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Pin the Tail on the Model: Blindfolded Repair of User-Flagged Failures in Text-to-Image Services

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion models are increasingly deployed in real-world text-to-image services. These models, however, encode implicit assumptions about the world based on webscraped image-caption pairs used during training. Over time, such assumptions may become outdated, incorrect, or socially biased-leading to failures where the generated images misalign with users' expectations or evolving societal norms. Identifying and fixing such failures is challenging and, thus, a valuable asset for service providers, as failures often emerge post-deployment and demand specialized expertise and resources to resolve them. In this work, we introduce SURE, the first end-to-end framework that SecUrely REpairs failures flagged by users of diffusionbased services. SURE enables the service provider to securely collaborate with an external third-party specialized in model repairing (i.e., Model Repair Institute) without compromising the confidentiality of user feedback, the service provider's proprietary model, or the Model Repair Institute's proprietary repairing knowledge. To achieve the best possible efficiency, we propose a co-design of a model editing algorithm with a customized two-party cryptographic protocol. Our experiments show that SURE is highly practical: SURE securely and effectively repairs all 32 layers of Stable Diffusion v1.4 in under 17 seconds (four orders of magnitude more efficient than a general baseline). Our results demonstrate that practical, secure model repair is attainable for large-scale, modern diffusion services.


Don't Let It Fade: Preserving Edits in Diffusion Language Models via Token Timestep Allocation

Neural Information Processing Systems

While diffusion language models (DLMs) enable fine-grained refinement, their practical controllability remains fragile. We identify and formally characterize a central failure mode--update-forgetting--in which uniform, context-agnostic updates induce token-level fluctuations across timesteps, erasing earlier semantic edits and disrupting the cumulative refinement process, thereby degrading fluency and coherence. As this failure originates in uniform, context-agnostic updates, effective control demands explicit token ordering. We propose Token Timestep Allocation (TTA-DIFFUSION), which realizes soft, semantic token ordering via pertoken timestep schedules: critical tokens are frozen early, while uncertain tokens receive continued refinement. This timestep-based ordering can be instantiated as either a fixed policy or an adaptive policy driven by task signals, thereby supporting a broad spectrum of refinement strategies. Because it operates purely at inference time, it applies uniformly across various DLMs and naturally extends to diverse supervision sources. Empirically, TTA-DIFFUSION improves controllability and fluency: on sentiment control, it yields >20%higher accuracy and nearly halves perplexity using <1/5 the steps; in detoxification, it lowers maximum toxicity (12.2 vs. 14.5) and perplexity (26.0 vs. 32.0). Together, these results demonstrate that softened ordering via timestep allocation is the critical lever for mitigating update-forgetting and achieving stable and controllable diffusion text generation.


Small Batch Size Training for Language Models: When Vanilla SGDWorks, and Why Gradient Accumulation Is Wasteful

Neural Information Processing Systems

Conventional wisdom dictates that small batch sizes make language model pretraining and fine-tuning unstable, motivating gradient accumulation, which trades off the number of optimizer steps for a proportional increase in batch size. While it is common to decrease the learning rate for smaller batch sizes, other hyperparameters are often held fixed. In this work, we revisit small batch sizes all the way down to batch size one, and we propose a rule for scaling Adam hyperparameters to small batch sizes. In particular, rather than holding the decay rate of the second moment fixed across batch sizes, we propose to hold its half-life fixed in terms of tokens. We find that small batch sizes (1) train stably, (2) are consistently more robust to hyperparameter choices, (3) achieve equal or better per-FLOP performance than larger batch sizes, and (4) notably enable stable language model training with vanilla SGD, even without momentum, despite storing no optimizer state. Building on these results, we provide practical recommendations for selecting a batch size and setting optimizer hyperparameters. We further recommend against gradient accumulation unless training on multiple devices with multiple model replicas. Finally, we show that a small batch size combined with an optimizer with a small state size can provide the performance benefits of full fine-tuning while maintaining a similar memory footprint to LoRA.


SeasonBench-EA: AMulti-Source Benchmark for Seasonal Prediction and Numerical Model Post-Processing in East Asia

Neural Information Processing Systems

Seasonal-scale climate prediction plays a critical role in supporting agricultural planning, disaster prevention, and long-term decision making. In particular, reliable forecasts issued 1-6 months in advance are essential for early warning of flood and drought risks associated with precipitation during the East Asian summer monsoon season. However, while the use of machine learning techniques has advanced rapidly in weather and subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasting, partly driven by the availability of benchmark datasets, their application to seasonal-scale prediction remains limited. Existing seasonal prediction primarily relies on ensemble forecasts from numerical models, which, while physically grounded, are subject to biases and uncertainties at long lead times. Motivated by these challenges, we propose SeasonBench-EA, a benchmark dataset for seasonal prediction in East Asia region.


iMIND: Insightful Multi-subject Invariant Neural Decoding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Decoding visual signals holds an appealing potential to unravel the complexities of cognition and perception. While recent reconstruction tasks leverage powerful generative models to produce high-fidelity images from neural recordings, they often pay limited attention to the underlying neural representations and rely heavily on pretrained priors. As a result, they provide little insight into how individual voxels encode and differentiate semantic content or how these representations vary across subjects. To mitigate this gap, we present an insightful Multi-subject Invariant Neural Decoding (iMIND) model, which employs a novel dual-decoding framework-both biometric and semantic decoding-to offer neural interpretability in a data-driven manner and deepen our understanding of brain-based visual functionalities. Our iMIND model operates through three core steps: establishing a shared neural representation space across subjects using a ViT-based masked autoencoder, disentangling neural features into complementary subject-specific and object-specific components, and performing dual decoding to support both biometric and semantic classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that iMIND achieves state-of-the-art decoding performance with minimal scalability limitations. Furthermore, iMIND empirically generates voxel-object activation fingerprints that reveal object-specific neural patterns and enable investigation of subject-specific variations in attention to identical stimuli. These findings provide a foundation for more interpretable and generalizable subject-invariant neural decoding, advancing our understanding of the voxel semantic selectivity as well as the neural vision processing dynamics.


Learning Robust Spectral Dynamics for Temporal Domain Generalization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modern machine learning models struggle to maintain performance in dynamic environments where temporal distribution shifts, i.e., concept drift, are prevalent. Temporal Domain Generalization (TDG) seeks to enable model generalization across evolving domains, yet existing approaches typically assume smooth incremental changes, struggling with complex real-world drifts involving both long-term structure (incremental evolution/periodicity) and local uncertainties. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FreKoo, which tackles these challenges through a novel frequency-domain analysis of parameter trajectories. It leverages the Fourier transform to disentangle parameter evolution into distinct spectral bands. Specifically, the low-frequency components with dominant dynamics are learned and extrapolated using the Koopman operator, robustly capturing diverse drift patterns including both incremental and periodic drifts. Simultaneously, potentially disruptive high-frequency variations are smoothed via targeted temporal regularization, preventing overfitting to transient noise and domain uncertainties. In addition, this dual-spectral strategy is rigorously grounded through theoretical analysis, providing stability guarantees for the Koopman prediction, a principled Bayesian justification for the high-frequency regularization, and culminating in a multiscale generalization bound connecting spectral dynamics to improved generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate FreKoo's significant superiority over state-of-the-art TDG methods, particularly excelling in real-world streaming scenarios with complex drifts and uncertainties.


Replicable Online Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

In our model, the input sequence received by the online learner is generated from timevarying distributions chosen by an adversary (obliviously). Our objective is to design low-regret online algorithms that, with high probability, produce the exact same sequence of actions when run on two independently sampled input sequences generated as described above. We refer to such algorithms as adversarially replicable. Previous works (such as Esfandiari et al. [2022]) explored replicability in the online setting under inputs generated independently from a fixed distribution; we term this notion as iid-replicability. Our model generalizes to capture both adversarial and iid input sequences, as well as their mixtures, which can be modeled by setting certain distributions as point-masses. We demonstrate adversarially replicable online learning algorithms for online linear optimization and the experts problem that achieve sub-linear regret. Additionally, we propose a general framework for converting an online learner into an adversarially replicable one within our setting, bounding the new regret in terms of the original algorithms regret. We also present a nearly optimal (in terms of regret) iid-replicable online algorithm for the experts problem, highlighting the distinction between the iid and adversarial notions of replicability. Finally, we establish lower bounds on the regret (in terms of the replicability parameter and time) that any replicable online algorithm must incur.


DAWP: A framework for global observation forecasting via Data Assimilation and Weather Prediction in satellite observation space

Neural Information Processing Systems

Weather prediction is a critical task for human society, where impressive progress has been made by training artificial intelligence weather prediction (AIWP) methods with reanalysis data. However, reliance on reanalysis data limits the AIWPs with shortcomings, including data assimilation biases and temporal discrepancies. To liberate AIWPs from the reanalysis data, observation forecasting emerges as a transformative paradigm for weather prediction. One of the key challenges in observation forecasting is learning spatiotemporal dynamics across disparate measurement systems with irregular high-resolution observation data, which constrains the design and prediction of AIWPs. To this end, we propose our DAWP as an innovative framework to enable AIWPs to operate in a complete observation space by initialization with an artificial intelligence data assimilation (AIDA) module. Specifically, our AIDA module applies a mask multi-modality autoencoder (MMAE) for assimilating irregular satellite observation tokens encoded by mask ViT-VAEs.


Neural Rule Lists: Learning Discretizations, Rules, and Order in One Go

Neural Information Processing Systems

Interpretable machine learning is essential in high-stakes domains like healthcare. Rule lists are a popular choice due to their transparency and accuracy, but learning them effectively remains a challenge. Existing methods require feature pre-discretization, constrain rule complexity or ordering, or struggle to scale. We present NEURULES, a novel end-to-end framework that overcomes these limitations. At its core, NEURULES transforms the inherently combinatorial task of rule list learning into a differentiable optimization problem, enabling gradient-based learning. It simultaneously discovers feature conditions, assembles them into conjunctive rules, and determines their order--without pre-processing or manual constraints. A key contribution here is a gradient shaping technique that steers learning toward sparse rules with strong predictive performance. To produce ordered lists, we introduce a differentiable relaxation that, through simulated annealing, converges to a strict rule list. Extensive experiments show that NEURULES consistently outperforms combinatorial and neural baselines on binary as well as multi-class classification tasks across a wide range of datasets.


Zero-shot World Models via Search in Memory

Neural Information Processing Systems

World Models have vastly permeated the field of Reinforcement Learning. Their ability to model the transition dynamics of an environment have greatly improved sample efficiency in online RL. Among them, the most notorious example is Dreamer, a model that learns to act in a diverse set of image-based environments.