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Multi-Agent Debate for LLMJudges with Adaptive Stability Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the advancing reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they are increasingly employed for complex evaluation tasks, such as grading student responses, verifying factual claims, and comparing competing answers. Leveraging multiple LLMs as automated judges can enhance robustness and accuracy by aggregating diverse perspectives, yet existing approaches often rely on static and simple aggregation methods, such as majority voting, which may produce incorrect judgments despite correct individual assessments. We propose a novel multiagent debate framework where LLMs collaboratively reason and iteratively refine judgments, formalizing this process mathematically and proving its advantages over static ensembles. To ensure computational efficiency, we introduce a stability detection mechanism using a time-varying Beta-Binomial mixture model (a mixture of two Beta-Binomial distributions) that tracks judge consensus dynamics and applies adaptive stopping via Kolmogorov-Smirnov testing. Experiments across diverse benchmarks and models demonstrate significant improvements in judgment accuracy over majority voting while maintaining computational efficiency.


Exploring the Noise Robustness of Online Conformal Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Conformal prediction is an emerging technique for uncertainty quantification that constructs prediction sets guaranteed to contain the true label with a predefined probability. Recent work develops online conformal prediction methods that adaptively construct prediction sets to accommodate distribution shifts. However, existing algorithms typically assume perfect label accuracy which rarely holds in practice. In this work, we investigate the robustness of online conformal prediction under uniform label noise with a known noise rate. We show that label noise causes a persistent gap between the actual mis-coverage rate and the desired rate ฮฑ, leading to either overestimated or underestimated coverage guarantees. To address this issue, we propose a novel loss function robust pinball loss, which provides an unbiased estimate of clean pinball loss without requiring ground-truth labels. Theoretically, we demonstrate that robust pinball loss enables online conformal prediction to eliminate the coverage gap under uniform label noise, achieving a convergence rate of O(T 1/2) for both empirical and expected coverage errors (i.e., absolute deviation of the empirical and expected mis-coverage rate from the target level ฮฑ). This loss offers a general solution to the uniform label noise, and is complementary to existing online conformal prediction methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that robust pinball loss enhances the noise robustness of various online conformal prediction methods by achieving a precise coverage guarantee and improved efficiency.


TTS-VAR: ATest-Time Scaling Framework for Visual Auto-Regressive Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Scaling visual generation models is essential for real-world content creation, yet requires substantial training and computational expenses. Alternatively, test-time scaling has garnered growing attention due to resource efficiency and promising performance.


Automatic Visual Instrumental Variable Learning for Confounding-Resistant Domain Generalization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Many confounding-resistant domain generalization methods for image classification have been developed based on causal interventions. However, their reliance on strong assumptions limits their effectiveness in handling unobserved confounders. Although recent work introduces instrumental variables (IVs) to overcome this limitation, the reliance on manually predefined instruments, particularly in the context of visual data, may result in severe bias or invalidity when IV conditions are violated. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach to automatically learning Visual Instrumental Variables for confounding-resistant Domain Generalization (VIV-DG). We observe that certain non-causal visual attributes in image data naturally satisfy the basic conditions required for valid IVs. Motivated by this insight, we propose the visual instrumental variable, a novel concept that extends classical IV theory to the visual domain. Furthermore, we develop an automatic visual instrumental variable learner that enforces IV conditions on learned representations, enabling the automatic learning of valid visual instrumental variables from image data. Ultimately, VIV-DG inherits the strengths of classical IVs to mitigate unobserved confounding and avoids the significant bias caused by violations of IV conditions in predefined IVs. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks verify that VIV-DG achieves superior generalization ability.


Hierarchical Balance Packing: Towards Efficient Supervised Fine-tuning for Long-Context LLM

Neural Information Processing Systems

Training Long-Context Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging, as hybrid training with long-context and short-context data often leads to workload imbalances. Existing works mainly use data packing to alleviate this issue, but fail to consider imbalanced attention computation and wasted communication overhead. This paper proposes Hierarchical Balance Packing (HBP), which designs a novel batch-construction method and training recipe to address those inefficiencies.


Interpreta view of the lighthouseandsky person works at his desk in officedifferent concepts(a)(b)(c)Vision RepresentationLanguage RepresentationConcept Activationthe same concept

Neural Information Processing Systems

However, the interpretability of the alignment component remains uninvestigated due to the difficulty in mapping the semantics of multi-modal representations into a unified concept set. To address this problem, we propose VL-SAE, a sparse autoencoder that encodes vision-language representations into its hidden activations. Each neuron in its hidden layer correlates to a concept represented by semantically similar images and texts, thereby interpreting these representations with a unified concept set. To establish the neuron-concept correlation, we encourage semantically similar representations to exhibit consistent neuron activations during self-supervised training. First, to measure the semantic similarity of multi-modal representations, we perform their alignment in an explicit form based on cosine similarity. Second, we construct the VL-SAE with a distance-based encoder and two modality-specific decoders to ensure the activation consistency of semantically similar representations. Experiments across multiple VLMs (e.g., CLIP, LLaVA) demonstrate the superior capability of VL-SAE in interpreting and enhancing the vision-language alignment. For interpretation, the alignment between vision and language representations can be understood by comparing their semantics with concepts. For enhancement, the alignment can be strengthened by aligning vision-language representations at the concept level, contributing to performance improvements in downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification and hallucination elimination.


Differential Privacy for Euclidean Jordan Algebra with Applications to Private Symmetric Cone Programming

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we study differentially private mechanisms for functions whose outputs lie in a Euclidean Jordan algebra. Euclidean Jordan algebras capture many important mathematical structures and form the foundation of linear programming, second-order cone programming, and semidefinite programming. Our main contribution is a generic Gaussian mechanism for such functions, with sensitivity measured in โ„“2, โ„“1, and โ„“ norms. Notably, this framework includes the important case where the function outputs are symmetric matrices, and sensitivity is measured in the Frobenius, nuclear, or spectral norm. We further derive private algorithms for solving symmetric cone programs under various settings, using a combination of the multiplicative weights update method and our generic Gaussian mechanism. As an application, we present differentially private algorithms for semidefinite programming, resolving a major open question posed by [Hsu, Roth, Roughgarden, and Ullman, ICALP 2014].


ComfyMind: Toward General-Purpose Generation via Tree-Based Planning and Reactive Feedback

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the rapid advancement of generative models, general-purpose generation has gained increasing attention as a promising approach to unify diverse tasks across modalities within a single system. Despite this progress, existing opensource frameworks often remain fragile and struggle to support complex real-world applications due to the lack of structured workflow planning and execution-level feedback. To address these limitations, we present ComfyMind, a collaborative AI system designed to enable robust and scalable general-purpose generation, built on the ComfyUI platform.



Embodied Cognition Augmented End2End Autonomous Driving

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, vision-based end-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a new paradigm. However, popular end-to-end approaches typically rely on visual feature extraction networks trained under label supervision. This limited supervision framework restricts the generality and applicability of driving models. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm termed E3AD, which advocates for comparative learning between visual feature extraction networks and the general EEG large model, in order to learn latent human driving cognition for enhancing end-to-end planning. In this work, we collected a cognitive dataset for the mentioned contrastive learning process. Subsequently, we investigated the methods and potential mechanisms for enhancing end-to-end planning with human driving cognition, using popular driving models as baselines on publicly available autonomous driving datasets. Both open-loop and closed-loop tests are conducted for a comprehensive evaluation of planning performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the E3AD paradigm significantly enhances the end-to-end planning performance of baseline models.