GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
CALM: Culturally Self-Aware Language Models
Authors: Lingzhi Shen; Xiaohao Cai; YUNFEI LONG; Imran Razzak; Guanming Chen; Shoaib Jameel
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Cultural awareness in language models is the capacity to understand and adapt to diverse cultural contexts. However, most existing approaches treat culture as static background knowledge, overlooking its dynamic and evolving nature. This limitation reduces their reliability in downstream tasks that demand genuine cultural sensitivity. In this work, we introduce CALM, a novel framework designed to endow language models with cultural self-awareness. CALM disentangles task semantics from explicit cultural concepts and latent cultural signals, shaping them into structured cultural clusters through contrastive learning. These clusters are then aligned via cross-attention to establish fine-grained interactions among related cultural features and are adaptively integrated through a Mixture-of-Experts mechanism along culture-specific dimensions. The resulting unified representation is fused with the model's original knowledge to construct a culturally grounded internal identity state, which is further enhanced through self-prompted reflective learning, enabling continual adaptation and self-correction. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple cross-cultural benchmark datasets demonstrate that CALM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Smooth Sailing: Lipschitz-Driven Uncertainty Quantification for Spatial Associations
Authors: David R. Burt; Renato Berlinghieri; Stephen Bates; Tamara Broderick
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Estimating associations between spatial covariates and responses — rather than merely predicting responses — is central to environmental science, epidemiology, and economics. For instance, public health officials might be interested in whether air pollution has a strictly positive association with a health outcome, and the magnitude of any effect. Standard machine learning methods often provide accurate predictions but offer limited insight into covariate-response relationships. And we show that existing methods for constructing confidence (or credible) intervals for associations can fail to provide nominal coverage in the face of model misspecification and nonrandom locations — despite both being essentially always present in spatial problems. We introduce a method that constructs valid frequentist confidence intervals for associations in spatial settings. Our method requires minimal assumptions beyond a form of spatial smoothness and a homoskedastic Gaussian error assumption. In particular, we do not require model correctness or covariate overlap between training and target locations. Our approach is the first to guarantee nominal coverage in this setting and outperforms existing techniques in both real and simulated experiments. Our confidence intervals are valid in finite samples when the noise of the Gaussian error is known, and we provide an asymptotically consistent estimation procedure for this noise variance when it is unknown.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Entropy Minimization in LLM Reasoning
Authors: Shivam Agarwal; Zimin Zhang; Lifan Yuan; Jiawei Han; Hao Peng
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. 
We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models’ (LLMs) performance on challenging math, physics, and coding tasks. We explore three approaches: (1) EM-FT minimizes token-level entropy similarly to instruction finetuning, but on unlabeled outputs drawn from the model; (2) EM-RL: reinforcement learning with negative entropy as the only reward to maximize; (3) EM-INF: inference-time logit adjustment to reduce entropy without any training data or parameter updates. 
On Qwen-7B, EM-RL, without any labeled data, achieves comparable or better performance than strong RL baselines such as GRPO and RLOO that are trained on 60K labeled examples. Furthermore, EM-INF enables Qwen-32B to match or exceed the performance of proprietary models like GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 Pro on the challenging SciCode benchmark, while being 3x more efficient than self-consistency and sequential refinement. Our findings reveal that many pretrained LLMs possess previously underappreciated reasoning capabilities that can be effectively elicited through entropy minimization alone, without any labeled data or even any parameter updates.
AcuRank: Uncertainty-Aware Adaptive Computation for Listwise Reranking
Authors: Soyoung Yoon; Gyuwan Kim; GYU-HWUNG CHO; seung-won hwang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Listwise reranking with large language models (LLMs) enhances top-ranked results in retrieval-based applications.
Due to the limit in context size and high inference cost of long context, reranking is typically performed over a fixed size of small subsets, with the final ranking aggregated from these partial results.
This fixed computation disregards query difficulty and document distribution, leading to inefficiencies. 
We propose AcuRank, an adaptive reranking framework that dynamically adjusts both the amount and target of computation based on uncertainty estimates over document relevance. 
Using a Bayesian TrueSkill model, we iteratively refine relevance estimates until reaching sufficient confidence levels, and our explicit modeling of ranking uncertainty enables principled control over reranking behavior and avoids unnecessary updates to confident predictions.
Results on the TREC-DL and BEIR benchmarks show that our method consistently achieves a superior accuracy–efficiency trade-off and scales better with compute than fixed-computation baselines.
These results highlight the effectiveness and generalizability of our method across diverse retrieval tasks and LLM-based reranking models.
Non-monotone Submodular Optimization: $p$-Matchoid Constraints and Fully Dynamic Setting
Authors: Kiarash Banihashem; Samira Goudarzi; MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi; Peyman Jabbarzade; Morteza Monemizadeh
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Submodular maximization subject to a $p$-matchoid constraint has various applications in machine learning, particularly in tasks such as feature selection, video and text summarization, movie recommendation, graph-based learning, and constraint-based optimization. We study this problem in the dynamic setting, where a sequence of insertions and deletions of elements to a $p$-matchoid $\mathcal{M}(\mathcal{V},\mathcal{I})$ occurs over time and the goal is to efficiently maintain an approximate solution.
We propose a dynamic algorithm for non-monotone submodular maximization under a $p$-matchoid constraint. For a $p$-matchoid $\mathcal{M}(\mathcal{V},\mathcal{I})$ of rank $k$, defined by a collection of $m$ matroids, our algorithm guarantees a $(2p + 2\sqrt{p(p+1)} + 1 + \epsilon)$-approximate solution at any time $t$ in the update sequence, with an expected amortized query complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-3} pk^4 \log^2(k))$ per update.
Adversary Aware Optimization for Robust Defense
Authors: Daniel Wesego; Pedram Rooshenas
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Deep neural networks remain highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, where small, subtle perturbations to input images may induce misclassification. We propose a novel optimization-based purification framework that directly removes these perturbations by maximizing a Bayesian-inspired objective combining a pretrained diffusion prior with a likelihood term tailored to the adversarial perturbation space. Our method iteratively refines a given input through gradient-based updates of a combined score-based loss to guide the purification process. Unlike existing optimization-based defenses that treat adversarial noise as generic corruption, our approach explicitly integrates the adversarial landscape into the objective. Experiments performed on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 demonstrate strong robust accuracy against a range of common adversarial attacks. Our work offers a principled test-time defense grounded in probabilistic inference using score-based generative models. Our code can be found at \url{ https://github.com/rooshenasgroup/aaopt }.
Schrödinger Bridge Matching for Tree-Structured Costs and Entropic Wasserstein Barycentres
Authors: Samuel Howard; Peter Potaptchik; George Deligiannidis
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in flow-based generative modelling have provided scalable methods for computing the Schrödinger Bridge (SB) between distributions, a dynamic form of entropy-regularised Optimal Transport (OT) for the quadratic cost. The successful Iterative Markovian Fitting (IMF) procedure solves the SB problem via sequential bridge-matching steps, presenting an elegant and practical approach with many favourable properties over the more traditional Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) procedure. Beyond the standard setting, optimal transport can be generalised to the multi-marginal case in which the objective is to minimise a cost defined over several marginal distributions. Of particular importance are costs defined over a tree structure, from which Wasserstein barycentres can be recovered as a special case. In this work, we extend the IMF procedure to solve for the tree-structured SB problem. Our resulting algorithm inherits the many advantages of IMF over IPF approaches in the tree-based setting. In the case of Wasserstein barycentres, our approach can be viewed as extending the widely used fixed-point approach to use flow-based entropic OT solvers, while requiring only simple bridge-matching steps at each iteration.
Return of ChebNet: Understanding and Improving an Overlooked GNN on Long Range Tasks
Authors: Ali Hariri; Alvaro Arroyo; Alessio Gravina; Moshe Eliasof; Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb; Davide Bacciu; Xiaowen Dong; Kamyar Azizzadenesheli; Pierre Vandergheynst
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: ChebNet, one of the earliest spectral GNNs, has largely been overshadowed by Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs), which gained popularity for their simplicity and effectiveness in capturing local graph structure. Despite their success, MPNNs are limited in their ability to capture long-range dependencies between nodes. This has led researchers to adapt MPNNs through *rewiring* or make use of *Graph Transformers*, which compromise the computational efficiency that characterized early spatial message passing architectures, and typically disregard the graph structure. Almost a decade after its original introduction, we revisit ChebNet to shed light on its ability to model distant node interactions. We find that out-of-box, ChebNet already shows competitive advantages relative to classical MPNNs and GTs on long-range benchmarks, while maintaining good scalability properties for high-order polynomials. However, we uncover that this polynomial expansion leads ChebNet to an unstable regime during training. To address this limitation, we cast ChebNet as a stable and non-dissipative dynamical system, which we coin Stable-ChebNet. Our Stable-ChebNet model allows for stable information propagation, and has controllable dynamics which do not require the use of eigendecompositions, positional encodings, or graph rewiring. Across several benchmarks, Stable-ChebNet achieves near  state-of-the-art performance.
Hyperparameter Transfer Enables Consistent Gains of Matrix-Preconditioned Optimizers Across Scales
Authors: Shikai Qiu; Zixi Chen; Hoang Phan; Qi Lei; Andrew Gordon Wilson
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Several recently introduced deep learning optimizers utilizing matrix-level preconditioning have shown promising speedups relative to the current dominant optimizer AdamW, particularly in relatively small-scale experiments. However, efforts to validate and replicate their successes have reported mixed results.
To better understand the effectiveness of these optimizers at scale, in this work we investigate how to scale preconditioned optimizers via hyperparameter transfer, building on prior works such as $\mu$P. We study how the optimal learning rate and weight decay should scale with model width and depth for a wide range of optimizers, including Shampoo, SOAP, and Muon, accounting for the impact of commonly used techniques such as blocking and grafting. We find that scaling the learning rate according to $\mu$P improves transfer, but can still suffer from significant finite-width deviations that cause drifting optimal learning rates, which we show can be mitigated by blocking and explicit spectral normalization.
For compute-optimal scaling, we find scaling independent weight decay as $1/\mathrm{width}$ is nearly optimal across optimizers.
Applying these scaling rules, we show Muon, SOAP and Shampoo consistently achieve near $1.4\times$ speedup over AdamW for training Llama-architecture language models of sizes ranging from $190$M to $1.4$B, whereas the speedup vanishes rapidly with scale under incorrect scaling. Based on these results and further ablations, we argue that studying optimal hyperparameter transfer is essential for reliably comparing optimizers at scale given a realistic tuning budget.
3BASiL: An Algorithmic Framework for Sparse plus Low-Rank Compression of LLMs
Authors: Mehdi Makni; Xiang Meng; Rahul Mazumder
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Sparse plus Low-Rank $(\mathbf{S} + \mathbf{L}\mathbf{R})$ decomposition of Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising direction in $\textit{model compression}$, aiming to decompose pre-trained model weights into a sum of sparse and low-rank matrices $\mathbf{W} \approx \mathbf{S} + \mathbf{LR}$. Despite recent progress, existing methods often suffer from substantial performance degradation compared to dense models. In this work, we introduce $\texttt{3BASiL-TM}$, an efficient one-shot post-training method for $(\mathbf{S} + \mathbf{L}\mathbf{R})$ decomposition of LLMs that addresses this gap. Our approach first introduces a novel 3-Block Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) method, termed $\texttt{3BASiL}$, to minimize the layer-wise reconstruction error with convergence guarantees. 
We then design a transformer-matching ($\texttt{TM}$) refinement step that jointly optimizes the sparse and low-rank components across transformer layers. This step minimizes a novel memory-efficient  loss that aligns outputs at the transformer level.
Notably, the $\texttt{TM}$ procedure is universal as it can enhance any $(\mathbf{S} + \mathbf{L}\mathbf{R})$ decomposition, including pure sparsity. Our numerical experiments show that $\texttt{3BASiL-TM}$ reduces the WikiText2 perplexity gap to dense LLaMA-8B model by over 30% under a (2:4 Sparse + 64 LR) configuration, compared to prior methods. Moreover, our method achieves over 2.5x faster compression runtime on an A100 GPU compared to SOTA $(\mathbf{S} + \mathbf{L}\mathbf{R})$ method.
Our code is available at https://github.com/mazumder-lab/3BASiL.
FrameShield: Adversarially Robust Video Anomaly Detection
Authors: Mojtaba Nafez; Mobina Poulaei; Nikan Vasei; Bardia soltani moakhar; Mohammad Sabokrou; Mohammad Hossein Rohban
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection (WSVAD) has achieved notable advancements, yet existing models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, limiting their reliability. Due to the inherent constraints of weak supervision—where only video-level labels are provided despite the need for frame-level predictions—traditional adversarial defense mechanisms, such as adversarial training, are not effective since video-level adversarial perturbations are typically weak and inadequate. To address this limitation, pseudo-labels generated directly from the model can enable frame-level adversarial training; however, these pseudo-labels are inherently noisy, significantly degrading performance. We therefore introduce a novel Pseudo-Anomaly Generation method called Spatiotemporal Region Distortion (SRD), which creates synthetic anomalies by applying severe augmentations to localized regions in normal videos while preserving temporal consistency. Integrating these precisely annotated synthetic anomalies with the noisy pseudo-labels substantially reduces label noise, enabling effective adversarial training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the robustness of WSVAD models against adversarial attacks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by an average of 71.0\% in overall AUROC performance across multiple benchmarks. The implementation and code are publicly available at [FrameShield (GitHub)](https://github.com/rohban-lab/FrameShield).
Spectral Analysis of Representational Similarity with Limited Neurons
Authors: Hyunmo Kang; Abdulkadir Canatar; SueYeon Chung
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Understanding representational similarity between neural recordings and computational models is essential for neuroscience, yet remains challenging to measure reliably due to the constraints on the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously. In this work, we apply tools from Random Matrix Theory to investigate how such limitations affect similarity measures, focusing on Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) and Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). We propose an analytical framework for representational similarity analysis that relates measured similarities to the spectral properties of the underlying representations. We demonstrate that neural similarities are systematically underestimated under finite neuron sampling, mainly due to eigenvector delocalization. To overcome this, we introduce a denoising method to infer population-level similarity, enabling accurate analysis even with small neuron samples. Theoretical predictions are validated on synthetic and real datasets, offering practical strategies for interpreting neural data under finite sampling constraints.
Information Theoretic Learning for Diffusion Models with Warm Start
Authors: Yirong Shen; Lu GAN; Cong Ling
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Generative models that maximize model likelihood have gained traction in many practical settings. Among them, perturbation-based approaches underpin many state-of-the-art likelihood estimation models, yet they often face slow convergence and limited theoretical understanding. In this paper, we derive a tighter likelihood bound for noise-driven models to improve both the accuracy and efficiency of maximum likelihood learning. Our key insight extends the classical Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence–Fisher information relationship to arbitrary noise perturbations, going beyond the Gaussian assumption and enabling structured noise distributions. This formulation allows flexible use of randomized noise distributions that naturally account for sensor artifacts, quantization effects, and data distribution smoothing, while remaining compatible with standard diffusion training. Treating the diffusion process as a Gaussian channel, we further express the mismatched entropy between data and model, showing that the proposed objective upper-bounds the negative log-likelihood (NLL). In experiments, our models achieve competitive NLL on CIFAR-10 and state-of-the-art results on ImageNet across multiple resolutions, all without data augmentation, and the framework extends naturally to discrete data.
Ravan: Multi-Head Low-Rank Adaptation for Federated Fine-Tuning
Authors: Arian Raje; Baris Askin; Divyansh Jhunjhunwala; Gauri Joshi
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have yet to effectively leverage the vast amounts of edge-device data, and Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising paradigm to collaboratively fine-tune LLMs without transferring private edge data to the cloud. To operate within the computational and communication constraints of edge devices, recent literature on federated fine-tuning of LLMs proposes the use of low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and similar parameter-efficient methods. However, LoRA-based methods suffer from accuracy degradation in FL settings, primarily because of data and computational heterogeneity across clients. We propose Ravan, an adaptive multi-head LoRA method that balances parameter efficiency and model expressivity by reparameterizing the weight updates as the sum of multiple LoRA heads, $s_i\textbf{B}_i\textbf{H}_i\textbf{A}_i$, in which only the $\textbf{H}_i$ parameters and their lightweight scaling factors $s_i$ are trained. These trainable scaling factors let the optimization focus on the most useful heads, recovering a higher-rank approximation of the full update without increasing the number of communicated parameters since clients upload $s_i\textbf{H}_i$ directly. Experiments on vision and language benchmarks show that Ravan improves test accuracy by 2–8\% over prior parameter-efficient baselines, making it a robust and scalable solution for federated fine-tuning of LLMs.
Emergence of Linear Truth Encodings in Language Models
Authors: Shauli Ravfogel; Gilad Yehudai; Tal Linzen; Joan Bruna; Alberto Bietti
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent probing studies reveal that large language models exhibit linear subspaces that separate true from false statements, yet the mechanism behind their emergence is unclear. We introduce a transparent, one-layer transformer toy model that reproduces such truth subspaces end-to-end and exposes one concrete route by which they can arise. We study one simple setting in which truth encoding can emerge: a data distribution where factual statements co-occur with other factual statements (and vice-versa), encouraging the model to learn this distinction in order to lower the LM loss on future tokens. We corroborate this pattern with experiments in pretrained language models. Finally, in the toy setting we observe a two-phase learning dynamic: networks first memorize individual factual associations in a few steps, then---over a longer horizon---learn to linearly separate true from false, which in turn lowers language-modeling loss. Together, these results provide both a mechanistic demonstration and an empirical motivation for how and why linear truth representations can emerge in language models.
Preconditioned Langevin Dynamics with Score-based Generative Models for Infinite-Dimensional Linear Bayesian Inverse Problems
Authors: Lorenzo Baldassari; Josselin Garnier; Knut Solna; Maarten V. de Hoop
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Designing algorithms for solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems directly in infinite‑dimensional function spaces – where such problems are naturally formulated – is crucial to ensure stability and  convergence as the discretization of the underlying  problem is refined. In this paper, we contribute to this line of work by analyzing a widely used sampler for linear inverse problems: Langevin dynamics driven by score‑based generative models (SGMs) acting as priors, formulated directly in function space. Building on the  theoretical framework for SGMs in Hilbert spaces, we give a rigorous definition of this sampler in the infinite-dimensional setting and derive, for the first time, error estimates that explicitly depend on the approximation error of the score. As a consequence, we obtain sufficient conditions for global convergence in Kullback–Leibler divergence on the underlying function space. Preventing numerical instabilities requires preconditioning of the Langevin algorithm and we prove the existence  and form of an optimal preconditioner. The preconditioner depends on both the score error and the forward operator and guarantees a uniform convergence rate across all posterior modes. Our analysis applies to both Gaussian and a general class of non‑Gaussian priors. Finally, we present examples that illustrate and validate our theoretical findings.