GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
ZEBRA: Towards Zero-Shot Cross-Subject Generalization for Universal Brain Visual Decoding
Authors: Haonan Wang; Jingyu Lu; Hongrui Li; Xiaomeng Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in neural decoding have enabled the reconstruction of visual experiences from brain activity, positioning fMRI-to-image reconstruction as a promising bridge between neuroscience and computer vision. However, current methods predominantly rely on subject-speciﬁc models or require subject-speciﬁc ﬁne-tuning, limiting their scalability and real-world applicability. In this work, we introduce ZEBRA, the ﬁrst zero-shot brain visual decoding framework that eliminates the need for subject-speciﬁc adaptation. Z EBRA is built on the key insight that fMRI representations can be decomposed into subject-related and semantic-related components. By leveraging adversarial training, our method explicitly disentangles these components to isolate subject-invariant, semantic-speciﬁc representations. This disentanglement allows ZEBRA to generalize to unseen subjects without any additional fMRI data or retraining. Extensive experiments show that ZEBRA signiﬁcantly outperforms zero-shot baselines and achieves performance comparable to fully ﬁnetuned models on several metrics. Our work represents a scalable and practical step toward universal neural decoding. Code and model weights are available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/ZEBRA.
Why Knowledge Distillation Works in Generative Models: A Minimal Working Explanation
Authors: Sungmin Cha; Kyunghyun Cho
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a core component in the training and deployment of modern generative models, particularly large language models (LLMs). While its empirical benefits are well documented---enabling smaller student models to emulate the performance of much larger teachers---the underlying mechanisms by which KD improves generative quality remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a minimal working explanation of KD in generative modeling. Using a controlled simulation with mixtures of Gaussians, we demonstrate that distillation induces a trade-off between precision and recall in the student model. As the teacher distribution becomes more selective, the student concentrates more probability mass on high-likelihood regions at the expense of coverage, which is a behavior modulated by a single entropy-controlling parameter. We then validate this effect in a large-scale language modeling setup using the SmolLM2 family of models. Empirical results reveal the same precision-recall dynamics observed in simulation, where precision corresponds to sample quality and recall to distributional coverage. This precision-recall trade-off in LLMs is found to be especially beneficial in scenarios where sample quality is more important than diversity, such as instruction tuning or downstream generation.  Our analysis provides a simple and general explanation for the effectiveness of KD in generative modeling.
Quantization-Free Autoregressive Action Transformer
Authors: Ziyad Sheebaelhamd; Michael Tschannen; Michael Muehlebach; Claire Vernade
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Current transformer-based imitation learning approaches introduce discrete action representations and train an autoregressive transformer decoder on the resulting latent code. However, the initial quantization breaks the continuous structure of the action space thereby limiting the capabilities of the generative model. We propose a quantization-free method instead that leverages Generative Infinite-Vocabulary Transformers (GIVT) as a direct, continuous policy parametrization for autoregressive transformers. This simplifies the imitation learning pipeline while achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of popular simulated robotics tasks. We enhance our policy roll-outs by carefully studying sampling algorithms, further improving the results.
Estimating Model Performance Under Covariate Shift Without Labels
Authors: Jakub Białek; Juhani Kivimäki; Wojtek Kuberski; Nikolaos Perrakis
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: After deployment, machine learning models often experience performance degradation due to shifts in data distribution. It is challenging to assess post-deployment performance accurately when labels are missing or delayed. Existing proxy methods, such as data drift detection, fail to measure the effects of these shifts adequately. To address this, we introduce a new method for evaluating binary classification models on unlabeled tabular data that accurately estimates model performance under covariate shift and call it Probabilistic Adaptive Performance Estimation (PAPE). It can be applied to any performance metric defined with elements of the confusion matrix. Crucially, PAPE operates independently of the original model, relying only on its predictions and probability estimates, and does not need any assumptions about the nature of covariate shift, learning directly from data instead. We tested PAPE using over 900 dataset-model combinations from US census data, assessing its performance against several benchmarks through various metrics. Our findings show that PAPE outperforms other methodologies, making it a superior choice for estimating the performance of binary classification models.
PRESTO: Preimage-Informed Instruction Optimization for Prompting Black-Box LLMs
Authors: Jaewon Chu; Seunghun Lee; Hyunwoo J. Kim
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. This raised interest in optimizing instructions for black-box LLMs, whose internal parameters are inaccessible but popular for their strong performance and ease of use. Recent approaches leverage white-box LLMs to assist instruction optimization for black-box LLMs by generating instructions from soft prompts. However, white-box LLMs often map different soft prompts to the same instruction, leading to redundant queries to the black-box model. While previous studies regarded this many-to-one mapping as a redundancy to be avoided, we reinterpret it as useful prior knowledge that can enhance the optimization performance. To this end, we introduce PREimage-informed inSTruction Optimization (PRESTO), a novel framework that leverages the preimage structure of soft prompts to improve query efficiency. PRESTO consists of three key components: (1) score sharing, which shares the evaluation score with all soft prompts in a preimage; (2) preimage-based initialization, which select initial data points that maximize search space coverage using preimage information; and (3) score consistency regularization, which enforces prediction consistency within each preimage. By leveraging preimages, PRESTO observes 14 times more scored data under the same query budget, resulting in more efficient optimization. Experimental results on 33 instruction optimization tasks demonstrate the superior performance of PRESTO.
True Zero-Shot Inference of Dynamical Systems Preserving Long-Term Statistics
Authors: Christoph Jürgen Hemmer; Daniel Durstewitz
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Complex, temporally evolving phenomena, from climate to brain activity, are governed by dynamical systems (DS). DS reconstruction (DSR) seeks to infer generative surrogate models of these from observed data, reproducing their long-term behavior. Existing DSR approaches require purpose-training for any new system observed, lacking the zero-shot and in-context inference capabilities known from LLMs. Here we introduce *DynaMix*, a novel multivariate ALRNN-based mixture-of-experts architecture pre-trained for DSR, the first DSR model able to generalize zero-shot to out-of-domain DS. Just from a provided context signal, without any re-training, DynaMix faithfully forecasts the long-term evolution of novel DS where existing time series (TS) foundation models, like Chronos, fail -- at a fraction of the number of parameters (0.1%) and orders of magnitude faster inference times. DynaMix outperforms TS foundation models in terms of long-term statistics, and often also short-term forecasts, even on real-world time series, like traffic or weather data, typically used for training and evaluating TS models, *but not at all part of DynaMix' training corpus*. We illustrate some of the failure modes of TS models for DSR problems, and conclude that models built on DS principles may bear a huge potential also for advancing the TS prediction field.
AugGen: Synthetic Augmentation using Diffusion Models Can Improve Recognition
Authors: Parsa Rahimi; Damien Teney; Sébastien Marcel
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The increasing reliance on large-scale datasets in machine learning poses significant privacy and ethical challenges, particularly in sensitive domains such as face recognition. Synthetic data generation offers a promising alternative; however, most existing methods depend heavily on external datasets or pre-trained models, increasing complexity and resource demands. In this paper, we introduce **AugGen**, a self-contained synthetic augmentation technique. AugGen strategically samples from a class-conditional generative model trained exclusively on the target FR dataset, eliminating the need for external resources. Evaluated across 8 FR benchmarks, including IJB-C and IJB-B, our method achieves **1–12% performance improvements**, outperforming models trained solely on real data and surpassing state-of-the-art synthetic data generation approaches, while using less real data. Notably, these gains often exceed those from architectural modifications, underscoring the value of synthetic augmentation in data-limited scenarios. Our findings demonstrate that carefully integrated synthetic data can both mitigate privacy constraints and substantially enhance discriminative performance in face recognition. Code and datasets will be made publicly available upon publication.
LLM-Explorer: A Plug-in Reinforcement Learning Policy Exploration Enhancement Driven by Large Language Models
Authors: Qianyue Hao; Yiwen Song; Qingmin Liao; Jian Yuan; Yong Li
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Policy exploration is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), where existing approaches include $\epsilon$-greedy, Gaussian process, etc.
However, these approaches utilize preset stochastic processes and are indiscriminately applied in all kinds of RL tasks without considering task-specific features that influence policy exploration. Moreover, during RL training, the evolution of such stochastic processes is rigid, which typically only incorporates a decay in the variance, failing to adjust flexibly according to the agent's real-time learning status.
Inspired by the analyzing and reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs), we design **LLM-Explorer** to adaptively generate task-specific exploration strategies with LLMs, enhancing the policy exploration in RL. In our design, we sample the learning trajectory of the agent during the RL training in a given task and prompt the LLM to analyze the agent's current policy learning status and then generate a probability distribution for future policy exploration. Updating the probability distribution periodically, we derive a stochastic process specialized for the particular task and dynamically adjusted to adapt to the learning process. Our design is a plug-in module compatible with various widely applied RL algorithms, including the DQN series, DDPG, TD3, and any possible variants developed based on them. Through extensive experiments on the Atari and MuJoCo benchmarks, we demonstrate LLM-Explorer's capability to enhance RL policy exploration, achieving an average performance improvement up to 37.27%. Our code is open-source at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/LLM-Explorer for reproducibility.
Provable Scaling Laws for the Test-Time Compute of Large Language Models
Authors: Yanxi Chen; Xuchen Pan; Yaliang Li; Bolin Ding; Jingren Zhou
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We propose two simple, principled and practical algorithms that enjoy provable scaling laws for the test-time compute of large language models (LLMs). The first one is a two-stage knockout-style algorithm: given an input problem, it first generates multiple candidate solutions, and then aggregate them via a knockout tournament for the final output. Assuming that the LLM can generate a correct solution with non-zero probability and do better than a random guess in comparing a pair of correct and incorrect solutions, we prove theoretically that the failure probability of this algorithm decays to zero exponentially or by a power law (depending on the specific way of scaling) as its test-time compute grows. The second one is a two-stage league-style algorithm, where each candidate is evaluated by its average win rate against multiple opponents, rather than eliminated upon loss to a single opponent. Under analogous but more robust assumptions, we prove that its failure probability also decays to zero exponentially with more test-time compute. Both algorithms require a black-box LLM and nothing else (e.g., no verifier or reward model) for a minimalistic implementation, which makes them appealing for practical applications and easy to adapt for different tasks. Through extensive experiments with diverse models and datasets, we validate the proposed theories and demonstrate the outstanding scaling properties of both algorithms.
Near-Optimal Quantum Algorithms for Computing (Coarse) Correlated Equilibria of General-Sum Games
Authors: Tongyang Li; Xinzhao Wang; Yexin Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Computing Nash equilibria of zero-sum games in classical and quantum settings is extensively studied. For general-sum games, computing Nash equilibria is PPAD-hard and the computing of a more general concept called correlated equilibria has been widely explored in game theory. In this paper, we initiate the study of quantum algorithms for computing $\varepsilon$-approximate correlated equilibria (CE) and coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) in multi-player normal-form games. Our approach utilizes quantum improvements to the multi-scale Multiplicative Weight Update (MWU) method for CE calculations, achieving a query complexity of $\tilde{O}(m\sqrt{n})$ for fixed $\varepsilon$. For CCE, we extend techniques from quantum algorithms for zero-sum games to multi-player settings, achieving query complexity $\tilde{O}(m\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon^{2.5})$. Both algorithms demonstrate a near-optimal scaling in the number of players $m$ and actions $n$, as confirmed by our quantum query lower bounds.
SegGraph: Leveraging Graphs of SAM Segments for Few-Shot 3D Part Segmentation
Authors: Yueyang Hu; Haiyong Jiang; Haoxuan Song; Jun Xiao; Hao Pan
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: This work presents a novel framework for few-shot 3D part segmentation. Recent advances have demonstrated the significant potential of 2D foundation models for low-shot 3D part segmentation. However, it is still an open problem that how to effectively aggregate 2D knowledge from foundation models to 3D. Existing methods either ignore geometric structures for 3D feature learning or neglects the high-quality grouping clues from SAM, leading to under-segmentation and inconsistent part labels. We devise a novel SAM segment graph-based propagation method, named SegGraph, to explicitly learn geometric features encoded within SAM's segmentation masks. Our method encodes geometric features by modeling mutual overlap and adjacency between segments while preserving intra-segment semantic consistency. We construct a segment graph, conceptually similar to an atlas, where nodes represent segments and edges capture their spatial relationships (overlap/adjacency). Each node adaptively modulates 2D foundation model features, which are then propagated via a graph neural network to learn global geometric structures. To enforce intra-segment semantic consistency, we map segment features to 3D points with a novel view-direction-weighted fusion attenuating contributions from low-quality segments. Extensive experiments on PartNet-E demonstrate that our method outperforms all competing baselines by at least 6.9% mIoU. Further analysis reveals that SegGraph achieves particularly strong performance on small components and part boundaries, demonstrating its superior geometric understanding.
BayeSQP: Bayesian Optimization through Sequential Quadratic Programming
Authors: Paul Brunzema; Sebastian Trimpe
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: We introduce BayeSQP, a novel algorithm for general black-box optimization that merges the structure of sequential quadratic programming with concepts from Bayesian optimization. BayeSQP employs second-order Gaussian process surrogates for both the objective and constraints to jointly model the function values, gradients, and Hessian from only zero-order information. At each iteration, a local subproblem is constructed using the GP posterior estimates and solved to obtain a search direction. Crucially, the formulation of the subproblem explicitly incorporates uncertainty in both the function and derivative estimates, resulting in a tractable second-order cone program for high probability improvements under model uncertainty. A subsequent one-dimensional line search via constrained Thompson sampling selects the next evaluation point. Empirical results show that BayeSQP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in specific high-dimensional settings. Our algorithm offers a principled and flexible framework that bridges classical optimization techniques with modern approaches to black-box optimization.
Learning Intractable Multimodal Policies with Reparameterization and Diversity Regularization
Authors: Ziqi Wang; Jiashun Liu; Ling Pan
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Traditional continuous deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms employ deterministic or unimodal Gaussian actors, which cannot express complex multimodal decision distributions. This limitation can hinder their performance in diversity-critical scenarios. There have been some attempts to design online multimodal RL algorithms based on diffusion or amortized actors. However, these actors are intractable, making existing methods struggle with balancing performance, decision diversity, and efficiency simultaneously. To overcome this challenge, we first reformulate existing intractable multimodal actors within a unified framework, and prove that they can be directly optimized by policy gradient via reparameterization. Then, we propose a distance-based diversity regularization that does not explicitly require decision probabilities. We identify two diversity-critical domains, namely multi-goal achieving and generative RL, to demonstrate the advantages of multimodal policies and our method, particularly in terms of few-shot robustness. In conventional MuJoCo benchmarks, our algorithm also shows competitive performance. Moreover, our experiments highlight that the amortized actor is a promising policy model class with strong multimodal expressivity and high performance.  Our code is available at https://github.com/PneuC/DrAC
Epistemic Uncertainty for Generated Image Detection
Authors: Jun Nie; Yonggang Zhang; Tongliang Liu; Yiu-ming Cheung; Bo Han; Xinmei Tian
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We introduce a novel framework for AI-generated image detection through epistemic uncertainty, aiming to address critical security concerns in the era of generative models. Our key insight stems from the observation that distributional discrepancies between training and testing data manifest distinctively in the epistemic uncertainty space of machine learning models.
 In this context, the distribution shift between natural and generated images leads to elevated epistemic uncertainty in models trained on natural images when evaluating generated ones. Hence, we exploit this phenomenon by using epistemic uncertainty as a proxy for detecting generated images. This converts the challenge of generated image detection into the problem of uncertainty estimation, underscoring the generalization performance of the model used for uncertainty estimation. Fortunately, advanced large-scale vision models pre-trained on extensive natural images have shown excellent generalization performance for various scenarios. Thus, we utilize these pre-trained models to estimate the epistemic uncertainty of images and flag those with high uncertainty as generated.
 Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method.
Towards a Geometric Understanding of Tensor Learning via the t-Product
Authors: Andong Wang; Yuning Qiu; Haonan Huang; Zhong Jin; Guoxu Zhou; Qibin Zhao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Despite the growing success of transform-based tensor models such as the t-product, their underlying geometric principles remain poorly understood. Classical differential geometry, built on real-valued function spaces, is not well suited to capture the algebraic and spectral structure induced by transform-based tensor operations. In this work, we take an initial step toward a geometric framework for  tensors equipped with tube-wise multiplication via orthogonal transforms. We introduce the notion of smooth t-manifolds, defined as topological spaces locally modeled on structured tensor modules over a commutative t-scalar ring. This formulation enables transform-consistent definitions of geometric objects, including metrics, gradients, Laplacians, and geodesics, thereby bridging discrete and continuous tensor settings within a unified algebraic-geometric perspective. 
On this basis, we develop a statistical procedure for testing whether tensor data lie near a low-dimensional t-manifold, and provide nonasymptotic guarantees for  manifold fitting under noise. We further establish approximation bounds for tensor neural networks that learn smooth functions over t-manifolds, with generalization rates determined by intrinsic geometric complexity. This framework offers a theoretical foundation for geometry-aware learning in structured tensor spaces and supports the development of models that align with transform-based tensor representations.
Accelerating Feature Conformal Prediction via Taylor Approximation
Authors: Zihao Tang; Boyuan Wang; Chuan Wen; Jiaye Teng
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Conformal prediction is widely adopted in uncertainty quantification, due to its post-hoc, distribution-free, and model-agnostic properties.
In the realm of modern deep learning, researchers have proposed Feature Conformal Prediction (FCP), which deploys conformal prediction in a feature space, yielding reduced band lengths.
However, the practical utility of FCP is limited due to the time-consuming non-linear operations required to transform confidence bands from feature space to output space.
In this paper, we present Fast Feature Conformal Prediction (FFCP), a method that accelerates FCP by leveraging a first-order Taylor expansion to approximate these non-linear operations.
The proposed FFCP introduces a novel non-conformity score that is both effective and efficient for real-world applications.
Empirical validations showcase that FFCP performs comparably with FCP (both outperforming the vanilla version) while achieving a significant reduction in computational time by approximately 50x in both regression and classification tasks.