NeurIPS 2025 论文列表

Accurate attribution for multiple platforms is critical for evaluating performance-based advertising. However, existing attribution methods rely heavily on the heuristic methods, e.g., Last-Click Mechanism (LCM) which always allocates the attribution to the platform with the latest report, lacking theoretical guarantees for attribution accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel theoretical model for the advertising attribution problem, in which we aim to design the optimal dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) mechanisms and evaluate their performance. We first show that LCM is not DSIC and performs poorly in terms of accuracy and fairness. To address this limitation, we introduce the Peer-Validated Mechanism (PVM), a DSIC mechanism in which a platform's attribution depends solely on the reports of other platforms. We then examine the accuracy of PVM across both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings, and provide provable accuracy bounds for each case. Notably, we show that PVM is the optimal DSIC mechanism in the homogeneous setting. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to show that PVM consistently outperforms LCM in terms of attribution accuracy and fairness.

Conformal prediction is a distribution-free uncertainty quantification method that has gained popularity in the machine learning community due to its finite-sample guarantees and ease of use. Its most common variant, dubbed split conformal prediction, is also computationally efficient as it boils down to collecting statistics of the model predictions on some calibration data not yet seen by the model. Nonetheless, these guarantees only hold if the calibration and test data are exchangeable, a condition that is difficult to verify and often violated in practice due to so-called distribution shifts. The literature is rife with methods to mitigate the loss in coverage in this non-exchangeable setting, but these methods require some prior information on the type of distribution shift to be expected at test time. In this work, we study this problem via a new perspective, through the lens of optimal transport, and show that it is possible to estimate the loss in coverage and mitigate arbitrary distribution shifts, offering a principled and broadly applicable solution.

Existing recommendation systems either rely on user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. However, item-based histories are not always accessible and generalizable for multimodal recommendation. We hypothesize that a user's visual history --- comprising images from daily life --- can offer rich, task-agnostic insights into their interests and preferences, and thus be leveraged for effective personalization. To this end, we propose VisualLens, a novel framework that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable personalization using task-agnostic visual history. VisualLens extracts, filters, and refines a spectrum user profile from the visual history to support personalized recommendation. We created two new benchmarks, Google-Review-V and Yelp-V, with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that VisualLens improves over state-of-the-art item-based multimodal recommendations by 5-10\% on Hit@3, and outperforms GPT-4o by 2-5\%. Further analysis shows that VisualLens is robust across varying history lengths and excels at adapting to both longer histories and unseen content categories.

This study raises and addresses the problem of time-delayed feedback in learning in games. Because learning in games assumes that multiple agents independently learn their strategies, a discrepancy in optimization often emerges among the agents. To overcome this discrepancy, the prediction of the future reward is incorporated into algorithms, typically known as Optimistic Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (OFTRL). However, the time delay in observing the past rewards hinders the prediction. Indeed, this study firstly proves that even a single-step delay worsens the performance of OFTRL from the aspects of social regret and convergence. This study proposes the weighted OFTRL (WOFTRL), where the prediction vector of the next reward in OFTRL is weighted $n$ times. We further capture an intuition that the optimistic weight cancels out this time delay. We prove that when the optimistic weight exceeds the time delay, our WOFTRL recovers the good performances that social regret is constant in general-sum normal-form games, and the strategies last-iterate converge to the Nash equilibrium in poly-matrix zero-sum games. The theoretical results are supported and strengthened by our experiments.

Algorithms for learning decision trees often include heuristic local-search operations such as (1) adjusting the threshold of a cut or (2) also exchanging the feature of that cut. We study minimizing the number of classification errors by performing a fixed number of a single type of these operations. Although we discover that the corresponding problems are NP-complete in general, we provide a comprehensive parameterized-complexity analysis with the aim of determining those properties of the problems that explain the hardness and those that make the problems tractable. For instance, we show that the problems remain hard for a small number $d$ of features or small domain size $D$ but the combination of both yields fixed-parameter tractability. That is, the problems are solvable in $(D + 1)^{2d} \cdot |\mathcal{I}|^{O(1)}$ time, where $|\mathcal{I}|$ is the size of the input. We also provide a proof-of-concept implementation of this algorithm and report on empirical results.

Common Neighbors (CNs) and their higher-order variants are important pairwise features widely used in state-of-the-art link prediction methods. However, existing methods often struggle with the repetition across different orders of CNs and fail to fully leverage their potential. We identify that these limitations stem from two key issues: redundancy and over-smoothing in high-order common neighbors. To address these challenges, we design orthogonalization to eliminate redundancy between different-order CNs and normalization to mitigate over-smoothing. By combining these two techniques, we propose Orthogonal Common Neighbor (OCN), a novel approach that significantly outperforms the strongest baselines by an average of 7.7\% on popular link prediction benchmarks. A thorough theoretical analysis is provided to support our method. Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of our orthogonalization and normalization techniques.

Differentiable optimization has attracted significant research interest, particularly for quadratic programming (QP). Existing approaches for differentiating the solution of a QP with respect to its defining parameters often rely on specific integrated solvers. This integration limits their applicability, including their use in neural network architectures and bi-level optimization tasks, restricting users to a narrow selection of solver choices. To address this limitation, we introduce **dQP**, a modular and solver-agnostic framework for plug-and-play differentiation of virtually any QP solver. A key insight we leverage to achieve modularity is that, once the active set of inequality constraints is known, both the solution and its derivative can be expressed using simplified linear systems that share the same matrix. This formulation fully decouples the computation of the QP solution from its differentiation. Building on this result, we provide a minimal-overhead, open-source implementation (<https://github.com/cwmagoon/dQP>) that seamlessly integrates with over 15 state-of-the-art solvers. Comprehensive benchmark experiments demonstrate dQP’s robustness and scalability, particularly highlighting its advantages in large-scale sparse problems.

Accurate prediction of continuous properties is essential to many scientific and engineering tasks. Although deep-learning regressors excel with abundant labels, their accuracy deteriorates in data-scarce regimes. We introduce RankRefine, a model-agnostic, plug-and-play post-hoc refinement technique that injects expert knowledge through pairwise rankings. Given a query item and a small reference set with known properties, RankRefine combines the base regressor’s output with a rank-based estimate via inverse-variance weighting, requiring no retraining. In molecular property prediction task, RankRefine achieves up to 10\% relative reduction in mean absolute error using only 20 pairwise comparisons obtained through a general-purpose large language model (LLM) with no finetuning. As rankings provided by human experts or general-purpose LLMs are sufficient for improving regression across diverse domains, RankRefine offers practicality and broad applicability, especially in low-data settings.

Occupancy prediction infers fine-grained 3D geometry and semantics from camera images of the surrounding environment, making it a critical perception task for autonomous driving. Existing methods either adopt dense grids as scene representation which is difficult to scale to high resolution, or learn the entire scene using a single set of sparse queries, which is insufficient to handle the various object characteristics. In this paper, we present ODG, a hierarchical dual sparse Gaussian representation to effectively capture complex scene dynamics. Building upon the observation that driving scenes can be universally decomposed into static and dynamic counterparts, we define dual Gaussian queries to better model the diverse scene objects. We utilize a hierarchical Gaussian transformer to predict the occupied voxel centers and semantic classes along with the Gaussian parameters. Leveraging the real-time rendering capability of 3D Gaussian Splatting, we also impose rendering supervision with available depth and semantic map annotations injecting pixel-level alignment to boost occupancy learning. Extensive experiments on the Occ3D-nuScenes and Occ3D-Waymo benchmarks demonstrate our proposed method sets new state-of-the-art results while maintaining low inference cost.

The cost and accuracy of simulating complex physical systems using the Finite Element Method (FEM) scales with the resolution of the underlying mesh. Adaptive meshes improve computational efficiency by refining resolution in critical regions, but typically require task-specific heuristics or cumbersome manual design by a human expert. We propose Adaptive Meshing By Expert Reconstruction (AMBER), a supervised learning approach to mesh adaptation. Starting from a coarse mesh, AMBER iteratively predicts the sizing field, i.e., a function mapping from the geometry to the local element size of the target mesh, and uses this prediction to produce a new intermediate mesh using an out-of-the-box mesh generator. This process is enabled through a hierarchical graph neural network, and relies on data augmentation by automatically projecting expert labels onto AMBER-generated data during training. We evaluate AMBER on 2D and 3D datasets, including classical physics problems, mechanical components, and real-world industrial designs with human expert meshes. AMBER generalizes to unseen geometries and consistently outperforms multiple recent baselines, including ones using Graph and Convolutional Neural Networks, and Reinforcement Learning-based approaches.

Biomolecular structure determination is essential to a mechanistic understanding of diseases and the development of novel therapeutics. Machine-learning-based structure prediction methods have made significant advancements by computationally predicting protein and bioassembly structures from sequences and molecular topology alone. Despite substantial progress in the field, challenges remain to deliver structure prediction models to real-world drug discovery. Here, we present NeuralPLexer3 -- a physics-inspired flow-based generative model that achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy on key biomolecular interaction types and improves training and sampling efficiency compared to its predecessors and alternative methodologies. Examined through existing and new benchmarks, NeuralPLexer3 excels in areas crucial to structure-based drug design, including blind docking, physical validity, and ligand-induced protein conformational changes.

Link sign prediction in signed bipartite graphs, which are extensively utilized across diverse domains such as social networks and recommendation systems, has recently emerged as a pivotal challenge. However, significant space and time complexities associated with the scalability of bipartite graphs pose substantial challenges, particularly in large-scale environments. To address these issues, this paper introduces the SignFlow Bipartite Subgraph Network (SBSN), balancing sublinear training memory growth through a heuristic subgraph extraction method integrated with a novel message passing module, with optimal inference efficiency achieved via the node feature distillation module. Our subgraph sampling approach reduces the graph size by focusing on neighborhoods around target links and employs an optimized directed message passing mechanism to aggregate critical structural patterns. This mechanism allows SBSN to efficiently learn rich local structural patterns essential for accurate sign prediction. Furthermore, to overcome the inefficiency of subgraph sampling-based models during inference, SBSN incorporates a node feature distillation module after the first training stage. This module distills subgraph features into node features, enabling fast inference while retaining the rich structural information of subgraphs. Experiments reveal that SBSN shows superior performance in both medium- and large-scale datasets, efficiently managing memory and computational resources, making it a scalable solution for extensive applications.

Precise, generalizable subject-agnostic seizure prediction (SASP) remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic complexity and significant spectral variability of electrophysiologial signals across individuals and recording modalities. We propose \model{FAPEX}, a novel architecture that introduces a learnable \emph{fractional neural frame operator} (FrNFO) for adaptive time–frequency decomposition. Unlike conventional models that exhibit spectral bias toward low frequencies, our FrNFO employs fractional-order convolutions to capture both high and low-frequency dynamics, achieving approximately $10\%$ improvement in F1-score and sensitivity over state-of-the-art baselines. The FrNFO enables the extraction of \emph{instantaneous phase and amplitude representations} that are particularly informative for preictal biomarker discovery and enhance out-of-distribution generalization. \model{FAPEX} further integrates structural state-space modeling and channelwise attention, allowing it to handle heterogeneous electrode montages. Evaluated across 12 benchmarks spanning species (human, rat, dog, macaque) and modalities (Scalp‑EEG, SEEG, ECoG, LFP), \model{FAPEX} consistently outperforms 23 supervised and 10 self-supervised baselines under nested cross-validation, with gains of up to $15\%$ in sensitivity on complex cross-domain scenarios. It further demonstrates superior performance in several external validation cohorts. To our knowledge, these establish \model{FAPEX} as the first epilepsy model to show consistent superiority in SASP, offering a promising solution for discovering epileptic biomarker evidence supporting the existence of a distinct and identifiable preictal state for and clinical translation.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable efficient scaling of large language models but face prohibitive memory demands due to massive parameterization. Existing pruning methods rely on heuristic metrics or impractical enumeration of expert subsets, leading to suboptimal performance or scalability. In this paper, we propose Shapley-MoE, an efficient pruning method for MoE models inspired by cooperative game theory. By quantifying each expert’s contribution via Shapley value, our method identifies important experts without exhaustive combination evaluations. To overcome the NP-hard complexity of exact Shapley computation, we introduce a Monte Carlo sampling strategy for efficient approximation that reduces complexity to quadratic time. However, vanilla Monte Carlo sampling still faces issues of insufficient estimation accuracy and low sampling efficiency. To address these issues, we further propose two novel methods to improve sampling accuracy and efficiency: (1) Early Truncation, which early terminates unstable sampling steps caused by overly small expert subsets, and (2) Router-Guided Importance Sampling, which prioritize sampling important expert subsets using gating activation probabilities. Both theoretical and experimental analyses show that both methods can accelerate Shapley value estimation and improve accuracy. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that our pruned MoE models outperform existing expert pruning methods. Notably, when applied to the Qwen2-57B-A14B model, our method reduces the number of experts by 25% with only a 0.92 increase in perplexity and over 96.4% of the average zero-shot accuracy is maintained.

Accident anticipation aims to predict potential collisions in an online manner, enabling timely alerts to enhance road safety. Existing methods typically predict frame-level risk scores as indicators of hazard. However, these approaches rely on ambiguous binary supervision—labeling all frames in accident videos as positive—despite the fact that risk varies continuously over time, leading to unreliable learning and false alarms. To address this, we propose a novel paradigm that shifts the prediction target from current-frame risk scoring to directly estimating accident scores at multiple future time steps (e.g., 0.1s–2.0s ahead), leveraging precisely annotated accident timestamps as supervision. Our method employs a snippet-level encoder to jointly model spatial and temporal dynamics, and a Transformer-based temporal decoder that predicts accident scores for all future horizons simultaneously using dedicated temporal queries. Furthermore, we introduce a refined evaluation protocol that reports Time-to-Accident (TTA) and recall—evaluated at multiple pre-accident intervals (0.5s, 1.0s, and 1.5s)—only when the false alarm rate (FAR) remains within an acceptable range, ensuring practical relevance. Experiments show that our method achieves superior performance in both recall and TTA under realistic FAR constraints. Project page: https://happytianhao.github.io/TOP/

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong generative capabilities but remain prone to inconsistencies and hallucinations. We introduce Peer Elicitation Games (PEG), a training-free, game-theoretic framework for aligning LLMs through a peer elicitation mechanism involving a generator and multiple discriminators instantiated from distinct base models. Discriminators interact in a peer evaluation setting, where utilities are computed using a determinant-based mutual information score that provably incentivizes truthful reporting without requiring ground-truth labels. We establish theoretical guarantees showing that each agent, via online learning, achieves sublinear regret in the sense their cumulative performance approaches that of the best fixed truthful strategy in hindsight. Moreover, we prove last-iterate convergence to a truthful Nash equilibrium, ensuring that the actual policies used by agents converge to stable and truthful behavior over time. Empirical evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in factual accuracy. These results position PEG as a practical approach for eliciting truthful behavior from LLMs without supervision or fine-tuning.

Text-guided image editing involves modifying a source image based on a language instruction and, typically, requires changes to only small local regions. However, existing approaches generate the entire target image rather than selectively regenerate only the intended editing areas. This results in (1) unnecessary computational costs and (2) a bias toward reconstructing non-editing regions, which compromises the quality of the intended edits. To resolve these limitations, we propose to formulate image editing as $\textbf{N}$ext $\textbf{E}$diting-token $\textbf{P}$rediction (NEP) based on autoregressive image generation, where only regions that need to be edited are regenerated, thus avoiding unintended modification to the non-editing areas. To enable any-region editing, we propose to pre-train an any-order autoregressive text-to-image (T2I) model. Once trained, it is capable of zero-shot image editing and can be easily adapted to NEP for image editing, which achieves a new state-of-the-art on widely used image editing benchmarks. Moreover, our model naturally supports test-time scaling (TTS) through iteratively refining its generation in a zero-shot manner.

Prediction with expert advice serves as a fundamental model in online learning and sequential decision-making. However, in many real-world settings, this classical model proves insufficient as the feedback available to the decision-maker is often subject to noise, errors, or communication constraints. This paper provides fundamental limits on performance, quantified by the regret, in the case when the feedback is corrupted by an additive noise. Our general analysis achieves sharp regret bounds for canonical examples of such additive noise as the Gaussian distribution, the uniform distribution, and a general noise with a log-concave density. This analysis demonstrates how different noise characteristics affect regret bounds and identifies how the regret fundamentally scales as a function of the properties of the noise distribution.

We consider the problem of conformal prediction under covariate shift. Given labeled data from a source domain and unlabeled data from a covariate shifted target domain, we seek to construct prediction sets with valid marginal coverage in the target domain. Most existing methods require estimating the unknown likelihood ratio function, which can be prohibitive for high-dimensional data such as images. To address this challenge, we introduce the likelihood ratio regularized quantile regression (LR-QR) algorithm, which combines the pinball loss with a novel choice of regularization in order to construct a threshold function without directly estimating the unknown likelihood ratio. We show that the LR-QR method has coverage at the desired level in the target domain, up to a small error term that we can control. Our proofs draw on a novel analysis of coverage via stability bounds from learning theory. Our experiments demonstrate that the LR-QR algorithm outperforms existing methods on high-dimensional prediction tasks, including a regression task for the Communities and Crime dataset, an image classification task from the WILDS repository, and an LLM question-answering task on the MMLU benchmark.