OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Model-Guided Dual-Role Alignment for High-Fidelity Open-Domain Video-to-Audio Generation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

We present MGAudio, a novel flow-based framework for open-domain video-to-audio generation, which introduces model-guided dual-role alignment as a central design principle. Unlike prior approaches that rely on classifier-based or classifier-free guidance, MGAudio enables the generative model to guide itself through a dedicated training objective designed for video-conditioned audio generation. The framework integrates three main components: (1) a scalable flow-based Transformer model, (2) a dual-role alignment mechanism where the audio-visual encoder serves both as a conditioning module and as a feature aligner to improve generation quality, and (3) a model-guided objective that enhances cross-modal coherence and audio realism. MGAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance on VGGSound, reducing FAD to 0.40, substantially surpassing the best classifier-free guidance baselines, and consistently outperforms existing methods across FD, IS, and alignment metrics. It also generalizes well to the challenging UnAV-100 benchmark. These results highlight model-guided dual-role alignment as a powerful and scalable paradigm for conditional video-to-audio generation. Code is available at: https://github.com/pantheon5100/mgaudio
Noise Matters: Optimizing Matching Noise for Diffusion Classifiers
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Although today's pretrained discriminative vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have demonstrated strong perception abilities, such as zero-shot image classification, they also suffer from the bag-of-words problem and spurious bias. To mitigate these problems, some pioneering studies leverage powerful generative models (e.g., pretrained diffusion models) to realize generalizable image classification, dubbed Diffusion Classifier (DC). Specifically, by randomly sampling a Gaussian noise, DC utilizes the differences of denoising effects with different category conditions to classify categories. Unfortunately, an inherent and notorious weakness of existing DCs is noise instability: different random sampled noises lead to significant performance changes. To achieve stable classification performance, existing DCs always ensemble the results of hundreds of sampled noises, which significantly reduces the classification speed. To this end, we firstly explore the role of noise in DC, and conclude that: there are some ``good noises'' that can relieve the instability. Meanwhile, we argue that these good noises should meet two principles: Frequency Matching and Spatial Matching. Regarding both principles, we propose a novel Noise Optimization method to learn matching (i.e., good) noise for DCs: NoOp. For frequency matching, NoOp first optimizes a dataset-specific noise: Given a dataset and a timestep t, optimize one randomly initialized parameterized noise. For Spatial Matching, NoOp trains a Meta-Network that adopts an image as input and outputs image-specific noise offset. The sum of optimized noise and noise offset will be used in DC to replace random noise. Extensive ablations on various datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of NoOp.
Towards Comprehensive Scene Understanding: Integrating First and Third-Person Views for LVLMs
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive applications such as virtual and augmented reality, where a first-person (egocentric) view captured by head-mounted cameras serves as key input. While this view offers fine-grained cues about user attention and hand-object interactions, its narrow field of view and lack of global context often lead to failures on spatially or contextually demanding queries. To address this, we introduce a framework that augments egocentric inputs with third-person (exocentric) views, providing complementary information such as global scene layout and object visibility to LVLMs. We present E3VQA, the first benchmark for multi-view question answering with 4K high-quality question-answer pairs grounded in synchronized ego-exo image pairs. Additionally, we propose M3CoT, a training-free prompting technique that constructs a unified scene representation by integrating scene graphs from three complementary perspectives. M3CoT enables LVLMs to reason more effectively across views, yielding consistent performance gains (4.84% for GPT-4o and 5.94% for Gemini 2.0 Flash) over a recent CoT baseline. Our extensive evaluation reveals key strengths and limitations of LVLMs in multi-view reasoning and highlights the value of leveraging both egocentric and exocentric inputs. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/Leeinsu1/Towards-Comprehensive-Scene-Understanding.
Spotlight Attention: Towards Efficient LLM Generation via Non-linear Hashing-based KV Cache Retrieval
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Reducing the key-value (KV) cache burden in Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly accelerates inference. Dynamically selecting critical KV caches during decoding helps maintain performance. Existing methods use random linear hashing to identify important tokens, but this approach is inefficient due to the orthogonal distribution of queries and keys within two narrow cones in LLMs. We introduce Spotlight Attention, a novel method that employs non-linear hashing functions to optimize the embedding distribution of queries and keys, enhancing coding efficiency and robustness. We also developed a lightweight, stable training framework using a Bradley-Terry ranking-based loss, enabling optimization of the non-linear hashing module on GPUs with 16GB memory in 8 hours. Experimental results show that Spotlight Attention drastically improves retrieval precision while shortening the length of the hash code at least 5$\times$ compared to traditional linear hashing. Finally, we exploit the computational advantages of bitwise operations by implementing specialized CUDA kernels, achieving hashing retrieval for 512K tokens in under 100$μ$s on a single A100 GPU, with end-to-end throughput up to 3$\times$ higher than vanilla decoding.
Model-Informed Flows for Bayesian Inference
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Variational inference often struggles with the posterior geometry exhibited by complex hierarchical Bayesian models. Recent advances in flow-based variational families and Variationally Inferred Parameters (VIP) each address aspects of this challenge, but their formal relationship is unexplored. Here, we prove that the combination of VIP and a full-rank Gaussian can be represented exactly as a forward autoregressive flow augmented with a translation term and input from the model's prior. Guided by this theoretical insight, we introduce the Model-Informed Flow (MIF) architecture, which adds the necessary translation mechanism, prior information, and hierarchical ordering. Empirically, MIF delivers tighter posterior approximations and matches or exceeds state-of-the-art performance across a suite of hierarchical and non-hierarchical benchmarks.
Conformal Prediction for Time-series Forecasting with Change Points
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Conformal prediction has been explored as a general and efficient way to provide uncertainty quantification for time series. However, current methods struggle to handle time series data with change points - sudden shifts in the underlying data-generating process. In this paper, we propose a novel Conformal Prediction for Time-series with Change points (CPTC) algorithm, addressing this gap by integrating a model to predict the underlying state with online conformal prediction to model uncertainties in non-stationary time series. We prove CPTC's validity and improved adaptivity in the time series setting under minimum assumptions, and demonstrate CPTC's practical effectiveness on 6 synthetic and real-world datasets, showing improved validity and adaptivity compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
3DID: Direct 3D Inverse Design for Aerodynamics with Physics-Aware Optimization
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Inverse design aims to design the input variables of a physical system to optimize a specified objective function, typically formulated as a search or optimization problem. However, in 3D domains, the design space grows exponentially, rendering exhaustive grid-based searches infeasible. Recent advances in deep learning have accelerated inverse design by providing powerful generative priors and differentiable surrogate models. Nevertheless, current methods tend to approximate the 3D design space using 2D projections or fine-tune existing 3D shapes. These approaches sacrifice volumetric detail and constrain design exploration, preventing true 3D design from scratch. In this paper, we propose a 3D Inverse Design (3DID) framework that directly navigates the 3D design space by coupling a continuous latent representation with a physics-aware optimization strategy. We first learn a unified physics-geometry embedding that compactly captures shape and physical field data in a continuous latent space. Then, we introduce a two-stage strategy to perform physics-aware optimization. In the first stage, a gradient-guided diffusion sampler explores the global latent manifold. In the second stage, an objective-driven, topology-preserving refinement further sculpts each candidate toward the target objective. This enables 3DID to generate high-fidelity 3D geometries, outperforming existing methods in both solution quality and design versatility.
Accelerating Visual-Policy Learning through Parallel Differentiable Simulation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm for visual policy learning that leverages differentiable simulation and first-order analytical policy gradients. Our approach decouple the rendering process from the computation graph, enabling seamless integration with existing differentiable simulation ecosystems without the need for specialized differentiable rendering software. This decoupling not only reduces computational and memory overhead but also effectively attenuates the policy gradient norm, leading to more stable and smoother optimization. We evaluate our method on standard visual control benchmarks using modern GPU-accelerated simulation. Experiments show that our approach significantly reduces wall-clock training time and consistently outperforms all baseline methods in terms of final returns. Notably, on complex tasks such as humanoid locomotion, our method achieves a $4\times$ improvement in final return, and successfully learns a humanoid running policy within 4 hours on a single GPU.
Online Prediction with Limited Selectivity
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Selective prediction [Dru13, QV19] models the scenario where a forecaster freely decides on the prediction window that their forecast spans. Many data statistics can be predicted to a non-trivial error rate without any distributional assumptions or expert advice, yet these results rely on that the forecaster may predict at any time. We introduce a model of Prediction with Limited Selectivity (PLS) where the forecaster can start the prediction only on a subset of the time horizon. We study the optimal prediction error both on an instance-by-instance basis and via an average-case analysis. We introduce a complexity measure that gives instance-dependent bounds on the optimal error. For a randomly-generated PLS instance, these bounds match with high probability.
Do different prompting methods yield a common task representation in language models?
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Demonstrations and instructions are two primary approaches for prompting language models to perform in-context learning (ICL) tasks. Do identical tasks elicited in different ways result in similar representations of the task? An improved understanding of task representation mechanisms would offer interpretability insights and may aid in steering models. We study this through \textit{function vectors} (FVs), recently proposed as a mechanism to extract few-shot ICL task representations. We generalize FVs to alternative task presentations, focusing on short textual instruction prompts, and successfully extract instruction function vectors that promote zero-shot task accuracy. We find evidence that demonstration- and instruction-based function vectors leverage different model components, and offer several controls to dissociate their contributions to task performance. Our results suggest that different task promptings forms do not induce a common task representation through FVs but elicit different, partly overlapping mechanisms. Our findings offer principled support to the practice of combining instructions and task demonstrations, imply challenges in universally monitoring task inference across presentation forms, and encourage further examinations of LLM task inference mechanisms.
Let Them Talk: Audio-Driven Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Audio-driven human animation methods, such as talking head and talking body generation, have made remarkable progress in generating synchronized facial movements and appealing visual quality videos. However, existing methods primarily focus on single human animation and struggle with multi-stream audio inputs, facing incorrect binding problems between audio and persons. Additionally, they exhibit limitations in instruction-following capabilities. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel task: Multi-Person Conversational Video Generation, and introduce a new framework, MultiTalk, to address the challenges during multi-person generation. Specifically, for audio injection, we investigate several schemes and propose the Label Rotary Position Embedding (L-RoPE) method to resolve the audio and person binding problem. Furthermore, during training, we observe that partial parameter training and multi-task training are crucial for preserving the instruction-following ability of the base model. MultiTalk achieves superior performance compared to other methods on several datasets, including talking head, talking body, and multi-person datasets, demonstrating the powerful generation capabilities of our approach.
Gemstones: A Model Suite for Multi-Faceted Scaling Laws
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Scaling laws are typically fit using a family of models with a narrow range of frozen hyperparameter choices. In this work we study scaling laws using multiple architectural shapes and hyperparameter choices, highlighting their impact on resulting prescriptions. As a primary artifact of our research, we release the Gemstones: an open-source scaling law dataset, consisting of over 4000 checkpoints from transformers with up to 2 billion parameters and diverse architectural shapes; including ablations over learning rate and cooldown. Our checkpoints enable more complex studies of scaling, such as analyzing the relationship between width and depth. By examining our model suite, we find that the prescriptions of scaling laws can be highly sensitive to the experimental design process and the specific model checkpoints used during fitting.
Metritocracy: Representative Metrics for Lite Benchmarks
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

A common problem in LLM evaluation is how to choose a subset of metrics from a full suite of possible metrics. Subset selection is usually done for efficiency or interpretability reasons, and the goal is often to select a ``representative'' subset of metrics. However, ``representative'' is rarely clearly defined. In this work, we use ideas from social choice theory to formalize two notions of representation for the selection of a subset of evaluation metrics. We first introduce positional representation, which guarantees every alternative is sufficiently represented at every position cutoff. We then introduce positional proportionality, which guarantees no alternative is proportionally over- or under-represented by more than a small error at any position. We prove upper and lower bounds on the smallest number of metrics needed to guarantee either of these properties in the worst case. We also study a generalized form of each property that allows for additional input on groups of metrics that must be represented. Finally, we tie theory to practice through real-world case studies on both LLM evaluation and hospital quality evaluation.
BiggerGait: Unlocking Gait Recognition with Layer-wise Representations from Large Vision Models
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Large vision models (LVM) based gait recognition has achieved impressive performance. However, existing LVM-based approaches may overemphasize gait priors while neglecting the intrinsic value of LVM itself, particularly the rich, distinct representations across its multi-layers. To adequately unlock LVM's potential, this work investigates the impact of layer-wise representations on downstream recognition tasks. Our analysis reveals that LVM's intermediate layers offer complementary properties across tasks, integrating them yields an impressive improvement even without rich well-designed gait priors. Building on this insight, we propose a simple and universal baseline for LVM-based gait recognition, termed BiggerGait. Comprehensive evaluations on CCPG, CAISA-B*, SUSTech1K, and CCGR\_MINI validate the superiority of BiggerGait across both within- and cross-domain tasks, establishing it as a simple yet practical baseline for gait representation learning. All the models and code will be publicly available.
Uncertainty Estimation on Graphs with Structure Informed Stochastic Partial Differential Equations
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Graph Neural Networks have achieved impressive results across diverse network modeling tasks, but accurately estimating uncertainty on graphs remains difficult, especially under distributional shifts. Unlike traditional uncertainty estimation, graph-based uncertainty must account for randomness arising from both the graph's structure and its label distribution, which adds complexity. In this paper, making an analogy between the evolution of a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) driven by Matern Gaussian Process and message passing using GNN layers, we present a principled way to design a novel message passing scheme that incorporates spatial-temporal noises motivated by the Gaussian Process approach to SPDE. Our method simultaneously captures uncertainty across space and time and allows explicit control over the covariance kernel smoothness, thereby enhancing uncertainty estimates on graphs with both low and high label informativeness. Our extensive experiments on Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection on graph datasets with varying label informativeness demonstrate the soundness and superiority of our model to existing approaches.
Exploring Diffusion Transformer Designs via Grafting
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Designing model architectures requires decisions such as selecting operators (e.g., attention, convolution) and configurations (e.g., depth, width). However, evaluating the impact of these decisions on model quality requires costly pretraining, limiting architectural investigation. Inspired by how new software is built on existing code, we ask: can new architecture designs be studied using pretrained models? To this end, we present grafting, a simple approach for editing pretrained diffusion transformers (DiTs) to materialize new architectures under small compute budgets. Informed by our analysis of activation behavior and attention locality, we construct a testbed based on the DiT-XL/2 design to study the impact of grafting on model quality. Using this testbed, we develop a family of hybrid designs via grafting: replacing softmax attention with gated convolution, local attention, and linear attention, and replacing MLPs with variable expansion ratio and convolutional variants. Notably, many hybrid designs achieve good quality (FID: 2.38-2.64 vs. 2.27 for DiT-XL/2) using <2% pretraining compute. We then graft a text-to-image model (PixArt-Sigma), achieving a 1.43x speedup with less than a 2% drop in GenEval score. Finally, we present a case study that restructures DiT-XL/2 by converting every pair of sequential transformer blocks into parallel blocks via grafting. This reduces model depth by 2x and yields better quality (FID: 2.77) than other models of comparable depth. Together, we show that new diffusion model designs can be explored by grafting pretrained DiTs, with edits ranging from operator replacement to architecture restructuring. Code and grafted models: https://grafting.stanford.edu
Generative Trajectory Stitching through Diffusion Composition
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Effective trajectory stitching for long-horizon planning is a significant challenge in robotic decision-making. While diffusion models have shown promise in planning, they are limited to solving tasks similar to those seen in their training data. We propose CompDiffuser, a novel generative approach that can solve new tasks by learning to compositionally stitch together shorter trajectory chunks from previously seen tasks. Our key insight is modeling the trajectory distribution by subdividing it into overlapping chunks and learning their conditional relationships through a single bidirectional diffusion model. This allows information to propagate between segments during generation, ensuring physically consistent connections. We conduct experiments on benchmark tasks of various difficulties, covering different environment sizes, agent state dimension, trajectory types, training data quality, and show that CompDiffuser significantly outperforms existing methods.
Probabilistic Token Alignment for Large Language Model Fusion
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch can yield models with unique functionalities and strengths, but it is costly and often leads to redundant capabilities. A more cost-effective alternative is to fuse existing pre-trained LLMs with different architectures into a more powerful model. However, a key challenge in existing model fusion is their dependence on manually predefined vocabulary alignment, which may not generalize well across diverse contexts, leading to performance degradation in several evaluation. To solve this, we draw inspiration from distribution learning and propose the probabilistic token alignment method as a general and soft mapping for alignment, named as PTA-LLM. Our approach innovatively reformulates token alignment into a classic mathematical problem: optimal transport, seamlessly leveraging distribution-aware learning to facilitate more coherent model fusion. Apart from its inherent generality, PTA-LLM exhibits interpretability from a distributional perspective, offering insights into the essence of the token alignment. Empirical results demonstrate that probabilistic token alignment enhances the target model's performance across multiple capabilities. Our code is avaliable at https://runjia.tech/neurips_pta-llm/.