GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Sinusoidal Initialization, Time for a New Start
Authors: Alberto Fernández-Hernández; Jose I. Mestre; Manuel F. Dolz; José Duato; Enrique S. Quintana-Orti
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Initialization plays a critical role in Deep Neural Network training, directly influencing convergence, stability, and generalization. Common approaches such as Glorot and He initializations rely on randomness, which can produce uneven weight distributions across layer connections. In this paper, we introduce the Sinusoidal initialization, a novel deterministic method that employs sinusoidal functions to construct structured weight matrices expressly to improve the spread and balance of weights throughout the network while simultaneously fostering a more uniform, well‑conditioned distribution of neuron activation states from the very first forward pass. Because Sinusoidal initialization begins with weights and activations that are already evenly and efficiently utilized, it delivers consistently faster convergence, greater training stability, and higher final accuracy across a wide range of models, including convolutional neural networks, vision transformers, and large language models. On average, our experiments show an increase of 4.8 % in final validation accuracy and 20.9 % in convergence speed. By replacing randomness with structure, this initialization provides a stronger and more reliable foundation for Deep Learning systems.
Metropolis Adjusted Microcanonical Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
Authors: Jakob Robnik; Reuben Cohn-Gordon; Uros Seljak
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Sampling from high dimensional distributions is a computational bottleneck in many scientific applications. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), and in particular the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), are widely used, yet they struggle on problems with a very large number of parameters or a complicated geometry. Microcanonical Langevin Monte Carlo (MCLMC) has been recently proposed as an alternative which shows striking gains in efficiency over NUTS, especially for high-dimensional problems. However, it produces biased samples, with a bias that is hard to control in general. We introduce the Metropolis-Adjusted Microcanonical sampler (MAMS), which relies on the same dynamics as MCLMC, but introduces a Metropolis-Hastings step and thus produces asymptotically unbiased samples. We develop an automated tuning scheme for the hyperparameters of the algorithm, making it applicable out of the box. We demonstrate that MAMS outperforms NUTS across the board on benchmark problems of varying complexity and dimensionality, achieving up to a factor of seven speedup.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Communication-Constrained Priors
Authors: Guang Yang; Tianpei Yang; Jingwen Qiao; Yanqing Wu; Jing Huo; Xingguo Chen; Yang Gao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Communication is one of the effective means to improve the learning of cooperative policy in multi-agent systems. However, in most real-world scenarios, lossy communication is a prevalent issue. Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning with communication, due to their limited scalability and robustness, struggles to apply to complex and dynamic real-world environments. To address these challenges, we propose a generalized communication-constrained model to uniformly characterize communication conditions across different scenarios. Based on this, we utilize it as a learning prior to distinguish between lossy and lossless messages for specific scenarios. Additionally, we decouple the impact of lossy and lossless messages on distributed decision-making, drawing on a dual mutual information estimatior, and introduce a communication-constrained multi-agent reinforcement learning framework, quantifying the impact of communication messages into the global reward. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our approach across several communication-constrained benchmarks.
Towards General Continuous Memory for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Wenyi WU; Zixuan Song; Kun Zhou; Yifei Shao; Zhiting Hu; Biwei Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Language models (LMs) and their extension, vision-language models (VLMs), have achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, they still struggle with complex reasoning tasks that require multimodal or multilingual real world knowledge. To support such capabilities, an external memory system that can efficiently provide relevant multimodal information is essential. Existing approaches generally concatenate image and text tokens into a long sequence as memory, which, however, may drastically increase context length and even degrade performance. In contrast, we propose using continuous memory-a compact set of dense embeddings-to more effectively and efficiently represent multimodal and multilingual knowledge. Our key insight is that a VLM can serve as its own continuous memory encoder. We empirically show that this design improves performance on complex multimodal reasoning tasks. Building on this, we introduce a data-efficient and parameter-efficient method to fine-tune the VLM into a memory encoder, requiring only 1.2\% of the model’s parameters and a small corpus of 15.6K self-synthesized samples. Our approach CoMEM utilizes VLM's original capabilities to encode arbitrary multimodal and multilingual knowledge into just 8 continuous embeddings. Since the inference-time VLM remains frozen, our memory module is plug-and-play and can be flexibly integrated as needed. Extensive experiments across eight multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code and data is publicly released here https://github.com/WenyiWU0111/CoMEM.
Consistency of the $k_n$-nearest neighbor rule under adaptive sampling
Authors: Robi Bhattacharjee; Geelon So; Sanjoy Dasgupta
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: In the adaptive sampling model of online learning, future prediction tasks can be arbitrarily dependent on the past. Every round, an adversary selects an instance to test the learner. After the learner makes a prediction, a noisy label is drawn from an underlying conditional label distribution and is revealed to both learner and adversary. A learner is consistent if it eventually performs no worse than the Bayes predictor. We study the $k_n$-nearest neighbor learner within this setting. In the worst-case, the learner will fail because an adaptive process can generate spurious patterns out of noise. However, under the mild smoothing assumption that the process generating the instances is uniformly absolutely continuous and that choice of $(k_n)_n$ is reasonable, the $k_n$-nearest neighbor rule is online consistent.
A Semantic Parsing Framework for End-to-End Time Normalization
Authors: Xin Su; Sungduk Yu; Phillip Howard; Steven Bethard
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Time normalization is the task of converting natural language temporal expressions into machine-readable representations. It underpins many downstream applications in information retrieval, question answering, and clinical decision-making. Traditional systems based on the ISO-TimeML schema limit expressivity and struggle with complex constructs such as compositional, event-relative, and multi-span time expressions. In this work, we introduce a novel formulation of time normalization as a code generation task grounded in the SCATE framework, which defines temporal semantics through symbolic and compositional operators. We implement a fully executable SCATE Python library and demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) can generate executable SCATE code. Leveraging this capability, we develop an automatic data augmentation pipeline using LLMs to synthesize large-scale annotated data with code-level validation. Our experiments show that small, locally deployable models trained on this augmented data can achieve strong performance, outperforming even their LLM parents and enabling practical, accurate, and interpretable time normalization.
Inner Speech as Behavior Guides: Steerable Imitation of Diverse Behaviors for Human-AI coordination
Authors: Rakshit Trivedi; Kartik Sharma; David C. Parkes
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts. Imitation learning has emerged as one of the prominent approaches to build such agents by training them to mimic human-demonstrated behaviors. However, current methods struggle to capture the inherent diversity and non-Markovian nature of human behavior and  lack the ability to steer behavior at inference time. Drawing inspiration from the theory of human cognitive processes, where inner speech guides action selection before execution, we propose MIMIC (Modeling Inner Motivations for Imitation and Control), a framework that uses language as an internal representation of behavioral intent. MIMIC employs the novel use of vision-language models as linguistic scaffolding to train a conditional variational autoencoder capable of generating inner speech from observations. A diffusion-based behavior cloning policy then selects actions conditioned on  current observations and the generated inner speech. MIMIC enables fine-grained steering of behavior at inference time by conditioning the agent on behavior-specific speech. Experiments across robotic manipulation tasks and human-AI collaboration games demonstrate that MIMIC significantly enhances both behavior diversity and fidelity to human demonstrations while enabling nuanced behavioral steering without training on additional demonstrations.
Incentivizing LLMs to Self-Verify Their Answers
Authors: Fuxiang Zhang; Jiacheng Xu; Chaojie Wang; Ce Cui; Yang Liu; Bo An
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward models to guide the model generation process, we find that only marginal gains can be acquired when scaling a model post-trained on specific reasoning tasks. We identify that the limited improvement stems from distribution discrepancies between the specific post-trained generator and the general reward model. To address this, we propose a framework that incentivizes LLMs to self-verify their own answers. By unifying answer generation and verification within a single reinforcement learning (RL) process, we train models that can effectively assess the correctness of their own solutions. The trained model can further scale its performance at inference time by verifying its generations, without the need for external verifiers. We train our self-verification models based on Qwen2.5-Math-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, demonstrating their capabilities across varying reasoning context lengths. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that our models can not only improve post-training performance but also enable effective test-time scaling. Our code is available at https://github.com/mansicer/self-verification.
HPSERec: A Hierarchical Partitioning and Stepwise Enhancement Framework for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Xiaolong Xu; Xudong Zhao; Haolong Xiang; Xuyun Zhang; Wei Shen; Hongsheng Hu; Lianyong Qi
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The long-tail problem in sequential recommender systems stems from imbalanced interaction data, resulting in suboptimal model performance for tail users and items. Recent studies have leveraged head data to enhance tail data for diminish the impact of the long-tail problem. However, these methods often adopt ad-hoc strategies to distinguish between head and tail data, which fails to capture the underlying distributional characteristics and structural properties of each category. Moreover, due to a substantial representational gap exists between head and tail data, head-to-tail enhancement strategies are susceptible to negative transfer, often leading to a decline in overall model performance. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical partitioning and stepwise enhancement framework, called HPSERec, for long-tailed sequential recommendation. HPSERec partitions the item set into subsets based on a data imbalance metric, assigning an expert network to each subset to capture user-specific local features. Subsequently, we apply knowledge distillation to progressively improve long-tail interest representation, followed by a Sinkhorn optimal transport-based feedback module, which aligns user representations across expert levels through a globally optimal and softly matched mapping. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that HPSERec consistently outperforms all baseline methods. The implementation code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HPSERec-2404.
FlyLoRA: Boosting Task Decoupling and Parameter Efficiency via Implicit Rank-Wise Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Heming Zou; Yunliang Zang; Wutong Xu; Yao Zhu; Xiangyang Ji
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for foundation models, but it suffers from parameter interference, resulting in suboptimal performance. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based LoRA variants show promise in mitigating intra-task correlations in single-task instruction tuning, they introduce additional router parameters and remain ineffective in multi-task model merging where inter-task interference arises. Inspired by the fly olfactory circuit, we propose FlyLoRA, an implicit MoE-based LoRA variant that introduces: (1) rank-wise expert activation in the up-projection matrix, and (2) an implicit router that unifies expert routing and down-projection, where a frozen sparse random projection matrix replaces the traditional dense trainable version. This design resolves the trade-off between intra-task decorrelation and computational efficiency by eliminating the need for an explicit router, while inherently mitigating inter-task interference due to the orthogonality property of random matrices. Extensive experiments across four domains---general knowledge understanding, scientific question answering, mathematical reasoning, and code generation---demonstrate consistent performance improvements over existing methods. Beyond empirical gains, FlyLoRA highlights how biological structures can inspire innovations in AI technologies. Code is available at https://github.com/gfyddha/FlyLoRA.
CAS-Spec: Cascade Adaptive Self-Speculative Decoding for On-the-Fly Lossless Inference Acceleration of LLMs
Authors: Zhiyuan Ning; Jiawei Shao; Ruge Xu; Xinfei Guo; Jun Zhang; Chi Zhang; Xuelong Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Speculative decoding has become a widely adopted as an effective technique for lossless inference acceleration when deploying large language models (LLMs).
While on-the-fly self-speculative methods offer seamless integration and broad utility, they often fall short of the speed gains achieved by methods relying on specialized training.
Cascading a hierarchy of draft models promises further acceleration and flexibility, but the high cost of training multiple models has limited its practical application.
In this paper, we propose a novel Cascade Adaptive Self-Speculative Decoding (CAS-Spec) method which constructs speculative draft models by leveraging dynamically switchable inference acceleration (DSIA) strategies, including layer sparsity and activation quantization.
Furthermore, traditional vertical and horizontal cascade algorithms are inefficient when applied to self-speculative decoding methods.
We introduce a Dynamic Tree Cascade (DyTC) algorithm that adaptively routes the multi-level draft models and assigns the draft lengths, based on the heuristics of acceptance rates and latency prediction.
Our CAS-Spec method achieves state-of-the-art acceleration compared to existing on-the-fly speculative decoding methods, with an average speedup from $1.1\times$ to $2.3\times$ over autoregressive decoding across various LLMs and datasets.
DyTC improves the average speedup by $47$\% and $48$\% over cascade-based baseline and tree-based baseline algorithms, respectively.
CAS-Spec can be easily integrated into most existing LLMs and holds promising potential for further acceleration as self-speculative decoding techniques continue to evolve.
Doodle to Detect: A Goofy but Powerful Approach to Skeleton-based Hand Gesture Recognition
Authors: Sang Hoon Han; Seonho Lee; Hyeok Nam; Jae Hyeon Park; Min Hee Cha; Min Geol Kim; Hyunse Lee; Sangyeon Ahn; Chae moon ju; Sung In Cho
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Skeleton-based hand gesture recognition plays a crucial role in enabling intuitive human–computer interaction. Traditional methods have primarily relied on hand-crafted features—such as distances between joints or positional changes across frames—to alleviate issues from viewpoint variation or body proportion differences. However, these hand-crafted features often fail to capture the full spatio-temporal information in raw skeleton data, exhibit poor interpretability, and depend heavily on dataset-specific preprocessing, limiting generalization. In addition, normalization strategies in traditional methods, which rely on training data, can introduce domain gaps between training and testing environments, further hindering robustness in diverse real-world settings. To overcome these challenges, we exclude traditional hand-crafted features and propose Skeleton Kinematics Extraction Through Coordinated grapH (SKETCH), a novel framework that directly utilizes raw four-dimensional (time, x, y, and z) skeleton sequences and transforms them into intuitive visual graph representations. The proposed framework incorporates a novel learnable Dynamic Range Embedding (DRE) to preserve axis-wise motion magnitudes lost during normalization and visual graph representations, enabling richer and more discriminative feature learning. This approach produces a graph image that richly captures the raw data’s inherent information and provides interpretable visual attention cues. Furthermore, SKETCH applies independent min–max normalization on fixed-length temporal windows in real time, mitigating degradation from absolute coordinate fluctuations caused by varying sensor viewpoints or differences in individual body proportions. Through these designs, our approach becomes inherently topology-agnostic, avoiding fragile dependencies on dataset- or sensor-specific skeleton definitions. By leveraging pre-trained vision backbones, SKETCH achieves efficient convergence and superior recognition accuracy. Experimental results on SHREC’19 and SHREC’22 benchmarks show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both robustness and generalization, establishing a new paradigm for skeleton-based hand gesture recognition. The code is available at https://github.com/capableofanything/SKETCH.
AutoDiscovery: Open-ended Scientific Discovery via Bayesian Surprise
Authors: Dhruv Agarwal; Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder; Reece Adamson; Megha Chakravorty; Satvika Reddy Gavireddy; Aditya Parashar; Harshit Surana; Bhavana Dalvi Mishra; Andrew McCallum; Ashish Sabharwal; Peter Clark
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The promise of autonomous scientific discovery (ASD) hinges not only on answering questions, but also on knowing which questions to ask. Most recent works in ASD explore the use of large language models (LLMs) in goal-driven settings, relying on human-specified research questions to guide hypothesis generation. However, scientific discovery may be accelerated further by allowing the AI system to drive exploration by its own criteria. The few existing approaches in open-ended ASD select hypotheses based on diversity heuristics or subjective proxies for human interestingness, but the former struggles to meaningfully navigate the typically vast hypothesis space, and the latter suffers from imprecise definitions. This paper presents AutoDiscovery—a method for open-ended ASD that instead drives scientific exploration using Bayesian surprise. Here, we quantify the epistemic shift from the LLM’s prior beliefs about a hypothesis to its posterior beliefs after gathering experimental results. To efficiently explore the space of nested hypotheses, our method employs a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) strategy with progressive widening using surprisal as the reward function. We evaluate AutoDiscovery in the setting of data-driven discovery across 21 real-world datasets spanning domains such as biology, economics, finance, and behavioral science. Our results demonstrate that under a fixed budget, AutoDiscovery substantially outperforms competitors by producing 5-29% more discoveries deemed surprising by the LLM. Our human evaluation further reveals that two-thirds of discoveries made by our system are surprising to domain experts as well, suggesting this is an important step towards building open-ended ASD systems.
Graph-Based Attention for Differentiable MaxSAT Solving
Authors: Sota Moriyama; Katsumi Inoue
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: The use of deep learning to solve fundamental AI problems such as Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) has been explored recently to develop robust and scalable reasoning systems. This work advances such neural-based reasoning approaches by developing a new Graph Neural Network (GNN) to differentiably solve (weighted) Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT). To this end, we propose SAT-based Graph Attention Networks (SGATs) as novel GNNs that are built on t-norm based attention and message passing mechanisms, and structurally designed to approximate greedy distributed local search. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we develop a local search solver that uses SGATs to continuously solve any given MaxSAT problem. Experiments on (weighted) MaxSAT benchmark datasets demonstrate that SGATs significantly outperform existing neural-based architectures, and achieve state-of-the-art performance among continuous approaches, highlighting the strength of the proposed model.
Table as a Modality for Large Language Models
Authors: Liyao Li; Chao Ye; Wentao Ye; Yifei Sun; Zhe Jiang; Haobo Wang; Jiaming Tian; Yiming Zhang; NINGTAO WANG; Xing Fu; Gang Chen; Junbo Zhao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: To migrate the remarkable successes of Large Language Models (LLMs), the community has made numerous efforts to generalize them to the table reasoning tasks for the widely deployed tabular data. Despite that, in this work, by showing a probing experiment on our proposed StructQA benchmark, we postulate that even the most advanced LLMs (such as GPTs) may still fall short of coping with tabular data. More specifically, the current scheme often simply relies on serializing the tabular data, together with the meta information, then inputting them through the LLMs. We argue that the loss of structural information is the root of this shortcoming. In this work, we further propose TAMO, which bears an ideology to treat the tables as an independent modality integrated with the text tokens. The resulting model in TAMO is a multimodal framework consisting of a hypergraph neural network as the global table encoder seamlessly integrated with the mainstream LLM. Empirical results on various benchmarking datasets, including HiTab, WikiTQ, WikiSQL, FeTaQA, and StructQA, have demonstrated significant improvements on generalization with an average relative gain of **42.65%**.