GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
EvaLearn: Quantifying the Learning Capability and Efficiency of LLMs via Sequential Problem Solving
Authors: Shihan Dou; Ming Zhang; Chenhao Huang; Jiayi Chen; Feng Chen; Shichun Liu; Yan Liu; Chenxiao Liu; CHENG ZHONG; Zongzhang Zhang; Tao Gui; Chao Xin; Wei Chengzhi; Lin Yan; Qi Zhang; Xuanjing Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We introduce EvaLearn, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their learning capability and efficiency in challenging tasks, a critical, yet underexplored aspect of model potential. EvaLearn contains 648 challenging problems across six task types, grouped into 182 sequences, each sequence dedicated to one task type. Diverging from most existing benchmarks that evaluate models in parallel, EvaLearn requires models to solve problems sequentially, allowing them to leverage the experience gained from previous solutions. EvaLearn provides five comprehensive automated metrics to evaluate models and quantify their learning capability and efficiency. We extensively benchmark nine frontier models and observe varied performance profiles: some models, such as Claude-3.7-sonnet, start with moderate initial performance but exhibit strong learning ability, while some models struggle to benefit from experience and may even show negative transfer. Moreover, we investigate model performance under two learning settings and find that instance-level rubrics and teacher-model feedback further facilitate model learning. Importantly, we observe that current LLMs with stronger static abilities do not show a clear advantage in learning capability across all tasks, highlighting that EvaLearn evaluates a new dimension of model performance. We hope EvaLearn provides a novel evaluation perspective for assessing LLM potential and understanding the gap between models and human capabilities, promoting the development of deeper and more dynamic evaluation approaches. All datasets, the automatic evaluation framework, and the results studied in this paper are available in the supplementary materials.
Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network
Authors: YiliWang; Tairan Huang; Changlong He; Qiutong Li; Jianliang Gao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Heterogeneous temporal graphs (HTGs) are ubiquitous data structures in the real world. Recently, to enhance representation learning on HTGs, numerous attention-based neural networks have been proposed. Despite these successes, existing methods rely on a decoupled temporal and spatial learning paradigm, which weakens interactions of spatio-temporal information and leads to a high model complexity. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel learning paradigm for HTGs called Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network (SE-HTGNN). Specifically, we innovatively integrate temporal modeling into spatial learning via a novel dynamic attention mechanism, which substantially reduces model complexity while enhancing discriminative representation learning on HTGs. Additionally, to comprehensively and adaptively understand HTGs, we leverage large language models to prompt SE-HTGNN, enabling the model to capture the implicit properties of node types as prior knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SE-HTGNN achieves up to 10× speed-up over the state-of-the-art and latest baseline while maintaining the best forecasting accuracy.
Rethinking Out-of-Distribution Detection and Generalization with Collective Behavior Dynamics
Authors: Zhenbin Wang; Lei Zhang; Wei Huang; Zhao Zhang; Zizhou Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) problems commonly occur when models process data with a distribution significantly deviates from the in-distribution (InD) training data. In this paper, we hypothesize that a $\textit{field}$ or $\textit{potential}$ more essential than features exists, and features are not the ultimate essence of the data but rather manifestations of them during training. we investigate OOD problems from the perspective of collective behavior dynamics. With this in mind, we first treat the output of the feature extractor as charged particles and investigate their collective behavior dynamics within a self-consistent electric field. Then, to characterize the relationship between OOD problems and dynamical equations, we introduce the $\textit{basin of attraction}$ and prove that its boundary can be represented as the zero level set of a differentiable function of the potential, $\textit{i.e.}$, the spatial integral of field. We further demonstrate that: $\textit{i)}$ InD and OOD inputs can be effectively separated based on whether they are steady state solutions for specific field conditions, enabling robust OOD detection and outperforming prior methods over three benchmarks. $\textit{ii)}$ the generalization capability correlates positively with the basin of attraction. By analyzing the dynamics of perturbations, we propose that the potential is well-characterized by a Fourier-domain form of the Poisson equation. Evaluated on six benchmark datasets, our method rivals the SoTA approaches for OOD generalization and can be seamlessly integrated with them to deliver additional gains.
FracFace: Breaking the Visual Clues—Fractal-Based Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition
Authors: Wanying Dai; Beibei Li; Naipeng Dong; Guangdong Bai; Jin Song Dong
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Face recognition is essential for identity authentication, but the rich visual clues in facial images pose significant privacy risks, highlighting the critical importance of privacy-preserving solutions. For instance, numerous studies have shown that generative models are capable of effectively performing reconstruction attacks that result in the restoration of original visual clues. To mitigate this threat, we introduce FracFace, a fractal-based privacy-preserving face recognition framework. This approach effectively weakens the visual clues that can be exploited by reconstruction attacks by disrupting the spatial structure in frequency domain features, while retaining the vital visual clues required for identity recognition. To achieve this, we craft a Frequency Channels Refining module that reduces sparsity in the frequency domain. It suppresses visual clues that could be exploited by reconstruction attacks, while preserving features indispensable for recognition, thus making these attacks more challenging. More significantly, we design a Frequency Fractal Mapping module that obfuscates deep representations by remapping refined frequency channels into a fractal-based privacy structure. By leveraging the self-similarity of fractals, this module preserves identity relevant features while enhancing defense capabilities, thereby improving the overall robustness of the protection scheme. Experiments conducted on multiple public face recognition benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed FracFace significantly reduces the visual recoverability of facial features, while maintaining high recognition accuracy, as well as the superiorities over state-of-the-art privacy protection approaches.
An Adaptive Quantum Circuit of Dempster's Rule of Combination for Uncertain Pattern Classification
Authors: Fuyuan Xiao; Yu Zhou; Witold Pedrycz
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: In pattern classification, efficient uncertainty reasoning plays a critical role, particularly in real-time applications involving noisy data, ambiguous class boundaries, or overlapping categories. Leveraging the advanced computational power of quantum computing, an Adaptive Quantum Circuit for Dempster’s Rule of Combination (AQC-DRC) is proposed to address efficient classification under uncertain environments. The AQC-DRC is developed within the framework of quantum evidence theory (QET) and facilitates decision-making based on quantum basic probability and plausibility levels, which is a generalized Bayesian inference method. The AQC-DRC provides a deterministic computation of DRC, ensuring that quantum fusion outcomes in uncertain pattern classification are exactly aligned with those of the classical method, while simultaneously achieving exponential reductions in the computational complexity of evidence combination and significantly improving fusion efficiency. It is founded that the quantum basic probability amplitude function in QET, as a generalized quantum probability amplitude, can be naturally utilized to express the quantum amplitude encoding. In addition, the quantum basic probability in QET, as a generalized quantum probability, naturally forms a quantum basic probability distribution and can be used to represent quantum measurement outcomes for quantum basic probability level decision-making. Furthermore, the quantum plausibility function in QET also can be naturally used to express the quantum measurement outcomes for quantum plausibility level decision-making. These findings enrich the physical understanding of quantum amplitude encoding and quantum measurement outcomes, offering broad application prospects for representing and processing uncertain knowledge in pattern classification.
TARFVAE: Efficient One-Step Generative Time Series Forecasting via TARFLOW based VAE
Authors: Jiawen Wei; Lan Jiang; Pengbo Wei; Ziwen Ye; Teng Song; Chen Chen; Guangrui Ma
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Time series data is ubiquitous, with forecasting applications spanning from finance to healthcare. Beyond popular deterministic methods, generative models are gaining attention due to advancements in areas like image synthesis and video generation, as well as their inherent ability to provide probabilistic predictions. However, existing generative approaches mostly involve recurrent generative operations or repeated denoising steps, making the prediction laborious, particularly for long-term forecasting. Most of them only conduct experiments for relatively short-term forecasting, with limited comparison to deterministic methods in long-term forecasting, leaving their practical advantages unclear. This paper presents TARFVAE, a novel generative framework that combines the Transformer-based autoregressive flow (TARFLOW) and variational autoencoder (VAE) for efficient one-step generative time series forecasting. Inspired by the rethinking that complex architectures for extracting time series representations might not be necessary, we add a flow module, TARFLOW, to VAE to promote spontaneous learning of latent variables that benefit predictions. TARFLOW enhances VAE's posterior estimation by breaking the Gaussian assumption, thereby enabling a more informative latent space. TARFVAE uses only the forward process of TARFLOW, avoiding autoregressive inverse operations and thus ensuring fast generation. During generation, it samples from the prior latent space and directly generates full-horizon forecasts via the VAE decoder. With simple MLP modules, TARFVAE achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art deterministic and generative models across different forecast horizons on benchmark datasets while maintaining efficient prediction speed, demonstrating its effectiveness as an efficient and powerful solution for generative time series forecasting. Our code is available at https://github.com/Gavine77/TARFVAE.
FairDICE: Fairness-Driven Offline Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Woosung Kim; Jinho Lee; Jongmin Lee; Byung-Jun Lee
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) aims to optimize policies in the presence of conflicting objectives, where linear scalarization is commonly used to reduce vector-valued returns into scalar signals. While effective for certain preferences, this approach cannot capture fairness-oriented goals such as Nash social welfare or max-min fairness, which require nonlinear and non-additive trade-offs. Although several online algorithms have been proposed for specific fairness objectives, a unified approach for optimizing nonlinear welfare criteria in the offline setting—where learning must proceed from a fixed dataset—remains unexplored. In this work, we present FairDICE, the first offline MORL framework that directly optimizes nonlinear welfare objective. FairDICE leverages distribution correction estimation to jointly account for welfare maximization and distributional regularization, enabling stable and sample-efficient learning without requiring explicit preference weights or exhaustive weight search. Across multiple offline benchmarks, FairDICE demonstrates strong fairness-aware performance compared to existing baselines.
One for All: Universal Topological Primitive Transfer for Graph Structure Learning
Authors: Yide Qiu; Tong Zhang; Xing Cai; Hui Yan; Zhen Cui
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The non-Euclidean geometry inherent in graph structures fundamentally impedes cross-graph knowledge transfer. Drawing inspiration from texture transfer in computer vision, we pioneer topological primitives as transferable semantic units for graph structural knowledge. To address three critical barriers - the absence of specialized benchmarks, aligned semantic representations, and systematic transfer methodologies - we present G²SN-Transfer, a unified framework comprising: (i) TopoGraph-Mapping that transforms non-Euclidean graphs into transferable sequences via topological primitive distribution dictionaries; (ii) G²SN, a dual-stream architecture learning text-topology aligned representations through contrastive alignment; and (iii) AdaCross-Transfer, a data-adaptive knowledge transfer mechanism leveraging cross-attention for both full-parameter and parameter-frozen scenarios. Particularly, G²SN is a dual-stream sequence network driven by ordinary differential equations, and our theoretical analysis establishes the convergence guarantee of G²SN. We construct STA-18, the first large-scale benchmark with aligned topological primitive-text pairs across 18 diverse graph datasets. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that G²SN achieves state-of-the-art performance on four structural learning tasks (average 3.2\% F1-score improvement), while our transfer method yields consistent enhancements across 13 downstream tasks (5.2\% average gains) including 10 large-scale graph datasets. The datasets and code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UGSKT-C10E/.
EVOREFUSE: Evolutionary Prompt Optimization for Evaluation and Mitigation of LLM Over-Refusal to Pseudo-Malicious Instructions
Authors: Xiaorui Wu; Fei Li; Xiaofeng Mao; Xin Zhang; Li Zheng; Yuxiang Peng; Chong Teng; Donghong Ji; Zhuang Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) frequently refuse to respond to pseudo-malicious instructions: semantically harmless input queries triggering unnecessary LLM refusals due to conservative safety alignment, significantly impairing user experience. Collecting such instructions is crucial for evaluating and mitigating over-refusals, but existing instruction curation methods, like manual creation or instruction rewriting, either lack scalability or fail to produce sufficiently diverse and effective refusal-inducing prompts. To address these limitations, we introduce EVOREFUSE, a prompt optimization approach that generates diverse pseudo-malicious instructions consistently eliciting confident refusals across LLMs. EVOREFUSE employs an evolutionary algorithm exploring the instruction space in more diverse directions than existing methods via mutation strategies and recombination, and iteratively evolves seed instructions to maximize evidence lower bound on LLM refusal probability. Using EVOREFUSE, we create two novel datasets: EVOREFUSE-TEST, a benchmark of 582 pseudo-malicious instructions that outperforms the next-best benchmark with 85.34% higher average refusal triggering rate across 9 LLMs without a safety-prior system prompt, 34.86% greater lexical diversity, and 40.03% improved LLM response confidence scores; and EVOREFUSE-ALIGN, which provides 3,000 pseudo-malicious instructions with responses for supervised and preference-based alignment training. With supervised fine-tuning on EVOREFUSE-ALIGN, LLAMA3.1-8B-INSTRUCT achieves up to 29.85% fewer over-refusals than models trained on the second-best alignment dataset, without compromising safety. Our analysis with EVOREFUSE-TEST reveals models trigger over-refusals by overly focusing on sensitive keywords while ignoring broader context. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/FishT0ucher/EVOREFUSE .
Dynamic Regret Reduces to Kernelized Static Regret
Authors: Andrew Jacobsen; Alessandro Rudi; Francesco Orabona; Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We study dynamic regret in online convex optimization, where the objective is to achieve low cumulative loss relative to an arbitrary benchmark sequence. By observing that competing with an arbitrary sequence of comparators $u_{1},\ldots,u_{T}$ in $\mathcal{W}\subseteq\mathbb{R}^{d}$ can be reframed as competing with a  *fixed* comparator *function* $u:[1,T]\to \mathcal{W}$,  we cast dynamic regret minimization as a *static regret* problem in a *function space*. By carefully constructing a suitable function space in the form of a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), our reduction enables us to recover the optimal $R_{T}(u_{1},\ldots,u_{T}) = \mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\sum_{t}\\|u_{t}-u_{t-1}\\|T})$ dynamic regret guarantee in the setting of linear losses, and yields new scale-free and directionally-adaptive dynamic regret guarantees. Moreover, unlike prior dynamic-to-static reductions---which are valid only for linear losses---our reduction holds for *any* sequence of losses, allowing us to recover $\mathcal{O}\big(\\|u\\|^2_{\mathcal{H}}+d_{\mathrm{eff}}(\lambda)\ln T\big)$ bounds when the losses have meaningful curvature, where $d_{\mathrm{eff}}(\lambda)$ is a measure of complexity of the RKHS. Despite working in an infinite-dimensional space, the resulting reduction leads to algorithms that are computable in practice, due to the reproducing property of RKHSs.
A Differential and Pointwise Control Approach to Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Minh Phuong Nguyen; Chandrajit L. Bajaj
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces remains challenging in scientific computing due to poor sample efficiency and lack of pathwise physical consistency. We introduce Differential Reinforcement Learning (Differential RL), a novel framework that reformulates RL from a continuous-time control perspective via a differential dual formulation. This induces a Hamiltonian structure that embeds physics priors and ensures consistent trajectories without requiring explicit constraints. To implement Differential RL, we develop Differential Policy Optimization (dfPO), a pointwise, stage-wise algorithm that refines local movement operators along the trajectory for improved sample efficiency and dynamic alignment. We establish pointwise convergence guarantees, a property not available in standard RL, and derive a competitive theoretical regret bound of $\mathcal{O}(K^{5/6})$. Empirically, dfPO outperforms standard RL baselines on representative scientific computing tasks, including surface modeling, grid control, and molecular dynamics, under low-data and physics-constrained conditions.
Web-Shepherd: Advancing PRMs for Reinforcing Web Agents
Authors: Hyungjoo Chae; Sunghwan Kim; Junhee Cho; Seungone Kim; Seungjun Moon; Gyeom Hwangbo; Dongha Lim; Minjin Kim; Yeonjun Hwang; Minju Gwak; Dongwook Choi; Minseok Kang; Gwanhoon Im; ByeongUng Cho; Hyojun Kim; Jun Hee Han; Taeyoon Kwon; Minju Kim; Beong-woo Kwak; Dongjin Kang; Jinyoung Yeo
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Web navigation is a unique domain that can automate many repetitive real-life tasks and is challenging as it requires long-horizon sequential decision making beyond typical multimodal large language model (MLLM) tasks.
Yet, specialized reward models for web navigation that can be utilized during both training and test-time have been absent until now. Despite the importance of speed and cost-effectiveness, prior works have utilized MLLMs as reward models, which poses significant constraints for real-world deployment. To address this, in this work, we propose the first process reward model (PRM) called Web-Shepherd which could assess web navigation trajectories in a step-level. To achieve this, we first construct the WebPRM Collection, a large-scale dataset with 40K step-level preference pairs and annotated checklists spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels. Next, we also introduce the WebRewardBench, the first meta-evaluation benchmark for evaluating PRMs. In our experiments, we observe that our Web-Shepherd achieves about 30 points better accuracy compared to using GPT-4o on WebRewardBench. 
Furthermore, when testing on WebArena-lite by using GPT-4o-mini as the policy and Web-Shepherd as the verifier, we achieve 10.9 points better performance, in 10x less cost compared to using GPT-4o-mini as the verifier. 
Our model, dataset, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/kyle8581/Web-Shepherd.
The Quest for Universal Master Key Filters in DS-CNNs
Authors: Zahra Babaiee; Peyman Kiasari; Daniela Rus; Radu Grosu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: A recent study has proposed the ``Master Key Filters Hypothesis" for convolutional neural network filters. This paper extends this hypothesis by radically constraining its scope to a single set of just 8 universal filters that depthwise separable convolutional networks inherently converge to. While conventional DS-CNNs employ thousands of distinct trained filters, our analysis reveals these filters are predominantly linear shifts (ax+b) of our discovered universal set. Through systematic unsupervised search, we extracted these fundamental patterns across different architectures and datasets. Remarkably, networks initialized with these 8 unique frozen filters achieve over 80\% ImageNet accuracy, and even outperform models with thousands of trainable parameters when applied to smaller datasets. The identified master key filters closely match Difference of Gaussians (DoGs), Gaussians, and their derivatives, structures that are not only fundamental to classical image processing but also strikingly similar to receptive fields in mammalian visual systems. Our findings provide compelling evidence that depthwise convolutional layers naturally gravitate toward this fundamental set of spatial operators regardless of task or architecture. This work offers new insights for understanding generalization and transfer learning through the universal language of these master key filters.