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Imbalances in Neurosymbolic Learning: Characterization and Mitigating Strategies

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study one of the most popular problems in neurosymbolic learning (NSL), that of learning neural classifiers given only the result of applying a symbolic component σ to the gold labels of the elements of a vector x. The gold labels of the elements in x are unknown to the learner. We make multiple contributions, theoretical and practical, to address a problem that has not been studied so far in this context, that of characterizing and mitigating learning imbalances, i.e., major differences in the errors that occur when classifying instances of different classes (aka class-specific risks). Our theoretical reveals a unique phenomenon: that σ can greatly impact learning imbalances. This result sharply contrasts with previous research on supervised and weakly supervised learning, which only studies learning imbalances under data imbalances. On the practical side, we introduce a technique for estimating the marginal of the hidden gold labels using weakly supervised data. Then, we introduce algorithms that mitigate imbalances at training and testing time by treating the marginal of the hidden labels as a constraint. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques using strong baselines from NSL and long-tailed learning, suggesting performance improvements of up to 14%.


Toward Real-world Text Image Forgery Localization: Structured and Interpretable Data Synthesis

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing Text Image Forgery Localization (T-IFL) methods often suffer from poor generalization due to the limited scale of real-world datasets and the distribution gap caused by synthetic data that fails to capture the complexity of real-world tampering. To tackle this issue, we propose Fourier Series-based Tampering Synthesis (FSTS), a structured and interpretable framework for synthesizing tampered text images. FSTS first collects 16,750 real-world tampering instances from five representative tampering types, using a structured pipeline that records human-performed editing traces via multi-format logs (e.g., video, PSD, and editing logs). By analyzing these collected parameters and identifying recurring behavioral patterns at both individual and population levels, we formulate a hierarchical modeling framework. Specifically, each individual tampering parameter is represented as a compact combination of basis operation-parameter configurations, while the population-level distribution is constructed by aggregating these behaviors. Since this formulation draws inspiration from the Fourier series, it enables an interpretable approximation using basis functions and their learned weights. By sampling from this modeled distribution, FSTS synthesizes diverse and realistic training data that better reflect real-world forgery traces. Extensive experiments across four evaluation protocols demonstrate that models trained with FSTS data achieve significantly improved generalization on real-world datasets. Dataset is available at Project Page.


Brain-Informed Fine-Tuning for Improved Multilingual Understanding in Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning language models with brain data can improve their semantic understanding, although these findings have so far been limited to English. Interestingly, similar to the shared multilingual embedding space of pretrained multilingual language models, human studies provide strong evidence for a shared semantic system in bilingual individuals. Here, we investigate whether fine-tuning language models with bilingual brain data changes model representations in a way that improves them across multiple languages. To test this, we fine-tune monolingual and multilingual language models using brain activity recorded while bilingual participants read stories in English and Chinese. We then evaluate how well these representations generalize to the bilingual participants' first language, their second language, and several other languages that the participants are not fluent in. We assess the fine-tuned language models on brain encoding performance and downstream NLP tasks. Our results show that bilingual brain-informed fine-tuned language models outperform their vanilla (pretrained) counterparts in both brain encoding performance and most downstream NLP tasks across multiple languages. These findings suggest that brain-informed fine-tuning improves multilingual understanding in language models, offering a bridge between cognitive neuroscience and NLP research. We make our code publicly available.


With Limited Data for Multimodal Alignment, Let the STRUCTURE Guide You

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multimodal models have demonstrated powerful capabilities in complex tasks requiring multimodal alignment, including zero-shot classification and cross-modal retrieval. However, existing models typically rely on millions of paired multimodal samples, which are prohibitively expensive or infeasible to obtain in many domains. In this work, we explore the feasibility of building multimodal models with limited amount of paired data by aligning pretrained unimodal foundation models. We show that high-quality alignment is possible with as few as tens of thousands of paired samples--less than 1%of the data typically used in the field. To achieve this, we introduce STRUCTURE, an effective regularization technique that preserves the neighborhood geometry of the latent space of unimodal encoders. Additionally, we show that aligning last layers is often suboptimal and demonstrate the benefits of aligning the layers with the highest representational similarity across modalities. These two components can be readily incorporated into existing alignment methods, yielding substantial gains across 24 zero-shot image classification and retrieval benchmarks, with average relative improvement of 51.6%in classification and 91.8% in retrieval tasks. Our results highlight the effectiveness and broad applicability of our framework for limited-sample multimodal learning and offer a promising path forward for resource-constrained domains.


Feed-Forward Bullet-Time Reconstruction of Dynamic Scenes from Monocular Videos

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advancements in static feed-forward scene reconstruction have demonstrated significant progress in high-quality novel view synthesis. However, these models often struggle with generalizability across diverse environments and fail to effectively handle dynamic content.


ORIGEN: Zero-Shot 3DOrientation Grounding in Text-to-Image Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce ORIGEN, the first zero-shot method for 3D orientation grounding in text-to-image generation across multiple objects and diverse categories. While previous work on spatial grounding in image generation has mainly focused on 2D positioning, it lacks control over 3D orientation. To address this, we propose a reward-guided sampling approach using a pretrained discriminative model for 3D orientation estimation and a one-step text-to-image generative flow model. While gradient-ascent-based optimization is a natural choice for reward-based guidance, it struggles to maintain image realism. Instead, we adopt a sampling-based approach using Langevin dynamics, which extends gradient ascent by simply injecting random noise--requiring just a single additional line of code. Additionally, we introduce adaptive time rescaling based on the reward function to accelerate convergence. Our experiments show that ORIGEN outperforms both training-based and test-time guidance methods across quantitative metrics and user studies.


Uncoupled and Convergent Learning in Monotone Games under Bandit Feedback

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of no-regret learning algorithms for general monotone and smooth games and their last-iterate convergence properties. Specifically, we investigate the problem under bandit feedback and strongly uncoupled dynamics, which allows modular development of the multi-player system that applies to a wide range of real applications. We propose a mirror-descent-based algorithm, which converges in O(T 1/4)under Bregman divergence and is also no-regret, where the choice of Bregman divergence is determined by the convexity of the game. The result is achieved by the dedicated use of two regularizations and the analysis of the fixed point thereof. The convergence rate is further improved to O(T 1/2)in the case of strongly monotone games. Motivated by practical tasks where the game evolves over time, the algorithm is extended to time-varying monotone games. We provide the first non-asymptotic result in converging monotone games and give improved results for equilibrium tracking games.


Stochastically Dominant Peer Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Eliciting reliable human feedback is essential for many machine learning tasks, such as learning from noisy labels and aligning AI systems with human preferences. Peer prediction mechanisms incentivize truthful reporting without ground truth verification by scoring agents based on correlations with peers. Traditional mechanisms, which ensure that truth-telling maximizes the expected scores in equilibrium, can elicit honest information while assuming agents' utilities are linear functions of their scores. However, in practice, non-linear payment rules are usually preferred, or agents' utilities are inherently non-linear. We propose stochastically dominant truthfulness (SD-truthfulness) as a stronger guarantee: the score distribution of truth-telling stochastically dominates all other strategies, incentivizing truthful reporting for a wide range of monotone utility functions. Our first observation is that no existing peer prediction mechanism naturally satisfies this criterion without strong assumptions. A simple solution--rounding scores into binary lotteries--can enforce SD-truthfulness, but often degrades sensitivity, a key property related to fairness and statistical efficiency. We demonstrate how a more careful application of rounding can better preserve sensitivity. Furthermore, we introduce a new enforced agreement (EA) mechanism that is theoretically guaranteed to be SD-truthful in binary-signal settings and, under mild assumptions, empirically achieves the highest sensitivity among all known SD-truthful mechanisms.


Regional Explanations: Bridging Local and Global Variable Importance

Neural Information Processing Systems

We analyze two widely used local attribution methods, Local Shapley Values and LIME, which aim to quantify the contribution of a feature value xi to a specific prediction f(x1,...,xp). Despite their widespread use, we identify fundamental limitations in their ability to reliably detect locally important features, even under ideal conditions with exact computations and independent features. We argue that a sound local attribution method should not assign importance to features that neither influence the model output (e.g., features with zero coefficients in a linear model) nor exhibit statistical dependence with functionality-relevant features. We demonstrate that both Local SV and LIME violate this fundamental principle. To address this, we propose R-LOCO (Regional Leave Out COvariates), which bridges the gap between local and global explanations and provides more accurate attributions.


Optimal and Provable Calibration in High-Dimensional Binary Classification: Angular Calibration and Platt Scaling

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the fundamental problem of calibrating a linear binary classifier of the form σ(ˆw x), where the feature vector xis Gaussian, σis a link function, and ˆw is an estimator of the true linear weight w . By interpolating with a noninformative chance classifier, we construct a well-calibrated predictor whose interpolation weight depends on the angle (ˆw,w) between the estimator ˆw and the true linear weight w . We establish that this angular calibration approach is provably well-calibrated in a high-dimensional regime where the number of samples and features both diverge, at a comparable rate.