GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
ViDAR: Video Diffusion-Aware 4D Reconstruction From Monocular Inputs
Authors: Michal Nazarczuk; Sibi Catley-Chandar; Thomas Tanay; Zhensong Zhang; Gregory Slabaugh; Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Dynamic Novel View Synthesis aims to generate photorealistic views of moving subjects from arbitrary viewpoints. This task is particularly challenging when relying on monocular video, where disentangling structure from motion is ill-posed and supervision is scarce. We introduce Video Diffusion-Aware Reconstruction (ViDAR), a novel 4D reconstruction framework that leverages personalised diffusion models to synthesise a pseudo multi-view supervision signal for training a Gaussian splatting representation. By conditioning on scene-specific features, ViDAR recovers fine-grained appearance details while mitigating artefacts introduced by monocular ambiguity. To address the spatio-temporal inconsistency of diffusion-based supervision, we propose a diffusion-aware loss function and a camera pose optimisation strategy that aligns synthetic views with the underlying scene geometry. Experiments on DyCheck, a challenging benchmark with extreme viewpoint variation, show that ViDAR outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines in visual quality and geometric consistency. We further highlight ViDAR’s strong improvement over baselines on dynamic regions and provide a new benchmark to compare performance in reconstructing motion-rich parts of the scene.
How Does Topology Bias Distort Message Passing in Graph Recommender? A Dirichlet Energy Perspective
Authors: Yanbiao Ji; Yue Ding; Dan Luo; Chang Liu; Yuxiang Lu; Xin Xin; Hongtao Lu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Graph-based recommender systems have achieved remarkable effectiveness by modeling high-order interactions between users and items. However, such approaches are significantly undermined by popularity bias, which distorts the interaction graph’s structure—referred to as topology bias. This leads to overrepresentation of popular items, thereby reinforcing biases and fairness issues through the user-system feedback loop. Despite attempts to study this effect, most prior work focuses on the embedding or gradient level bias, overlooking how topology bias fundamentally distorts the message passing process itself. We bridge this gap by providing an empirical and theoretical analysis from a Dirichlet energy perspective, revealing that graph message passing inherently amplifies topology bias and consistently benefits highly connected nodes. To address these limitations, we propose Test-time Simplicial Propagation (TSP), which extends message passing to higher-order simplicial complexes. By incorporating richer structures beyond pairwise connections, TSP mitigates harmful topology bias and substantially improves the representation and recommendation of long-tail items during inference. Extensive experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach in mitigating topology bias and enhancing recommendation quality. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/sotaagi/TSP.
Leveraging Depth and Language for Open-Vocabulary Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Siyu Chen; Ting Han; Chengzheng Fu; Changshe Zhang; Chaolei Wang; Jinhe Su; Guorong Cai; Meiliu Wu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Open-Vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) and domain generalization in semantic segmentation (DGSS) highlight a subtle complementarity that motivates Open-Vocabulary Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation (OV-DGSS). OV-DGSS aims to generate pixel-level masks for unseen categories while maintaining robustness across unseen domains, a critical capability for real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving in adverse conditions. We introduce Vireo, a novel single-stage framework for OV-DGSS that unifies the strengths of OVSS and DGSS for the first time. Vireo builds upon the frozen Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) and incorporates scene geometry via Depth VFMs to extract domain-invariant structural features. To bridge the gap between visual and textual modalities under domain shift, we propose three key components: (1) GeoText Query, which align geometric features with language cues and progressively refine VFM encoder representations; (2) Coarse Mask Prior Embedding (CMPE) for enhancing gradient flow for faster convergence and stronger textual influence; and (3) the Domain-Open-Vocabulary Vector Embedding Head (DOV-VEH), which fuses refined structural and semantic features for robust prediction. Comprehensive evaluation on these components demonstrates the effectiveness of our designs. Our proposed Vireo achieves the state-of-the-art performance and surpasses existing methods by a large margin in both domain generalization and open-vocabulary recognition, offering a unified and scalable solution for robust visual understanding in diverse and dynamic environments. Code is available at https://github.com/SY-Ch/Vireo.
VITA-Audio: Fast Interleaved Audio-Text Token Generation for Efficient Large Speech-Language Model
Authors: Zuwei Long; Yunhang Shen; Chaoyou Fu; Heting Gao; lijiang Li; Peixian Chen; Mengdan Zhang; Hang Shao; Jian Li; Jinlong Peng; Haoyu Cao; Ke Li; Rongrong Ji; Xing Sun
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: With the growing requirement for natural human-computer interaction, speech-based systems receive increasing attention as speech is one of the most common forms of daily communication. However, the existing speech models still experience high latency when generating the first audio token during streaming, which poses a significant bottleneck for deployment. To address this issue, we propose VITA-Audio, an end-to-end large speech model with fast audio-text token generation. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight Multiple Cross-modal Token Prediction (MCTP) module that efficiently generates multiple audio tokens within a single model forward pass, which not only accelerates the inference but also significantly reduces the latency for generating the first audio in streaming scenarios. In addition, a four-stage progressive training strategy is explored to achieve model acceleration with minimal loss of speech quality. To our knowledge, VITA-Audio is the first multi-modal large language model capable of generating audio output during the first forward pass, enabling real-time conversational capabilities with minimal latency. VITA-Audio is fully reproducible and is trained on open-source data only. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves an inference speedup of 3~5x at the 7B parameter scale, but also significantly outperforms open-source models of similar model size on multiple benchmarks for automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and spoken question answering (SQA) tasks.
The quest for the GRAph Level autoEncoder (GRALE)
Authors: Paul Krzakala; Gabriel Melo; Charlotte Laclau; Florence d'Alché-Buc; Rémi Flamary
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Although graph-based learning has attracted a lot of attention, graph representation learning is still a challenging task whose resolution may impact key application fields such as chemistry or biology. To this end, we introduce GRALE, a novel graph autoencoder that encodes and decodes graphs of varying sizes into a shared embedding space. GRALE is trained using an Optimal Transport-inspired loss that compares the source and reconstructed graphs and leverages a differentiable matching module, which is trained jointly with the encoder and decoder. The proposed attention-based architecture relies on Evoformer, the core component of AlphaFold, which we extend to support both graph encoding and decoding. We show, in numerical experiments on simulated and molecular data, that GRALE enables a highly general form of pre-training, applicable to a wide range of downstream tasks, from classification and regression to more complex tasks such as graph interpolation, editing, matching, and prediction.
VORTA: Efficient Video Diffusion via Routing Sparse Attention
Authors: Wenhao Sun; Rong-Cheng Tu; Yifu Ding; Jingyi Liao; Zhao Jin; Shunyu Liu; Dacheng Tao
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Video diffusion transformers have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality video generation, but remain computationally expensive due to the quadratic complexity of attention over high-dimensional video sequences.
Recent acceleration methods enhance the efficiency by exploiting the local sparsity of attention scores; yet they often struggle with accelerating the long-range computation.
To address this problem, we propose VORTA, an acceleration framework with two novel components: 1) a sparse attention mechanism that efficiently captures long-range dependencies, and 2) a routing strategy that adaptively replaces full 3D attention with specialized sparse attention variants.
VORTA achieves an end-to-end speedup $1.76\times$ without loss of quality on VBench.
Furthermore, it can seamlessly integrate with various other acceleration methods, such as model caching and step distillation, reaching up to speedup $14.41\times$ with negligible performance degradation.
VORTA demonstrates its efficiency and enhances the practicality of video diffusion transformers in real-world settings.
Codes and weights are available at https://github.com/wenhao728/VORTA.
Fractional Diffusion Bridge Models
Authors: Gabriel Nobis; Maximilian Springenberg; Arina Belova; Rembert Daems; Christoph Knochenhauer; Manfred Opper; Tolga Birdal; Wojciech Samek
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We present *Fractional Diffusion Bridge Models* (FDBM), a novel generative diffusion bridge framework driven by an approximation of the rich and non-Markovian fractional Brownian motion (fBM). Real stochastic processes exhibit a degree of memory effects (correlations in time), long-range dependencies, roughness and anomalous diffusion phenomena that are not captured in standard diffusion or bridge modeling due to the use of Brownian motion (BM). 
As a remedy, leveraging a recent Markovian approximation of fBM (MA-fBM), we construct FDBM that enable tractable inference while preserving the non-Markovian nature of fBM. We prove the existence of a coupling-preserving generative diffusion bridge and leverage it for future state prediction from paired training data. We then extend our formulation to the Schrödinger bridge problem and derive a principled loss function to learn the unpaired data translation. We evaluate FDBM on both tasks: predicting future protein conformations from aligned data, and unpaired image translation. In both settings, FDBM achieves superior performance compared to the Brownian baselines, yielding lower root mean squared deviation (RMSD) of C$_\alpha$ atomic positions in protein structure prediction and lower Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) in unpaired image translation.
What Makes a Reward Model a Good Teacher? An Optimization Perspective
Authors: Noam Razin; Zixuan Wang; Hubert Strauss; Stanley Wei; Jason D. Lee; Sanjeev Arora
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: The success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) critically depends on the quality of the reward model. However, while this quality is primarily evaluated through accuracy, it remains unclear whether accuracy fully captures what makes a reward model an effective teacher. We address this question from an optimization perspective. First, we prove that regardless of how accurate a reward model is, if it induces low reward variance, then the RLHF objective suffers from a flat landscape. Consequently, even a perfectly accurate reward model can lead to extremely slow optimization, underperforming less accurate models that induce higher reward variance. We additionally show that a reward model that works well for one language model can induce low reward variance, and thus a flat objective landscape, for another. These results establish a fundamental limitation of evaluating reward models solely based on accuracy or independently of the language model they guide. Experiments using models of up to 8B parameters corroborate our theory, demonstrating the interplay between reward variance, accuracy, and reward maximization rate. Overall, our findings highlight that beyond accuracy, a reward model needs to induce sufficient variance for efficient optimization.
Kinaema: a recurrent sequence model for memory and pose in motion
Authors: Mert Bülent Sarıyıldız; Philippe Weinzaepfel; Guillaume Bono; Gianluca Monaci; Christian Wolf
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: One key aspect of spatially aware robots is the ability to "find their bearings", ie. to correctly situate themselves or previously seen spaces. In this work, we focus on this particular scenario of continuous robotics operations, where information observed before an actual episode start is exploited to optimize efficiency. We introduce a new model, "Kinaema" and agent, capable of integrating a stream of visual observations while moving in a potentially large scene, and upon request, processing a query image and predicting the relative position of the shown space with respect to its current position. Our model does not explicitly store an observation history, therefore does not have hard constraints on context length. It maintains an implicit latent memory, which is updated by a transformer in a recurrent way, compressing the history of sensor readings into a compact representation. We evaluate the impact of this model in a new downstream task we call "Mem-Nav", targeting continuous robotics operations. We show that our large-capacity recurrent model maintains a useful representation of the scene, navigates to goals observed before the actual episode start, and is computationally efficient, in particular compared to classical transformers with attention over an observation history.
Integral Imprecise Probability Metrics
Authors: Siu Lun Chau; Michele Caprio; Krikamol Muandet
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Quantifying differences between probability distributions is fundamental to statistics and machine learning, primarily for comparing statistical uncertainty. In contrast, epistemic uncertainty---due to incomplete knowledge---requires richer representations than those offered by classical probability. Imprecise probability (IP) theory offers such models, capturing ambiguity and partial belief. This has driven growing interest in imprecise probabilistic machine learning (IPML), where inference and decision-making rely on broader uncertainty models---highlighting the need for metrics beyond classical probability. This work introduces the Integral Imprecise Probability Metric (IIPM) framework, a Choquet integral-based generalisation of classical Integral Probability Metric to the setting of capacities---a broad class of IP models encompassing many existing ones, including lower probabilities, probability intervals, belief functions, and more. Theoretically, we establish conditions under which IIPM serves as a valid metric and metrises a form of weak convergence of capacities. Practically, IIPM not only enables comparison across different IP models but also supports the quantification of epistemic uncertainty~(EU) within a single IP model. In particular, by comparing an IP model with its conjugate, IIPM gives rise to a new class of epistemic uncertainty measures---Maximum Mean Imprecision (MMI) ---which satisfy key axiomatic properties proposed in the Uncertainty Quantification literature. We validate MMI through selective classification experiments, demonstrating strong empirical performance against established EU measures, and outperforming them when classical methods struggle to scale to a large number of classes. Our work advances both theory and practice in Imprecise Probabilistic Machine Learning, offering a principled framework for comparing and quantifying epistemic uncertainty under imprecision.
EvolvedGRPO: Unlocking Reasoning in LVLMs via Progressive Instruction Evolution
Authors: Zhebei Shen; Qifan Yu; Juncheng Li; Wei Ji; Qizhi Chen; Siliang Tang; Yueting Zhuang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as Grouped Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) have strengthened the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, due to the inherent entanglement between visual and textual modalities, applying GRPO to LVLMs often leads to reward convergence across different responses to the same sample as training progresses, hindering effective gradient updates and causing the enhancement of chain-of-thought reasoning to stagnate or even collapse.
To address this issue, we propose a progressive instruction evolution framework, EvolvedGRPO, to gradually generate more complex questions via editing instructions in an adversarial way, progressively aligned with the model’s evolving capabilities. Specifically, we design two instruction editing strategies across modalities, incorporating incrementally increasing editing instructions and RL-based adversarial data augmentation to improve the effectiveness of model training. To address GRPO's limitations on overly difficult problems, we first train on basic subproblem versions of complex multi-modal questions in both the visual and textual modalities, progressively increasing difficulty to enable prefix-style process rewards, effectively combining the strengths of both process rewards and group-wise relative rewards. Finally, EvolvedGRPO achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source RL models on multi-modal reasoning tasks, even approaching the closed-source GPT-4o in reasoning capabilities, and demonstrates better performance on unseen LVLM general benchmarks. The Code for EvolvedGRPO is available at https://github.com/SHENZHEBEI/EvolvedGRPO.
$\Psi$-Sampler: Initial Particle Sampling for SMC-Based Inference-Time Reward Alignment in Score Models
Authors: TaeHoon Yoon; Yunhong Min; Kyeongmin Yeo; Minhyuk Sung
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: We introduce $\Psi$-Sampler, an SMC-based framework incorporating pCNL-based initial particle sampling for effective inference-time reward alignment with a score-based model. Inference-time reward alignment with score-based generative models has recently gained significant traction, following a broader paradigm shift from pre-training to post-training optimization. At the core of this trend is the application of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to the denoising process. However, existing methods typically initialize particles from the Gaussian prior, which inadequately captures reward-relevant regions and results in reduced sampling efficiency. We demonstrate that initializing from the reward-aware posterior significantly improves alignment performance. To enable posterior sampling in high-dimensional latent spaces, we introduce the preconditioned Crank–Nicolson Langevin (pCNL) algorithm, which combines dimension-robust proposals with gradient-informed dynamics. This approach enables efficient and scalable posterior sampling and consistently improves performance across various reward alignment tasks, including layout-to-image generation, quantity-aware generation, and aesthetic-preference generation, as demonstrated in our experiments.
DynamicVerse: A Physically-Aware Multimodal Framework for 4D World Modeling
Authors: Kairun Wen; Yuzhihuang; Runyu Chen; Hui Zheng; Yunlong Lin; Panwang Pan; Chenxin Li; Wenyan Cong; Jian Zhang; Junbin Lu; Chenguo Lin; Dilin Wang; Zhicheng Yan; Hongyu Xu; Justin Theiss; Yue Huang; Xinghao Ding; Rakesh Ranjan; Zhiwen Fan
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Understanding the dynamic physical world, characterized by its evolving 3D structure, real-world motion, and semantic content with textual descriptions, is crucial for human-agent interaction and enables embodied agents to perceive and act within real environments with human‑like capabilities. However, existing datasets are often derived from limited simulators or utilize traditional Structure-from-Motion for up-to-scale annotation and offer limited descriptive captioning, which restricts the capacity of foundation models to accurately interpret real-world dynamics from monocular videos, commonly sourced from the internet. To bridge these gaps, we introduce **DynamicVerse**, a physical‑scale, multimodal 4D world modeling framework for dynamic real-world video. We employ large vision, geometric, and multimodal models to interpret metric-scale static geometry, real-world dynamic motion, instance-level masks, and holistic descriptive captions. By integrating window-based Bundle Adjustment with global optimization, our method converts long real-world video sequences into a comprehensive 4D multimodal format. DynamicVerse delivers a large-scale dataset consists of 100K+ videos with 800K+ annotated masks and 10M+ frames from internet videos. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark tasks, namely video depth estimation, camera pose estimation, and camera intrinsics estimation, demonstrate that our 4D modeling achieves superior performance in capturing physical-scale measurements with greater global accuracy than existing methods.
SEAL: Semantic-Aware Hierarchical Learning for Generalized Category Discovery
Authors: Zhenqi He; Yuanpei Liu; Kai Han
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: This paper investigates the problem of Generalized Category Discovery (GCD). Given a partially labelled dataset, GCD aims to categorize all unlabelled images, regardless of whether they belong to known or unknown classes. Existing approaches typically depend on either single-level semantics or manually designed abstract hierarchies, which limit their generalizability and scalability. To address these limitations, we introduce a SEmantic-aware hierArchical Learning framework (SEAL), guided by naturally occurring and easily accessible hierarchical structures. Within SEAL, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic-Guided Soft Contrastive Learning approach that exploits hierarchical similarity to generate informative soft negatives, addressing the limitations of conventional contrastive losses that treat all negatives equally. Furthermore, a Cross-Granularity Consistency (CGC) module is designed to align the predictions from different levels of granularity. SEAL consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on fine-grained benchmarks, including the SSB benchmark, Oxford-Pet, and the Herbarium19 dataset, and further demonstrates generalization on coarse-grained datasets.
Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/seal/