OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Visual Jenga: Discovering Object Dependencies via Counterfactual Inpainting
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

This paper proposes a novel scene understanding task called Visual Jenga. Drawing inspiration from the game Jenga, the proposed task involves progressively removing objects from a single image until only the background remains. Just as Jenga players must understand structural dependencies to maintain tower stability, our task reveals the intrinsic relationships between scene elements by systematically exploring which objects can be removed while preserving scene coherence in both physical and geometric sense. As a starting point for tackling the Visual Jenga task, we propose a simple, data-driven, training-free approach that is surprisingly effective on a range of real-world images. The principle behind our approach is to utilize the asymmetry in the pairwise relationships between objects within a scene and employ a large inpainting model to generate a set of counterfactuals to quantify the asymmetry.
Do Automatic Factuality Metrics Measure Factuality? A Critical Evaluation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Modern LLMs can now produce highly readable abstractive summaries, to the point that traditional automated metrics for evaluating summary quality, such as ROUGE, have saturated. However, LLMs still sometimes introduce inaccuracies into summaries, i.e., information inconsistent with or unsupported by the corresponding source. Measuring the occurrence of these often subtle factual inconsistencies automatically has proved challenging. This in turn has motivated development of metrics intended to measure the factual consistency of generated summaries against sources. But are these approaches measuring what they purport to? Or are they mostly exploiting artifacts? In this work, we stress test a range of automatic factuality metrics, including specialized models and LLM-based prompting methods, to probe what they actually capture. Using a shallow classifier to separate ``easy'' examples for factual evaluation where surface features suffice from ``hard'' cases requiring deeper reasoning, we find that all metrics show substantial performance drops on the latter. Furthermore, some metrics are more sensitive to benign, fact-preserving edits than to factual corrections. Building on this observation, we demonstrate that most automatic factuality metrics can be gamed, i.e., their scores can be artificially inflated by appending innocuous, content-free sentences to summaries. Among the metrics tested, the prompt based ChatGPT-DA approach is the most robust and reliable. However, this comes with a notable caveat: Prompting LLMs to assess factuality may overly rely on their parametric knowledge rather than the provided reference when making judgments. Taken together, our findings call into question the reliability of current factuality metrics and prompt a broader reflection on what these metrics are truly measuring.
One Token Embedding Is Enough to Deadlock Your Large Reasoning Model
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Modern large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit impressive multi-step problem-solving via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this iterative thinking mechanism introduces a new vulnerability surface. We present the Deadlock Attack, a resource exhaustion method that hijacks an LRM's generative control flow by training a malicious adversarial embedding to induce perpetual reasoning loops. Specifically, the optimized embedding encourages transitional tokens (e.g., "Wait", "But") after reasoning steps, preventing the model from concluding its answer. A key challenge we identify is the continuous-to-discrete projection gap: naïve projections of adversarial embeddings to token sequences nullify the attack. To overcome this, we introduce a backdoor implantation strategy, enabling reliable activation through specific trigger tokens. Our method achieves a 100% attack success rate across four advanced LRMs (Phi-RM, Nemotron-Nano, R1-Qwen, R1-Llama) and three math reasoning benchmarks, forcing models to generate up to their maximum token limits. The attack is also stealthy (in terms of causing negligible utility loss on benign user inputs) and remains robust against existing strategies trying to mitigate the overthinking issue. Our findings expose a critical and underexplored security vulnerability in LRMs from the perspective of reasoning (in)efficiency.
Distributive Fairness in Large Language Models: Evaluating Alignment with Human Values
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

The growing interest in employing large language models (LLMs) for decision-making in social and economic contexts has raised questions about their potential to function as agents in these domains. A significant number of societal problems involve the distribution of resources, where fairness, along with economic efficiency, play a critical role in the desirability of outcomes. In this paper, we examine whether LLM responses adhere to fundamental fairness concepts such as equitability, envy-freeness, and Rawlsian maximin, and investigate their alignment with human preferences. We evaluate the performance of several LLMs, providing a comparative benchmark of their ability to reflect these measures. Our results demonstrate a lack of alignment between current LLM responses and human distributional preferences. Moreover, LLMs are unable to utilize money as a transferable resource to mitigate inequality. Nonetheless, we demonstrate a stark contrast when (some) LLMs are tasked with selecting from a predefined menu of options rather than generating one. In addition, we analyze the robustness of LLM responses to variations in semantic factors (e.g., intentions or personas) or non-semantic prompting changes (e.g., templates or orderings). Finally, we highlight potential strategies aimed at enhancing the alignment of LLM behavior with well-established fairness concepts.
Seeing through Uncertainty: Robust Task-Oriented Optimization in Visual Navigation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Visual navigation is a fundamental problem in embodied AI, yet practical deployments demand long-horizon planning capabilities to address multi-objective tasks. A major bottleneck is data scarcity: policies learned from limited data often overfit and fail to generalize OOD. Existing neural network-based agents typically increase architectural complexity that paradoxically become counterproductive in the small-sample regime. This paper introduce NeuRO, a integrated learning-to-optimize framework that tightly couples perception networks with downstream task-level robust optimization. Specifically, NeuRO addresses core difficulties in this integration: (i) it transforms noisy visual predictions under data scarcity into convex uncertainty sets using Partially Input Convex Neural Networks (PICNNs) with conformal calibration, which directly parameterize the optimization constraints; and (ii) it reformulates planning under partial observability as a robust optimization problem, enabling uncertainty-aware policies that transfer across environments. Extensive experiments on both unordered and sequential multi-object navigation tasks demonstrate that NeuRO establishes SoTA performance, particularly in generalization to unseen environments. Our work thus presents a significant advancement for developing robust, generalizable autonomous agents.
Auto-Search and Refinement: An Automated Framework for Gender Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Pre-training large language models (LLMs) on vast text corpora enhances natural language processing capabilities but risks encoding social biases, particularly gender bias. While parameter-modification methods like fine-tuning mitigate bias, they are resource-intensive, unsuitable for closed-source models, and lack adaptability to evolving societal norms. Instruction-based approaches offer flexibility but often compromise task performance. To address these limitations, we propose $\textbf{FaIRMaker}$, an automated and model-independent framework that employs an $\textbf{auto-search and refinement}$ paradigm to adaptively generate Fairwords, which act as instructions integrated into input queries to reduce gender bias and enhance response quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FaIRMaker automatically searches for and dynamically refines Fairwords, effectively mitigating gender bias while preserving task integrity and ensuring compatibility with both API-based and open-source LLMs.
FerretNet: Efficient Synthetic Image Detection via Local Pixel Dependencies
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

The increasing realism of synthetic images generated by advanced models such as VAEs, GANs, and LDMs poses significant challenges for synthetic image detection. To address this issue, we explore two artifact types introduced during the generation process: (1) latent distribution deviations and (2) decoding-induced smoothing effects, which manifest as inconsistencies in local textures, edges, and color transitions. Leveraging local pixel dependencies (LPD) properties rooted in Markov Random Fields, we reconstruct synthetic images using neighboring pixel information to expose disruptions in texture continuity and edge coherence. Building upon LPD, we propose FerretNet, a lightweight neural network with only 1.1M parameters that delivers efficient and robust synthetic image detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FerretNet, trained exclusively on the 4-class ProGAN dataset, achieves an average accuracy of 97.1% on an open-world benchmark comprising 22 generative models. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/xigua7105/FerretNet.
Distribution-Aware Tensor Decomposition for Compression of Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Neural networks are widely used for image-related tasks but typically demand considerable computing power. Once a network has been trained, however, its memory- and compute-footprint can be reduced by compression. In this work, we focus on compression through tensorization and low-rank representations. Whereas classical approaches search for a low-rank approximation by minimizing an isotropic norm such as the Frobenius norm in weight-space, we use data-informed norms that measure the error in function space. Concretely, we minimize the change in the layer's output distribution, which can be expressed as $\lVert (W - \widetilde{W}) Σ^{1/2}\rVert_F$ where $Σ^{1/2}$ is the square root of the covariance matrix of the layer's input and $W$, $\widetilde{W}$ are the original and compressed weights. We propose new alternating least square algorithms for the two most common tensor decompositions (Tucker-2 and CPD) that directly optimize the new norm. Unlike conventional compression pipelines, which almost always require post-compression fine-tuning, our data-informed approach often achieves competitive accuracy without any fine-tuning. We further show that the same covariance-based norm can be transferred from one dataset to another with only a minor accuracy drop, enabling compression even when the original training dataset is unavailable. Experiments on several CNN architectures (ResNet-18/50, and GoogLeNet) and datasets (ImageNet, FGVC-Aircraft, Cifar10, and Cifar100) confirm the advantages of the proposed method.
High-Dimensional Calibration from Swap Regret
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

We study the online calibration of multi-dimensional forecasts over an arbitrary convex set $\mathcal{P} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ relative to an arbitrary norm $\Vert\cdot\Vert$. We connect this with the problem of external regret minimization for online linear optimization, showing that if it is possible to guarantee $O(\sqrt{ρT})$ worst-case regret after $T$ rounds when actions are drawn from $\mathcal{P}$ and losses are drawn from the dual $\Vert \cdot \Vert_*$ unit norm ball, then it is also possible to obtain $ε$-calibrated forecasts after $T = \exp(O(ρ/ε^2))$ rounds. When $\mathcal{P}$ is the $d$-dimensional simplex and $\Vert \cdot \Vert$ is the $\ell_1$-norm, the existence of $O(\sqrt{T\log d})$-regret algorithms for learning with experts implies that it is possible to obtain $ε$-calibrated forecasts after $T = \exp(O(\log{d}/ε^2)) = d^{O(1/ε^2)}$ rounds, recovering a recent result of Peng (2025). Interestingly, our algorithm obtains this guarantee without requiring access to any online linear optimization subroutine or knowledge of the optimal rate $ρ$ -- in fact, our algorithm is identical for every setting of $\mathcal{P}$ and $\Vert \cdot \Vert$. Instead, we show that the optimal regularizer for the above OLO problem can be used to upper bound the above calibration error by a swap regret, which we then minimize by running the recent TreeSwap algorithm with Follow-The-Leader as a subroutine. Finally, we prove that any online calibration algorithm that guarantees $εT$ $\ell_1$-calibration error over the $d$-dimensional simplex requires $T \geq \exp(\mathrm{poly}(1/ε))$ (assuming $d \geq \mathrm{poly}(1/ε)$). This strengthens the corresponding $d^{Ω(\log{1/ε})}$ lower bound of Peng, and shows that an exponential dependence on $1/ε$ is necessary.
Generalized Linear Bandits: Almost Optimal Regret with One-Pass Update
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

We study the generalized linear bandit (GLB) problem, a contextual multi-armed bandit framework that extends the classical linear model by incorporating a non-linear link function, thereby modeling a broad class of reward distributions such as Bernoulli and Poisson. While GLBs are widely applicable to real-world scenarios, their non-linear nature introduces significant challenges in achieving both computational and statistical efficiency. Existing methods typically trade off between two objectives, either incurring high per-round costs for optimal regret guarantees or compromising statistical efficiency to enable constant-time updates. In this paper, we propose a jointly efficient algorithm that attains a nearly optimal regret bound with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ time and space complexities per round. The core of our method is a tight confidence set for the online mirror descent (OMD) estimator, which is derived through a novel analysis that leverages the notion of mix loss from online prediction. The analysis shows that our OMD estimator, even with its one-pass updates, achieves statistical efficiency comparable to maximum likelihood estimation, thereby leading to a jointly efficient optimistic method.
Efficient Data Selection at Scale via Influence Distillation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Effective data selection is critical for efficient training of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper introduces Influence Distillation, a novel, mathematically-justified framework for data selection that employs second-order information to optimally weight training samples. By distilling each sample's influence on a target distribution, our method assigns model-specific weights that are used to select training data for LLM fine-tuning, guiding it toward strong performance on the target domain. We derive these optimal weights for both Gradient Descent and Adam optimizers. To ensure scalability and reduce computational cost, we propose a $\textit{landmark-based approximation}$: influence is precisely computed for a small subset of "landmark" samples and then efficiently propagated to all other samples to determine their weights. We validate Influence Distillation by applying it to instruction tuning on the Tulu V2 dataset, targeting a range of tasks including GSM8k, SQuAD, and MMLU, across several models from the Llama and Qwen families. Experiments show that Influence Distillation matches or outperforms state-of-the-art performance while achieving up to $3.5\times$ faster selection.
Reasoning Planning for Language Models
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Selecting an appropriate reasoning method for a given query remains a key challenge in language model generation. Existing approaches typically generate multiple candidate responses and use an aggregation strategy to select the output answer, often assuming that more candidate answers yield higher accuracy. We revisit this assumption through a rigorous theoretical analysis, deriving accuracy bounds for standard aggregation methods under fixed generation distributions and candidate sizes. Building on these insights, we introduce EPIC, an Ensemble Planning with Contrastive learning framework to learn a shared representation space that captures both model reasoning abilities and query-method compatibility. EPIC incorporates our probability bounds as a regularizer in a utility-driven optimization that balances accuracy and computational cost. Experiments on diverse mathematical reasoning tasks show that EPIC consistently selects optimal reasoning methods, improving accuracy while reducing computational overhead. Our code can be found at https://github.com/nguyenngocbaocmt02/EPIC.
Matching Markets Meet LLMs: Algorithmic Reasoning with Ranked Preferences
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven progress in reasoning tasks -- from program synthesis to scientific hypothesis generation -- yet their ability to handle ranked preferences and structured algorithms in combinatorial domains remains underexplored. We study matching markets, a core framework behind applications like resource allocation and ride-sharing, which require reconciling individual ranked preferences to ensure stable outcomes. We evaluate several state-of-the-art models on a hierarchy of preference-based reasoning tasks -- ranging from stable-matching generation to instability detection, instability resolution, and fine-grained preference queries -- to systematically expose their logical and algorithmic limitations in handling ranked inputs. Surprisingly, even top-performing models with advanced reasoning struggle to resolve instability in large markets, often failing to identify blocking pairs or execute algorithms iteratively. We further show that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) significantly improves performance in small markets, but fails to bring about a similar improvement on large instances, suggesting the need for more sophisticated strategies to improve LLMs' reasoning with larger-context inputs.
LLM Meets Diffusion: A Hybrid Framework for Crystal Material Generation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in generative modeling have shown significant promise in designing novel periodic crystal structures. Existing approaches typically rely on either large language models (LLMs) or equivariant denoising models, each with complementary strengths: LLMs excel at handling discrete atomic types but often struggle with continuous features such as atomic positions and lattice parameters, while denoising models are effective at modeling continuous variables but encounter difficulties in generating accurate atomic compositions. To bridge this gap, we propose CrysLLMGen, a hybrid framework that integrates an LLM with a diffusion model to leverage their complementary strengths for crystal material generation. During sampling, CrysLLMGen first employs a fine-tuned LLM to produce an intermediate representation of atom types, atomic coordinates, and lattice structure. While retaining the predicted atom types, it passes the atomic coordinates and lattice structure to a pre-trained equivariant diffusion model for refinement. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art generative models across several benchmark tasks and datasets. Specifically, CrysLLMGen not only achieves a balanced performance in terms of structural and compositional validity but also generates more stable and novel materials compared to LLM-based and denoisingbased models Furthermore, CrysLLMGen exhibits strong conditional generation capabilities, effectively producing materials that satisfy user-defined constraints. Code is available at https://github.com/kdmsit/crysllmgen
FedMGP: Personalized Federated Learning with Multi-Group Text-Visual Prompts
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we introduce FedMGP, a new paradigm for personalized federated prompt learning in vision-language models. FedMGP equips each client with multiple groups of paired textual and visual prompts, enabling the model to capture diverse, fine-grained semantic and instance-level cues. A diversity loss is introduced to drive each prompt group to specialize in distinct and complementary semantic aspects, ensuring that the groups collectively cover a broader range of local characteristics. During communication, FedMGP employs a dynamic prompt aggregation strategy based on similarity-guided probabilistic sampling: each client computes the cosine similarity between its prompt groups and the global prompts from the previous round, then samples s groups via a softmax-weighted distribution. This soft selection mechanism preferentially aggregates semantically aligned knowledge while still enabling exploration of underrepresented patterns effectively balancing the preservation of common knowledge with client-specific features. Notably, FedMGP maintains parameter efficiency by redistributing a fixed prompt capacity across multiple groups, achieving state-of-the-art performance with the lowest communication parameters among all federated prompt learning methods. Theoretical analysis shows that our dynamic aggregation strategy promotes robust global representation learning by reinforcing shared semantics while suppressing client-specific noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedMGP consistently outperforms prior approaches in both personalization and domain generalization across diverse federated vision-language benchmarks. The code will be released on https://github.com/weihao-bo/FedMGP.git.
Improving Generalization of Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Vehicle Routing Problems via Test-Time Projection Learning
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising learning-based paradigm for addressing Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by minimizing the need for extensive manual engineering. While existing NCO methods, trained on small-scale instances (e.g., 100 nodes), have demonstrated considerable success on problems of similar scale, their performance significantly degrades when applied to large-scale scenarios. This degradation arises from the distributional shift between training and testing data, rendering policies learned on small instances ineffective for larger problems. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel learning framework driven by Large Language Models (LLMs). This framework learns a projection between the training and testing distributions, which is then deployed to enhance the scalability of the NCO model. Notably, unlike prevailing techniques that necessitate joint training with the neural network, our approach operates exclusively during the inference phase, obviating the need for model retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method enables a backbone model (trained on 100-node instances) to achieve superior performance on large-scale Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) of up to 100K nodes from diverse distributions.
Uncovering Critical Sets of Deep Neural Networks via Sample-Independent Critical Lifting
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2025
Year: 2025

This paper investigates the sample dependence of critical points for neural networks. We introduce a sample-independent critical lifting operator that associates a parameter of one network with a set of parameters of another, thus defining sample-dependent and sample-independent lifted critical points. We then show by example that previously studied critical embeddings do not capture all sample-independent lifted critical points. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of sample-dependent lifted critical points for sufficiently large sample sizes and prove that saddles appear among them.