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FreqExit: Enabling Early-Exit Inference for Visual Autoregressive Models via Frequency-Aware Guidance 1 2 1 Ying Li Chengfei Lv Huan Wang 1Westlake University 2Alibaba Group Original VarFigure

Neural Information Processing Systems

FreqExit is based on a key insight: high-frequency details are crucial for perceptual quality and tend to emerge only in later decoding stages. Leveraging this insight, we design targeted mechanisms that guide the model to learn more effectively through frequency-aware supervision. The proposed framework consists of layer three dropout components: and early (1) e a xit curriculum-based loss; (2) a wav supervision elet-domain strate high-frequenc gy with progressi y consisve tency loss that aligns spectral content across different generation steps; and (3) a lightweight self-supervised frequency-gated module that guides adaptive learning of both structural and detailed spectral components. On ImageNet 256 256, FreqExit achieves up to 2 speedup with only minor degradation, and delivers 1.3 acceleration without perceptible quality loss. This enables runtime-adaptive acceleration able trade-of within f between a consistent efficiency design and fidelity tailored for for practica next-scale l and VAR, flexible offering deplo a yment.


Latent Chain-of-Thought for Visual Reasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is critical for improving the interpretability and reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, existing training algorithms such as SFT, PPO, and GRPO may not generalize well across unseen reasoning tasks and heavily rely on a biased reward model. To address this challenge, we reformulate reasoning in LVLMs as posterior inference and propose a scalable training algorithm based on amortized variational inference. By leveraging diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithms, we introduce a novel sparse reward function for token-level learning signals that encourage diverse, high-likelihood latent CoT, overcoming deterministic sampling limitations and avoiding reward hacking. Additionally, we implement a Bayesian inference-scaling strategy that replaces costly Best-of-N and Beam Search with a marginal likelihood to efficiently rank optimal rationales and answers. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the state-of-the-art LVLMs on seven reasoning benchmarks, in terms of effectiveness, generalization, and interpretability.


SeRL: Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models with Limited Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances have demonstrated the effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing works inevitably rely on high-quality instructions and verifiable rewards for effective training, both of which are often difficult to obtain in specialized domains. In this paper, we propose Self-play Reinforcement Learning (SeRL) to bootstrap LLM training with limited initial data. Specifically, SeRL comprises two complementary modules: self-instruction and self-rewarding. The former module generates additional instructions based on the available data at each training step, employing robust online filtering strategies to ensure instruction quality, diversity, and difficulty. The latter module introduces a simple yet effective majority-voting mechanism to estimate response rewards for additional instructions, eliminating the need for external annotations. Finally, SeRL performs conventional RL based on the generated data, facilitating iterative self-play learning. Extensive experiments on various reasoning benchmarks and across different LLM backbones demonstrate that the proposed SeRL yields results superior to its counterparts and achieves performance on par with those obtained by high-quality data with verifiable rewards.


Understanding Bias Terms in Neural Representations

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we examine the impact and significance of bias terms in Implicit Neural Representations (INRs). While bias terms are known to enhance nonlinear capacity by shifting activations in typical neural networks, we discover their functionality differs markedly in neural representation networks. Our analysis reveals that INR performance neither scales with increased number of bias terms nor shows substantial improvement through bias term gradient propagation. We demonstrate that bias terms in INRs primarily serve to eliminate spatial aliasing caused by symmetry from both coordinates and activation functions, with inputlayer bias terms yielding the most significant benefits. These findings challenge the conventional practice of implementing full-bias INR architecture. We propose using freezing bias terms exclusively in input layers, which consistently outperforms fully biased networks in signal fitting tasks. Furthermore, we introduce Feature-Biased INRs (Feat-Bias), which initialize input-layer bias with high-level features extracted from pre-trained models. This feature-biasing approach effectively addresses the limited performance in INR post-processing tasks due to neural parameter uninterpretability, achieving superior accuracy while reducing parameter count and improving reconstruction quality. Our code is available at this link.


GraphMaster: Automated Graph Synthesis via LLM Agents in Data-Limited Environments

Neural Information Processing Systems

The era of foundation models has revolutionized AI research, yet Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) remain constrained by the scarcity of large-scale graph corpora. Traditional graph data synthesis techniques primarily focus on simplistic structural operations, lacking the capacity to generate semantically rich nodes with meaningful textual attributes--a critical limitation for real-world applications. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional text generation capabilities, their direct application to graph synthesis is impeded by context window limitations, hallucination phenomena, and structural consistency challenges. To address these issues, we introduce GraphMaster--the first multi-agent framework specifically designed for graph data synthesis in data-limited environments.


CausalVTG: Towards Robust Video Temporal Grounding via Causal Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to localize relevant segments in untrimmed videos based on natural language queries and has seen notable progress in recent years. However, most existing methods suffer from two critical limitations. First, they are prone to learning superficial co-occurrence patterns--such as associating specific objects or phrases with certain events--induced by dataset biases, which ultimately degrades their semantic understanding abilities. Second, they typically assume that relevant segments always exist in the video, an assumption misaligned with real-world scenarios where queried content may be absent. Fortunately, causal inference offers a natural solution to the above-mentioned issues by disentangling dataset-induced biases and enabling counterfactual reasoning about query relevance. To this end, we propose CausalVTG, a novel framework that explicitly integrates causal reasoning into VTG. Specifically, we introduce a causality-aware disentangled encoder (CADE) based on front-door adjustment to mitigate confounding biases in visual and textual modalities.


Computational Hardness of Reinforcement Learning with Partial qฯ€-Realizability

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper investigates the computational complexity of reinforcement learning within a novel linear function approximation regime, termed partial qฯ€-realizability. In this framework, the objective is to learn an ฯต-optimal policy with respect to a predefined policy set ฮ , under the assumption that all value functions corresponding to policies in ฮ  are linearly realizable. This framework adopts assumptions that are weaker than those in the qฯ€-realizability setting yet stronger than those in the q -realizability setup. As a result, it provides a more practical model for reinforcement learning scenarios where function approximation naturally arise. We prove that learning an ฯต-optimal policy in this newly defined setting is computationally hard. More specifically, we establish NP-hardness under a parameterized greedy policy set (i.e., argmax) and, further, show that--unless NP = RP--an exponential lower bound (exponential in feature vector dimension) holds when the policy set contains softmax policies, under the Randomized Exponential Time Hypothesis. Our hardness results mirror those obtained in the q -realizability settings, and suggest that computational difficulty persists even when the policy class ฮ is expanded beyond the optimal policy, reinforcing the unbreakable nature of the computational hardness result regarding partial qฯ€-realizability under two important policy sets. To establish our negative result, our primary technical contribution is a reduction from two complexity problems, ฮด-MAX-3SAT and ฮด-MAX-3SAT(b), to instances of our problem settings: GLINEAR-ฮบ-RL (under the greedy policy set) and SLINEAR-ฮบ-RL (under the softmax policy set), respectively. Our findings indicate that positive computational results are generally unattainable in the context of partial qฯ€-realizability, in sharp contrast to the qฯ€-realizability setting under a generative access model.


Domain-Specific Pruning of Large Mixture-of-Experts Models with Few-shot Demonstrations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models achieve a favorable trade-off between performance and inference efficiency by activating only a subset of experts. However, the memory overhead of storing all experts remains a major limitation, especially in large-scale MoE models such as DeepSeek-R1 (671B). In this study, we investigate domain specialization and expert redundancy in large-scale MoE models and uncover a consistent behavior we term few-shot expert localization, with only a few in-domain demonstrations, the model consistently activates a sparse and stable subset of experts on tasks within the same domain. Building on this observation, we propose a simple yet effective pruning framework, EASY-EP, that leverages a few domain-specific demonstrations to identify and retain only the most relevant experts. EASY-EP comprises two key components: output-aware expert importance assessment and expert-level token contribution estimation. The former evaluates the importance of each expert for the current token by considering the gating scores and L2 norm of the outputs of activated experts, while the latter assesses the contribution of tokens based on representation similarities before and after routed experts. Experiments on DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3-0324 show that our method can achieve comparable performances and 2.99 throughput under the same memory budget as the full model, with only half the experts.


Boosting Skeleton-based Zero-Shot Action Recognition with Training-Free Test-Time Adaptation

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce Skeleton-Cache, the first training-free test-time adaptation framework for skeleton-based zero-shot action recognition (SZAR), aimed at improving model generalization to unseen actions during inference. Skeleton-Cache reformulates inference as a lightweight retrieval process over a non-parametric cache that stores structured skeleton representations, combining both global and fine-grained local descriptors. To guide the fusion of descriptor-wise predictions, we leverage the semantic reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to assign classspecific importance weights. By integrating these structured descriptors with LLMguided semantic priors, Skeleton-Cache dynamically adapts to unseen actions without any additional training or access to training data. Extensive experiments on NTURGB+D 60/120 and PKU-MMDII demonstrate that Skeleton-Cache consistently boosts the performance of various SZAR backbones under both zeroshot and generalized zero-shot settings.


Searching Latent Program Spaces

Neural Information Processing Systems

General intelligence requires systems that acquire new skills efficiently and generalize beyond their training distributions. Although program synthesis approaches have strong generalization power, they face scaling issues due to the large combinatorial spaces that quickly render them impractical, requiring human-generated DSLs or pre-trained priors to narrow this search space. On the other hand, deep learning methods have had high successes, but they lack structured test-time adaptation and rely on heavy stochastic sampling or expensive gradient updates for fine-tuning. In this work, we propose the Latent Program Network (LPN), a novel architecture that builds in test-time search directly into neural models. LPN learns a latent space of implicit programs--neurally mapping inputs to outputs--through which it can search using gradients at test time.