entirely in the frozen VQ latent space and enables parallel sequence generation via flow matching. We tackle three key challenges in making this transition: (1) eliminating exposure bias by replacing step-wise token prediction with a global transport map; (2) mitigating the high-dimensionality of VQ token spaces via a low-rank manifold decomposition with a learned anchor prior over the latent manifold; and (3) incorporating discrete supervision into continuous transport dynamics by introducing a categorical posterior over codebook indices within a variational flow-matching formulation. Extensive experiments show that SDFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving Discriminative Score and substantially reducing Context-FID, particularly for challenging long-sequence generation. Moreover, SDFlow provides significant inference speedups over autoregressive baselines, offering both high fidelity and computational efficiency. Code is available at *https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SDFlow-D6F3/*

NeurIPS 2026

SD-Search: Hindsight Self-Distillation for Search-Augmented Reasoning

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

Search-augmented reasoning agents interleave internal reasoning with calls to an external retriever, and their performance relies on the quality of each issued query. However, under outcome-reward reinforcement learning, every search decision in a rollout shares the same trajectory-level reward, leaving individual queries without step-specific credit. Recent process-supervision approaches address this gap by drawing step-level signals from outside the policy, relying either on a much larger teacher model, or on sub-question annotations produced by a stronger external system. In contrast, we propose \textbf{SD-Search}, which derives step-level supervision \emph{from the policy itself} through hindsight self-distillation, requiring neither an external teacher nor additional annotations. In SD-Search, a single model plays two roles that differ only in conditioning: a student that sees only the context available at inference time, and a teacher that additionally conditions on a compact hindsight block summarizing the search queries and final outcomes of a group of rollouts sampled from the same question. Since teacher knows how each rollout unfolded and which ones succeeded, its query distribution implicitly marks which decisions were worth making, and the student is trained to recover this behavior by minimizing the token-level Jensen--Shannon divergence to the teacher at search-query positions. This layers a dense, step-level signal on top of GRPO's coarse trajectory reward. Crucially, this signal requires only a single teacher forward pass per rollout at training time, all absorbed within the standard RL loop without external model inference, auxiliary annotation pipeline, or additional training. On seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks, SD-Search reaches $0.428$ average Exact Match with Qwen2.5-3B, matching the leading process-supervision baseline without its external teacher, and $0.476$ with Qwen2.5-7B, surpassing all outcome-reward and process-supervision baselines on the average.

NeurIPS 2026

SD-LoRA: Training-Time Structural Distillation into LoRA for Few-Shot Vision-Language Adaptation

Mohammed Rahman Sherif Khan Mohammad, Ardhendu Behera, Sandip Pradhan, Swagat Kumar, Yonghuai Liu

Few-shot adaptation of vision--language models must balance two competing goals: learning fine-grained visual distinctions from very limited supervision, and preserving the efficiency that makes frozen CLIP-like models attractive for deployment. Existing lightweight adaptation methods, including prompt tuning, LoRA, and cache-based adapters, typically supervise global image embeddings and therefore underuse token-level structure. Conversely, structure-aware methods can exploit local evidence but often introduce additional inference-time computation. We propose SD-LoRA, a structural distillation framework that uses token-level graph reasoning only during training and absorbs its effect into a lightweight LoRA-adapted CLIP model. During training, a heterogeneous graph teacher models patch-patch, global-local, and visual-text relations over high-resolution ViT tokens. Rather than keeping this graph at test time, SD-LoRA transfers its structural bias into the shared CLIP-LoRA backbone through implicit distillation and Prototype Predictive Alignment, which aligns graph-conditioned representations with support-derived class prototypes. At inference, the entire graph teacher is discarded; prediction uses only a single CLIP-LoRA forward pass and a cache-based classifier. Across 11 few-shot benchmarks, SD-LoRA improves over a strong CLIP-LoRA baseline by 1.3/1.2/2.4/1.9/2.0% in the 1/2/4/8/16-shot settings, while adding no graph computation at test time. Further results on base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, OOD robustness, and calibration show that training-time structural supervision improves not only accuracy but also transfer reliability.

NeurIPS 2026

SCULPT: Advancing Masked Discrete Diffusion for High-Resolution Image Synthesis.

Shufan Li, Greg Heinrich, Hanrong Ye, Yonggan Fu, Aditya Grover, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov

We propose SCULPT, a state-of-the Art masked discrete diffusion model (MDMs) for high resolution text-to-image synthesis. Compared with prior works on masked image generation, SCULPT addresses two key challenges. First, unlike continuously diffusion models which progressively refines image latent across the entire image, vanilla MDMs do not have self-correcting capability because discrete tokens cannot be changed once it's unmasked. Second, while scaling the vocabulary size of discrete image tokenizers can improve reconstruction quality, it also introduces optimization challenges for training generative models as per-token training signal becomes more spares. To address the first challenge, SCULPT incroprates a token-editing mechanism where the model can dynamically correct already-unmasked output tokens during inference. To address the second challenge. we proposed a Goruped Corss Entrophy (GCE) objective that assigns positive learning signal to adjacent tokens of the ground truth in the embedding space. To improve the training efficiency, we further implemented a custom fused operator that greatly reduce the VRAM requirements during training in large-vocabulary setting. Experiment results show that these innovations significant improves the training efficiency and image fidelity of masked discrete image generators.

NeurIPS 2026

SCTI: Self-Calibrated Trident Identification of Black-Box LLM Watermarks

Zhixiong Nan, Haoyu Lu, Tao Xiang, Yiwei Wang

Black-box watermarked LLM identification has become an important task for watermark auditing. The core challenge arises from inherent black-box constraints that deny access to logits, detector keys, model parameters, and internal watermark settings. For this reason, existing methods have not conducted in-depth exploration on this task, leaving prominent limitations: **Fixed-Reference Calibration** and **Family-Specific Tests**. First, existing works use fixed null reference to serve as a baseline for judging the presence of watermarks in LLM outputs, which might misidentify a watermarked LLM as unwatermarked because the null reference is sensitive to the prompt pair, queried model, and sampling configuration. Second, existing statistical-tests based methods adopt distinct statistical features and judgment criteria for different LLM watermark families, making them less suitable when the deployed watermark algorithm is unknown. To remedy the above two limitations, this work proposes **SCTI**, a Self-Calibrated Trident Identification framework for black-box watermarked LLM identification. Specifically, to handle the first limitation, **SCTI** constructs empirical null distributions from the queried responses to estimate the generalizable reference instead of relying on a fixed reference. Meanwhile, to address the second limitation, **SCTI** is configured with a Trident-View Consistency measuring mechanism, which enables a unified pipeline to avoid designing separate tests for individual watermark family. Experimental results verify that **SCTI** outperforms representative black-box watermark identification baselines across diverse LLMs and watermark algorithms.

NeurIPS 2026

SCOUT: Planning under Occlusion via Object-Centric World Model Rollouts

Amir Hossain Raj, Xuesu Xiao

Robots manipulating in cluttered spaces must often plan from partial views where foreground objects occlude the target, surrounding geometry, and usable free space. Reactive policies often miss these hidden constraints, while exhaustive search becomes computationally prohibitive in dense clutter. We present SCOUT, an occlusion-aware planning framework that bridges high-level deliberation with grounded physical rollouts. SCOUT leverages an object-centric scene representation to reconstruct hidden geometry and derive a relational planning state capturing blocker hierarchies and accessibility corridors. To navigate the vast action space in clutter, an LLM proposes structured action candidates which are then rigorously evaluated via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) using a learned action-conditioned world model. Evaluations on ‘Reveal’ and ‘Placement’ tasks show that SCOUT outperforms Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies, embodied agents, and 3D world models, with significant gains in long-horizon tasks requiring reasoning over occluded geometry. We further validate the framework’s robustness through real-world robotic manipulation in a cluttered shelf environment.

NeurIPS 2026

SCOT: Multi-Source Cross-City Transfer with Optimal-Transport Soft-Correspondence Objectives

Yuyao Wang, Min Yang, Meng Chen, Weiming Huang, Yilong Yin, Yongshun Gong

Cross-city transfer leverages labeled data from well-instrumented cities to improve prediction in label-scarce ones, but remains challenging when cities adopt incompatible partitions with no ground-truth region correspondences. Even with expressive GNN encoders, transfer quality varies dramatically across methods sharing nearly identical backbones---indicating that alignment design, not encoder capacity, is the binding constraint. Existing paradigms exhibit complementary failure modes: heuristic anchor matching collapses to hubness under unequal partitions, while distribution-level matching over-mixes embeddings under heterogeneity. Both stem from a single missing primitive---explicit, mass-controlled soft correspondence between unequal region sets. The challenge intensifies in multi-source transfer, where independent source-to-target alignments yield conflicting gradients and source domination. We propose SCOT, which adapts entropic OT to this regime through three application-specific designs: an OT-weighted contrastive objective that resolves the geometric--semantic tension, a one-sided cycle regularizer respecting the rectangular $n_s\!\neq\!n_t$ geometry, and---as our central contribution---a shared prototype hub coordinated through balanced entropic OT under a target-induced prior, bypassing the source-selection problem in label-scarce regimes. Across real-world cities and tasks, \scot consistently improves transfer accuracy, achieving 5--50\% relative MAE/MAPE reductions over the strongest baseline, with learned couplings and hub assignments quantitatively confirming that the diagnosed failure modes are resolved.

NeurIPS 2026

SCOPE: Self-Play via Co-Evolving Policies for Open-Ended Tasks

Wai-Chung Kwan, Aryo Gema, Joshua O Leang, Pasquale Minervini

Self-play can train language models without external supervision. However, existing methods require rule-checkable answers, leaving open-ended tasks dependent on curated prompts or frontier-model judges. We introduce SCOPE, a data-free self-play framework for open-ended tasks that co-evolves two policies: a Challenger that generates document-grounded tasks, and a Solver that answers them through multi-turn retrieval. A frozen copy of the initial model serves as the self-judge, which writes task-specific rubrics from the source document and grades Solver responses against them. Across three 7-8B instruction-tuned models (Qwen2.5, Qwen3, OLMo-3), SCOPE improves open-ended performance by up to +10.4 points on eight benchmarks and matches or exceeds GRPO_data trained on ~9K curated prompts. Although trained only on open-ended tasks, SCOPE also improves held-out short-form QA by up to +13.8 points on seven held-out benchmarks, surpassing GRPO_data on all three models. Ablations show that co-evolving the Challenger is necessary to keep tasks near the Solver's frontier, that gains arise from improvements in both retrieval and synthesis with the relative contribution varying by task, and that rubric generation quality is the bottleneck for self-judging.

NeurIPS 2026

SCION: Scene Composition via Instanced Neural Primitives

William Koch, Amogh Joshi, Cyrus Vachha, Cheng Zheng, Felix Heide

Real-world scenes are compositional: bricks, blades of grass, pebbles, and tree leaves recur across human-built and natural environments. Existing neural scene representations model these elements independently. Most 3D Gaussian Splatting and follow-up abstraction and compression methods treat each element as unique, fitting millions of independent Gaussians per scene. Prior methods like Splat and Replace fit template objects, but they require mostly manual selection of repeated elements. As a result, these representations store redundant parameters and provide weak manipulation handles for downstream tasks. We introduce SCION, a hierarchical compositional scene representation that replaces independent Gaussians with a compact vocabulary of reusable primitives and lightweight world-space instances that place transformed copies throughout the scene. We fit this representation to multi-view captures via a joint optimization over discrete and continuous scene parameters, combining two-level densification over splats and instances with an adversarial loss that preserves detail across shared primitives. The recovered structure yields a compact, controllable representation while maintaining high quality even at 1.2 MB. SCION achieves rate-distortion favorable to existing Gaussian compression methods, and it enables instance-level scene editing and animation without retraining. Our results show that neural scene representations need not memorize scenes as independent primitives; they can discover reusable parts.

NeurIPS 2026

SCHOLARPEER: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Peer Review

Palash Goyal, Mihir Parmar, Yiwen Song, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister, Jinsung Yoon

The exponential growth of machine learning submissions has strained the traditional peer review process, resulting in slow feedback loops for authors and an immense burden on reviewers to rigorously audit technical soundness and verify literature. To address this, we introduce ScholarPeer, a multi-agent framework designed to operationalize the rigorous auditing workflow of a senior researcher. Rather than attempting to replace human judgment, ScholarPeer serves as a co-scientist: acting as a mentor for rapid author iteration prior to submission, and as an active verification assistant that augments human reviewers. The framework structurally decouples contextualization from critique by deploying a sub-domain historian to synthesize the field's trajectory, a baseline scout to proactively hunt for omitted state-of-the-art comparisons, and a multi-aspect Q&A engine that deeply audits technical soundness—scrutinizing internal logical consistency, experimental validity, and mathematical rigor—while cross-referencing claims against top-tier academic venues. We comprehensively evaluate ScholarPeer on $\sim$1,800 ICLR submissions spanning 2020 through 2025. Our results show that ScholarPeer achieves significant win-rates against state-of-the-art fine-tuned models and search-augmented agentic baselines.

NeurIPS 2026

SCG-HF: Semantic Consistency Grouping for Hierarchical Fusion in Video Emotion Recognition

Muci Li, Yujing Rao, He Li, Mang Ye

Video Emotion Recognition (VER) aims to identify and understand the emotional states of characters by analyzing visual and auditory information in videos. However, conventional rigid frame sampling strategies for long videos tend to fragment continuous emotional expressions. Moreover, existing fusion methods often fail to properly model temporal dependencies and may suffer from future information leakage. To address these limitations, we propose SCG-HF, a novel framework that preserves semantic consistency through adaptive grouping and hierarchical fusion. Specifically, we introduce Semantic Consistency Grouping (SCG), which dynamically segments videos into semantically coherent units based on feature similarity, thereby maintaining the integrity of emotional patterns. Furthermore, we design a three-level Hierarchical Fusion (HF) architecture to capture emotional dynamics at different temporal granularities: (i) frame-level refinement enhances subtle local emotional cues; (ii) segment-level history-guided fusion models temporal evolution across segments while strictly preventing future information leakage via attention; and (iii) sample-level contrastive alignment synchronizes audio and visual representations in a shared latent space. Extensive experiments on the VideoEmotion-8 and Ekman-6 benchmarks demonstrate that SCG-HF achieves state-of-the-art performance.

NeurIPS 2026

SCDM: Scalable Causal Discovery in Nonlinear Temporal Systems with Meta-Learning

Jingbo Wang, Kegeng Tang, Zihao Wang, Shaogang Ren

Causal discovery from nonlinear multivariate time series is challenging in high-dimensional systems, where the number of candidate directed relations grows quadratically with the number of variables. Existing methods are often limited by target-wise model fitting, repeated conditional testing, or expensive graph-search procedures. We propose SCDM, a shared-parameter meta-learning framework for scalable temporal causal discovery. SCDM treats each target variable as a task while learning a shared temporal predictor and a shared causal-strength matrix across tasks. Each meta-episode updates only a subset of target-variable tasks, allowing the model to accumulate structural evidence across the full system without exhaustive target-wise optimization. After training, a post-training graph readout converts the learned predictor into continuous directed causal scores for threshold-independent evaluation. We also provide a finite-error recovery principle showing that, under fully observed delayed-system assumptions and a positive risk-gap condition, thresholding SCDM scores recovers the graph when statistical, meta-optimization, and readout errors are below the population margin. Experiments on controlled synthetic, neuroimaging-inspired, high-dimensional, and real-world temporal benchmarks demonstrate competitive causal recovery and improved scalability in large temporal systems.

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