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ComRank: Ranking Loss for Multi-Label Complementary Label Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multi-label complementary label learning (MLCLL) is a weakly supervised paradigm that addresses multi-label learning (MLL) tasks using complementary labels (i.e., irrelevant labels) instead of relevant labels. Existing methods typically adopt an unbiased risk estimator (URE) under the assumption that complementary labels follow a uniform distribution. However, this assumption fails in realworld scenarios due to instance-specific annotation biases, making URE-based methods ineffective under such conditions.


The U.S.-Iran War: By the Numbers

TIME - Tech

As officials meet in Switzerland to negotiate the terms of a tenuous U.S.-Iran accord, and tensions reignite over the Strait of Hormuz, here's a look at what the conflict has already cost.


DictPFL: Efficient and Private Federated Learning on Encrypted Gradients

Neural Information Processing Systems

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across institutions without sharing raw data. However, gradient sharing still risks privacy leakage, such as gradient inversion attacks. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) can secure aggregation but often incurs prohibitive computational and communication overhead. Existing HE-based FL methods sit at two extremes: encrypting all gradients for full privacy at high cost, or partially encrypting gradients to save resources while exposing vulnerabilities. We present DictPFL, a practical framework that achieves full gradient protection with minimal overhead. DictPFL encrypts every transmitted gradient while keeping non-transmitted parameters local, preserving privacy without heavy computation. It introduces two key modules: Decomposefor-Partial-Encrypt (DePE), which decomposes model weights into a static dictionary and an updatable lookup table--only the latter is encrypted and aggregated, while the static dictionary remains local and requires neither sharing nor encryption; and Prune-for-Minimum-Encrypt (PrME), which applies encryption-aware pruning to minimize encrypted parameters via consistent, history-guided masks. Experiments show that DictPFL reduces communication cost by 402-748 and accelerates training by 28-65 compared to fully encrypted FL, while outperforming state-of-the-art selective encryption methods by 51-155 in overhead and 4-19 in speed. Remarkably, DictPFL's runtime is within 2 of plaintext FL, demonstrating--for the first time--that HE-based private federated learning is practical for real-world deployment.


LoRATv2: Enabling Low-Cost Temporal Modeling in One-Stream Trackers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Transformer-based algorithms, such as LoRAT, have significantly enhanced objecttracking performance. However, these approaches rely on a standard attention mechanism, which incurs quadratic token complexity, making real-time inference computationally expensive. In this paper, we introduce LoRATv2, a novel tracking framework that addresses these limitations with three main contributions. First, LoRATv2 integrates frame-wise causal attention, which ensures full selfattention within each frame while enabling causal dependencies across frames, significantly reducing computational overhead. Moreover, key-value (KV) caching is employed to efficiently reuse past embeddings for further speedup.


Conditioning Matters: Training Diffusion Policies is Faster Than You Think

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion policies have emerged as a mainstream paradigm for building visionlanguage-action (VLA) models. Although they demonstrate strong robot control capabilities, their training efficiency remains suboptimal. In this work, we identify a fundamental challenge in conditional diffusion policy training: when generative conditions are hard to distinguish, the training objective degenerates into modeling the marginal action distribution, a phenomenon we term loss collapse. To overcome this, we propose Cocos, a simple yet general solution that modifies the source distribution in the conditional flow matching to be condition-dependent. By anchoring the source distribution around semantics extracted from condition inputs, Cocos encourages stronger condition integration and prevents the loss collapse. We provide theoretical justification and extensive empirical results across simulation and real-world benchmarks. Our method achieves faster convergence and higher success rates than existing approaches, matching the performance of large-scale pre-trained VLAs using significantly fewer gradient steps and parameters. Cocos is lightweight, easy to implement, and compatible with diverse policy architectures, offering a general-purpose improvement to diffusion policy training.


AliO: Output Alignment Matters in Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF) tasks, which leverage the current data sequence as input to predict the future sequence, have become increasingly crucial in real-world applications such as weather forecasting and planning of electricity consumption. However, state-of-the-art LTSF models often fail to achieve prediction output alignment for the same timestamps across lagged input sequences.


Twilight: Adaptive Attention Sparsity with Hierarchical Top-p Pruning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Leveraging attention sparsity to accelerate long-context large language models (LLMs) has been of great importance recently. However, most existing sparse attention algorithms use a fixed budget of how many tokens to use in their computations. This simple static decision raises critical issues in real-world deployment because it fails to account for the dynamic nature of real-world scenarios, where the optimal balance between accuracy and efficiency can vary greatly. In this paper, we reveal a key insight that leveraging the idea of top-p sampling (a.k.a., nucleus sampling) in sparse attention could enable efficient and adaptive budget decisions. Based on this, we propose Twilight, a framework that enhances any existing sparse attention algorithm with adaptive budget decision capabilities without sacrificing accuracy. Empirical results show that Twilight can adaptively prune up to 98% tokens with nearly no accuracy loss in both long-and medium-context scenarios, leading to a 1.4 speedup over state-of-the-art sparse attention mechanisms.


SVRPBench: ARealistic Benchmark for Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem

Neural Information Processing Systems

Robust routing under uncertainty is central to real-world logistics, yet most benchmarks assume static, idealized settings. We present SVRPBench, the first open benchmark to capture high-fidelity stochastic dynamics in vehicle routing at urban scale. Spanning more than 500 instances with up to 1000 customers, it simulates realistic delivery conditions: time-dependent congestion, log-normal delays, probabilistic accidents, and empirically grounded time windows for residential and commercial clients. Our pipeline generates diverse, constraint-rich scenarios, including multi-depot and multi-vehicle setups. Benchmarking reveals that state-of-the-art RL solvers like POMO and AM degrade by over 20% under distributional shift, while classical and metaheuristic methods remain robust. To enable reproducible research, we release the dataset (Hugging Face) and evaluation suite (GitHub). SVRPBenchchallenges the community to design solvers that generalize beyond synthetic assumptions and adapt to real-world uncertainty.


SDPGO: Efficient Self-Distillation Training Meets Proximal Gradient Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Self-knowledge distillation (SKD) enables single-model training by distilling knowledge from the model's own output, eliminating the need for a separate teacher network required in conventional distillation methods. However, current SKD methods focus mainly on replicating common features in the student model, neglecting the extraction of key features that significantly enhance student learning. Inspired by this, we devise a self-knowledge distillation framework entitled Self-Distillation training via Proximal Gradient Optimization or SDPGO, which utilizes gradient information to identify and assign greater weight to features that significantly impact classification performance, enabling the network to learn the most relevant features during training. Specifically, the proposed framework refines the gradient information into a dynamically changing weighting factor to evaluate the distillation knowledge via the dynamic weight adjustment scheme. Meanwhile, we devise the sequential iterative learning module to dynamically optimize knowledge transfer by leveraging historical predictions and real-time gradients, stabilizing training through mini-batch-based KL divergence refinement while adaptively prioritizing task-critical features for efficient self-distillation. Comprehensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation demonstrate that our method consistently surpasses recent state-of-the-art knowledge distillation techniques.


acb3e20075b0a2dfa3565f06681578e5-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper investigates convex-concave minimax optimization problems where only the function value access is allowed. We introduce a class of Hessianaware quantum zeroth-order methods that can find the ǫ-saddle point within O(d2/3ǫ 2/3) function value oracle calls. This represents an improvement of d1/3ǫ 1/3 over the O(dǫ 1) upper bound of classical zeroth-order methods, where d denotes the problem dimension. We extend these results to µ-stronglyconvex µ-strongly-concave minimax problems using a restart strategy, and show a speedup of d1/3µ 1/3 compared to classical zeroth-order methods. The acceleration achieved by our methods stems from the construction of efficient quantum estimators for the Hessian and the subsequent design of efficient Hessian-aware algorithms. In addition, we apply such ideas to non-convex optimization, leading to a reduction in the query complexity compared to classical methods.