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SPRINT: Enabling Interleaved Planning and Parallelized Execution in Reasoning Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large reasoning models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but typically generate lengthy sequential chains-of-thought, resulting in long inference times before arriving at the final answer. To address this challenge, we introduce SPRINT, a novel post-training and inference-time framework designed to enable LRMs to dynamically identify and exploit opportunities for parallelization during their reasoning process. SPRINT incorporates an innovative data curation pipeline that reorganizes natural language reasoning trajectories into structured rounds of longhorizon planning and parallel execution. By fine-tuning LRMs on a small amount of such curated data, the models learn to dynamically identify independent subtasks within extended reasoning processes and effectively execute them in parallel. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that models fine-tuned with the SPRINT framework match the performance of reasoning models on complex domains such as mathematics while generating up to 39% fewer sequential tokens on problems requiring more than 8,000 output tokens. Finally, we observe consistent results transferred to two out-of-distribution tasks, namely GPQA and Countdown, with up to 45% and 65% reduction in average sequential tokens respectively for longer reasoning trajectories, while matching the performance of the fine-tuned reasoning model.


Learning Dynamics of RNNs in Closed-Loop Environments

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on neuroscience-inspired tasks offer powerful models of brain computation. However, typical training paradigms rely on open-loop, supervised settings, whereas real-world learning unfolds in closed-loop environments. Here, we develop a mathematical theory describing the learning dynamics of linear RNNs trained in closed-loop contexts. We first demonstrate that two otherwise identical RNNs, trained in either closed-or open-loop modes, follow markedly different learning trajectories. To probe this divergence, we analytically characterize the closed-loop case, revealing distinct stages aligned with the evolution of the training loss. Specifically, we show that the learning dynamics of closed-loop RNNs, in contrast to open-loop ones, are governed by an interplay between two competing objectives: short-term policy improvement and long-term stability of the agent-environment interaction. Finally, we apply our framework to a realistic motor control task, highlighting its broader applicability. Taken together, our results underscore the importance of modeling closed-loop dynamics in a biologically plausible setting.


AGradient Guidance Perspective on Stepwise Preference Optimization for Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a key framework for aligning text-to-image models with human preferences, extended by Stepwise Preference Optimization (SPO) to leverage intermediate steps for preference learning, generating more aesthetically pleasing images with significantly less computational cost.


InFlux: ABenchmark for Self-Calibration of Dynamic Intrinsics of Video Cameras

Neural Information Processing Systems

Accurately tracking camera intrinsics is crucial for achieving 3D understanding from 2D video. However, most 3D algorithms assume that camera intrinsics stay constant throughout a video, which is often not true for many real-world in-the-wild videos. A major obstacle in this field is a lack of dynamic camera intrinsics benchmarks-existing benchmarks typically offer limited diversity in scene content and intrinsics variation, and none provide per-frame intrinsic changes for consecutive video frames. In this paper, we present Intrinsics in Flux (InFlux), a real-world benchmark that provides per-frame ground truth intrinsics annotations for videos with dynamic intrinsics. Compared to prior benchmarks, InFlux captures a wider range of intrinsic variations and scene diversity, featuring 143K+ annotated frames from 386 high-resolution indoor and outdoor videos with dynamic camera intrinsics. To ensure accurate per-frame intrinsics, we build a comprehensive lookup table of calibration experiments and extend the Kalibr toolbox to improve its accuracy and robustness. Using our benchmark, we evaluate existing baseline methods for predicting camera intrinsics and find that most struggle to achieve accurate predictions on videos with dynamic intrinsics. For the dataset, code, videos, and submission, please visit https://influx.cs.princeton.edu/.


Adaptive Data Analysis for Growing Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reuse of data in adaptive workflows poses challenges regarding overfitting and the statistical validity of results. Previous work has demonstrated that interacting with data via differentially private algorithms can mitigate overfitting, achieving worstcase generalization guarantees with asymptotically optimal data requirements. However, such past work assumes data is static and cannot accommodate situations where data grows over time. In this paper we address this gap, presenting the first generalization bounds for adaptive analysis on dynamic data. We allow the analyst to adaptively schedule their queries conditioned on the current size of the data, in addition to previous queries and responses. We also incorporate time-varying empirical accuracy bounds and mechanisms, allowing for tighter guarantees as data accumulates. In a batched query setting, the asymptotic data requirements of our bound grows with the square-root of the number of adaptive queries, matching prior works' improvement over data splitting for the static setting. We instantiate our bound for statistical queries with the clipped Gaussian mechanism, where it empirically outperforms baselines composed from static bounds.


8a7495d84596b831dbdd938453bd3697-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

A key component, Semantic Perceiver, is introduced to efficiently transform SAM 2's rich visual features, which inherently carry general vision, localization, and semantic priors into multi-modal tokens for LLM comprehension. To support robust multi-granularity understanding, we also develop a dedicated data refinement and augmentation pipeline, yielding a high-quality dataset of 1.5M image and 0.6M video region-semantic annotations, including novel region-level streaming video caption data. PAM is designed for lightweightness and efficiency, while also demonstrates strong performance across a diverse range of region understanding tasks. It runs 1.2 2.4 faster and consumes less GPU memory than prior approaches, offering a practical solution for real-world applications. We believe that our effective approach will serve as a strong baseline for future research in region-level visual understanding.


Privacy amplification by random allocation

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the privacy amplification properties of a sampling scheme in which a user's data is used in k steps chosen randomly and uniformly from a sequence (or set) of t steps. This sampling scheme has been recently applied in the context of differentially private optimization [Chua et al., 2024a, Choquette-Choo et al., 2025] and is also motivated by communication-efficient high-dimensional private aggregation [Asi et al., 2025]. Existing analyses of this scheme either rely on privacy amplification by shuffling which leads to overly conservative bounds or require Monte Carlo simulations that are computationally prohibitive in most practical scenarios. We give the first theoretical guarantees and numerical estimation algorithms for this sampling scheme. In particular, we demonstrate that the privacy guarantees of random k-out-of-t allocation can be upper bounded by the privacy guarantees of the well-studied independent (or Poisson) subsampling in which each step uses the user's data with probability (1+o(1))k/t. Further, we provide two additional analysis techniques that lead to numerical improvements in several parameter regimes. Altogether, our bounds give efficiently-computable and nearly tight numerical results for random allocation applied to Gaussian noise addition.


UnCLe: Towards Scalable Dynamic Causal Discovery in Non-linear Temporal Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Uncovering cause-effect relationships from observational time series is fundamental to understanding complex systems. While many methods infer static causal graphs, real-world systems often exhibit dynamic causality--where relationships evolve over time. Accurately capturing these temporal dynamics requires time-resolved causal graphs. We propose UnCLe, a novel deep learning method for scalable dynamic causal discovery. UnCLe employs a pair of Uncoupler and Recoupler networks to disentangle input time series into semantic representations and learns inter-variable dependencies via auto-regressive Dependency Matrices. It estimates dynamic causal influences by analyzing datapoint-wise prediction errors induced by temporal perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UnCLe not only outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on static causal discovery benchmarks but, more importantly, exhibits a unique capability to accurately capture and represent evolving temporal causality in both synthetic and real-world dynamic systems (e.g., human motion). UnCLe offers a promising approach for revealing the underlying, time-varying mechanisms of complex phenomena.



Visual Thoughts Perspective of Understanding Chain of Thought

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant success in multimodal tasks, with multimodal chain-of-thought (MCoT) further enhancing performance and interpretability. Recent MCoT methods fall into two categories: (i) Textual-MCoT (T-MCoT), which takes multimodal input and produces textual output; and (ii) Interleaved-MCoT (I-MCoT), which generates interleaved imagetext outputs. Despite advances in both approaches, the mechanisms driving these improvements are not fully understood. To fill this gap, we first reveal that MCoT boosts LVLMs by incorporating visual thoughts, which convey image information to the reasoning process regardless of the MCoT format, depending only on clarity and conciseness of expression. Furthermore, to explore visual thoughts systematically, we define four distinct forms of visual thought expressions and analyze them comprehensively. Our findings demonstrate that these forms differ in clarity and conciseness, yielding varying levels of MCoT improvement. Additionally, we explore the internal nature of visual thoughts, finding that visual thoughts serve as intermediaries between the input image and reasoning to deeper transformer layers, enabling more advanced visual information transmission. We hope that the visual thoughts can inspire further breakthroughs for future MCoT research.