NeurIPS 2025 论文列表

SpatialLM is a large language model designed to process 3D point cloud data and generate structured 3D scene understanding outputs. These outputs include architectural elements like walls, doors, windows, and oriented object boxes with their semantic categories. Unlike previous methods which exploit task-specific network designs, our model adheres to the standard multimodal LLM architecture and is fine-tuned directly from open-source LLMs. To train SpatialLM, we collect a large-scale, high-quality synthetic dataset consisting of the point clouds of 12,328 indoor scenes (54,778 rooms) with ground-truth 3D annotations, and conduct a careful study on various modeling and training decisions. On public benchmarks, our model gives state-of-the-art performance in layout estimation and competitive results in 3D object detection. With that, we show a feasible path for enhancing the spatial understanding capabilities of modern LLMs for applications in augmented reality, embodied robotics, and more.

Local SGD, or Federated Averaging, is one of the most widely used algorithms for distributed optimization. Although it often outperforms alternatives such as mini-batch SGD, existing theory has not fully explained this advantage under realistic assumptions about data heterogeneity. Recent work has suggested that a second-order heterogeneity assumption may suffice to justify the empirical gains of local SGD. We confirm this conjecture by establishing new upper and lower bounds on the convergence of local SGD. These bounds demonstrate how a low second-order heterogeneity, combined with third-order smoothness, enables local SGD to interpolate between heterogeneous and homogeneous regimes while maintaining communication efficiency. Our main technical contribution is a refined analysis of the consensus error, a central quantity in such results. We validate our theory with experiments on a distributed linear regression task.

This paper presents a novel theoretical framework for understanding how diffusion models can learn disentangled representations with commonly used weak supervision such as partial labels and multiple views. Within this framework, we establish identifiability conditions for diffusion models to disentangle latent variable models with \emph{stochastic}, \emph{non-invertible} mixing processes. We also prove \emph{finite-sample global convergence} for diffusion models to disentangle independent subspace models. To validate our theory, we conduct extensive disentanglement experiments on subspace recovery in latent subspace Gaussian mixture models, image colorization, denoising, and voice conversion for speech classification. Our experiments show that training strategies inspired by our theory, such as style guidance regularization, consistently enhance disentanglement performance.

We study a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit information from the agent and to signal her own information. The players communicate with each other and then select actions independently. Both players are {\em far-sighted}, aiming to maximize their total payoffs over the entire time horizon. We consider both the computation and learning of the principal's optimal policy. The key challenge lies in enabling {\em history-dependent} policies, which are essential for achieving optimality in this model but difficult to cope with because of the exponential growth of possible histories as the size of the model increases; explicit representation of history-dependent policies is infeasible as a result. To address this challenge, we develop algorithmic techniques based on the concept of {\em inducible value set}. The techniques yield an efficient algorithm that computes an $\epsilon$-approximate optimal policy in time polynomial in $1/\epsilon$. We also present an efficient learning algorithm for an episodic reinforcement learning setting with unknown transition probabilities. The algorithm achieves sublinear regret $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{2/3})$ for both players over $T$ episodes.

The need for training multilingual multi-task speech processing (MSP) models that perform both automatic speech recognition and speech-to-text translation is increasingly evident. However, a significant challenge arises from the conflicts among multiple objectives when using a single model. Multi-objective optimization can address this challenge by facilitating the optimization of multiple conflicting objectives and aligning the gradient updates in a common descent direction. While multi-objective optimization helps avoid conflicting gradient updates, a critical issue is that when there are many objectives, such as in MSP, it is often {\em difficult to find} a common descent direction. This leads to an important question: Is it more effective to separate highly conflicting objectives into different optimization levels or to keep them in a single level? To address this question, this paper investigates three multi-objective MSP formulations, which we refer to as \textbf{objective soup recipes}. These formulations apply multi-objective optimization at different optimization levels to mitigate potential conflicts among all objectives. To keep computation and memory overhead low, we incorporate a lightweight layer‑selection strategy that detects the most conflicting layers and uses only their gradients when computing the conflict‑avoidance direction. We conduct an extensive investigation using the CoVoST v2 dataset for combined multilingual ASR and ST tasks, along with the LibriSpeech and AISHELL-1 datasets for multilingual ASR, to identify highly conflicting objectives and determine the most effective training recipe among the three proposed multi-objective optimization algorithms.

Inspired by the remarkable success of foundation models in language and vision, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) hold significant promise for broad applicability across diverse graph tasks and domains. However, existing GFMs struggle with unstable few-shot fine-tuning, where both performance and adaptation efficiency exhibit significant fluctuations caused by the randomness in the support sample selection and structural discrepancies between the pre-trained and target graphs. How to fine-tune GFMs robustly and efficiently to enable trustworthy knowledge transfer across domains and tasks is the major challenge. In this paper, we propose **GRAVER**, a novel **G**enerative g**RA**ph **V**ocabulari**E**s for **R**obust GFM fine-tuning framework that tackles the aforementioned instability via generative augmentations. Specifically, to identify transferable units, we analyze and extract key class-specific subgraph patterns by ego-graph disentanglement and validate their transferability both theoretically and empirically. To enable effective pre-training across diverse domains, we leverage a universal task template based on ego-graph similarity and construct graph vocabularies via graphon-based generative experts. To facilitate robust and efficient prompt fine-tuning, we grave the support samples with in-context vocabularies, where the lightweight MoE-CoE network attentively routes knowledge from source domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of GRAVER over **effectiveness**, **robustness**, and **efficiency** on downstream few-shot node and graph classification tasks compared with **15** state-of-the-art baselines.

Recent advances in language modeling have demonstrated the effectiveness of State Space Models (SSMs) for efficient sequence modeling. While hybrid architectures such as Samba and the decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, have shown promising performance gains over Transformers, prior works have not investigated the efficiency potential of representation sharing between SSM layers. In this paper, we introduce the Gated Memory Unit (GMU), a simple yet effective mechanism for efficient memory sharing across layers. We apply it to create SambaY, a decoder-hybrid-decoder architecture that incorporates GMUs in the cross-decoder to share memory readout states from a Samba-based self-decoder. SambaY significantly enhances decoding efficiency, preserves linear pre-filling time complexity, and boosts long-context performance, all while eliminating the need for explicit positional encoding. Through extensive scaling experiments, we demonstrate that our model exhibits a significantly lower irreducible loss compared to a strong YOCO baseline, indicating superior performance scalability under large-scale compute regimes. Our largest model enhanced with Differential Attention, Phi4-mini-Flash-Reasoning, achieves significantly better performance than Phi4-mini-Reasoning on reasoning tasks such as Math500, AIME24/25, and GPQA Diamond without any reinforcement learning, while delivering up to 10× higher decoding throughput on 2K-length prompts with 32K generation length under the vLLM inference framework. We release our training codebase on open-source data at https://github.com/microsoft/ArchScale.

We study the problem of offline imitation learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the goal is to learn a well-performing policy given a dataset of state-action pairs generated by an expert policy. Complementing a recent line of work on this topic that assumes that the expert policy belongs to a tractable class of known policies, we approach this problem from a new angle and leverage another type of structural assumption about the environment. Specifically, for the class of linear $Q^\pi$-realizable MDPs, we introduce a new algorithm called primal-dual offline imitation learning (PDOIL), which is guaranteed to match the performance of any expert up to an additive error $\varepsilon$ with access to $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ samples. Moreover, we extend this result to possibly non-linear $Q^\pi$-realizable MDPs at the cost of a worst sample complexity of order $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$. Finally, our analysis suggests a new loss function for training critic networks from expert data in deep imitation learning. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that the neural net implementation of PDOIL is superior to behavior cloning and competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms.

Masked Graph Autoencoders (MGAEs) have gained significant attention recently. Their proxy tasks typically involve random corruption of input graphs followed by reconstruction. However, in the molecular domain, two main issues arise: the predetermined mask ratio and reconstruction objectives can lead to suboptimal performance or negative transfer due to overly simplified or complex tasks, and these tasks may deviate from chemical priors. To tackle these challenges, we propose Dynamic and Chemical Constraints (DyCC) for MGAEs. This includes a masking strategy called GIBMS, which preserves essential semantic information during graph masking while adaptively adjusting the mask ratio and content for each molecule. Additionally, we introduce a Soft Label Generator (SLG) that reconstructs masked tokens as learnable prototypes (soft labels) rather than hard labels. These components adhere to chemical constraints and allow dynamic variation of proxy tasks during training. We integrate the model-agnostic DyCC into various MGAEs and conduct comprehensive experiments, demonstrating significant performance improvements. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/forever-ly/DyCC}.

The visual world around us constantly evolves, from real-time news and social media trends to global infrastructure changes visible through satellite imagery and augmented reality enhancements. However, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which automate many tasks, struggle to stay current, limited by the cutoff dates in their fixed training datasets. To quantify this stagnation, we introduce LiveVQA, the first-of-its-kind dataset featuring 107,143 samples and 12 categories data specifically designed to support research in both seeking and updating with live visual knowledge. Drawing from recent news articles, video platforms, and academic publications in April 2024-May 2025, LiveVQA enables evaluation of how models handle latest visual information beyond their knowledge boundaries and how current methods help to update them. Our comprehensive benchmarking of 17 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals significant performance gaps on content beyond knowledge cutoff, and tool-use or agentic visual seeking framework drastically gain an average of 327% improvement. Furthermore, we explore parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods to update MLLMs with new visual knowledge. We dive deeply to the critical balance between adapter capacity and model capability when updating MLLMs with new visual knowledge. All the experimental dataset and source code are publicly available at: https://livevqa.github.io.

High-quality long-context instruction data is essential for aligning long-context large language models (LLMs). Despite the public release of models like Qwen and Llama, their long-context instruction data remains proprietary. Human annotation is costly and challenging, while template-based synthesis methods limit scale, diversity, and quality. We introduce LongMagpie, a self-synthesis framework that automatically generates large-scale long-context instruction data. Our key insight is that aligned long-context LLMs, when presented with a document followed by special tokens preceding a user turn, auto-regressively generate contextually relevant queries. By harvesting these document-query pairs and the model's responses, LongMagpie produces high-quality instructions without human effort. Experiments on HELMET, RULER, and Longbench v2 demonstrate that LongMagpie achieves leading performance on long-context tasks while maintaining competitive performance on short-context tasks, establishing it as a simple and effective approach for open, diverse, and scalable long-context instruction data synthesis.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in high-stakes scenarios, yet their safety mechanisms often remain fragile. Simple jailbreak prompts or even benign fine-tuning can bypass internal safeguards, underscoring the need to understand the failure modes of current safety strategies. Recent findings suggest that vulnerabilities emerge when alignment is confined to only the initial output tokens. To address this, we introduce the notion of safety depth, a designated output position where the model refuses to generate harmful content. While deeper alignment appears promising, identifying the optimal safety depth remains an open and underexplored challenge. We leverage the equivalence between autoregressive language models and Markov chains to derive the first theoretical result on identifying the optimal safety depth. To reach this safety depth effectively, we propose a cyclic group augmentation strategy that improves safety scores across six LLMs. In addition, we uncover a critical interaction between safety depth and ensemble width, demonstrating that larger ensembles can offset shallower alignments. These results suggest that test-time computation, often overlooked in safety alignment, can play a key role. Our approach provides actionable insights for building safer LLMs.

Recent advancements in video generation models have enabled the creation of diverse and realistic videos, with promising applications in advertising and film production. However, as one of the essential tasks of video generation models, video concept transfer remains significantly challenging. Existing methods generally model video as an entirety, leading to limited flexibility and precision when solely editing specific regions or concepts. To mitigate this dilemma, we propose a novel architecture UniTransfer, which introduces both spatial and diffusion timestep decomposition in a progressive paradigm, achieving precise and controllable video concept transfer. Specifically, in terms of spatial decomposition, we decouple videos into three key components: the foreground subject, the background, and the motion flow. Building upon this decomposed formulation, we further introduce a dual-to-single-stream DiT-based architecture for supporting fine-grained control over different components in the videos. We also introduce a self-supervised pretraining strategy based on random masking to enhance the decomposed representation learning from large-scale unlabeled video data. Inspired by the Chain-of-Thought reasoning paradigm, we further revisit the denoising diffusion process and propose a Chain-of-Prompt (CoP) mechanism to achieve the timestep decomposition. We decompose the denoising process into three stages of different granularity and leverage large language models (LLMs) for stage-specific instructions to guide the generation progressively. We also curate an animal-centric video dataset called OpenAnimal to facilitate the advancement and benchmarking of research in video concept transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high-quality and controllable video concept transfer across diverse reference images and scenes, surpassing existing baselines in both visual fidelity and editability.

Large language models (LLMs) are now pivotal in real-world applications. Model editing has emerged as a promising paradigm for efficiently modifying LLMs without full retraining. However, current editing approaches face significant limitations due to parameter drift, which stems from inconsistencies between newly edited knowledge and the model's existing knowledge. In sequential editing scenarios, cumulative drifts progressively lead to model collapse characterized by general capability degradation and balance between acquiring new knowledge and catastrophic forgetting of existing knowledge. Drawing inspiration from the hippocampal trisynaptic circuit for continual memorizing and forgetting, we propose a Hippocampal-like Sequential Editing (HSE) framework that designs the unlearning of obsolete knowledge, domain-specific knowledge update separation and replay for edited knowledge. Specifically, the HSE framework designs three core mechanisms: (1) Machine unlearning selectively erases outdated knowledge to facilitate integration of new information, (2) Fisher Information Matrix-guided parameter updates prevents cross-domain knowledge interference, and (3) Parameter replay consolidates long-term editing memory through lightweight and global replay of editing data in a parametric form. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that HSE achieves smaller generalization error bounds, more stable convergence and higher computational efficiency. Experimental results validate its effective balance between acquiring new knowledge and mitigating catastrophic forgetting, maintaining or even slightly enhancing general capabilities. In practical applications, experiments confirm its effectiveness in multi-domain hallucination mitigation, healthcare knowledge injecting, and societal bias reduction.

We present a novel framework for \(\varepsilon\)-optimally solving two-player zero-sum partially observable stochastic games (zs-POSGs). These games pose a major challenge due to the absence of a principled connection with dynamic programming (DP) techniques developed for two-player zero-sum stochastic games (zs-SGs). Prior attempts at transferring solution methods have lacked a lossless reduction—defined here as a transformation that preserves value functions, equilibrium strategies, and optimality structure—thereby limiting generalisation to ad hoc algorithms. This work introduces the first lossless reduction from zs-POSGs to transition-independent zs-SGs, enabling the principled application of a broad class of DP-based methods. We show empirically that point-based value iteration (PBVI) algorithms, applied via this reduction, produce \(\varepsilon\)-optimal strategies across a range of benchmark domains, consistently matching or outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Our results open a systematic pathway for algorithmic and theoretical transfer from SGs to partially observable settings.

This position paper argues that setting the privacy budget in differential privacy should not be viewed as an important limitation of differential privacy compared to alternative methods for privacy-preserving machine learning. The so-called problem of interpreting the privacy budget is often presented as a major hindrance to the wider adoption of differential privacy in real-world deployments and is sometimes used to promote alternative mitigation techniques for data protection. We believe this misleads decision-makers into choosing unsafe methods. We argue that the difficulty in interpreting privacy budgets does not stem from the definition of differential privacy itself, but from the intrinsic difficulty of estimating privacy risks in context, a challenge that any rigorous method for privacy risk assessment face. Moreover, we claim that any sound method for estimating privacy risks should, given the current state of research, be expressible within the differential privacy framework or justify why it cannot.

Event cameras provide asynchronous, low-latency, and high-dynamic-range visual signals, making them ideal for real-time perception tasks such as object detection. However, effectively modeling the temporal dynamics of event streams remains a core challenge. Most existing methods follow frame-based detection paradigms, applying temporal modules only at high-level features, which limits early-stage temporal modeling. Transformer-based approaches introduce global attention to capture long-range dependencies, but often add unnecessary complexity and overlook fine-grained temporal cues. In this paper, we propose a CNN-RNN hybrid framework that rethinks temporal modeling for event-based object detection. Our approach is based on two key insights: (1) introducing recurrent modules at lower spatial scales to preserve detailed temporal information where events are most dense, and (2) utilizing Decoupled Deformable-enhanced Recurrent Layers specifically designed according to the inherent motion characteristics of event cameras to extract multiple spatiotemporal features, and performing independent downsampling at multiple spatiotemporal scales to enable flexible, scale-aware representation learning. These multi-scale features are then fused via a feature pyramid network to produce robust detection outputs. Experiments on Gen1, 1 Mpx and eTram dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves superior accuracy over recent transformer-based models, highlighting the importance of precise temporal feature extraction in early stages. This work offers a new perspective on designing architectures for event-driven vision beyond attention-centric paradigms. Code: https://github.com/BIT-Vision/SATE.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for modern generative modeling, demonstrating strong potential for large language models (LLMs). Unlike conventional autoregressive (AR) models that generate tokens sequentially, diffusion models allow for parallel sampling, offering a promising path to accelerate generation and eliminate the left-to-right generation constraints. Despite their empirical success, theoretical understandings of diffusion language models remain underdeveloped. In this work, we develop convergence guarantees for diffusion language models from an information-theoretic perspective. Our analysis demonstrates that the sampling error, measured by the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, decays inversely with the number of iterations $T$ and scales linearly with the mutual information between tokens in the target text sequence. Crucially, our theory covers the regime $T<L$, where $L$ is the text sequence length. This justifies that high-quality samples can be generated with fewer iterations than $L$, thereby breaking the fundamental sampling bottleneck of $L$ steps required by AR models. We further establish matching upper and lower bounds, up to some constant factor, that shows the tightness of our convergence analysis. These results offer novel theoretical insights into the practical effectiveness of diffusion language models.

Training Transformers on algorithmic tasks frequently demonstrates an intriguing *abrupt learning* phenomenon: an extended performance plateau followed by a sudden, sharp improvement. This work investigates the underlying mechanisms for such dynamics, primarily in shallow Transformers. We reveal that during the plateau, the model often develops an interpretable *partial solution* while simultaneously exhibiting a strong *repetition bias* in their outputs. This output degeneracy is accompanied by *internal representation collapse*, where hidden states across different tokens become nearly parallel. We further identify the slow learning of optimal attention maps as a key bottleneck. Hidden progress in attention configuration during the plateau precedes the eventual rapid convergence, and directly intervening on attention significantly alters plateau duration and the severity of repetition bias and representational collapse. We validate that these identified phenomena—repetition bias and representation collapse—are not artifacts of toy setups but also manifest in the early pre-training stage of large language models like Pythia and OLMo.