GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Bridging Expressivity and Scalability with Adaptive Unitary SSMs
Authors: Arjun Karuvally; Franz Nowak; T. Anderson Keller; Carmen Amo Alonso; Terrence Sejnowski; Hava T Siegelmann
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent work has revealed that state space models (SSMs), while efficient for long-sequence processing, are fundamentally limited in their ability to represent formal languages—particularly due to time-invariant and real-valued recurrence structures. In this work, we draw inspiration from adaptive and structured dynamics observed in biological neural systems and introduce the Adaptive Unitary State Space Model (AUSSM): a novel class of SSMs that leverages skew-symmetric, input-dependent recurrence to achieve unitary evolution and high expressive power. Using algebraic automata theory, we prove that AUSSM can perform modulo counting and simulate solvable group automata at precision logarithmically bounded in the input length, enabling SSMs to model a broad class of regular languages out of reach for other SSM architectures. To overcome the practical inefficiencies of adaptive recurrence, we develop a separable convolution formulation and a CUDA implementation that enables scalable parallel training. Empirically, we show that AUSSM and its hybrid variant—interleaved with Mamba—outperform prior SSMs on formal algorithmic tasks such as parity and modular arithmetic, and achieve competent performance on real-world long time-series classification benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that adaptive unitary recurrence provides a powerful and efficient inductive bias for both symbolic and continuous sequence modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/arjunkaruvally/AUSSM
Backdoor Mitigation via Invertible Pruning Masks
Authors: Kealan Dunnett; Reza Arablouei; Volkan Dedeoglu; Dimity Miller; Raja Jurdak
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Model pruning has gained traction as a promising defense strategy against backdoor attacks in deep learning. However, existing pruning-based approaches often fall short in accurately identifying and removing the specific parameters responsible for inducing backdoor behaviors. Despite the dominance of fine-tuning-based defenses in recent literature, largely due to their superior performance, pruning remains a compelling alternative, offering greater interpretability and improved robustness in low-data regimes. In this paper, we propose a novel pruning approach featuring a learned \emph{selection} mechanism to identify parameters critical to both main and backdoor tasks, along with an \emph{invertible} pruning mask designed to simultaneously achieve two complementary goals: eliminating the backdoor task while preserving it through the inverse mask. We formulate this as a bi-level optimization problem that jointly learns selection variables, a sparse invertible mask, and sample-specific backdoor perturbations derived from clean data. The inner problem synthesizes candidate triggers using the inverse mask, while the outer problem refines the mask to suppress backdoor behavior without impairing clean-task accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing pruning-based backdoor mitigation approaches, maintains strong performance under limited data conditions, and achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. Notably, the proposed approach is particularly effective in restoring correct predictions for compromised samples after successful backdoor mitigation.
FAPEX: Fractional Amplitude-Phase Expressor for Robust Cross-Subject Seizure Prediction
Authors: Ruizhe Zheng; Lingyan Mao; DINGDING HAN; Tian Luo; Yi Wang; Jing Ding; Yuguo Yu
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Precise, generalizable subject-agnostic seizure prediction (SASP) remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic complexity and significant spectral variability of electrophysiologial signals across individuals and recording modalities. We propose \model{FAPEX}, a novel architecture that introduces a learnable \emph{fractional neural frame operator} (FrNFO) for adaptive time–frequency decomposition. Unlike conventional models that exhibit spectral bias toward low frequencies, our FrNFO employs fractional-order convolutions to capture both high and low-frequency dynamics, achieving approximately $10\%$ improvement in F1-score and sensitivity over state-of-the-art baselines. The FrNFO enables the extraction of \emph{instantaneous phase and amplitude representations} that are particularly informative for preictal biomarker discovery and enhance out-of-distribution generalization. \model{FAPEX} further integrates structural state-space modeling and channelwise attention, allowing it to handle heterogeneous electrode montages. Evaluated across 12 benchmarks spanning species (human, rat, dog, macaque) and modalities (Scalp‑EEG, SEEG, ECoG, LFP), \model{FAPEX} consistently outperforms 23 supervised and 10 self-supervised baselines under nested cross-validation, with gains of up to $15\%$ in sensitivity on complex cross-domain scenarios. It further demonstrates superior performance in several external validation cohorts. To our knowledge, these establish \model{FAPEX} as the first epilepsy model to show consistent superiority in SASP, offering a promising solution for discovering epileptic biomarker evidence supporting the existence of a distinct and identifiable preictal state for and clinical translation.
Bifrost-1: Bridging Multimodal LLMs and Diffusion Models with Patch-level CLIP Latents
Authors: Han Lin; Jaemin Cho; Amir Zadeh; Chuan Li; Mohit Bansal
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: There is growing interest in integrating high-fidelity visual synthesis capabilities into large language models (LLMs) without compromising their strong reasoning capabilities. Existing methods that directly train LLMs or bridge LLMs and diffusion models usually suffer from costly training since the backbone LLMs have not seen image representations during pretraining. We present Bifrost-1, a unified framework that bridges pretrained multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and diffusion models using patch-level CLIP image embeddings as latent variables, which are natively aligned with the MLLM's CLIP visual encoder. These patch-level image embeddings are integrated into the diffusion model with a lightweight adaptation of its ControlNet. To retain the original multimodal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we equip the MLLM with a visual generation branch initialized from the original MLLM parameters when predicting the patch-level image embeddings. By seamlessly integrating pretrained MLLMs and diffusion models with patch-level CLIP latents, our framework enables high-fidelity controllable image generation with significant training efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that Bifrost-1 achieves comparable or better performance than previous methods in terms of visual fidelity and multimodal understanding, with substantially lower compute during training. We also provide comprehensive ablation studies showing the effectiveness of our design choices. Project page: https://bifrost-1.github.io.
Robustly Learning Monotone Single-Index Models
Authors: Puqian Wang; Nikos Zarifis; Ilias Diakonikolas; Jelena Diakonikolas
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We consider the basic problem of learning Single-Index Models 
with respect to the square loss under the Gaussian distribution 
in the presence of adversarial label 
noise. Our main contribution is the first computationally 
efficient  algorithm for this learning task, achieving a constant 
factor approximation,
that succeeds for the class of {\em all} monotone activations with bounded moment of order $2 + \zeta,$ for $\zeta > 0.$ This class in particular includes all monotone Lipschitz functions and even discontinuous functions like (possibly biased) halfspaces. 
Prior work for the case of unknown activation either does not attain constant factor approximation or succeeds for a substantially smaller family of activations. The main conceptual novelty of our approach lies in developing an optimization framework that steps outside the boundaries of usual gradient methods and instead identifies a useful vector field to guide the algorithm updates by directly leveraging the problem structure, properties of Gaussian spaces, and regularity of monotone functions.
RAT: Bridging RNN Efficiency and Attention Accuracy via Chunk-based Sequence Modeling
Authors: Xiuying Wei; Anunay Yadav; Razvan Pascanu; Caglar Gulcehre
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Transformers have become the cornerstone of modern large-scale language models, but their reliance on softmax attention poses a computational bottleneck at both training and inference. Recurrent models offer high efficiency, but compressing the full sequence into a fixed-size and holistic representation can suffer from memory degradation in long contexts and limit fine-grained retrieval. To address this, we propose RAT, an intermediate design that bridges the efficiency of RNNs and capacity of attention. RAT partitions the input into chunks, applies recurrence within each chunk for local dependencies, and softmax-based attention across chunks for long-range interactions. This design mitigates memory degradation and enables direct access to distant tokens, while retaining computational efficiency. Empirically, with a chunk size of 16, the RAT block achieves a $7\times$ improvement in training speed for 100K sequence length and $9\times$ in generation at the 4K position, while maintaining similar performance compared to standard attention. We demonstrate this by training 1.3B parameter models from scratch and performing large-scale evaluations, including short- and long-context benchmarks, as well as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We further propose a hybrid architecture that interleaves RAT with local attention. By combining efficient long-range modeling with strong local interactions, this hybrid design not only improves inference speed and reduces cache memory usage, but also consistently enhances performance and shows the overall best results. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/CLAIRE-Labo/RAT}.
On topological descriptors for graph products
Authors: Mattie Ji; Amauri H Souza; Vikas K Garg
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Topological descriptors have been increasingly utilized for capturing multiscale structural information in relational data. In this work, we consider various filtrations on the (box) product of graphs and the effect on their outputs on the topological descriptors - the Euler characteristic (EC) and persistent homology (PH). In particular, we establish a complete characterization of the expressive power of EC on general color-based filtrations. We also show that the PH descriptors of (virtual) graph products contain strictly more information than the computation on individual graphs, whereas EC does not. Additionally, we provide algorithms to compute the PH diagrams of the product of vertex- and edge-level filtrations on the graph product. We also substantiate our theoretical analysis with empirical investigations on runtime analysis, expressivity, and graph classification performance. Overall, this work paves way for powerful graph persistent descriptors via product filtrations. Code is available at https://github.com/Aalto-QuML/tda_graph_product.
Zero-shot World Models via Search in Memory
Authors: Federico Malato; Ville Hautamaki
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: World Models have vastly permeated the field of Reinforcement Learning. Their ability to model the transition dynamics of an environment have led to tremendous improvements in sample efficiency for online RL. Among them, the most notorious example is Dreamer, a model that learns to act in a diverse set of image-based environments. In this paper, we leverage similarity search and stochastic representations to approximate a world model without a training procedure. We establish a comparison with PlaNet, a well-established world model of the Dreamer family. We evaluate the models on the quality of latent reconstruction and on the perceived similarity of the reconstructed image, on both next-step and long horizon dynamics prediction. The results of our study demonstrate that a search-based world model is comparable to a training based one in both cases. Notably, our model shows stronger performance in long-horizon prediction with respect to the baseline on a range of visually different environments.
CCS: Controllable and Constrained Sampling with Diffusion Models via Initial Noise Perturbation
Authors: Bowen Song; Zecheng Zhang; Zhaoxu Luo; Jason Hu; Wei Yuan; Jing Jia; Zhengxu Tang; Guanyang Wang; Liyue Shen
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generative tasks, producing high-quality outputs across diverse domains. However, how the generated data responds to the initial noise perturbation in diffusion models remains under-explored, hindering a deeper understanding of the controllability of the sampling process.
In this work, we first observe an interesting phenomenon: the relationship between the change of generation outputs and the scale of initial noise perturbation is highly linear through the diffusion ODE sampling process. We then provide both theoretical and empirical analyses to justify this linearity property of the input–output (noise → generation data) relationship.
Inspired by these insights, we propose a novel **C**ontrollable and **C**onstrained **S**ampling (CCS) method, along with a new controller algorithm for diffusion models, that enables precise control over both (1) the proximity of individual samples to a target image and (2) the alignment of the sample mean with the target, while preserving high sample quality.
We conduct extensive experiments comparing our proposed sampling approach with other methods in terms of both sampling controllability and generated data quality. Results show that CCS achieves significantly more precise controllability while maintaining superior sample quality and diversity, enabling practical applications such as fine-grained and robust image editing. Code: [https://github.com/efzero/diffusioncontroller](https://github.com/efzero/diffusioncontroller)
OpenVLThinker: Complex Vision-Language Reasoning via Iterative SFT-RL Cycles
Authors: Yihe Deng; Hritik Bansal; Fan Yin; Nanyun Peng; Wei Wang; Kai-Wei Chang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: We introduce *OpenVLThinker*, one of the first open-source large vision–language models (LVLMs) to exhibit sophisticated chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving notable performance gains on challenging visual reasoning tasks. While text-based reasoning models (e.g., Deepseek R1) show promising results in text-only tasks, distilling their reasoning into LVLMs via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often results in performance degradation due to imprecise visual grounding. Conversely, purely reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods face a large search space, hindering the emergence of reflective behaviors in smaller models (e.g., 7B LVLMs). Surprisingly, alternating between SFT and RL ultimately results in significant performance improvements after a few iterations. Our analysis reveals that the base model rarely exhibits reasoning behaviors initially, but SFT effectively surfaces these latent actions and narrows the RL search space, accelerating the development of reasoning capabilities. Each subsequent RL stage further refines the model's reasoning skills, producing higher-quality SFT data for continued self-improvement. OpenVLThinker-7B consistently advances performance across six benchmarks demanding mathematical and general reasoning, notably improving MathVista by 3.2\%, EMMA by 1.4\%, and HallusionBench by 2.7\%. Beyond demonstrating the synergy between SFT and RL for complex reasoning tasks, our findings provide early evidence towards achieving R1-style reasoning in multimodal contexts.
One-Step is Enough: Sparse Autoencoders for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Viacheslav Surkov; Chris Wendler; Antonio Mari; Mikhail Terekhov; Justin Deschenaux; Robert West; Caglar Gulcehre; David Bau
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: For large language models (LLMs), sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been shown to decompose intermediate representations that often are not interpretable directly into sparse sums of interpretable features, facilitating better control and subsequent analysis. However, similar analyses and approaches have been lacking for text-to-image models. We investigate the possibility of using SAEs to learn interpretable features for SDXL Turbo, a few-step text-to-image diffusion model. To this end, we train SAEs on the updates performed by transformer blocks within SDXL Turbo's denoising U-net in its 1-step setting. Interestingly, we find that they generalize to 4-step SDXL Turbo and even to the multi-step SDXL base model (i.e., a different model) without additional training. In addition, we show that their learned features are interpretable, causally influence the generation process, and reveal specialization among the blocks. We do so by creating RIEBench, a representation-based image editing benchmark, for editing images while they are generated by turning on and off individual SAE features. This allows us to track which transformer blocks' features are the most impactful depending on the edit category. Our work is the first investigation of SAEs for interpretability in text-to-image diffusion models and our results establish SAEs as a promising approach for understanding and manipulating the internal mechanisms of text-to-image models.
Flick: Empowering Federated Learning with Commonsense Knowledge
Authors: Ran Zhu; Mingkun Yang; Shiqiang Wang; Jie Yang; Qing Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a privacy-preserving framework for training models on data generated at the edge. However, the heterogeneity of data silos (e.g., label skew and domain shift) often leads to inconsistent learning objectives and suboptimal model performance. Inspired by the data-driven approach, we propose Flick, a novel data generation framework for heterogeneous **F**ederated **L**earning w**i**th **C**ommonsense **K**nowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs). In Flick, the client performs the local data summary to capture client-specific knowledge in textual form. The central server then distills task-relevant, high-quality knowledge from the out-of-the-box LLM -- guided by cross-client-specific insights -- to generate informative text prompts. These prompts direct a generative model in producing synthetic data, enabling global model fine-tuning and local data compensation. This process gradually aligns the label and feature distributions across clients. Extensive results on three datasets demonstrate that Flick improves the global model accuracy by up to 11.43\%, and accelerates convergence by up to 12.9$\times$, validating its effectiveness in addressing data heterogeneity.
SpikingVTG: A Spiking Detection Transformer for Video Temporal Grounding
Authors: Malyaban Bal; Brian Matejek; Susmit Jha; Adam D. Cobb
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 poster)

Abstract: Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to retrieve precise temporal segments in a video conditioned on natural language queries. Unlike conventional neural frameworks that rely heavily on computationally expensive dense matrix multiplications, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs)—previously underexplored in this domain—offer a unique opportunity to tackle VTG tasks through bio-plausible spike-based communication and an event-driven accumulation-based computational paradigm. We introduce SpikingVTG, a multi-modal spiking detection transformer, designed to harness the computational simplicity and sparsity of SNNs for VTG tasks. Leveraging the temporal dynamics of SNNs, our model introduces a Saliency Feedback Gating (SFG) mechanism that assigns dynamic saliency scores to video clips and applies multiplicative gating to highlight relevant clips while suppressing less informative ones. SFG enhances performance and reduces computational overhead by minimizing neural activity. We analyze the layer-wise convergence dynamics of SFG-enabled model and apply implicit differentiation at equilibrium to enable efficient, BPTT-free training. To improve generalization and maximize performance, we enable knowledge transfer by optimizing a Cos-L2 representation matching loss that aligns the layer-wise representation and attention maps of a non-spiking teacher with those of our student SpikingVTG. Additionally, we present Normalization-Free (NF)-SpikingVTG, which eliminates non-local operations like softmax and layer normalization, and an extremely quantized 1-bit (NF)-SpikingVTG variant for potential deployment on edge devices. Our models achieve competitive results on QVHighlights, Charades-STA, TACoS, and YouTube Highlights, establishing a strong baseline for multi-modal spiking VTG solutions.
Causality Meets Locality: Provably Generalizable and Scalable Policy Learning for Networked Systems
Authors: Hao Liang; Shuqing Shi; Yudi Zhang; Biwei Huang; Yali Du
Venue: NeurIPS 2025 (NeurIPS 2025 spotlight)

Abstract: Large‑scale networked systems, such as traffic, power, and wireless grids, challenge reinforcement‑learning agents with both scale and environment shifts. To address these challenges, we propose \texttt{GSAC} (\textbf{G}eneralizable and \textbf{S}calable \textbf{A}ctor‑\textbf{C}ritic), a framework that couples  causal representation learning with meta actor‑critic learning to achieve both scalability and domain generalization. Each agent first learns a sparse local causal mask that provably identifies the minimal neighborhood variables influencing its dynamics, yielding exponentially tight approximately compact representations (ACRs) of state and domain factors. These ACRs bound the error of truncating value functions to $\kappa$-hop neighborhoods, enabling efficient learning on graphs. A meta actor‑critic then trains a shared policy across multiple source domains while conditioning on the compact domain factors; at test time, a few trajectories suffice to estimate the new domain factor and deploy the adapted policy. We establish finite‑sample guarantees on causal recovery, actor-critic convergence, and adaptation gap, and show that \texttt{GSAC} adapts rapidly and significantly outperforms learning-from-scratch and conventional adaptation baselines.