GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Influence Functions for Edge Edits in Non-Convex Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Jaeseung Heo; Kyeongheung Yun; Seokwon Yoon; MoonJeong Park; Jungseul Ok; Dongwoo Kim
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Understanding how individual edges influence the behavior of graph neural networks (GNNs) is essential for improving their interpretability and robustness. Graph influence functions have emerged as promising tools to efficiently estimate the effects of edge deletions without retraining. However, existing influence prediction methods rely on strict convexity assumptions, exclusively consider the influence of edge deletions while disregarding edge insertions, and fail to capture changes in message propagation caused by these modifications. In this work, we propose a proximal Bregman response function specifically tailored for GNNs, relaxing the convexity requirement and enabling accurate influence prediction for standard neural network architectures. Furthermore, our method explicitly accounts for message propagation effects and extends influence prediction to both edge deletions and insertions in a principled way. Experiments with real-world datasets demonstrate accurate influence predictions for different characteristics of GNNs. We further demonstrate that the influence function is versatile in applications such as graph rewiring and adversarial attacks.
The Future Unmarked: Watermark Removal in AI-Generated Images via Next-Frame Prediction
Authors: Huming Qiu; Zhaoxiang Wang; Mi Zhang; Xiaohan Zhang; Xiaoyu You; Min Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Image watermarking embeds imperceptible signals into AI-generated images for deepfake detection and provenance verification. Although recent semantic-level watermarking methods demonstrate strong resistance against conventional pixel-level removal attacks, their robustness against more advanced removal strategies remains underexplored, raising concerns about their reliability in practical scenarios. Existing removal attacks primarily operate in the pixel domain without altering image semantics, which limits their effectiveness against semantic-level watermarks.
In this paper, we propose Next Frame Prediction Attack (NFPA), the first semantic-level removal attack. Unlike pixel-level attacks, NFPA formulates watermark removal as a video generation task: it treats the watermarked image as the initial frame and aims to subtly manipulate the image semantics to generate the next-frame image, i.e., the unwatermarked image.
We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on eight state-of-the-art image watermarking schemes, demonstrating that NFPA consistently outperforms thirteen removal attack baselines in terms of the trade-off between watermark removal and image quality. Our results reveal the vulnerabilities of current image watermarking methods and highlight the urgent need for more robust watermarks.
VQToken: Neural Discrete Token Representation Learning for Extreme Token Reduction in Video Large Language Models
Authors: Haichao Zhang; Yun Fu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Token-based video representation has emerged as a promising approach for enabling large language models (LLMs) to interpret video content. However, existing token reduction techniques, such as pruning and merging, often disrupt essential positional embeddings and rely on continuous visual tokens sampled from nearby pixels with similar spatial–temporal locations. By removing only a small fraction of tokens, these methods still produce relatively lengthy continuous sequences, which falls short of the extreme compression required to balance computational efficiency and token count in video LLMs.
In this paper, we introduce the novel task of **Extreme Short Token Reduction**, which aims to represent entire videos using a minimal set of discrete tokens.  We propose **VQToken**, a neural discrete token representation framework that
(i) applies adaptive vector quantization to continuous ViT embeddings to learn a compact codebook and 
(ii) preserves spatial–temporal positions via a token hash function by assigning each grid-level token to its nearest codebook entry.
On the Extreme Short Token Reduction task, our VQToken compresses sequences to just **0.07\%** of their original length while incurring only a **0.66\%** drop in accuracy on NextQA-MC benchmark. It also achieves comparable performance on ActNet-QA, Long Video Bench, and VideoMME. 
We further introduce the **Token Information Density** (**TokDense**) metric and formalize fixed-length and adaptive-length subtasks, achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings. Our approach dramatically lowers theoretical complexity, increases information density, way fewer tokens counts, and enables efficient video large language models in resource-constrained environments.
Miss-ReID: Delivering Robust Multi-Modality Object Re-Identification Despite Missing Modalities
Authors: Ruida Xi
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multi-modality object Re-IDentification (ReID) targets to retrieve special objects by integrating complementary information from diverse visual sources.
However, existing models that are trained on modality-complete datasets typically exhibit significantly degraded discrimination
during inference with modality-incomplete inputs.
This disparity highlights the necessity of developing a robust multi-modality ReID model that remains effective in real-world applications. For that, this paper delivers a flexible framework tailored for more realistic multi-modality retrieval scenario, dubbed as Miss-ReID, which is the first work to friendly support both the modality-missing training and inference conditions. The core of Miss-ReID lies in compensating for missing visual cues via vision-text knowledge transfer driven by Vision-Language foundation Models (VLMs), effectively mitigating performance degradation. In brief, we capture diverse visual features from accessible modalities first, and then build memory banks to store heterogeneous prototypes for each identity, preserving multi-modality characteristics. Afterwards, we employ structure-aware query interactions to dynamically distill modality-invariant object structures from existing localized visual patches, which are further reversed into pseudo-word tokens that encapsulate the identity-relevant structural semantics.
In tandem, the inverted tokens, integrated with learnable modality prompts, are embedded into crafted textual template to form the personalized linguistic descriptions tailored for diverse modalities.
Ultimately, harnessing VLMs' inherent vision-text alignment capability, the resulting textual features effectively function as compensatory semantic representations for missing visual modalities, after being optimized with some memory-based alignment constraints.
Extensive experiments demonstrate our model's efficacy and superiority over state-of-the-art methods in various modality-missing scenarios, and our endeavors further propel multi-modality ReID into real-world applications.
PLMTrajRec: A Scalable and Generalizable Trajectory Recovery Method with Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Tonglong Wei; Yan Lin; Youfang Lin; Shengnan Guo; Jilin Hu; Haitao Yuan; Gao Cong; Huaiyu Wan
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Spatiotemporal trajectory data is crucial for various traffic-related applications. However, issues such as device malfunctions and network instability often result in sparse trajectories that lose detailed movement information compared to their dense counterparts. Recovering missing points in sparse trajectories is thus essential. Despite recent progress, three challenges remain. First, the lack of large-scale dense trajectory datasets hinders the training of a trajectory recovery model. Second, the varying spatiotemporal correlations in sparse trajectories make it hard to generalize across different sampling intervals. Third, extracting road conditions for missing points is non-trivial.

To address these challenges, we propose $\textit{PLMTrajRec}$, a novel trajectory recovery model. It leverages the scalability of a pre-trained language model (PLM) and can effectively recover trajectories by fine-tuning with small-scale dense trajectory datasets. To handle different sampling intervals in sparse trajectories, we first convert sampling intervals and movement features into prompts for the PLM to understand. We then introduce a trajectory encoder to unify trajectories of varying intervals into a single interval. To extract road conditions for missing points, we propose an area flow-guided implicit trajectory prompt that represents traffic conditions in each region, and a road condition passing mechanism that infers the road conditions of missing points using the observed ones. Experiments on four public trajectory datasets with three sampling intervals demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and generalization ability of PLMTrajRec. Code is available at https://github.com/wtl52656/PLMTrajRec.
MindJourney: Test-Time Scaling with World Models for Spatial Reasoning
Authors: Yuncong Yang; Jiageng Liu; Zheyuan Zhang; Siyuan Zhou; Reuben Tan; Jianwei Yang; Yilun Du; Chuang Gan
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Spatial reasoning in 3D space is central to human cognition and indispensable for embodied tasks such as navigation and manipulation. However, state-of-the-art vision–language models (VLMs) struggle frequently with tasks as simple as anticipating how a scene will look after an egocentric motion: they perceive 2D images but lack an internal model of 3D dynamics. We therefore propose SpatialNavigator, a test-time scaling framework that grants a VLM with this missing capability by coupling it to a controllable world model based on video diffusion. The VLM iteratively sketches a concise camera trajectory, while the world model synthesizes the corresponding view at each step. The VLM then reasons over this multi-view evidence gathered during the interactive exploration. Without any fine-tuning, our SpatialNavigator achieves an average 7.7\% performance boost on the representative spatial reasoning benchmark SAT, showing that pairing VLMs with world models for test-time scaling offers a simple, plug-and-play route to robust 3D reasoning. Meanwhile, our method also improves upon the test-time inference VLMs trained through reinforcement learning, which demonstrates the potential of our method that utilizes world models for test-time scaling.
Quantifying and Alleviating Co-Adaptation in Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Kangjie Chen; Yingji Zhong; Zhihao Li; Jiaqi Lin; Youyu Chen; Minghan Qin; Haoqian Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive performance in novel view synthesis under dense-view settings. However, in sparse-view scenarios, despite the realistic renderings in training views, 3DGS occasionally manifests appearance artifacts in novel views. This paper investigates the appearance artifacts in sparse-view 3DGS and uncovers a core limitation of current approaches: the optimized Gaussians are overly-entangled with one another to aggressively fit the training views, which leads to a neglect of the real appearance distribution of the underlying scene and results in appearance artifacts in novel views. The analysis is based on a proposed metric, termed Co-Adaptation Score (CA), which quantifies the entanglement among Gaussians, i.e., co-adaptation, by computing the pixel-wise variance across multiple renderings of the same viewpoint, with different random subsets of Gaussians. The analysis reveals that the degree of co-adaptation is naturally alleviated as the number of training views increases. Based on the analysis, we propose two lightweight strategies to explicitly mitigate the co-adaptation in sparse-view 3DGS: (1) random gaussian dropout; (2) multiplicative noise injection to the opacity. Both strategies are designed to be plug-and-play, and their effectiveness is validated across various methods and benchmarks. We hope that our insights into the co-adaptation effect will inspire the community to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of sparse-view 3DGS.
PANDA: Towards Generalist Video Anomaly Detection via Agentic AI Engineer
Authors: Zhiwei Yang; Chen Gao; Mike Zheng Shou
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Video anomaly detection (VAD) is a critical yet challenging task due to the complex and diverse nature of real-world scenarios. Previous methods typically rely on domain-specific training data and manual adjustments when applying to new scenarios and unseen anomaly types, suffering from high labor costs and limited generalization. Therefore, we aim to achieve generalist VAD, \ie, automatically handle any scene and any anomaly types without training data or human involvement. In this work, we propose PANDA, an agentic AI engineer based on MLLMs. Specifically, we achieve PANDA by comprehensively devising four key capabilities: (1) self-adaptive scene-aware strategy planning, (2) goal-driven heuristic reasoning, (3) tool-augmented self-reflection, and (4) self-improving chain-of-memory. Concretely, we develop a self-adaptive scene-aware RAG mechanism, enabling PANDA to retrieve anomaly-specific knowledge for anomaly detection strategy planning. Next, we introduce a latent anomaly-guided heuristic prompt strategy to enhance reasoning precision. Furthermore, PANDA employs a progressive reflection mechanism alongside a suite of context-aware tools to iteratively refine decision-making in complex scenarios. Finally, a chain-of-memory mechanism enables PANDA to leverage historical experiences for continual performance improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PANDA achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-scenario, open-set, and complex scenario settings without training and manual involvement, validating its generalizable and robust anomaly detection capability. Code is released at https://github.com/showlab/PANDA.
A Novel General Framework for Sharp Lower Bounds in Succinct Stochastic Bandits
Authors: Guo Zeng; Jean Honorio
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Many online learning applications adopt the stochastic bandit problem with a linear reward model, where the unknown parameter exhibits a succinct structure. We study minimax regret lower bounds which allow to know whether more efficient algorithms can be proposed. We introduce a general definition of succinctness and propose a novel framework for constructing minimax regret lower bounds based on an information-regret trade-off. When applied to entry-sparse vectors, our framework sharpens a recent lower bound by (Hao et al, NeurIPS 2020). We further apply our framework to derive novel results. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first lower bounds for the group-sparse and low-rank matrix settings.
Learning Dense Hand Contact Estimation from Imbalanced Data
Authors: Daniel Sungho Jung; Kyoung Mu Lee
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Hands are essential to human interaction, and exploring contact between hands and the world can promote comprehensive understanding of their function. Recently, there have been growing number of hand interaction datasets that cover interaction with object, other hand, scene, and body. Despite the significance of the task and increasing high-quality data, how to effectively learn dense hand contact estimation remains largely underexplored. There are two major challenges for learning dense hand contact estimation. First, there exists class imbalance issue from hand contact datasets where majority of regions are not in contact. Second, hand contact datasets contain spatial imbalance issue with most of hand contact exhibited in finger tips, resulting in challenges for generalization towards contacts in other hand regions. To tackle these issues, we present a framework that learns dense HAnd COntact estimation (HACO) from imbalanced data. To resolve the class imbalance issue, we introduce balanced contact sampling, which builds and samples from multiple sampling groups that fairly represent diverse contact statistics for both contact and non-contact vertices. Moreover, to address the spatial imbalance issue, we propose vertex-level class-balanced (VCB) loss, which incorporates spatially varying contact distribution by separately reweighting loss contribution of each vertex based on its contact frequency across dataset. As a result, we effectively learn to predict dense hand contact estimation with large-scale hand contact data without suffering from class and spatial imbalance issue. The codes are available at https://github.com/dqj5182/HACO_RELEASE.
Optimization Inspired Few-Shot Adaptation for Large Language Models
Authors: Boyan Gao; Xin Wang; Yibo Yang; David A. Clifton
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in real-world applications. However, adapting LLMs to novel tasks via fine-tuning often requires substantial training data and computational resources that are impractical in few-shot scenarios. Existing approaches, such as In-context learning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), face key limitations: In-context learning introduces additional inference computational overhead with limited performance gains, while PEFT models are prone to overfitting on the few demonstration examples. In this work, we reinterpret the forward pass of LLMs as an optimization process, a sequence of preconditioned gradient descent steps refining internal representations. Based on this connection, we propose Optimization-Inspired Few-Shot Adaptation (OFA), integrating a parameterization that learns preconditioners without introducing additional trainable parameters, and an objective that improves optimization efficiency by learning preconditioners based on a convergence bound, while simultaneously steering the optimization path toward the flat local minimum. Our method overcomes both issues of ICL-based and PEFT-based methods, and demonstrates superior performance over the existing methods on a variety of few-shot adaptation tasks in experiments.
EfficientVLA: Training-Free Acceleration and Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models
Authors: Yantai Yang; Yuhao Wang; Zichen Wen; Luo Zhongwei; Chang Zou; Zhipeng Zhang; Chuan Wen; Linfeng Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, particularly diffusion-based architectures, demonstrate transformative potential for embodied intelligence but are severely hampered by high computational and memory demands stemming from extensive inherent and inference-time redundancies. While existing acceleration efforts often target isolated inefficiencies, such piecemeal solutions typically fail to holistically address the varied computational and memory bottlenecks across the entire VLA pipeline, thereby limiting practical deployability.  We introduce EfficientVLA, a structured and training-free inference acceleration framework that systematically eliminates these barriers by cohesively exploiting multifaceted redundancies. EfficientVLA synergistically integrates three targeted strategies: (1) pruning of functionally inconsequential layers from the language module, guided by an analysis of inter-layer redundancies; (2) optimizing the visual processing pathway through a task-aware strategy that selects a compact, diverse set of visual tokens, balancing task-criticality with informational coverage; and (3) alleviating temporal computational redundancy within the iterative diffusion-based action head by strategically caching and reusing key intermediate features.
We apply our method to a standard VLA model CogACT, yielding a $1.93\times$ inference speedup and reduces FLOPs to 28.9%, with only a 0.6% success rate drop in the SIMPLER benchmark.
PanoWan: Lifting Diffusion Video Generation Models to 360$^\circ$ with Latitude/Longitude-aware Mechanisms
Authors: Yifei Xia; Shuchen Weng; Siqi Yang; Jingqi Liu; Chengxuan Zhu; Minggui Teng; Zijian Jia; Han Jiang; Boxin Shi
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Panoramic video generation enables immersive 360$^\circ$ content creation, valuable in applications that demand scene-consistent world exploration. However, existing panoramic video generation models struggle to leverage pre-trained generative priors from conventional text-to-video models for high-quality and diverse panoramic videos generation, due to limited dataset scale and the gap in spatial feature representations. In this paper, we introduce PanoWan to effectively lift pre-trained text-to-video models to the panoramic domain, equipped with minimal modules. PanoWan employs latitude-aware sampling to avoid latitudinal distortion, while its rotated semantic denoising and padded pixel-wise decoding ensure seamless transitions at longitude boundaries. To provide sufficient panoramic videos for learning these lifted representations, we contribute PanoVid, a high-quality panoramic video dataset with captions and diverse scenarios. Consequently, PanoWan achieves state-of-the-art performance in panoramic video generation and demonstrates robustness for zero-shot downstream tasks.
Computational Budget Should Be Considered in Data Selection
Authors: Weilin Wan; WEIZHONG ZHANG; Cheng Jin
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Data selection improves computational efficiency by choosing informative subsets of training samples. 
However, existing methods ignore the compute budget, treating data selection and importance evaluation independently of compute budget constraints. Yet empirical studies show no algorithm can consistently outperform others (or even random selection) across varying budgets. We therefore argue that compute budget must be integral to data-selection strategies, since different budgets impose distinct requirements on data quantity, quality, and distribution for effective training. 
To this end, we propose a novel Computational budget-Aware Data Selection (CADS) method and naturally formulate it into a bilevel optimization framework, where the inner loop trains the model within the constraints of the computational budget on some selected subset of training data, while the outer loop optimizes data selection based on model evaluation. 
Our technical contributions lie
in addressing two main challenges in solving this bilevel optimization problem: the expensive Hessian matrix estimation for outer-loop gradients and the computational burden of achieving inner-loop optimality during iterations. 
To solve the first issue, we propose a probabilistic reparameterization strategy and compute the gradient using a Hessian-free policy gradient estimator. To address the second challenge, we transform the inner optimization problem into a penalty term in the outer objective, further discovering that we only need to estimate the minimum of a one-dimensional loss to calculate the gradient, significantly improving efficiency. To accommodate different data selection granularities, we present two complementary CADS variants: an example-level version (CADS-E) offering fine-grained control and a source-level version (CADS-S) aggregating samples into source groups for scalable, efficient selection without sacrificing effectiveness.
Extensive experiments show that our method achieves performance gains of up to 14.42\% over baselines in vision and language benchmarks. 
Additionally, CADS achieves a 3-20× speedup compared to conventional bilevel implementations, with acceleration correlating positively with compute budget size.