GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Knowledge Starts with Practice: Knowledge-Aware Exercise Generative Recommendation with Adaptive Multi-Agent Cooperation
Authors: Yangtao Zhou; Hua Chu; Yongxiang Chen; Ziwen Wang; Jiacheng Liu; Jianan Li; Yueying Feng; Xiangming Li; Zihan Han; Qingshan Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Adaptive learning, which requires the in-depth understanding of students' learning processes and rational planning of learning resources, plays a crucial role in intelligent education. However, how to effectively model these two processes and seamlessly integrate them poses significant implementation challenges for adaptive learning. As core learning resources, exercises have the potential to diagnose students' knowledge states during the learning processes and provide personalized learning recommendations to strengthen students' knowledge, thereby serving as a bridge to boost student-oriented adaptive learning. Therefore, we introduce a novel task called Knowledge-aware Exercise Generative Recommendation (KEGR). It aims to dynamically infer students' knowledge states from their past exercise responses and customizably generate new exercises. To achieve KEGR, we propose an adaptive multi-agent cooperation framework, called ExeGen, inspired by the excellent reasoning and generative capabilities of LLM-based AI agents. Specifically, ExeGen coordinates four specialized agents for supervision, knowledge state perception, exercise generation, and quality refinement through an adaptive loop workflow pipeline. More importantly, we devise two enhancement mechanisms in ExeGen: 1) A human-simulated knowledge perception mechanism mimics students' cognitive processes and generates interpretable knowledge state descriptions via demonstration-based In-Context Learning (ICL). In this mechanism, a dual-matching strategy is further designed to retrieve highly relevant demonstrations for reliable ICL reasoning. 2) An exercise generation-adversarial mechanism collaboratively refines exercise generation leveraging a group of quality evaluation expert agents via iterative adversarial feedback. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation protocol is carefully designed to assess ExeGen. Extensive experiments on real-world educational datasets and a practical deployment in college education demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of ExeGen. The code is available at https://github.com/dsz532/exeGen.
Shortcuts and Identifiability in Concept-based Models from a Neuro-Symbolic Lens
Authors: Samuele Bortolotti; Emanuele Marconato; Paolo Morettin; Andrea Passerini; Stefano Teso
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Concept-based Models are neural networks that learn a concept extractor to map inputs to high-level concepts and an inference layer to translate these into predictions. Ensuring these modules produce interpretable concepts and behave reliably in out-of-distribution is crucial, yet the conditions for achieving this remain unclear. We study this problem by establishing a novel connection between Concept-based Models and reasoning shortcuts (RSs), a common issue where models achieve high accuracy by learning low-quality concepts, even when the inference layer is fixed and provided upfront. Specifically, we extend RSs to the more complex setting of Concept-based Models and derive theoretical conditions for identifying both the concepts and the inference layer. Our empirical results highlight the impact of RSs and show that existing methods, even combined with multiple natural mitigation strategies, often fail to meet these conditions in practice.
Sample-Adaptivity Tradeoff in On-Demand Sampling
Authors: Nika Haghtalab; Omar Montasser; Mingda Qiao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: We study the tradeoff between sample complexity and round complexity in *on-demand sampling*, where the learning algorithm adaptively samples from $k$ distributions over a limited number of rounds. In the realizable setting of Multi-Distribution Learning (MDL), we show that the optimal sample complexity of an $r$-round algorithm scales approximately as $dk^{\Theta(1/r)} / \epsilon$. For the general agnostic case, we present an algorithm that achieves near-optimal sample complexity of $\widetilde O((d + k) / \epsilon^2)$ within $\widetilde O(\sqrt{k})$ rounds. Of independent interest, we introduce a new framework, Optimization via On-Demand Sampling (OODS), which abstracts the sample-adaptivity tradeoff and captures most existing MDL algorithms. We establish nearly tight bounds on the round complexity in the OODS setting. The upper bounds directly yield the $\widetilde O(\sqrt{k})$-round algorithm for agnostic MDL, while the lower bounds imply that achieving sub-polynomial round complexity would require fundamentally new techniques that bypass the inherent hardness of OODS.
Robust Reinforcement Learning in Finance:  Modeling Market Impact with Elliptic Uncertainty Sets
Authors: Shaocong Ma; Heng Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: In financial applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are commonly trained on historical data, where their actions do not influence prices. However, during deployment, these agents trade in live markets where their own transactions can shift asset prices, a phenomenon known as market impact. This mismatch between training and deployment environments can significantly degrade performance.  Traditional robust RL approaches address this model misspecification by optimizing the worst-case performance over a set of uncertainties, but typically rely on symmetric structures that fail to capture the directional nature of market impact. To address this issue, we develop a novel class of elliptic uncertainty sets. We establish both implicit and explicit closed-form solutions for the worst-case uncertainty under these sets, enabling efficient and tractable robust policy evaluation. Experiments on single-asset and multi-asset trading tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior Sharpe ratio and remains robust under increasing trade volumes, offering a more faithful and scalable approach to RL in financial markets.
Online Strategic Classification With Noise and Partial Feedback
Authors: Tianrun Zhao; Xiaojie Mao; Yong Liang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: In this paper, we study an online strategic classification problem, where a principal aims to learn an accurate binary linear classifier from sequentially arriving agents. For each agent, the principal announces a classifier. The agent can strategically exercise costly manipulations on his features to be classified as the favorable positive class. The principal is unaware of the true feature-label distribution, but observes all reported features and only labels of positively classified agents. We assume that the true feature-label distribution is given by a halfspace model subject to arbitrary feature-dependent bounded noise (i.e., Massart Noise). This problem faces the combined challenges of agents' strategic feature manipulations, partial label observations, and label noises. We tackle these challenges by a novel learning algorithm. We show that the proposed algorithm yields classifiers that converge to the clairvoyant optimal one and attains a  regret rate of $ O(\sqrt{T})$ up to poly-logarithmic and constant factors over $T$ cycles.
EMLoC: Emulator-based Memory-efficient Fine-tuning with LoRA Correction
Authors: Hsi-Che Lin; Yu-Chu Yu; Kai-Po Chang; Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Open-source foundation models have seen rapid adoption and development, enabling powerful general-purpose capabilities across diverse domains. However, fine-tuning large foundation models for domain-specific or personalized tasks remains prohibitively expensive for most users due to the significant memory overhead beyond that of inference. We introduce EMLoC, an Emulator-based Memory-efficient fine-tuning framework with LoRA Correction, which enables model fine-tuning within the same memory budget required for inference. EMLoC constructs a task-specific light-weight emulator using activation-aware singular value decomposition (SVD) on a small downstream calibration set. Fine-tuning then is performed on this lightweight emulator via LoRA. To tackle the misalignment between the original model and the compressed emulator, we propose a novel compensation algorithm to correct the fine-tuned LoRA module, which thus can be merged into the original model for inference. EMLoC supports flexible compression ratios and standard training pipelines, making it adaptable to a wide range of applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMLoC outperforms other baselines across multiple datasets and modalities. Moreover, without quantization, EMLoC enables fine-tuning of a 38B model, which originally required 95GB of memory, on a single 24GB consumer GPU—bringing efficient and practical model adaptation to individual users.
Beyond Pairwise Connections: Extracting High-Order Functional Brain Network Structures under Global Constraints
Authors: Ling Zhan; Junjie Huang; Xiaoyao Yu; Wenyu Chen; Tao Jia
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Functional brain network (FBN) modeling often relies on local pairwise interactions, whose limitation in capturing high-order dependencies is theoretically analyzed in this paper. Meanwhile, the computational burden and heuristic nature of current hypergraph modeling approaches hinder end-to-end learning of FBN structures directly from data distributions. To address this, we propose to extract high-order FBN structures under global constraints, and implement this as a Global Constraints oriented Multi-resolution (GCM) FBN structure learning framework. It incorporates 4 types of global constraint (signal synchronization, subject identity, expected edge numbers, and data labels) to enable learning FBN structures for 4 distinct levels (sample/subject/group/project) of modeling resolution. Experimental results demonstrate that GCM achieves up to a 30.6% improvement in relative accuracy and a 96.3% reduction in computational time across 5 datasets and 2 task settings, compared to 9 baselines and 10 state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments validate the contributions of individual components and highlight the interpretability of GCM. This work offers a novel perspective on FBN structure learning and provides a foundation for interdisciplinary applications in cognitive neuroscience. Code is publicly available on https://github.com/lzhan94swu/GCM.
Model Editing for Vision Transformers
Authors: Xinyi Huang; Kangfei Zhao; Long-Kai Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Model editing offers a promising paradigm for efficiently and precisely updating knowledge in pre-trained transformers without costly retraining. While extensively studied in language models (LMs), model editing for vision transformers (ViTs) remains underexplored. Existing methods typically adapt LM-based techniques by modifying the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) modules, overlooking the unique characteristics of ViTs. In this work, we show that ViT predictions are more strongly influenced by the multi-head self-attention (MSA) modules than by the MLPs. Building on this observation, we propose a two-stage framework for editing ViTs. First, we identify which attention heads are most responsible for incorrect predictions. Next, we selectively remove the corresponding features to correct the model’s prediction. To further balance error correction with predictive stability on unrelated data, we learn a projection matrix that refines the image representations. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world datasets and model editing benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing model editing methods for ViTs, achieving superior generalization and locality. Our code is available at https://github.com/shanghxy/Model-editing-for-vision-transformers.
Partition-Then-Adapt: Combating Prediction Bias for Reliable Multi-Modal Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: Guowei Wang; Fan Lyu; Changxing Ding
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods primarily focus on scenarios involving domain shifts in a single modality. However, they often prove ineffective when multiple modalities simultaneously undergo domain shifts, as they struggle to identify and utilize reliable samples within testing batches amid severe prediction bias. To address this problem, we propose Partition-Then-Adapt (PTA), a novel approach combating prediction bias for TTA with multi-modal domain shifts. PTA comprises two key components: Partition and Debiased Reweighting (PDR) and multi-modal Attention-Guided Alignment (AGA). Specifically, PDR evaluates each sample’s predicted label frequency relative to the batch average, partitioning the batch into potential reliable and unreliable subsets. It then reweights each sample by jointly assessing its bias and confidence levels through a quantile-based approach. By applying weighted entropy loss, PTA simultaneously promotes learning from reliable subsets and discourages reliance on unreliable ones. Moreover, AGA regularizes PDR to focus on semantically meaningful multi-modal cues. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of PTA, surpassing state-of-the-art method by 6.1\% on Kinetics50-MC and 5.8\% on VGGSound-MC, respectively. Code of this paper is available at https://github.com/MPI-Lab/PTA.
CyIN: Cyclic Informative Latent Space for Bridging Complete and Incomplete Multimodal Learning
Authors: Ronghao Lin; Qiaolin He; Sijie Mai; Ying Zeng; Aolin Xiong; Li Huang; Yap-Peng Tan; Haifeng Hu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multimodal machine learning, mimicking the human brain’s ability to integrate various modalities has seen rapid growth. Most previous multimodal models are trained on perfectly paired multimodal input to reach optimal performance. In real‑world deployments, however, the presence of modality is highly variable and unpredictable, causing the pre-trained models in suffering significant performance drops and fail to remain robust with dynamic missing modalities circumstances. In this paper, we present a novel Cyclic INformative Learning framework (CyIN) to bridge the gap between complete and incomplete multimodal learning. Specifically, we firstly build an informative latent space by adopting token- and label-level Information Bottleneck (IB) cyclically among various modalities. Capturing task-related features with variational approximation, the informative bottleneck latents are purified for more efficient cross-modal interaction and multimodal fusion. Moreover, to supplement the missing information caused by incomplete multimodal input, we propose cross-modal cyclic translation by reconstruct the missing modalities with the remained ones through forward and reverse propagation process. With the help of the extracted and reconstructed informative latents, CyIN succeeds in jointly optimizing complete and incomplete multimodal learning in one unified model. Extensive experiments on 4 multimodal datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in both complete and diverse incomplete scenarios.
Policy Optimized Text-to-Image Pipeline Design
Authors: Uri Gadot; Rinon Gal; Yftah Ziser; Gal Chechik; Shie Mannor
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Text-to-image generation has evolved beyond single monolithic models to complex multi-component pipelines that combine various enhancement tools. While these pipelines significantly improve image quality, their effective design requires substantial expertise. Recent approaches automating this process through large language models (LLMs) have shown promise but suffer from two critical limitations: extensive computational requirements from generating images with hundreds of predefined pipelines, and poor generalization beyond memorized training examples.
    We introduce a novel reinforcement learning-based framework that addresses these inefficiencies. Our approach first trains an ensemble of reward models capable of predicting image quality scores directly from prompt-workflow combinations, eliminating the need for costly image generation during training. We then implement a two-phase training strategy: initial workflow prediction training followed by GRPO-based optimization that guides the model toward higher-performing regions of the workflow space. Additionally, we incorporate a classifier-free guidance based enhancement technique that extrapolates along the path between the initial and GRPO-tuned models, further improving output quality.
    We validate our approach through a set of comparisons, showing that it can successfully create new flows with greater diversity and lead to superior image quality compared to existing baselines.
E-BATS: Efficient Backpropagation-Free Test-Time Adaptation for Speech Foundation Models
Authors: Jiaheng Dong; Hong Jia; Soumyajit Chatterjee; Abhirup Ghosh; James Bailey; Ting Dang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Speech Foundation Models encounter significant performance degradation when deployed in real-world scenarios involving acoustic domain shifts, such as background noise and speaker accents. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has recently emerged as a viable strategy to address such domain shifts at inference time without requiring access to source data or labels. However, existing TTA approaches, particularly those relying on backpropagation, are memory-intensive, limiting their applicability in speech tasks and resource-constrained settings. Although backpropagation-free methods offer improved efficiency, existing ones exhibit poor accuracy. This is because they are predominantly developed for vision tasks, which fundamentally differ from speech task formulations, noise characteristics, and model architecture, posing unique transferability challenges.
In this paper, we introduce E-BAT, first Efficient BAckpropagation-free TTA framework designed explicitly for speech foundation models. E-BAT achieves a balance between adaptation effectiveness and memory efficiency through three key components: (i) lightweight prompt adaptation for a forward-pass-based feature alignment, (ii) a multi-scale loss to capture both global (utterance-level) and local distribution shifts (token-level) and (iii) a test-time exponential moving average mechanism for stable adaptation across utterances. Experiments conducted on four noisy speech datasets spanning sixteen acoustic conditions demonstrate consistent improvements, with 4.1\%--13.5% accuracy gains over backpropogation-free baselines and 2.0$\times$–6.4$\times$ GPU memory savings compared to backpropogation-based methods. By enabling scalable and robust adaptation under acoustic variability, this work paves the way for developing more efficient adaptation approaches for practical speech processing systems in real-world environments.
When Does Closeness in Distribution Imply Representational Similarity? An Identifiability Perspective
Authors: Beatrix Miranda Ginn Nielsen; Emanuele Marconato; Andrea Dittadi; Luigi Gresele
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: When and why representations learned by different deep neural networks are similar is an active research topic. 
    We choose to address these questions from the perspective of identifiability theory, which suggests that a measure of representational similarity should be invariant to transformations that leave the model distribution unchanged.
    Focusing on a model family which includes several popular pre-training approaches, e.g., autoregressive language models, we explore when models which generate distributions that are close have similar representations. We prove that a small Kullback--Leibler divergence between the model distributions does not guarantee that the corresponding representations are similar. This has the important corollary that models with near-maximum data likelihood can still learn dissimilar representations---a phenomenon mirrored in our experiments with models trained on CIFAR-10.
    We then define a distributional distance for which closeness implies representational similarity, and in synthetic experiments, we find that wider networks learn distributions which are closer with respect to our distance and have more similar representations. Our results thus clarify the link between closeness in distribution and representational similarity.
High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics: a solvable model
Authors: Valentin Schmutz; Ali Haydaroğlu; Shuqi Wang; Yixiao Feng; Matteo Carandini; Kenneth D. Harris
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 oral)

Abstract: Computation in recurrent networks of neurons has been hypothesized to occur at the level of low-dimensional latent dynamics, both in artificial systems and in the brain. This hypothesis seems at odds with evidence from large-scale neuronal recordings in mice showing that neuronal population activity is high-dimensional. To demonstrate that low-dimensional latent dynamics and high-dimensional activity can be two sides of the same coin, we present an analytically solvable recurrent neural network (RNN) model whose dynamics can be exactly reduced to a low-dimensional dynamical system, but generates an activity manifold that has a high linear embedding dimension. This raises the question: Do low-dimensional latents explain the high-dimensional activity observed in mouse visual cortex? Spectral theory tells us that the covariance eigenspectrum alone does not allow us to recover the dimensionality of the latents, which can be low or high, when neurons are nonlinear. To address this indeterminacy, we develop Neural Cross-Encoder (NCE), an interpretable, nonlinear latent variable modeling method for neuronal recordings, and find that high-dimensional neuronal responses to drifting gratings and spontaneous activity in visual cortex can be reduced to low-dimensional latents, while the responses to natural images cannot. We conclude that the high-dimensional activity measured in certain conditions, such as in the absence of a stimulus, is explained by low-dimensional latents that are nonlinearly processed by individual neurons.
Strategic Hypothesis Testing
Authors: Yatong Chen; Safwan Hossain; Yiling Chen
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: We examine hypothesis testing within a principal-agent framework, where a strategic agent, holding private beliefs about the effectiveness of a product, submits data to a principal who decides on approval. The principal employs a hypothesis testing rule, aiming to pick a p-value threshold that balances false positives and false negatives while anticipating the agent’s incentive to maximize expected profitability. Building on prior work, we develop a game-theoretic model that captures how the agent’s participation and reporting behavior respond to the principal’s statistical decision rule. Despite the complexity of the interaction, we show that the principal's errors exhibit clear monotonic behavior when segmented by an efficiently computable critical p-value threshold, leading to an interpretable characterization of their optimal p-value threshold. We empirically validate our model and these insights using publicly available data on drug approvals. Overall, our work offers a comprehensive perspective on strategic interactions within the hypothesis testing framework, providing technical and regulatory insights.