NeurIPS 2026 论文列表

Vision-Language Models increasingly make socially consequential judgments from image-text inputs, yet current evaluations often stop at verdict-level accuracy: whether the final label is human-aligned, not whether it follows from the correct evidence. We introduce MM-SCALE (Multimodal Moral SCALE), a benchmark for evidence-grounded moral judgment built around a design choice: each image is paired with multiple action scenarios, so models must compare how different actions interact with the same visual context rather than score images in isolation. MM-SCALE contains 8,444 image contexts and 21,977 action scenarios, each annotated with a 5-point moral acceptability rating and a modality-grounding label indicating whether the human judgment relied on text, image, or both. Three tasks evaluate whether models (i) assign calibrated scalar moral scores, (ii) preserve human orderings within a shared visual context, and (iii) ground rationales in the evidence source humans found critical to judgment. Across models, aggregate metrics overstate alignment: NDCG@5 remains high across models, while within-image pairwise accuracy remains only 0.53--0.62 even on scenario pairs whose human mean ratings differ by at least one point. CoT has inconsistent effects on calibration and does not reliably improve within-image ordering. Evidence-grounding evaluations further show that models often describe visual context without making it critical for the verdict. These results reveal an evidence-grounding failure in current VLMs and position MM-SCALE as an evaluation testbed for moral judgment under shared image contexts. This dataset includes potentially harmful and sensitive visual content. Images are intended solely for evaluation.

Optimization modeling translates real decision-making problems into mathematical optimization models and solver-executable implementations. Although language models are increasingly used to generate optimization formulations and solver code, existing benchmarks for this capability are almost entirely text-only. This omits many optimization-modeling tasks that arise in operational practice, where requirements are described in text but essential instance information is often conveyed through visual artifacts such as tables, graphs, maps, schedules, and planning dashboards. We introduce \emph{multimodal optimization modeling}, a benchmark setting in which models must construct both a mathematical formulation and executable solver code from a text-and-visual problem specification. To evaluate this setting, we develop a solver-grounded framework that generates structured optimization instances, verifies each instance with an exact solver, and builds both the model-facing inputs and the hidden reference files from the same verified source. We instantiate the framework as MM-OptBench, a benchmark of 780 solver-verified instances spanning 6 optimization families, 26 subcategories, and 3 structural difficulty levels. We then evaluate 9 multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including 6 frontier general-purpose models and 3 math-specialized models, with aggregate, family-level, difficulty-level, and failure-mode analyses. The results show that the task remains far from solved: the best two models reach 52.1\% and 51.3\% pass@1, while on average across the six general-purpose MLLMs, pass@1 is 43.4\% on easy instances and 15.9\% on hard instances. All three math-specialized MLLMs solve 0/780 instances. Failure attribution shows that errors arise both when extracting instance data from text and visuals and when turning extracted data into solver-correct formulations and code. MM-OptBench provides a concrete testbed for solver-grounded, decision-oriented multimodal intelligence.

Multimodal dynamic graphs are pervasive in real-world applications, where nodes and edges are accompanied by multimodal signals, including text and images. Despite their practical importance, benchmarks and methods that explicitly study multimodal learning in dynamic graphs remain scarce, hindering the full understanding and effective utilization of multimodal information for downstream tasks. To address this gap, we introduce MM-DyGraph, to the best of our knowledge, the first benchmark for multimodal dynamic graph learning, consisting of diverse real-world datasets with fine-grained temporal graph evolution and rich multimodal attributes. MM-DyGraph provides three evaluation tasks to comprehensively assess model performance in dynamic settings. We benchmark five state-of-the-art dynamic graph methods and reveal that naive feature concatenation yields target-level inconsistencies: multimodal inputs benefit certain prediction targets while harming others. This observation indicates that the modality informativeness depends on the specific prediction target over time. Building on these observations, we propose a Target-aware Spatial-Temporal Multimodal Fusion (TST-MF) framework, which jointly conditions multimodal fusion on the prediction target and spatial-temporal relations, enabling context-adaptive cross-modal interplay for target-specific representations. Extensive experiments over diverse datasets and tasks show that TST-MF delivers robust and competitive performance, achieving clear gains in multimodal settings.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across vision–language tasks, yet their large-scale deployment raises pressing concerns about memorized private data, outdated knowledge, and harmful content. Existing unlearning approaches for MLLMs typically adapt training-based strategies such as gradient ascent or preference optimization, but these methods are computationally expensive, irreversible, and often distort retained knowledge. In this work, we propose MLLMEraser, an input-aware, training-free framework for test-time unlearning. Our approach leverages activation steering to enable dynamic knowledge erasure without parameter updates. Specifically, we construct a multimodal erasure direction by contrasting adversarially perturbed, knowledge-recall image–text pairs with knowledge-erasure counterparts, capturing both textual and visual discrepancies. To prevent unnecessary interference, we further design an input-aware steering mechanism that adaptively determines when and how the erasure direction should be applied, preserving utility on retained knowledge while enforcing forgetting on designated content. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen-2.5-VL demonstrate that MLLMEraser consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MLLM unlearning baselines, achieving stronger forgetting performance with lower computational cost and minimal utility degradation.

We study the problem of detecting treatment effects in randomized A/B experiments when the effects are potentially small and complex. A common approach in such settings is to fit machine learning (ML) models of outcomes on observed features and then apply classical $t$-tests to residualized outcomes. We show that this approach can suffer substantial power loss under treatment effect heterogeneity. We propose a randomization-based test whose statistic measures the out-of-sample predictive gain from including the treatment variable in a flexible ML model. Leveraging experimental randomization and sample splitting, our test is finite-sample valid for arbitrary models and loss functions. We establish power guarantees under heterogeneous treatment effects and demonstrate substantial empirical gains in simulations and large-scale A/B experiments.

The ability to observe the world is fundamental to reasoning and making informed decisions on how to interact with the environment. However, optical perception can often be disrupted due to common occurrences like occlusions, which can pose challenges to existing vision systems. We present MITO, the first millimeter-wave (mmWave) dataset of diverse, everyday objects, collected using a UR5 robotic arm with two mmWave radars operating at different frequencies and an RGB-D camera. Unlike visible light, mmWave signals can penetrate common occlusions (e.g., cardboard boxes, fabric, plastic). MITO captures over 24 million mmWave frames and uses them to generate 550 high-resolution mmWave images in line-of-sight and non-light-of-sight (NLOS), as well as RGB-D images, segmentation masks, and raw mmWave signals, taken from 76 different objects. We develop an open-source simulation tool that can be used to generate synthetic mmWave images for any 3D triangle mesh. Finally, we establish benchmarks for NLOS segmentation and classification to demonstrate the utility of our dataset and simulator for enabling broader NLOS perception.

High-fidelity generative models have narrowed the perceptual gap between synthetic and real images, putting media security under increasing pressure. Most AI-generated image (AIGI) detectors classify by artifact and fail to generalise to new generators. We argue that anchoring detection on the stationary real-image distribution gives a more generalisable signal than chasing the non-stationary forgery distribution, and cast AIGI detection as a Reference-Comparison problem that checks consistency against a learned real-domain feature subspace rather than fitting specific forgery cues. We propose **MIRROR** (**M**anifold **I**deal **R**eference **R**econstruct**OR**), which encodes real-image priors in a learnable discrete memory bank, projects an input onto these prototypes via sparse linear combination to form a manifold-consistent ideal reference, and uses the Comparison Residual and Reconstruction Perplexity as detection signals. To mark the Superhuman Crossover where detectors surpass human experts, we build the Human-AIGI benchmark with a psychophysically curated human-imperceptible subset. Across 14 benchmarks, MIRROR improves over prior methods by 2.1% on six standard benchmarks and 8.1% on seven in-the-wild benchmarks. On Human-AIGI it reaches 89.6% fake accuracy over 27 generators, sitting between the computer-vision-expert and AIGI-detection-expert reference levels, and the gap to the AIGI-detection-expert level closes further as the pretrained backbone scales.

Learning high-quality representations of mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is crucial for advancing machine learning (ML)-based methods, yet remains challenging due to the discrete nature of MILPs and their extreme sensitivity to small perturbations. Although contrastive learning has proven highly effective for representation learning in domains such as computer vision, designing effective data augmentations for MILPs is particularly difficult. To address this challenge, we propose MIRAGE, a principled data augmentation framework grounded in the invariance of the piecewise-affine dual price function induced by the branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm. Viewing this dual function as a recorded, solver-level surrogate of the MILP's lower-bound structure, we derive two complementary augmentation certificates that act as its right-hand and objective-side projections. Both certificates are provably invariant under the same dual price function on the recorded B&B tree, and therefore preserve either the structural similarity of the search tree or the optimality of the original optimal solution. Empirically, we integrate MIRAGE with ML models for two significant downstream tasks—learning to branch and predict-and-search—and observe consistent performance improvements across multiple benchmarks. By grounding MILP data augmentation in a single, solver-induced duality quantity, our work provides a principled and effective approach to MILP representation learning.

Recent progress in task-optimized neural networks has established encoding models as a powerful tool for predicting brain responses to naturalistic stimuli, yet most existing approaches rely on unimodal representations. The emergence of omni-modal foundation models and rich multimodal neural datasets enables shared encoding models that jointly integrate visual, auditory, and linguistic information across subjects. We introduce MIRAGE, a brain encoding framework that predicts whole-brain fMRI responses to naturalistic audiovisual stimuli with paired transcripts. MIRAGE extracts representations from a single pretrained omni-modal backbone through three modality-specific cross-attention modules whose latent queries adaptively aggregate features across the backbone's 48 layers, and combines them through a transformer-based brain encoder and a subject-specific linear head over the cortical parcels. On the Algonauts benchmark, MIRAGE achieves state-of-the-art results on the out-of-distribution dataset. Controlled comparisons show that native multimodal fusion (features taken from a single jointly trained model) consistently outperforms post-hoc fusion of independently extracted unimodal streams, across architectural levels and backbones. Beyond predictive accuracy, the learned attention weights are directly inspectable: each modality's gating module discovers a distinct depth profile over the backbone, and each modality traces a distinct, anatomically structured pattern across cortex. Together, these results propose adaptive layer-wise aggregation of natively multimodal features as a more generalizable, interpretable, and accurate approach for whole-brain encoding.

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced multimodal reasoning, existing frameworks suffer from a critical “perception–reasoning gap.” Due to an over-reliance on seemingly relevant visual tokens, even minor perceptual perturbations can propagate through the reasoning process, leading to compounding hallucinations. To address this issue, we propose MIRA, a training framework that improves robustness to erroneous visual contexts while enhancing logical reasoning ability. By injecting filtered, deceptive visual contexts during training, we construct challenging “hard traps” that stress-test the model’s robustness to misleading information. Furthermore, we introduce a group-wise reflection-triggering mechanism that enables the model to autonomously detect and rectify inconsistencies between visual cues and logical constraints, which is ultimately internalized as an intrinsic policy behavior. Importantly, MIRA does not rely on human annotations. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks show that MIRA improves the base model by 7% and demonstrates superior robustness against deceptive contexts. These findings highlight that active error recovery is essential for reliable multimodal reasoning. Comprehensive ablation studies and analyses further provide insights into why MIRA is effective.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly improve their reasoning at test time via additional computation, yet most procedures treat each problem in isolation. When problems arrive sequentially, accumulating reusable experience across them can further improve performance. Existing memory-based methods either store whole-solution templates that generalize poorly to novel problems or use heuristic step-level selection that is not optimized for final-answer correctness. Learning selection policies requires large-scale training data and fixed action spaces. We propose MILES (Modular Instruction Memory with LEarnable Selection for self-improving LLM reasoning), a framework that dynamically expands step-wise memory and applies correctness-optimized memory composition under realistic test-time constraints. MILES maintains modular memory units consisting of asymmetric pairs of sub-goal embeddings and sub-instructions, each associated with a learnable selection head. This memory structure enables a coarse-to-fine retrieval mechanism: The coarse level enables memory expansion and collects supervision for training selection heads from confident samples, while the fine stage applies learned selection heads to rerank coarse-level candidates and guide reasoning for uncertain samples. MILES consistently matches or outperforms prior methods while achieving superior accuracy–efficiency tradeoffs. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness, robustness, and transferability.

Current evaluation protocols for medical image segmentation remain largely anchored in sample-wise comparisons, e.g., Dice and Hausdorff distance, which require each prediction to be paired with a ground-truth mask. Yet two limitations arise in practice: they are inapplicable when predictions are made on unlabeled data; and even when annotations are available, they cannot assess whether a collection of predictions matches the distributional structure of the ground-truth population. We introduce MID (Mask–Image Distributional Divergence), a distribution-level evaluation metric for medical image segmentation. MID builds upon the observation that segmentation quality is a property of the joint image-mask distribution: a mask may be anatomically plausible in isolation yet incorrect for the image it accompanies. MID compares the joint distribution of images and masks between a reference set and a set of predictions, without requiring sample-wise correspondence. This captures both mask realism and image-mask consistency. We evaluate MID across 13 publicly available datasets spanning CT, MRI, and MRA. Under anatomically realistic corruptions across 56 organ groups, MID tracks mean Dice and Hausdorff distance without per-sample ground-truth pairing. MID also detects distributional shifts across modalities and anatomies, identifies image-mask misalignment through controlled shuffling experiments, and produces reliable model rankings across real segmentation models.

Quantifying mouse behavior from pose is a foundational tool in neuroscience, ethology, drug discovery, and animal welfare. Self-supervised foundation models are a natural fit, but a foundation model for mouse behavior must handle social behavior - many behaviors that matter (aggression, courtship, mounting, allogrooming) are inherently multi-animal. Existing self-supervised pose models fall short: they encode each animal independently and discard interaction signal, hard-code the animal count, and pretrain one dataset at a time. We introduce MICE (Multi-animal Interaction Context Encoder), a hierarchical foundation model for mouse behavior that pretrains jointly on six mouse-pose corpora spanning one to four mice and 7 to 27 keypoints. MICE combines a hierarchical individual encoder capturing per-mouse kinematics at multiple temporal scales with a Perceiver-style social encoder whose learned latent codebook decouples parameter count from animal count, so a single checkpoint serves any group size without retraining. Across four evaluation protocols on all six datasets, MICE matches or exceeds prior keypoint-based baselines, and layer-wise probing shows the social stage incrementally improves discriminability beyond the individual encoder. Code and weights will be released.

Foundation models for electroencephalography (EEG) have shown promise in learning transferable representations, but existing approaches treat EEG as a generic time series, ignoring the Riemannian geometry of spatial covariance structure that is fundamental to neural signal analysis. We propose MENDR (Manifold-Embedded Neural Data Representations), the first EEG foundation model that builds this geometry directly into its architecture (via the matrix logarithm and Log-Euclidean tangent space) rather than learning it from data. MENDR embeds windowed covariance matrices into the Log-Euclidean tangent space via differentiable matrix logarithm, where standard transformer operations become geometrically equivalent to Riemannian operations. A channel-agnostic spatial projection based on Perceiver-style cross-attention enables seamless transfer across electrode configurations ranging from 6 to 64 channels. Pretrained on the Temple University Hospital EEG Corpus (4,000+ hours, 14,987 subjects) using a masked autoencoder objective in the tangent space, MENDR achieves state-of-the-art results on 3 of 6 downstream benchmarks (TUAB abnormality, TUEV event, CHB-MIT seizure) with only 1.2M parameters, up to $42\times$ fewer than competing foundation models.

Agent-based frameworks grounded in vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as a dominant paradigm for long video understanding. Yet, prevailing agents lack the core capacity for \textit{dynamic memory evolution}, failing to transform ephemeral perceptions into a continuously growing, adaptive knowledge system and thus inducing inefficient redundant exploration during reasoning. To this end, we present MEMEVO, an online Memory-Evolved Video Agent framework centered on \textit{dynamic memory evolution} that leverages accumulating multi-turn queries to actively drive progressive memory evolution, establishing a long-lived memory system for knowledge accumulation. Central to MEMEVO is a four-level Hierarchical Self-Evolved Memory, which constructs memory bottom-up via progressive abstraction, distilling transient perceptions into reusable, query-agnostic event nodes organized within a temporal-semantic graph, while realizing active memory evolution through event insertion, duplicate merging, and redundant pruning. To mitigate redundant retrieval in the evolved memory, we devise a State-Conditioned Graph Memory Retrieval mechanism that guides efficient navigation of the memory space, integrating State-Conditioned Graph Routing and Meta-Cognitive Stopping criteria to ensure sufficient evidence acquisition without re-exploration. Extensive benchmarking confirms that MEMEVO achieves state-of-the-art performance on reasoning-intensive tasks (\textbf{\textcolor[HTML]{00FF00}{+6.1\%}} VideoMMMU, \textbf{\textcolor[HTML]{00FF00}{+4.8\%}} LongVideoBench), while facilitating \textit{cross-query knowledge reuse} and \textit{cross-model generalization}.

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) and emotion recognition (ER) are closely related affective understanding tasks, yet they are usually studied separately due to differences in label space, task formulation, dataset distribution, and modality dependence. In this paper, we propose MEME ($\textbf{M}$ixture-of-$\textbf{E}$xperts for $\textbf{M}$ultimodal sentiment analysis and $\textbf{E}$motion recognition), a lightweight hierarchical MoE framework for unified multimodal affective computing across MSA, conversational emotion recognition, and dynamic facial expression recognition. MEME operates on frozen text, visual, and audio features, compresses variable-length modality sequences with learned-query attention pooling, and processes them with a shared hierarchical MoE backbone. Each block first applies hard modality experts for modality-specific refinement and then task-conditioned cross experts for task-aware multimodal interaction. A $\texttt{[TASK]}$ token provides an explicit task anchor for routing, while modality dropping regularizes unified training. We jointly train MEME on nine affective benchmarks and evaluate all datasets using a single composite-best checkpoint without dataset-wise adaptation. Extensive experiments show that MEME outperforms strong task-specific baselines and recent large-model-based unified methods on most benchmarks, while maintaining favorable efficiency, robustness and generalization.

Image generation models have rapidly advanced, with many models now supporting generation conditioned on multiple reference images and textual instructions. Such models enable a wide range of applications, including entity fusion and attribute transfer across images. However, existing benchmarks for multi-reference image generation rely on limited evaluation dimensions and fail to capture the diverse challenges of the task. To address this limitation, we propose **MDMR-Bench**, a **M**ulti-**D**imensional benchmark for **M**ulti-**R**eference image generation. MDMR-Bench is designed based on realistic usage scenarios and consists of multiple evaluation subsets spanning diverse dimensions of multi-reference image generation, including (1) common entity fusion and attribute transfer, (2) multi-element extraction from a single image, (3) infographic manipulation, and (4) visual reasoning-intensive generation. This design enables systematic analysis of model capabilities and failure modes across different challenge dimensions. Furthermore, to achieve more reliable and interpretable evaluation, we introduce a checklist-based evaluation protocol that decomposes generation quality into fine-grained evaluation aspects. Instead of relying solely on holistic scoring, our framework uses structured checklists composed of both global-level and atomic-level queries, enabling more diagnostic assessment of model performance. By benchmarking both open-source and proprietary models, we demonstrate that MDMR-Bench provides fine-grained insights into model performance across different dimensions. Our dataset is available at [Kaggle](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/6f695be8363ee17928c25f36fa976fd10f976f9f6d4925bc0df74f38dfce268c). The code is available at [GitHub](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Neurips2026_ED_paper3412).

Spatio-temporal point processes (STPPs) represent a random collection of points where each point corresponds to the time and location of an event. STPPs are widely used to describe a wide range of phenomena, from earthquakes to wildfires to crime occurrence to disease outbreaks. Generative models have recently emerged as a new powerful paradigm for STPPs, demonstrating %due to their exceptional highly competitive generalization capabilities and promising potential for systematic uncertainty quantification. However, existing generative approaches primarily rely on unimodal numerical data, overlooking the geographic context in which events occur and failing to capture critical spatial and temporal patterns within the STPP. To address these limitations, we propose Morse-aware Cross-Modality learning within Diffusion Model, or \textbf{MCM-DM}. MCM-DM represents a cross-modality diffusion framework based on the discrete Morse and cobordism theories that augments STPP modeling with geographic scene understanding. MCM-DM consists of three key components: (i) a vision-language model-based geographic encoder that extracts semantic embeddings from satellite tiles at each event location; (ii) an attention-based fusion mechanism to integrate critical structure representation with spatio-temporal embeddings, and (iii) a Morse-theoretic topological aligner which aligns latent representations of critical events with spatio-temporal embedding space. We demonstrate the MCM-DM utility on 8 diverse STPP datasets from Earth sciences, epidemiology, urban mobility, and crime analytics, highlighting its cross-domain versatility. The code is available at~\url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCM-DM-CF83}.

Fine-tuning Vision Language Models (VLMs) with parameter-efficient methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is crucial for task adaptation. However, imbalanced training dynamics across modalities often lead to suboptimal accuracy due to negative interference, a challenge typically addressed with inefficient heuristic methods such as manually tuning separate learning rates. To overcome this, we introduce **MARS** (**M**ultimodal **A**daptive **R**ank **S**earch), an approach to discover optimal rank pairs that balance training dynamics while maximizing performance. Our key innovation, a proposed framework of dual scaling laws, enables this search:~one law models module-specific convergence time to prune the search space to candidates with aligned dynamics, while the other predicts final task performance to select the optimal pair from the pruned set. By re-purposing the LoRA rank as a controller for modality-specific convergence speed, MARS outperforms baseline methods and provides a robust, automated strategy for optimizing VLM fine-tuning.