GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
CAMILA: Context-Aware Masking for Image Editing with Language Alignment
Authors: Hyunseung Kim; Chiho Choi; Srikanth Malla; Sai Prahladh Padmanabhan; Saurabh Bagchi; Joon Hee Choi
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Text-guided image editing has been allowing users to transform and synthesize images through natural language instructions, offering considerable flexibility. However, most existing image editing models naively attempt to follow all user instructions, even if those instructions are inherently infeasible or contradictory, often resulting in nonsensical output. To address these challenges, we propose a context-aware method for image editing named as CAMILA (Context-Aware Masking for Image Editing with Language Alignment). CAMILA is designed to validate the contextual coherence between instructions and the image, ensuring that only relevant edits are applied to the designated regions while ignoring non-executable instructions. For comprehensive evaluation of this new method, we constructed datasets for both single- and multi-instruction image editing, incorporating the presence of infeasible requests. Our method achieves better performance and higher semantic alignment than state-of-the-art models, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling complex instruction challenges while preserving image integrity.
Masked Diffusion Models as Energy Minimization
Authors: Sitong Chen; Shen Nie; Jiacheng Sun; Zijin Feng; Zhenguo Li; Ji-Rong Wen; Chongxuan Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We present a systematic theoretical framework that interprets masked diffusion models (MDMs) as solutions to energy minimization problems in discrete optimal transport. Specifically, we prove that three distinct energy formulations—kinetic, conditional kinetic, and geodesic energy—are mathematically equivalent under the structure of MDMs, and that MDMs minimize all three when the mask schedule satisfies a closed-form optimality condition. This unification not only clarifies the theoretical foundations of MDMs, but also motivates practical improvements in sampling. By parameterizing interpolation schedules via Beta distributions, we reduce the schedule design space to a tractable 2D search, enabling efficient post-training tuning without model modification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our energy-inspired schedules outperform hand-crafted baselines, particularly in low-step sampling settings.
UniMRSeg: Unified Modality-Relax Segmentation via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Compensation
Authors: Xiaoqi Zhao; Youwei Pang; Chenyang Yu; Lihe Zhang; Huchuan Lu; Shijian Lu; Georges El Fakhri; Xiaofeng Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multi-modal image segmentation faces real-world deployment challenges from incomplete/corrupted modalities degrading performance. While existing methods address training-inference modality gaps via specialized per-combination models, they introduce  high deployment costs by requiring exhaustive model subsets and model-modality matching. In this work, we propose a unified modality-relax segmentation network (UniMRSeg) through hierarchical self-supervised compensation (HSSC). Our approach hierarchically bridges representation gaps between complete and incomplete modalities across input, feature and output levels. 
First, we adopt modality reconstruction with the hybrid shuffled-masking augmentation, encouraging the model to learn the intrinsic modality characteristics and generate meaningful representations for missing modalities through cross-modal fusion.  
Next, modality-invariant contrastive learning implicitly compensates the feature space distance among incomplete-complete modality pairs.  Furthermore, the proposed lightweight reverse attention adapter explicitly compensates for the weak perceptual semantics in the frozen encoder. Last, UniMRSeg is fine-tuned under the hybrid consistency constraint to ensure stable prediction under all modality combinations without large performance fluctuations. Without bells and whistles, UniMRSeg significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under diverse missing modality scenarios on MRI-based brain tumor segmentation, RGB-D semantic segmentation, RGB-D/T salient object segmentation.  The code will be released at \url{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/UniMRSeg}.
CSGO: Content-Style Composition in Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Peng Xing; Haofan Wang; Yanpeng Sun; wangqixun; Baixu; Hao Ai; Jen-Yuan Huang; Zechao Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The advancement of image style transfer has been fundamentally constrained by the absence of large-scale, high-quality datasets with explicit content-style-stylized supervision. Existing methods predominantly adopt training-free paradigms (e.g., image inversion), which limit controllability and generalization due to the lack of structured triplet data. To bridge this gap, we design a scalable and automated pipeline that constructs and purifies high-fidelity content-style-stylized image triplets. Leveraging this pipeline, we introduce IMAGStyle—the first large-scale dataset of its kind, containing 210K diverse and precisely aligned triplets for style transfer research. Empowered by IMAGStyle, we propose CSGO, a unified, end-to-end trainable framework that decouples content and style representations via independent feature injection. CSGO jointly supports image-driven style transfer, text-driven stylized generation, and text-editing-driven stylized synthesis within a single architecture. Extensive experiments show that CSGO achieves state-of-the-art controllability and fidelity, demonstrating the critical role of structured synthetic data in unlocking robust and generalizable style transfer. Source code: \url{https://github.com/instantX-research/CSGO}
Cypher-RI: Reinforcement Learning for Integrating Schema Selection into Cypher Generation
Authors: Hanchen Su; Xuyuan Li; Yan Zhou; zhuoyi lu; Ziwei Chai; Haozheng Wang; Chen Zhang; Yang Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The increasing utilization of graph databases across various fields stems from their capacity to represent intricate interconnections. Nonetheless, exploiting the full capabilities of graph databases continues to be a significant hurdle, largely because of the inherent difficulty in translating natural language into Cypher. Recognizing the critical role of schema selection in database query generation and drawing inspiration from recent progress in reasoning-augmented approaches trained through reinforcement learning to enhance inference capabilities and generalization, we introduce Cypher-RI, a specialized framework for the Text-to-Cypher task. Distinct from conventional approaches, our methodology seamlessly integrates schema selection within the Cypher generation pipeline, conceptualizing it as a critical element in the reasoning process. The schema selection mechanism is guided by textual context, with its outcomes recursively shaping subsequent inference processes. Impressively, our 7B-parameter model, trained through this RL paradigm, demonstrates superior performance compared to baselines, exhibiting a 9.41\% accuracy improvement over GPT-4o on CypherBench. These results underscore the effectiveness of our proposed reinforcement learning framework, which integrates schema selection to enhance both the accuracy and reasoning capabilities in Text-to-Cypher tasks.
Learning Dynamics of RNNs in Closed-Loop Environments
Authors: Yoav Ger; Omri Barak
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on neuroscience-inspired tasks offer powerful models of brain computation. However, typical training paradigms rely on open-loop, supervised settings, whereas real-world learning unfolds in closed-loop environments. Here, we develop a mathematical theory describing the learning dynamics of linear RNNs trained in closed-loop contexts. We first demonstrate that two otherwise identical RNNs, trained in either closed- or open-loop modes, follow markedly different learning trajectories. To probe this divergence, we analytically characterize the closed-loop case, revealing distinct stages aligned with the evolution of the training loss. Specifically, we show that the learning dynamics of closed-loop RNNs, in contrast to open-loop ones, are governed by an interplay between two competing objectives: short-term policy improvement and long-term stability of the agent-environment interaction. Finally, we apply our framework to a realistic motor control task, highlighting its broader applicability. Taken together, our results underscore the importance of modeling closed-loop dynamics in a biologically plausible setting.
SCOUT: Teaching Pre-trained Language Models to Enhance Reasoning via Flow Chain-of-Thought
Authors: Guanghao Li; Wenhao Jiang; Mingfeng Chen; Yan Li; Hao Yu; Shuting Dong; Tao Ren; Ming Tang; Chun Yuan
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by encouraging step-by-step thinking. However, CoT-based methods depend on  intermediate reasoning steps, which limits scalability and generalization. Recent work explores recursive reasoning, where LLMs reuse internal layers across iterations to refine latent representations without explicit CoT supervision. While promising, these approaches often require costly pretraining and lack a principled framework for how reasoning should evolve across iterations.
We address this gap by introducing **Flow Chain-of-Thought (Flow CoT)**, a reasoning paradigm that models recursive inference as a progressive trajectory of latent cognitive states. Flow CoT frames each iteration as a distinct cognitive stage—deepening reasoning across iterations without relying on manual supervision. To realize  this, we propose **SCOUT** (*Stepwise Cognitive Optimization Using Teachers*), a lightweight fine-tuning framework that enables Flow CoT-style reasoning without the need for pretraining. SCOUT uses progressive distillation to align each iteration with a teacher of appropriate capacity, and a cross-attention-based retrospective module that integrates outputs from previous iterations while preserving the model’s original computation flow.
Experiments across eight reasoning benchmarks show that SCOUT consistently improves both accuracy and explanation quality, achieving up to 1.8\% gains under fine-tuning. Qualitative analyses further reveal that SCOUT enables progressively deeper reasoning across iterations—refining both belief formation and explanation granularity. These results not only validate the effectiveness of SCOUT, but also demonstrate the practical viability of Flow CoT as a scalable framework for enhancing reasoning in LLMs.
Understanding and Enhancing Message Passing on Heterophilic Graphs via Compatibility Matrix
Authors: Zhuonan Zheng; Yuanchen Bei; Zhiyao Zhou; Sheng Zhou; Yao Ma; Ming Gu; HONGJIA XU; Jiawei Chen; Jiajun Bu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in graph mining tasks thanks to their message-passing mechanism, which aligns with the homophily assumption. However, connected nodes can also exhibit inconsistent behaviors, termed heterophilic patterns, sparking interest in heterophilic GNNs (HTGNNs). Although the message-passing mechanism seems unsuitable for heterophilic graphs owing to the propagation of dissimilar messages, it is still popular in HTGNNs and consistently achieves notable success. Some efforts have investigated such an interesting phenomenon, but are limited in the data perspective. The model-perspective understanding remains largely unexplored, which is conducive to guiding the designs of HTGNNs. To fill this gap, we build the connection between node discriminability and the compatibility matrix (CM). We reveal that the effectiveness of the message passing in HTGNNs may be credited to increasing the proposed Compatibility Matrix Discriminability (CMD). However, the issues of sparsity and noise pose great challenges to leveraging CM. Thus, we propose CMGNN, a novel approach to alleviate these issues while enhancing the CM and node embeddings explicitly. A thorough evaluation involving 13 datasets and comparison against 20 well-established baselines highlights the superiority of CMGNN.
Tackling Biased Evaluators in Dueling Bandits
Authors: Ming Tang; Yuxuan Zhou; Chao Huang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: In dueling bandits, an agent explores and exploits choices (i.e., arms) by learning from their stochastic feedback in the form of relative preferences. Prior related studies focused on unbiased feedback. In practice, however, the feedback provided by evaluators can be biased. For example, human users are likely to provide biased evaluation towards large language models due to their heterogeneous background. In this work, we aim to minimize the regret in dueling bandits considering evaluators’ biased feedback. We begin with a benchmark case where evaluators’ bias information is known. Solving the known-bias case is nontrivial, because the bias cannot be easily decoupled from the feedback. We overcome this challenge and propose an unbiased arm performance estimator and a bias-sensitive dueling bandits algorithm. We manage to analyze the regret, dealing with the complex form of the estimator, and show that the feedback either matching or opposing the ground-truth reduces the regret. Then, we study the case where evaluators’ bias information is unknown. The associated estimator can hardly be solved in closed-form due to the non-convexity of the estimator solving problem. We address this challenge and propose an extended bias-sensitive algorithm by incorporating block coordinate descent. This algorithm is proven to achieve the same order of regret (as in the known bias case) with a bounded error. Experiments show that when compared with baselines, our algorithms reduces the regret by up to 86.9%.
Spike-timing-dependent Hebbian learning as noisy gradient descent
Authors: Niklas Dexheimer; Sascha Gaudlitz; Johannes Schmidt-Hieber
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Hebbian learning is a key principle underlying learning in biological neural networks. We relate a Hebbian spike-timing-dependent plasticity rule to noisy gradient descent with respect to a non-convex loss function on the probability simplex. Despite the constant injection of noise and the non-convexity of the underlying optimization problem, one can rigorously prove that the considered Hebbian learning dynamic identifies the presynaptic neuron with the highest activity and that the convergence is exponentially fast in the number of iterations. This is non-standard and surprising as typically noisy gradient descent with fixed noise level only converges to a stationary regime where the noise causes the dynamic to fluctuate around a minimiser.
Unified Scaling Laws for Compressed Representations
Authors: Andrei Panferov; Alexandra Volkova; Ionut-Vlad Modoranu; Vage Egiazarian; Mher Safaryan; Dan Alistarh
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Scaling laws have shaped recent advances in machine learning by enabling predictable scaling of model performance based on model size, computation, and data volume. Concurrently, the rise in computational cost for AI has motivated model compression techniques, notably quantization and sparsification, which have emerged to mitigate the steep computational demands associated with large-scale training and inference. This paper investigates the interplay between scaling laws and compression strategies, exploring whether a unified scaling framework can accurately predict model performance when training occurs over various compressed representations, such as sparse, scalar-quantized, sparse-quantized or even vector-quantized formats. Our key contributions include proposing and validating a general scaling law formulation applicable both individually but also composably across compression types. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that a simple metric based on Gaussian mean squared error fitting can robustly predict parameter efficiency across compressed models. Additionally, we extend our formulation to directly compare the accuracy potential of different compressed formats, and to derive better algorithms for training over sparse-quantized formats. Finally, we identify conditions under which these unified scaling laws fail.
Embodied Crowd Counting
Authors: Runling Long; Yunlong Wang; Jia Wan; Xiang Deng; Xinting Zhu; Weili Guan; Antoni B. Chan; Liqiang Nie
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Occlusion is one of the fundamental challenges in crowd counting. In the community, various data-driven approaches have been developed to address this issue, yet their effectiveness is limited. This is mainly because most existing crowd counting datasets on which the methods are trained are based on passive cameras, restricting their ability to fully sense the environment.
Recently, embodied navigation methods have shown significant potential in precise object detection in interactive scenes. These methods incorporate active camera settings, holding promise in addressing the fundamental issues in crowd counting. However, most existing methods are designed for indoor navigation, showing unknown performance in analyzing complex object distribution in large-scale scenes, such as crowds. Besides, most existing embodied navigation datasets are indoor scenes with limited scale and object quantity, preventing them from being introduced into dense crowd analysis. Based on this, a novel task, Embodied Crowd Counting (ECC), is proposed to count the number of persons in a large-scale scene actively. We then build up an interactive simulator, the Embodied Crowd Counting Dataset (ECCD), which enables large-scale scenes and large object quantities. A prior probability distribution approximating a realistic crowd distribution is introduced to generate crowds. Then, a zero-shot navigation method (ZECC) is proposed as a baseline. This method contains an MLLM-driven coarse-to-fine navigation mechanism, enabling active Z-axis exploration, and a normal-line-based crowd distribution analysis method for fine counting. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best trade-off between counting accuracy and navigation cost. Code can be found at https://github.com/longrunling/ECC?.
Spike4DGS: Towards High-Speed Dynamic Scene Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting via a Spike Camera Array
Authors: Qinghong Ye; Yiqian Chang; Jianing Li; Haoran Xu; Xuan Wang; Wei Zhang; Yonghong Tian; Peixi Peng
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Spike camera with high temporal resolution offers a new perspective on high-speed dynamic scene rendering. Most existing rendering methods rely on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) or 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for static scenes using a monocular spike camera. However, these methods struggle with dynamic motion, while a single camera suffers from limited spatial coverage, making it challenging to reconstruct fine details in high-speed scenes. To address these problems, we propose Spike4DGS, the first high-speed dynamic scene rendering framework with 4D Gaussian Splatting using spike camera arrays. Technically, we first build a multi-view spike camera array to validate our solution, then establish both synthetic and real-world multi-view spike-based reconstruction datasets. Then, we design a multi-view spike-based dense initialization module that obtains dense point clouds and camera poses from continuous spike streams. Finally, we propose a spike-pixel synergy constraint supervision to optimize Spike4DGS, incorporating both rendered image quality loss and dynamic spatiotemporal spike loss. The results show that our Spike4DGS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of novel view rendering quality on both synthetic and real-world datasets. More details are available at https://github.com/Qinghongye/Spike4DGS.
Confusion-Driven Self-Supervised Progressively Weighted Ensemble Learning for Non-Exemplar Class Incremental Learning
Authors: Kai Hu; Zhang Yu; Yuan Zhang; Zhineng Chen; Xieping Gao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Non-exemplar class incremental learning (NECIL) aims to continuously assimilate new knowledge while retaining previously acquired knowledge in scenarios where prior examples are unavailable. A prevalent strategy within NECIL mitigates knowledge forgetting by freezing the feature extractor after training on the initial task. However, this freezing mechanism does not provide explicit training to differentiate between new and old classes, resulting in overlapping feature representations. To address this challenge, we propose a **C**onfusion-driven se**L**f-supervised pr**O**gressi**V**ely weighted **E**nsemble lea**R**ning (*CLOVER*) framework for NECIL. Firstly, we introduce a confusion-driven self-supervised learning approach that enhances representation extraction by guiding the model to distinguish between highly confusable classes, thereby reducing class representation overlap. Secondly, we develop a progressively weighted ensemble learning method that gradually adjusts weights to integrate diverse knowledge more effectively, further minimizing representation overlap. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the CIFAR100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet-Subset NECIL benchmarks.
SHAP Meets Tensor Networks: Provably Tractable Explanations with Parallelism
Authors: Reda Marzouk; Shahaf Bassan; Guy Katz
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Although Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) can be computed in polynomial time for simple models like decision trees, they unfortunately become NP-hard to compute for more expressive black-box models like neural networks - where generating explanations is often most critical. In this work, we analyze the problem of computing SHAP explanations for *Tensor Networks (TNs)*, a broader and more expressive class of models than those for which current exact SHAP algorithms are known to hold, and which is widely used for neural network abstraction and compression. First, we introduce a general framework for computing provably exact SHAP explanations for general TNs with arbitrary structures. Interestingly, we show that, when TNs are restricted to a *Tensor Train (TT)* structure, SHAP computation can be performed in *poly-logarithmic* time using *parallel* computation. Thanks to the expressiveness power of TTs, this complexity result can be generalized to many other popular ML models such as decision trees, tree ensembles, linear models, and linear RNNs, therefore tightening previously reported complexity results for these families of models. Finally, by leveraging reductions of binarized neural networks to Tensor Network representations, we demonstrate that SHAP computation can become *efficiently tractable* when the network’s *width* is fixed, while it remains computationally hard even with constant *depth*. This highlights an important insight: for this class of models, width - rather than depth - emerges as the primary computational bottleneck in SHAP computation.