GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Quantifying Elicitation of Latent Capabilities in Language Models
Authors: Elizabeth Donoway; Hailey Joren; Arushi Somani; Henry Sleight; Julian Michael; Michael R DeWeese; John Schulman; Ethan Perez; Fabien Roger; Jan Leike
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Large language models often possess latent capabilities that lie dormant unless explicitly elicited, or surfaced, through fine-tuning or prompt engineering. Predicting, assessing, and understanding these latent capabilities pose significant challenges in the development of effective, safe AI systems. In this work, we recast elicitation as an information-constrained fine-tuning problem and empirically characterize upper bounds on the minimal number of parameters needed to achieve specific task performances. We find that training as few as 10–100 randomly chosen parameters—several orders of magnitude fewer than state-of-the-art parameter-efficient methods—can recover up to 50\% of the performance gap between pretrained-only and full fine-tuned models, and 1,000s to 10,000s of parameters can recover 95\% of this performance gap. We show that a logistic curve fits the relationship between the number of trained parameters and model performance gap recovery. This scaling generalizes across task formats and domains, as well as model sizes and families, extending to reasoning models and remaining robust to increases in inference compute. To help explain this behavior, we consider a simplified picture of elicitation via fine-tuning where each trainable parameter serves as an encoding mechanism for accessing task-specific knowledge. We observe a relationship between the number of trained parameters and how efficiently relevant model capabilities can be accessed and elicited, offering a potential route to distinguish elicitation from teaching.
Stable Matching with Ties: Approximation Ratios and Learning
Authors: Shiyun Lin; Simon Mauras; Nadav Merlis; Vianney Perchet
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We study matching markets with ties, where workers on one side of the market may have tied preferences over jobs, determined by their matching utilities. Unlike classical two-sided markets with strict preferences, no single stable matching exists that is utility-maximizing for all workers. To address this challenge, we introduce the \emph{Optimal Stable Share} (OSS)-ratio, which measures the ratio of a worker's maximum achievable utility in any stable matching to their utility in a given matching. We prove that distributions over only stable matchings can incur linear utility losses, i.e., an $\Omega (N)$ OSS-ratio, where $N$ is the number of workers. To overcome this, we design an algorithm that efficiently computes a distribution over (possibly non-stable) matchings, achieving an asymptotically tight $O (\log N)$ OSS-ratio.
    When exact utilities are unknown, our second algorithm guarantees workers a logarithmic approximation of their optimal utility under bounded instability.
    Finally, we extend our offline approximation results to a bandit learning setting where utilities are only observed for matched pairs. In this setting, we consider worker-optimal stable regret, design an adaptive algorithm that smoothly interpolates between markets with strict preferences and those with statistical ties, and establish a lower bound revealing the fundamental trade-off between strict and tied preference regimes.
Accurate KV Cache Eviction via Anchor Direction Projection for Efficient LLM Inference
Authors: Zijie Geng; Jie Wang; Ziqi Liu; Feng Ju; Yiming Li; Xing Li; Mingxuan Yuan; Jianye HAO; Defu Lian; Enhong Chen; Feng Wu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Key-Value (KV) cache eviction---which retains the KV pairs of the most important tokens while discarding less important ones---is a critical technique for optimizing both memory usage and inference latency in large language models (LLMs).
However, existing approaches often rely on simple heuristics---such as attention weights---to measure token importance, overlooking the spatial relationships between token value states in the vector space.
This often leads to suboptimal token selections and thus performance degradation.
To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method, namely **AnDPro** (**An**chor **D**irection **Pro**jection), which introduces a projection-based scoring function to more accurately measure token importance.
Specifically, AnDPro operates in the space of value vectors and leverages the projections of these vectors onto an *``Anchor Direction''*---the direction of the pre-eviction output---to measure token importance and guide more accurate token selection.
Experiments on $16$ datasets from the LongBench benchmark demonstrate that AnDPro can maintain $96.07\\%$ of the full cache accuracy using only $3.44\\%$ KV cache budget, reducing KV cache budget size by $46.0\\%$ without compromising quality compared to previous state-of-the-arts.
Reinforcement learning for one-shot DAG scheduling with comparability identification and dense reward
Authors: Xumai Qi; Dongdong Zhang; Taotao Liu; Hongcheng Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: In recent years, many studies proposed to generate solutions for Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) scheduling problem in one shot by combining reinforcement learning and list scheduling heuristic. However, these existing methods suffer from biased estimation of sampling probabilities and inefficient guidance in training, due to redundant comparisons among node priorities and the sparse reward challenge. To address these issues, we analyze of the limitations of these existing methods, and propose a novel one-shot DAG scheduling method with comparability identification and dense reward signal, based on the policy gradient framework. In our method, a comparable antichain identification mechanism is proposed to eliminate the problem of redundant nodewise priority comparison. We also propose a dense reward signal for node level decision-making optimization in training, effectively addressing the sparse reward challenge. The experimental results show that the proposed method can yield superior results of scheduling objectives compared to other learning-based DAG scheduling methods.
Tortoise and Hare Guidance: Accelerating Diffusion Model Inference with Multirate Integration
Authors: Yunghee Lee; Byeonghyun Pak; Junwha Hong; Hoseong Kim
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we propose Tortoise and Hare Guidance (THG), a training-free strategy that accelerates diffusion sampling while maintaining high-fidelity generation. We demonstrate that the noise estimate and the additional guidance term exhibit markedly different sensitivity to numerical error by reformulating the classifier-free guidance (CFG) ODE as a multirate system of ODEs. Our error-bound analysis shows that the additional guidance branch is more robust to approximation, revealing substantial redundancy that conventional solvers fail to exploit. 
Building on this insight, THG significantly reduces the computation of the additional guidance: the noise estimate is integrated with the tortoise equation on the original, fine-grained timestep grid, while the additional guidance is integrated with the hare equation only on a coarse grid. We also introduce (i) an error-bound-aware timestep sampler that adaptively selects step sizes and (ii) a guidance-scale scheduler that stabilizes large extrapolation spans. 
THG reduces the number of function evaluations (NFE) by up to 30% with virtually no loss in generation fidelity (∆ImageReward ≤ 0.032) and outperforms state-of-the-art CFG-based training-free accelerators under identical computation budgets. Our findings highlight the potential of multirate formulations for diffusion solvers, paving the way for real-time high-quality image synthesis without any model retraining. The source code is available at https://github.com/yhlee-add/THG.
Tropical Attention: Neural Algorithmic Reasoning for Combinatorial Algorithms
Authors: Baran Hashemi; Kurt Pasque; Chris Teska; Ruriko Yoshida
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: *Can algebraic geometry enhance the sharpness, robustness, and interpretability of modern neural reasoning models  by equipping them with a mathematically grounded inductive bias?* 
To answer this, we introduce Tropical Attention, an attention mechanism grounded in tropical geometry that lifts the attention kernel into tropical projective space, where reasoning is piecewise-linear and 1-Lipschitz, thus preserving the polyhedral decision structure inherent to combinatorial reasoning. We prove that multi-head Tropical Attention (MHTA) stacks universally approximate tropical circuits and realize tropical transitive closure through composition, achieving polynomial resource bounds without invoking recurrent mechanisms. These guarantees explain why the induced polyhedral decision boundaries remain sharp and scale-invariant, rather than smoothed by Softmax. Empirically, we show that Tropical Attention delivers stronger out-of-distribution generalization in both length and value, with high robustness against perturbative noise, and substantially faster inference with fewer parameters compared to Softmax-based and recurrent attention baselines, respectively. For the first time, we push the domain of neural algorithmic reasoning beyond **PTIME** problems to **NP-hard/complete** problems, paving the way toward  sharper and more expressive Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) capable of tackling complex combinatorial challenges in Phylogenetics, Cryptography, Particle Physics, and Mathematical Discovery. The code is available at https://github.com/Baran-phys/Tropical-Attention/.
AI-Researcher: Autonomous Scientific Innovation
Authors: Jiabin Tang; Lianghao Xia; Zhonghang Li; Chao Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: The powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematics and coding, combined with their ability to automate complex tasks through agentic frameworks, present unprecedented opportunities for accelerating scientific innovation. In this paper, we introduce AI-Researcher, a fully autonomous research system that transforms how AI-driven scientific discovery is conducted and evaluated. Our framework seamlessly orchestrates the complete research pipeline--from literature review and hypothesis generation to algorithm implementation and publication-ready manuscript preparation--with minimal human intervention. To rigorously assess autonomous research capabilities, we develop Scientist-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising state-of-the-art papers across diverse AI research domains, featuring both guided innovation and open-ended exploration tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AI-Researcher achieves remarkable implementation success rates and produces research papers that approach human-level quality. This work establishes new foundations for autonomous scientific innovation that can complement human researchers by systematically exploring solution spaces beyond cognitive limitations.
GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations - Natural Language Rules for Global GNN Interpretability
Authors: Burouj Armgaan; Eshan Jain; Harsh Pandey; Mahesh Chandran; Sayan Ranu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 oral)

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used for node classification, yet their opaque decision-making limits trust and adoption. While local explanations offer insights into individual predictions, global explanation methods—those that characterize an entire class—remain underdeveloped. Existing global explainers rely on motif discovery in small graphs, an approach that breaks down in large, real-world settings where subgraph repetition is rare, node attributes are high-dimensional, and predictions arise from complex structure-attribute interactions. We propose GnnXemplar, a novel global explainer inspired from Exemplar Theory from cognitive science. GnnXemplar identifies representative nodes in the GNN embedding space—exemplars—and explains predictions using natural language rules derived from their neighborhoods. Exemplar selection is framed as a coverage maximization problem over reverse $k$-nearest neighbors, for which we provide an efficient greedy approximation. To derive interpretable rules, we employ a self-refining prompt strategy using large language models (LLMs). Experiments across diverse benchmarks show that GnnXemplar significantly outperforms existing methods in fidelity, scalability, and human interpretability, as validated by a user study with 60 participants.
BREAD: Branched Rollouts from Expert Anchors Bridge SFT & RL for Reasoning
Authors: Xuechen Zhang; Zijian Huang; Yingcong Li; Chenshun Ni; Jiasi Chen; Samet Oymak
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Small language models (SLMs) struggle to learn complex reasoning behaviors, especially when high-quality traces are scarce or difficult to learn from. A typical approach for training such models combines a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, often to distill reasoning capabilities from a larger model, followed by a reinforcement learning (RL) stage such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). In this paper, we investigate the fundamental limitations of this SFT + RL paradigm and propose methods to overcome them. Using a toy student-expert model over Markov chains, we demonstrate that the SFT + RL strategy can fail completely when (1) the expert's traces are too difficult for the small model to express, or (2) the small model's initialization achieves exponentially sparse rewards as task complexity grows. To address these, we introduce BREAD, a GRPO variant that bridges SFT and RL via partial expert guidance and branch rollouts. When self-generated traces fail, BREAD adaptively inserts short expert prefixes/hints, allowing the small model to complete the rest of the reasoning path, and ensuring that each update includes at least one successful trace. This mechanism both densifies the reward signal and induces a natural learning curriculum. BREAD requires fewer than 40\% of ground-truth traces, consistently outperforming standard GRPO while speeding up the training by about 3$\times$. Importantly, we find that BREAD helps the model solve problems that are otherwise unsolvable by the SFT + RL strategy, highlighting how branch rollouts and expert guidance can aid SLM reasoning.
Abstain Mask Retain Core: Time Series Prediction by Adaptive Masking Loss with Representation Consistency
Authors: Renzhao Liang; Sizhe Xu; Chenggang Xie; Jingru Chen; Feiyang Ren; Shu Yang; Takahiro Yabe
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a pivotal role in critical domains such as energy management and financial markets. Although deep learning-based approaches (e.g., MLP, RNN, Transformer) have achieved remarkable progress, the prevailing "long-sequence information gain hypothesis" exhibits inherent limitations. Through systematic experimentation, this study reveals a counterintuitive phenomenon: appropriately truncating historical data can paradoxically enhance prediction accuracy, indicating that existing models learn substantial redundant features (e.g., noise or irrelevant fluctuations) during training, thereby compromising effective signal extraction. Building upon information bottleneck theory, we propose an innovative solution termed Adaptive Masking Loss with Representation Consistency (AMRC), which features two core components: 1) Dynamic masking loss, which adaptively identified highly discriminative temporal segments to guide gradient descent during model training; 2) Representation consistency constraint, which stabilized the mapping relationships among inputs, labels, and predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that AMRC effectively suppresses redundant feature learning while significantly improving model performance. This work not only challenges conventional assumptions in temporal modeling but also provides novel theoretical insights and methodological breakthroughs for developing efficient and robust forecasting models. We have made our code available at \url{https://github.com/MazelTovy/AMRC}.
Improving Task-Specific Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with General MLLMs via Prompting
Authors: Haoyu Zhang; Yinan Zhang; Chaolong Ying; Xiaoying Tang; Tianshu Yu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to predict sentiment from diverse data types, such as video, audio, and language. Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks. However, in MSA, the increase in computational costs does not always correspond to a significant improvement in performance, raising concerns about the cost-effectiveness of applying MLLMs to MSA. This paper introduces the MLLM-Guided Multimodal Sentiment Learning Framework (MMSLF). It improves the performance of task-specific MSA models by leveraging the generalized knowledge of MLLMs through a teacher-student framework, rather than directly using MLLMs for sentiment prediction. First, the proposed teacher built upon a powerful MLLM (e.g., GPT-4o-mini), guides the student model to align multimodal representations through MLLM-generated context-aware prompts. Then, knowledge distillation enables the student to mimic the teacher’s predictions, thus allowing it to predict sentiment independently without relying on the context-aware prompts. Extensive experiments on the SIMS, MOSI, and MOSEI datasets demonstrate that our framework enables task-specific models to achieve state-of-the-art performance across most metrics. This also provides new insights into the application of general MLLMs for improving MSA.
Segment Policy Optimization: Effective Segment-Level Credit Assignment in RL for Large Language Models
Authors: Yiran Guo; Lijie Xu; Jie Liu; Ye Dan; Shuang Qiu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models effectively using reinforcement learning (RL) remains a crucial challenge. Existing approaches primarily adopt two contrasting advantage estimation granularities: token-level methods (e.g., PPO) aim to provide fine-grained advantage signals but suffer from inaccurate estimation due to difficulties in training an accurate critic model. On the other extreme, trajectory-level methods (e.g., GRPO) solely rely on a coarse-grained advantage signal from the final reward, leading to imprecise credit assignment. To address these limitations, we propose Segment Policy Optimization (SPO), a novel RL framework that leverages segment-level advantage estimation at an intermediate granularity, achieving a better balance by offering more precise credit assignment than trajectory-level methods and requiring fewer estimation points than token-level methods, enabling accurate advantage estimation based on Monte Carlo (MC) without a critic model. SPO features three components with novel strategies: (1) flexible segment partition; (2) accurate segment advantage estimation; and (3) policy optimization using segment advantages, including a novel probability-mask strategy. We further instantiate SPO for two specific scenarios: (1) SPO-chain for short chain-of-thought (CoT), featuring novel cutpoint-based partition and chain-based advantage estimation, achieving $6$-$12$ percentage point improvements in accuracy over PPO and GRPO on GSM8K. (2) SPO-tree for long CoT, featuring novel tree-based advantage estimation, which significantly reduces the cost of MC estimation, achieving $7$-$11$ percentage point improvements over GRPO on MATH500 under 2K and 4K context evaluation. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/AIFrameResearch/SPO.
Connecting Neural Models Latent Geometries with Relative Geodesic Representations
Authors: Hanlin Yu; Berfin Inal; Georgios Arvanitidis; Søren Hauberg; Francesco Locatello; Marco Fumero
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Neural models learn representations of high-dimensional data on low-dimensional manifolds. Multiple factors, including stochasticities in the training process, model architectures, and additional inductive biases, may induce different representations, even when learning the same task on the same data. However, it has recently been shown that when a latent structure is shared between distinct latent spaces, relative distances between representations can be preserved, up to distortions. Building on this idea, we demonstrate that exploiting the differential-geometric structure of latent spaces of neural models, it is possible to capture *precisely* the transformations between representational spaces trained on similar data distributions. Specifically, we assume that distinct neural models parametrize approximately the same underlying manifold, and introduce a representation based on the *pullback metric* that captures the intrinsic structure of the latent space, while scaling efficiently to large models. We validate experimentally our method on model stitching and retrieval tasks, covering autoencoders and vision foundation discriminative models, across diverse architectures, datasets, pretraining schemes and modalities. Code is available at the following [link](https://github.com/marc0git/RelativeGeodesics).
MRO: Enhancing Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models via Multi-Reward Optimization
Authors: Chenglong Wang; Yang Gan; Hang Zhou; Chi Hu; Yongyu Mu; Kai Song; MuRun Yang; Bei Li; Chunliang Zhang; Tongran Liu; JingBo Zhu; Zhengtao Yu; Tong Xiao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in diffusion language models (DLMs) have presented a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, DLMs still lag behind LLMs in reasoning performance, especially as the number of denoising steps decreases. Our analysis reveals that this shortcoming arises primarily from the independent generation of masked tokens across denoising steps, which fails to capture the token correlation. In this paper, we define two types of token correlation: intra-sequence correlation and inter-sequence correlation, and demonstrate that enhancing these correlations improves reasoning performance. To this end, we propose a Multi-Reward Optimization (MRO) approach, which encourages DLMs to consider the token correlation during the denoising process. More specifically, our MRO approach leverages test-time scaling, reject sampling, and reinforcement learning to directly optimize the token correlation with multiple elaborate rewards. Additionally, we introduce group step and importance sampling strategies to mitigate reward variance and enhance sampling efficiency. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MRO not only improves reasoning performance but also achieves significant sampling speedups while maintaining high performance on reasoning benchmarks.