GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
AceReason-Nemotron: Advancing Math and Code Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yang Chen; Zhuolin Yang; Zihan Liu; Chankyu Lee; Peng Xu; Mohammad Shoeybi; Bryan Catanzaro; Wei Ping
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Despite recent progress in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning, the training recipe for building high-performing reasoning models remains elusive. Key implementation details of frontier models, such as DeepSeek-R1, including data curation strategies and RL training recipe, are often omitted. Moreover, recent research indicates distillation remains more effective than RL for smaller models. In this work, we demonstrate that large-scale RL can significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of strong, small- and mid-sized models, achieving results that surpass those of state-of-the-art distillation-based models. We systematically study the RL training process through extensive ablations and propose a simple yet effective approach: first training on math-only prompts, then on code-only prompts. 
Notably, we find that math-only RL not only significantly enhances the performance of strong distilled models on math benchmarks (e.g., +14.6\% / +17.2\% on AIME 2025 for the 7B / 14B models), but also code reasoning tasks (e.g., +6.8\% / +5.8\% on LiveCodeBench for the 7B / 14B models).  In addition, extended code-only RL further improves code benchmark performance while causing minimal degradation in math results.  We develop a robust data curation pipeline to collect challenging prompts with high-quality, verifiable answers and test cases to enable verification-based RL across both domains. The dataset will be released to support open research.
Finally, we identify key experimental insights, including curriculum learning with progressively increasing response lengths and the stabilizing effect of on-policy parameter updates.  We find that RL not only elicits the foundational reasoning capabilities acquired during pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but also pushes the limits of the model’s reasoning ability, enabling it to solve problems that were previously unsolvable.
Focus-Then-Reuse: Fast Adaptation in Visual Perturbation Environments
Authors: Jiahui Wang; Chao Chen; Jiacheng Xu; Zongzhang Zhang; Yang Yu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Visual reinforcement learning has shown promise in various real-world applications. However, deploying policies in complex real-world environments with visual perturbations remains a significant challenge. We notice that humans tend to filter information at the object level prior to decision-making, facilitating efficient skill transfer across different contexts. Inspired by this, we introduce Focus-Then-Reuse (FTR), a method utilizing a novel object selection mechanism to focus on task-relevant objects, and directly reuse the simulation-trained policy on them. The training of the object selection mechanism integrates prior knowledge from a vision-language model and feedback from the environment. Experimental results on challenging tasks based on DeepMind Control Suite and Franka Emika Robotics demonstrate that FTR enables rapid adaptation in visual perturbation environments and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/FTR.
DeepASA: An Object-Oriented Multi-Purpose Network for Auditory Scene Analysis
Authors: Dongheon Lee; Younghoo Kwon; Jung-Woo Choi
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We propose DeepASA, a multi-purpose model for auditory scene analysis that performs multi-input multi-output (MIMO) source separation, dereverberation, sound event detection (SED), audio classification, and direction-of-arrival estimation (DoAE) within a unified framework. DeepASA is designed for complex auditory scenes where multiple, often similar, sound sources overlap in time and move dynamically in space. To achieve robust and consistent inference across tasks, we introduce an object-oriented processing (OOP) strategy. This approach encapsulates diverse auditory features into object-centric representations and refines them through a chain-of-inference (CoI) mechanism. The pipeline comprises a dynamic temporal kernel-based feature extractor, a transformer-based aggregator, and an object separator that yields per-object features. These features feed into multiple task-specific decoders. Our object-centric representations naturally resolve the parameter association ambiguity inherent in traditional track-wise processing. However, early-stage object separation can lead to failure in downstream ASA tasks. To address this, we implement temporal coherence matching (TCM) within the chain-of-inference, enabling multi-task fusion and iterative refinement of object features using estimated auditory parameters. We evaluate DeepASA on representative spatial audio benchmark datasets, including ASA2, MC-FUSS, and STARSS23. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across all evaluated tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in both source separation and auditory parameter estimation under diverse spatial auditory scenes. The demo video, samples and code are available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/donghoney22/DeepASA.
Learning Personalized Ad Impact via Contextual Reinforcement Learning under Delayed Rewards
Authors: Yuwei Cheng; Zifeng Zhao; Haifeng Xu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Online advertising platforms use automated auctions to connect advertisers with potential customers, requiring effective bidding strategies to maximize profits. Accurate ad impact estimation requires considering three key factors: delayed and long-term effects, cumulative ad impacts such as reinforcement or fatigue, and customer heterogeneity. However, these effects are often not jointly addressed in previous studies. To capture these factors, we model ad bidding as a Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) with delayed Poisson rewards. For efficient estimation, we propose a two-stage maximum likelihood estimator combined with data-splitting strategies, ensuring controlled estimation error based on the first-stage estimator's (in)accuracy. Building on this, we design a reinforcement learning algorithm to derive efficient personalized bidding strategies. This approach achieves a near-optimal regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(dH^2\sqrt{T})$, where $d$ is the contextual dimension, $H$ is the number of rounds, and $T$ is the number of customers. Our theoretical findings are validated by simulation experiments.
UniteFormer: Unifying Node and Edge Modalities in Transformers for Vehicle Routing Problems
Authors: Dian Meng; Zhiguang Cao; Jie Gao; Yaoxin Wu; Yaqing Hou
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Neural solvers for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) have typically relied on either node or edge inputs, limiting their flexibility and generalization in real-world scenarios. We propose UniteFormer, a unified neural solver that supports node-only, edge-only, and hybrid input types through a single model trained via joint edge-node modalities. UniteFormer introduces: (1) a mixed encoder that integrates
graph convolutional networks and attention mechanisms to collaboratively process node and edge features, capturing cross-modal interactions between them; and (2) a parallel decoder enhanced with query mapping and a feed-forward layer for improved representation. The model is trained with REINFORCE by randomly sampling input types across batches. Experiments on the Traveling Salesman
Problem (TSP) and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) demonstrate that UniteFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes effectively to TSPLib and CVRPLib instances. These results underscore UniteFormer’s ability to handle diverse input modalities and its strong potential to improve performance across various VRP tasks.
Simultaneous Swap Regret Minimization via KL-Calibration
Authors: Haipeng Luo; Spandan Senapati; Vatsal Sharan
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Calibration is a fundamental concept that aims at ensuring the reliability of probabilistic predictions by aligning them with real-world outcomes. There is a surge of studies on new calibration measures that are easier to optimize compared to the classical $\ell_1$-Calibration while still having strong implications for downstream applications. One recent such example is the work by Fishelson et al. (2025) who show that it is possible to achieve $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ pseudo $\ell_{2}$-Calibration error via minimizing pseudo swap regret of the squared loss, which in fact implies the same bound for all bounded proper losses with a smooth univariate form. In this work, we significantly generalize their result in the following ways: (a) in addition to smooth univariate forms, our algorithm also simultaneously achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ swap regret for any proper loss with a twice continuously differentiable univariate form (such as Tsallis entropy); (b) our bounds hold not only for pseudo swap regret that measures losses using the forecaster's distributions on predictions, but also hold for the actual swap regret that measures losses using the forecaster's actual realized predictions.
    
 We achieve so by introducing a new stronger notion of calibration called (pseudo) KL-Calibration, which we show is equivalent to the (pseudo) swap regret with respect to log loss. We prove that there exists an algorithm that achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ KL-Calibration error and provide an explicit algorithm that achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ pseudo KL-Calibration error. Moreover, we show that the same algorithm achieves ${\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3} (\log T) ^ {-\frac{1}{3}}\log (T/{\delta}))$ swap regret with probability at least $1-\delta$ for any proper loss with a smooth univariate form, which implies $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{1/3})$ $\ell_2$-Calibration error. A technical contribution of our work is a new randomized rounding procedure and a non-uniform discretization scheme to minimize the swap regret for log loss.
Decoder-Hybrid-Decoder Architecture for Efficient Reasoning with Long Generation
Authors: Liliang Ren; Congcong Chen; Haoran Xu; Young Jin Kim; Adam Atkinson; Zheng Zhan; Jiankai Sun; Baolin Peng; Liyuan Liu; Shuohang Wang; Hao Cheng; Jianfeng Gao; Weizhu Chen; yelong shen
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in language modeling have demonstrated the effectiveness of State Space Models (SSMs) for efficient sequence modeling. While hybrid architectures such as Samba and the decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, have shown promising performance gains over Transformers, prior works have not investigated the efficiency potential of representation sharing between SSM layers. In this paper, we introduce the Gated Memory Unit (GMU), a simple yet effective mechanism for efficient memory sharing across layers. We apply it to create SambaY, a decoder-hybrid-decoder architecture that incorporates GMUs in the cross-decoder to share memory readout states from a Samba-based self-decoder. SambaY significantly enhances decoding efficiency, preserves linear pre-filling time complexity, and boosts long-context performance, all while eliminating the need for explicit positional encoding. Through extensive scaling experiments, we demonstrate that our model exhibits a significantly lower irreducible loss compared to a strong YOCO baseline, indicating superior performance scalability under large-scale compute regimes. Our largest model enhanced with Differential Attention, Phi4-mini-Flash-Reasoning, achieves significantly better performance than Phi4-mini-Reasoning on reasoning tasks such as Math500, AIME24/25, and GPQA Diamond without any reinforcement learning, while delivering up to 10× higher decoding throughput on 2K-length prompts with 32K generation length under the vLLM inference framework. We release our training codebase on open-source data at https://github.com/microsoft/ArchScale.
4D3R: Motion-Aware Neural Reconstruction and Rendering of Dynamic Scenes from Monocular Videos
Authors: Mengqi Guo; Bo Xu; Yan Li; Gim Hee Lee
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Novel view synthesis from monocular videos of dynamic scenes with unknown camera poses remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. While recent advances in 3D representations such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have shown promising results for static scenes, they struggle with dynamic content and typically rely on pre-computed camera poses.
We present 4D3R, a pose-free dynamic neural rendering framework that decouples static and dynamic components through a two-stage approach. Our method first leverages 3D foundational models for initial pose and geometry estimation, followed by motion-aware refinement. 4D3R introduces two key technical innovations: (1) a motion-aware bundle adjustment (MA-BA) module that combines transformer-based learned priors with SAM2 for robust dynamic object segmentation, enabling more accurate camera pose refinement; and (2) an efficient Motion-Aware Gaussian Splatting (MA-GS) representation that uses control points with a deformation field MLP and linear blend skinning to model dynamic motion, significantly reducing computational cost while maintaining high-quality reconstruction.
Extensive experiments on real-world dynamic datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves up to 1.8dB PSNR improvement over state-of-the-art methods, particularly in challenging scenarios with large dynamic objects, while reducing computational requirements by 5× compared to previous dynamic scene representations.
PrefixKV: Adaptive Prefix KV Cache is What Vision Instruction-Following Models Need for Efficient Generation
Authors: Ao Wang; Hui Chen; Jianchao Tan; Kefeng Zhang; Xunliang Cai; Zijia Lin; Jungong Han; Guiguang Ding
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recently, large vision-language models (LVLMs) have rapidly gained popularity for their strong generation and reasoning capabilities given diverse multimodal inputs. However, these models incur significant computational and memory overhead during inference, which greatly hinders the efficient deployment in practical scenarios. The extensive key-value (KV) cache, necessitated by the lengthy input and output sequences, notably contributes to the high inference cost. Based on this, recent works have investigated ways to reduce the KV cache size for higher efficiency. Although effective, they generally overlook the distinct importance distributions of KV vectors across layers and maintain the same cache size for each layer during the next token prediction. This results in the significant contextual information loss for certain layers, leading to notable performance decline. To address this, we present PrefixKV. It reframes the challenge of determining KV cache sizes for all layers into the task of searching for the optimal global prefix configuration. With an adaptive layer-wise KV retention recipe based on binary search, the maximum contextual information can thus be preserved in each layer, facilitating the generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with others. It exhibits superior inference efficiency and generation quality trade-offs, showing promising potential for practical applications. Code is available at
https://github.com/THU-MIG/PrefixKV.
Chain of Execution Supervision Promotes General Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Nuo Chen; Zehua Li; Keqin Bao; Junyang Lin; Dayiheng Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Building robust and general reasoning ability is a central goal in the development of large language models (LLMs). Recent efforts increasingly turn to code as a rich training source, given its inherent logical structure and diverse reasoning paradigms—such as divide-and-conquer, topological ordering, and enumeration. However, reasoning in code is often expressed implicitly and entangled with syntactic or implementation noise, making direct training on raw code suboptimal. To address this, we introduce TraceMind, a large-scale corpus of 2.6 million samples that transforms code execution into explicit, step-by-step chain-of-thought style rationales, which we call Chain of Execution (CoE). 
The corpus spans domains including mathematics, classical algorithms and algorithmic competition, and is enriched with variable-tracing questions and code rewritings to enhance logical granularity and code diversity.
 We evaluate Tracepile using three training setups—continue-pretraining, instruction tuning after pretraining, and two-stage finetuning. Experiments across four base models (LLaMA 3, LLaMA 3.1, Qwen-2.5, and Qwen-2.5 Coder) and 20 benchmarks covering math, code, logic, and algorithms demonstrate consistent improvements. Notably, Tracepile boosts LLaMA3-8B by 9.2\% on average across nine math datasets and delivers clear gains on LiveCodeBench, CRUX, and Zebra Logic under two-stage finetuning.
Wide-Horizon Thinking and Simulation-Based Evaluation for Real-World LLM Planning with Multifaceted Constraints
Authors: Dongjie Yang; Chengqiang Lu; Qimeng Wang; Xinbei Ma; Yan Gao; Yao Hu; hai zhao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Unlike reasoning, which often entails a deep sequence of deductive steps, complex real-world planning is characterized by the need to synthesize a broad spectrum of parallel and potentially conflicting information and constraints. For example, in travel planning scenarios, it requires the integration of diverse real-world information and user preferences. While LLMs show promise, existing methods with long-horizon thinking struggle with handling multifaceted constraints, leading to suboptimal solutions. Motivated by the challenges of real-world travel planning, this paper introduces the Multiple Aspects of Planning (MAoP), empowering LLMs with "wide-horizon thinking" to solve planning problems with multifaceted constraints. Instead of direct planning, MAoP leverages the strategist to conduct pre-planning from various aspects and provide the planning blueprint for planners, enabling strong inference-time scalability by scaling aspects to consider various constraints. In addition, existing benchmarks for multi-constraint planning are flawed because they assess constraints in isolation, ignoring causal dependencies within the constraints, e.g, travel planning, where past activities dictate future itinerary. To address this, we propose Travel-Sim, an agent-based benchmark assessing plans via real-world simulation, thereby inherently resolving these causal dependencies. This paper advances LLM capabilities in complex planning and offers novel insights for evaluating sophisticated scenarios through simulation.
ESCA: Enabling Seamless Codec Avatar Execution through Algorithm and Hardware Co-Optimization for Virtual Reality
Authors: Mingzhi Zhu; Ding Shang; Sai Qian Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Photorealistic Codec Avatars (PCA), which generate high-fidelity human face renderings, are increasingly being used in Virtual Reality (VR) environments to enable immersive communication and interaction through deep learning–based generative models. However, these models impose significant computational demands, making real-time inference challenging on resource-constrained VR devices such as head-mounted displays (HMDs), where latency and power efficiency are critical.
To address this challenge, we propose an efficient post-training quantization (PTQ) method tailored for Codec Avatar models, enabling low-precision execution without compromising output quality. In addition, we design a custom hardware accelerator that can be integrated into the system-on-chip (SoC) of VR devices to further enhance processing efficiency.
Building on these components, we introduce ESCA, a full-stack optimization framework that accelerates PCA inference on edge VR platforms. Experimental results demonstrate that ESCA boosts FovVideoVDP quality scores by up to +0.39 over the best 4-bit baseline, delivers up to 3.36× latency reduction, and sustains a rendering rate of 100 frames per second in end-to-end tests, satisfying real-time VR requirements. These results demonstrate the feasibility of deploying high-fidelity codec avatars on resource-constrained devices, opening the door to more immersive and portable VR experiences.
SiriuS: Self-improving Multi-agent Systems via Bootstrapped Reasoning
Authors: Wanjia Zhao; Mert Yuksekgonul; Shirley Wu; James Zou
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multi-agent AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to solve complex tasks. However, these systems often rely on fragile, manually designed prompts and heuristics, making optimization difficult. A key challenge in optimizing multi-agent systems is acquiring suitable training data for specialized agents. We introduce SiriuS, a self-improving, reasoning-driven optimization framework for multi-agent systems. Central to our approach is the construction of an experience library: a repository of high-quality reasoning trajectories. The library is built by retaining reasoning steps that lead to successful outcomes, providing a robust training set for optimizing multi-agent system. Additionally, we introduce a library augmentation procedure that refines unsuccessful trajectories, further enriching the library. SiriuS boosts performance by 2.86% to 21.88% on reasoning and biomedical QA and enhances agent negotiation in competitive settings. Our results show that SiriuS enhances multi-agent performance while generating reusable data for self-correction and self-play enhancement in the future.
Data-Free Model Extraction for Black-box Recommender Systems via Graph Convolutions
Authors: Zeyu Wang; Yidan Song; Shihao Qin; Yu Shanqing; Yujin Huang; Qi Xuan; Xin Zheng
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Privacy and security concerns are becoming increasingly critical for recommender systems, as model extraction attack provides an effective way to probe system robustness by replicating the model’s recommendation logic — potentially exposing sensitive user preferences and proprietary algorithmic knowledge. Despite the promising performance of existing model extraction methods, they still face two key challenges: unrealistic assumptions on the requirement of accessible member or surrogate data and generalization problem where surrogate model architecture constraints lead to overfitting on generated data. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we first thoroughly analyze how the architecture of surrogate models influences extraction attack performance, highlighting the superior effectiveness of the graph convolution architecture. Based on this, we propose a novel Data-free Black-box Graph convolution-based Recommender Model Extraction method, dubbed DBGRME. Specifically, DBGRME contains: (1) an interaction generator to alleviate the need for member data requirements in a data-free scenario; and (2) a generalization-aware graph convolution-based surrogate model to capture diverse and complex recommender interaction patterns for mitigating the overfitting issue. Experimental results on various datasets and victim models demonstrate the superiority of our attack in data-free scenarios (e.g., surpassing PTQ data-require methods with 17.4% improvement on LightGCN). Code is available: \url{https://github.com/Vencent-Won/DBGRME.git}.