We introduce LOKI, a compute-efficient framework for co-designing morphologies and control policies that generalize across unseen tasks. Inspired by biological adaptation--where animals quickly adjust to morphological changes--our method overcomes the inefficiencies of traditional evolutionary and quality-diversity algorithms. We propose learning convergent functions: shared control policies trained across clusters of morphologically similar designs in a learned latent space, drastically reducing the training cost per design. Simultaneously, we promote divergent forms by replacing mutation with dynamic local search, enabling broader exploration and preventing premature convergence. The policy reuse allows us to explore 780 more designs using 78% fewer simulation steps and 40% less compute per design. Local competition paired with a broader search results in a diverse set of high-performing final morphologies. Using the UNIMAL design space and a flatterrain locomotion task, LOKI discovers a rich variety of designs--ranging from quadrupeds to crabs, bipedals, and spinners--far more diverse than those produced by prior work. These morphologies also transfer better to unseen downstream tasks * Equal contribution 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025).

Time series data in real-world applications such as healthcare, climate modeling, and finance are often irregular, multimodal, and messy, with varying sampling rates, asynchronous modalities, and pervasive missingness. However, existing benchmarks typically assume clean, regularly sampled, unimodal data, creating a significant gap between research and real-world deployment. We introduce TIME-IMM, a dataset specifically designed to capture cause-driven irregularity in multimodal multivariate time series. TIME-IMM represents nine distinct types of time series irregularity, categorized into trigger-based, constraint-based, and artifact-based mechanisms. Complementing the dataset, we introduce IMM-TSF, a benchmark library for forecasting on irregular multimodal time series, enabling asynchronous integration and realistic evaluation. IMM-TSF includes specialized fusion modules, including a timestamp-to-text fusion module and a multimodality fusion module, which support both recency-aware averaging and attention-based integration strategies. Empirical results demonstrate that explicitly modeling multimodality on irregular time series data leads to substantial gains in forecasting performance. TIME-IMM and IMM-TSF provide a foundation for advancing time series analysis under real-world conditions.

Although RAW images offer advantages over sRGB by avoiding ISP-induced distortion and preserving more information in low-light conditions, their widespread use is limited due to high storage costs, transmission burdens, and the need for significant architectural changes for downstream tasks. To address the issues, this paper explores a new raw-based machine vision paradigm, termed Compact RAW Metadata-guided Image Refinement (CRM-IR). In particular, we propose a Machine Vision-oriented Image Refinement (MV-IR) module that refines sRGB images to better suit machine vision preferences, guided by learned raw metadata. In detail, we propose a Cross-Modal Contextual Entropy (CMCE) network for raw metadata extraction and compression. It builds upon the latent representation and entropy modeling framework of learned image compression methods, and uniquely exploits the contextual correspondence between raw images and their sRGB counterparts to achieve more efficient and compact metadata representation. Additionally, we integrate priors derived from the ISP pipeline to simplify the refinement process, enabling a more efficient design. Such a design allows the CRM-IR to focus on extracting the most essential metadata from raw images to support downstream machine vision tasks, while remaining plug-and-play and fully compatible with existing imaging pipelines, without any changes to model architectures or ISP modules. We implement our CRM-IR scheme on various object detection networks, and extensive experiments under low-light conditions demonstrate that it can significantly improve performance with an additional bitrate cost of less than 10 3 bits per pixel.

We prove the first generalization bound for large-margin halfspaces that is asymptotically tight in the tradeoff between the margin, the fraction of training points with the given margin, the failure probability and the number of training points.

We introduce the first method for translating text embeddings from one vector space to another without any paired data, encoders, or predefined sets of matches.

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.

Flow matching is an emerging generative modeling framework that learns continuous-time dynamics to map noise into data. To enhance expressiveness and sampling efficiency, recent works have explored incorporating high-order trajectory information. Despite the empirical success, a holistic theoretical foundation is still lacking. We present a unified framework for standard and high-order flow matching that incorporates trajectory derivatives up to an arbitrary order K. Our key innovation is establishing the marginalization technique that converts the intractable K-order loss into a simple conditional regression with exact gradients and identifying the consistency constraint. We establish sharp statistical rates of the K-order flow matching implemented with transformer networks. With nsamples, flow matching estimates nonparametric distributions at a rate eO(n Θ(1/d)), matching minimax lower bounds up to logarithmic factors.

We tackle the task of recovering an animatable 3D human avatar from a single or a sparse set of images. For this task, beyond a set of images, many prior state-of-theart methods use accurate "ground-truth" camera poses and human poses as input to guide reconstruction at test-time. We show that pose-dependent reconstruction degrades results significantly if pose estimates are noisy. To overcome this, we introduce NoPo-Avatar, which reconstructs avatars solely from images, without any pose input. By removing the dependence of test-time reconstruction on human poses, NoPo-Avatar is not affected by noisy human pose estimates, making it more widely applicable.

Prefix caching is a key technique for reducing Large Language Model (LLM) inference costs. However, the prevalent least-recently-used (LRU) eviction algorithm has a large gap to the optimal algorithm. This paper introduces LPC, the first learned method to perform LLM prefix cache eviction. LPC leverages conversational content analysis to provide predictive guidance for eviction, determining which conversations are likely to continue. These insights, combined with last access timestamps, inform more effective cache management. Extensive evaluations across three real-world datasets demonstrate that LPC achieves 18-47% reductions in required cache sizes for equivalent hit ratios and has an 11% improvement in LLM prefilling throughput in an emulated environment.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models by grounding their outputs in external documents. These systems, however, remain vulnerable to attacks on the retrieval corpus, such as prompt injection. RAG-based search systems (e.g., Google's Search AIOverview) present an interesting setting for studying and protecting against such threats, as defense algorithms can benefit from built-in reliability signals--like document ranking--and represent a non-LLM challenge for the adversary due to decades of work to thwart SEO. Motivated by, but not limited to, this scenario, this work introduces ReliabilityRAG, a framework for adversarial robustness that explicitly leverages reliability information of retrieved documents. Our first contribution adopts a graph-theoretic perspective to identify a "consistent majority" among retrieved documents to filter out malicious ones. We introduce a novel algorithm based on finding a Maximum Independent Set (MIS) on a document graph where edges encode contradiction. Our MIS variant explicitly prioritizes higher-reliability documents and provides provable robustness guarantees against bounded adversarial corruption under natural assumptions. Recognizing the computational cost of exact MIS for large retrieval sets, our second contribution is a scalable weighted sample and aggregate framework.