GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
AREAL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoning
Authors: Wei Fu; Jiaxuan Gao; Xujie Shen; Chen Zhu; Zhiyu Mei; Chuyi He; Shusheng Xu; Guo Wei; Jun Mei; WANG JIASHU; Tongkai Yang; Binhang Yuan; Yi Wu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a trending paradigm for training large language models (LLMs), particularly for reasoning tasks. Effective RL for LLMs requires massive parallelization and poses an urgent need for efficient training systems. Most existing large-scale RL systems for LLMs are synchronous by alternating generation and training in a batch setting, where the rollouts in each training batch are generated by the same (or latest) model. This stabilizes RL training but suffers from severe system-level inefficiency. Generation must wait until the longest output in the batch is completed before model update, resulting in GPU underutilization. We present AReaL, a fully asynchronous RL  system that completely decouples generation from training. Rollout workers in AReaL continuously generate new outputs without waiting, while training workers update the model whenever a batch of data is collected. AReaL also incorporates a collection of system-level optimizations, leading to substantially higher GPU utilization. To stabilize RL training, AReaL balances the workload of rollout and training workers to control data staleness, and adopts a staleness-enhanced PPO variant to better handle outdated training samples. Extensive experiments on math and code reasoning benchmarks show that AReaL achieves up to 2.77x training speedup compared to synchronous systems with the same number of GPUs and matched or even improved final performance. The code of AReaL is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/AReaL/.
On the Optimality of the Median-of-Means Estimator under Adversarial Contamination
Authors: Xabier de Juan; Santiago Mazuelas
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The Median-of-Means (MoM) is a robust estimator widely used in machine learning that is known to be (minimax) optimal in scenarios where samples are i.i.d. In more grave scenarios, samples are contaminated by an adversary that can inspect and modify the data. Previous work has theoretically shown the suitability of the MoM estimator in certain contaminated settings. However, the (minimax) optimality of MoM and its limitations under adversarial contamination remain unknown beyond the Gaussian case. In this paper, we present upper and lower bounds for the error of MoM under adversarial contamination for multiple classes of distributions. In particular, we show that MoM is (minimax) optimal in the class of distributions with finite variance, as well as in the class of distributions with infinite variance and finite absolute $(1+r)$-th moment. We also provide lower bounds for MoM's error that match the order of the presented upper bounds, and show that MoM is sub-optimal for light-tailed distributions.
Exploring Neural Granger Causality with xLSTMs: Unveiling Temporal Dependencies in Complex Data
Authors: Harsh Poonia; Felix Divo; Kristian Kersting; Devendra Singh Dhami
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Causality in time series can be challenging to determine, especially in the presence of non-linear dependencies. Granger causality helps analyze potential relationships between variables, thereby offering a method to determine whether one time series can predict—Granger cause—future values of another. Although successful, Granger causal methods still struggle with capturing long-range relations between variables. To this end, we leverage the recently successful Extended Long Short-Term Memory (xLSTM) architecture and propose Granger causal xLSTMs (GC-xLSTM). It first enforces sparsity between the time series components by using a novel dynamic loss penalty on the initial projection. Specifically, we adaptively improve the model and identify sparsity candidates. Our joint optimization procedure then ensures that the Granger causal relations are recovered robustly. Our experimental evaluation on six diverse datasets demonstrates the overall efficacy of GC-xLSTM.
How Different from the Past? Spatio-Temporal Time Series Forecasting with Self-Supervised Deviation Learning
Authors: Haotian Gao; Zheng Dong; Jiawei Yong; Shintaro Fukushima; Kenjiro Taura; Renhe Jiang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Spatio-temporal forecasting is essential for real-world applications such as traffic management and urban computing. Although recent methods have shown improved accuracy, they often fail to account for dynamic deviations between current inputs and historical patterns. These deviations contain critical signals that can significantly affect model performance. To fill this gap, we propose $\textbf{ST-SSDL}$, a $\underline{S}$patio-$\underline{T}$emporal time series forecasting framework that incorporates a $\underline{S}$elf-$\underline{S}$upervised $\underline{D}$eviation $\underline{L}$earning scheme to capture and utilize such deviations. ST-SSDL anchors each input to its historical average and discretizes the latent space using learnable prototypes that represent typical spatio-temporal patterns. Two auxiliary objectives are proposed to refine this structure: a contrastive loss that enhances inter-prototype discriminability and a deviation loss that regularizes the distance consistency between input representations and corresponding prototypes to quantify deviation. Optimized jointly with the forecasting objective, these components guide the model to organize its hidden space and improve generalization across diverse input conditions. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that ST-SSDL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple metrics. Visualizations further demonstrate its ability to adaptively respond to varying levels of deviation in complex spatio-temporal scenarios. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Jimmy-7664/ST-SSDL.
The Curse of Depth in Large Language Models
Authors: Wenfang Sun; Xinyuan Song; Pengxiang Li; Lu Yin; Yefeng Zheng; Shiwei Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we re-introduce the Curse of Depth, a concept that re-introduces, explains, and addresses the recent observation in modern Large Language Models (LLMs) where deeper layers are much less effective than expected. We first confirm the wide existence of this phenomenon across the most popular families of LLMs, such as Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Qwen. Our analysis, theoretically and empirically, identifies that the underlying reason for the ineffectiveness of deep layers in LLMs is the widespread usage of Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN). While Pre-LN stabilizes the training of Transformer LLMs, its output variance exponentially grows with the model depth, which undesirably causes the derivative of the deep Transformer blocks to be an identity matrix, and therefore barely contributes to the training. To resolve this training pitfall, we propose LayerNorm Scaling, which scales the variance of output of the layer normalization inversely by the square root of its depth. This simple modification mitigates the output variance explosion of deeper Transformer layers, improving their contribution. Our experimental results, spanning model sizes from 130M to 7B, demonstrate that \ours significantly enhances LLM pre-training performance compared to Pre-LN. Moreover, this improvement seamlessly carries over to supervised fine-tuning. All these gains can be attributed to the fact that LayerNorm Scaling enables deeper layers to contribute more effectively during training.
Point or Line? Using Line-based Representation for Panoptic Symbol Spotting in CAD Drawings
Authors: Xingguang Wei; Haomin Wang; Shenglong Ye; Ruifeng Luo; Yanting Zhang; Lixin Gu; Jifeng Dai; Yu Qiao; Wenhai Wang; Hongjie Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We study the task of panoptic symbol spotting, which involves identifying both individual instances of countable \textit{things} and the semantic regions of uncountable \textit{stuff} in computer-aided design (CAD) drawings composed of vector graphical primitives.
Existing methods typically rely on image rasterization, graph construction, or point-based representation, but these approaches often suffer from high computational costs, limited generality, and loss of geometric structural information. In this paper, we propose \textit{VecFormer}, a novel method that addresses these challenges through \textit{line-based representation} of primitives. This design preserves the geometric continuity of the original primitive, enabling more accurate shape representation while maintaining a computation-friendly structure, making it well-suited for vector graphic understanding tasks. To further enhance prediction reliability, we introduce a \textit{Branch Fusion Refinement} module that effectively integrates instance and semantic predictions, resolving their inconsistencies for more coherent panoptic outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving 91.1 PQ, with Stuff-PQ improved by 9.6 and 21.2 points over the second-best results under settings with and without prior information, respectively—highlighting the strong potential of line-based representation as a foundation for vector graphic understanding.
Neural Collapse is Globally Optimal in Deep Regularized ResNets and Transformers
Authors: Peter Súkeník; Christoph H. Lampert; Marco Mondelli
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The empirical emergence of neural collapse---a surprising symmetry in the feature representations of the training data in the penultimate layer of deep neural networks---has spurred a line of theoretical research aimed at its understanding. However, existing work focuses on data-agnostic models or, when data structure is taken into account, it remains limited to multi-layer perceptrons. Our paper fills both these gaps by analyzing modern architectures in data-aware regime: we prove that global optima of deep regularized transformers and residual networks (ResNets) with LayerNorm trained with cross entropy or mean squared error loss are approximately collapsed, and the approximation gets tighter as the depth grows. More generally, we formally reduce any end-to-end large-depth ResNet or transformer training into an equivalent unconstrained features model, thus justifying its wide use in the literature even beyond data-agnostic settings. Our theoretical results are supported by experiments on computer vision and language datasets showing that, as the depth grows, neural collapse indeed becomes more prominent.
Redundancy-Aware Test-Time Graph Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Yue Hou; He Zhu; Ruomei Liu; Yingke Su; Junran Wu; Ke Xu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Distributional discrepancy between training and test data can lead models to make inaccurate predictions when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) samples in real-world applications. Although existing graph OOD detection methods leverage data-centric techniques to extract effective representations, their performance remains compromised by structural redundancy that induces semantic shifts. To address this dilemma, we propose RedOUT, an unsupervised framework that integrates structural entropy into test-time OOD detection for graph classification. Concretely, we introduce the Redundancy-aware Graph Information Bottleneck (ReGIB) and decompose the objective into essential information and irrelevant redundancy. By minimizing structural entropy, the decoupled redundancy is reduced, and theoretically grounded upper and lower bounds are proposed for optimization. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of RedOUT on OOD detection. Specifically, our method achieves an average improvement of 6.7\%, significantly surpassing the best competitor by 17.3\% on the ClinTox/LIPO dataset pair.
SurfelSplat: Learning Efficient and Generalizable Gaussian Surfel Representations for Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction
Authors: Chensheng Dai; Shengjun Zhang; Min Chen; Yueqi Duan
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive performance in 3D scene reconstruction. Beyond novel view synthesis, it shows great potential for multi-view surface reconstruction. Existing methods employ optimization-based reconstruction pipelines that achieve precise and complete surface extractions. However, these approaches typically require dense input views and high time consumption for per-scene optimization. To address these limitations, we propose SurfaceSplat, a feed-forward framework that generates efficient and generalizable pixel-aligned Gaussian surfel representations from sparse-view images. We observe that conventional feed-forward structures struggle to recover accurate geometric attributes of Gaussian surfels because the spatial frequency of pixel-aligned primitives exceeds Nyquist sampling rates. Therefore, we propose a cross-view feature aggregation module based on the Nyquist sampling theorem. Specifically, we first adapt the geometric forms of Gaussian surfels with spatial sampling rate-guided low-pass filters. We then project the filtered surfels across all input views to obtain cross-view feature correlations. By processing these correlations through a specially designed feature fusion network, we can finally regress Gaussian surfels with precise geometry. Extensive experiments on DTU reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods, and predict Gaussian surfels within 1 second, offering a 100× speedup without costly per-scene training.
OpenOmni: Advancing Open-Source Omnimodal Large Language Models with Progressive Multimodal Alignment and Real-time Emotional Speech Synthesis
Authors: Run Luo; Ting-En Lin; Haonan Zhang; Yuchuan Wu; Xiong Liu; Yongbin Li; Longze Chen; Jiaming Li; Lei Zhang; Xiaobo Xia; Hamid Alinejad-Rokny; Fei Huang; Min Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in omnimodal learning have significantly improved understanding and generation across images, text, and speech, yet these developments remain predominantly confined to proprietary models. The lack of high-quality omnimodal datasets and the challenges of real-time emotional speech synthesis have notably hindered progress in open-source research. To address these limitations, we introduce OpenOmni, a two-stage training framework that integrates omnimodal alignment and speech generation to develop a state-of-the-art omnimodal large language model. In the alignment phase, a pretrained speech model undergoes further training on image-text tasks, enabling (near) zero-shot generalization from vision to speech, outperforming models trained on tri-modal datasets. In the speech generation phase, a lightweight decoder is trained on speech tasks with direct preference optimization, which enables real-time emotional speech synthesis with high fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OpenOmni surpasses state-of-the-art models across omnimodal, vision-language, and speech-language benchmarks. It achieves a 4-point absolute improvement on OmniBench over the leading open-source model VITA, despite using 5$\times$ fewer training examples and a smaller model size (7B vs. 7$\times$8B). Besides, OpenOmni achieves real-time speech generation with less than 1 second latency at non-autoregressive mode, reducing inference time by 5$\times$ compared to autoregressive methods, and improves emotion classification accuracy by 7.7\%. The codebase is available at https://github.com/RainBowLuoCS/OpenOmni.
Reliable Lifelong Multimodal Editing: Conflict-Aware Retrieval Meets Multi-Level Guidance
Authors: Qiang Zhang; Fanrui Zhang; Jiawei Liu; Ming Hu; Junjun He; Zheng-Jun Zha
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The dynamic nature of real-world information demands efficient knowledge editing in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to ensure continuous knowledge updates. However, existing methods often struggle with precise matching in large-scale knowledge retrieval and lack multi-level guidance for coordinated editing, leading to less reliable outcomes. To tackle these challenges, we propose CARML, a novel retrieval-augmented editing framework that integrates conflict-aware dynamic retrieval with multi-level implicit and explicit guidance for reliable lifelong multimodal editing. Specifically, CARML introduces intra-modal uncertainty and inter-modal conflict quantification to dynamically integrate multi-channel retrieval results, so as to pinpoint the most relevant knowledge to the incoming edit samples. Afterwards, an edit scope classifier discerns whether the edit sample semantically aligns with the edit scope of the retrieved knowledge. If deemed in-scope, CARML refines the retrieved knowledge into information-rich continuous prompt prefixes, serving as the implicit knowledge guide. These prefixes not only include static knowledge prompt that capture key textual semantics but also incorporate token-level, context-aware dynamic prompt to explore fine-grained cross-modal associations between the edit sample and retrieved knowledge. To further enhance reliability, CARML incorporates a "hard correction" mechanism, leveraging explicit label knowledge to adjust the model’s output logits. Extensive experiments across multiple MLLMs and datasets indicate the superior performance of CARML in lifelong multimodal editing scenarios.
xLSTM-Mixer: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting by Mixing via Scalar Memories
Authors: Maurice Kraus; Felix Divo; Devendra Singh Dhami; Kristian Kersting
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Time series data is prevalent across numerous fields, necessitating the development of robust and accurate forecasting models.
 Capturing patterns both within and between temporal and multivariate components is crucial for reliable predictions.
  We introduce xLSTM-Mixer, a model designed to effectively integrate temporal sequences, joint time-variate information, and multiple perspectives for robust forecasting.
    Our approach begins with a linear forecast shared across variates, which is then refined by xLSTM blocks.
    They serve as key elements for modeling the complex dynamics of challenging time series data.
   xLSTM-Mixer ultimately reconciles two distinct views to produce the final forecast.
    Our extensive evaluations demonstrate its superior long-term forecasting performance compared to recent state-of-the-art methods while requiring very little memory.
    A thorough model analysis provides further insights into its key components and confirms its robustness and effectiveness.
    This work contributes to the resurgence of recurrent models in forecasting by combining them, for the first time, with mixing architectures.
NeedleInATable: Exploring Long-Context Capability of Large Language Models towards Long-Structured Tables
Authors: Lanrui Wang; Mingyu Zheng; Hongyin Tang; Zheng Lin; Yanan Cao; Jingang Wang; Xunliang Cai; Weiping Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Processing structured tabular data, particularly large and lengthy tables, constitutes a fundamental yet challenging task for large language models (LLMs). However, existing long-context benchmarks like Needle-in-a-Haystack primarily focus on unstructured text, neglecting the challenge of diverse structured tables. Meanwhile, previous tabular benchmarks mainly consider downstream tasks that require high-level reasoning abilities, and overlook models' underlying fine-grained perception of individual table cells, which is crucial for practical and robust LLM-based table applications. To address this gap, we introduce \textsc{NeedleInATable} (NIAT), a new long-context tabular benchmark that treats each table cell as a ``needle'' and requires models to extract the target cell based on cell locations or lookup questions. Our comprehensive evaluation of various LLMs and multimodal LLMs reveals a substantial performance gap between popular downstream tabular tasks and the simpler NIAT task, suggesting that they may rely on dataset-specific correlations or shortcuts to obtain better benchmark results but lack truly robust long-context understanding towards structured tables. Furthermore, we demonstrate that using synthesized NIAT training data can effectively improve performance on both NIAT task and downstream tabular tasks, which validates the importance of NIAT capability for LLMs' genuine table understanding ability. Our data, code and models will be released to facilitate future research.
Fact-R1: Towards Explainable Video Misinformation Detection with Deep Reasoning
Authors: Fanrui Zhang; Dian Li; Qiang Zhang; Chenjun; sinbadliu; Junxiong Lin; Jiahong Yan; Jiawei Liu; Zheng-Jun Zha
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: The rapid spread of multimodal misinformation on social media has raised growing concerns, while research on video misinformation detection remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, diverse datasets. Existing methods often overfit to rigid templates and lack deep reasoning over deceptive content. To address these challenges, we introduce FakeVV, a large-scale benchmark comprising over 100,000 video-text pairs with fine-grained, interpretable annotations. In addition, we further propose Fact-R1, a novel framework that integrates deep reasoning with collaborative rule-based reinforcement learning. Fact-R1 is trained through a three-stage process: (1) misinformation long-Chain-of-Thought (CoT) instruction tuning, (2) preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and (3) Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using a novel verifiable reward function. This enables Fact-R1 to exhibit emergent reasoning behaviors comparable to those observed in advanced text-based reinforcement learning systems, but in the more complex multimodal misinformation setting. Our work establishes a new paradigm for misinformation detection, bridging large-scale video understanding, reasoning-guided alignment, and interpretable verification.