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Benchmarking Egocentric Multimodal Goal Inference for Assistive Wearable Agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

There has been a surge of interest in assistive wearable agents: agents embodied in wearable form factors (e.g., smart glasses) who take assistive actions toward a user's goal/query (e.g. "Where did I leave my keys?"). In this work, we consider the important complementary problem of inferring that goal from multi-modal contextual observations. Solving this "goal inference" problem holds the promise of eliminating the effort needed to interact with such an agent. This work focuses on creating WAGIBench, a strong benchmark to measure progress in solving this problem using vision-language models (VLMs). Given the limited prior work in this area, we collected a novel dataset comprising 29 hours of multimodal data from 348 participants across 3,477 recordings, featuring ground-truth goals alongside accompanying visual, audio, digital, and longitudinal contextual observations. We validate that human performance exceeds model performance, achieving 93% multiple-choice accuracy compared with 84% for the best-performing VLM. Generative benchmark results that evaluate several families of modern vision-language models show that larger models perform significantly better on the task, yet remain far from practical usefulness, as they produce relevant goals only 55% of the time. Through a modality ablation, we show that models benefit from extra information in relevant modalities with minimal performance degradation from irrelevant modalities.


Fairness-aware Anomaly Detection via Fair Projection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unsupervised anomaly detection is a critical task in many high-social-impact applications such as finance, healthcare, social media, and cybersecurity, where demographics involving age, gender, race, disease, etc. are used frequently. In these scenarios, possible bias from anomaly detection systems can lead to unfair treatment for different groups and even exacerbate social bias. In this work, first, we thoroughly analyze the feasibility and necessary assumptions for ensuring group fairness in unsupervised anomaly detection. Second, we propose a novel fairnessaware anomaly detection method FairAD. From the normal training data, FairAD learns a projection to map data of different demographic groups to a common target distribution that is simple and compact, and hence provides a reliable base to estimate the density of the data. The density can be directly used to identify anomalies while the common target distribution ensures fairness between different groups. Furthermore, we propose a threshold-free fairness metric that provides a global view for model's fairness, eliminating dependence on manual threshold selection. Experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves an improved trade-off between detection accuracy and fairness under both balanced and skewed data across different groups.


Hybrid Norm: Towards Stable and Efficient Transformer Training via Hybrid Normalization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Transformers have become the de facto architecture for a wide range of machine learning tasks, particularly in large language models (LLMs). Despite their remarkable performance, many challenges remain in training deep transformer networks, especially regarding the position of the layer normalization. While Pre-Norm structures facilitate more stable training owing to their stronger identity path, they often lead to suboptimal performance compared to Post-Norm. In this paper, we propose HybridNorm, a simple yet effective hybrid normalization strategy that integrates the advantages of both Pre-Norm and Post-Norm. Specifically, HybridNorm employs QKV normalization within the attention mechanism and Post-Norm in the feed-forward network (FFN) of each transformer block. We provide both theoretical insights and empirical evidence to demonstrate that HybridNorm improves the gradient flow and the model robustness. Extensive experiments on large-scale transformer models, including both dense and sparse variants, show that HybridNorm consistently outperforms both Pre-Norm and Post-Norm approaches across multiple benchmarks.


Underwater Scene Understanding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Underw ing attention ater e for xploration its broader offers applications critical insights in resource into our exploration, planet and national attracts security increas, etc. automated We study underw the underw ater explora ater scene tion.


Looking Beyond the Known: Towards a Data Discovery Guided Open-World Object Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Open-World Object Detection (OWOD) enriches traditional object detectors by enabling continual discovery and integration of unknown objects via human guidance. However, existing OWOD approaches frequently suffer from semantic confusion between known and unknown classes, alongside catastrophic forgetting, leading to diminished unknown recall and degraded known-class accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose Combinatorial Open-World Detection (CROWD2), a unified framework reformulating unknown object discovery and adaptation as an interwoven combinatorial (set-based) data-discovery (CROWD-Discover) and representation learning (CROWD-Learn) task. CROWD-Discover strategically mines unknown instances by maximizing Submodular Conditional Gain (SCG) functions, selecting representative examples distinctly dissimilar from known objects. Subsequently, CROWD-Learn employs novel combinatorial objectives that jointly disentangle known and unknown representations while maintaining discriminative coherence among known classes, thus mitigating confusion and forgetting. Extensive evaluations on OWOD benchmarks illustrate that CROWD achieves improvements of 2.83% and 2.05% in known-class accuracy on M-OWODB and S-OWODB, respectively, and nearly 2.4 unknown recall compared to leading baselines. Figure 1: Overall Architecture of CROWD showing our novel combinatorial data-discovery guided representation learning approach to (a) identify unknown objects3 and (b) learn distinguishable representations of both known and unknown objects.


Oracle-Efficient Combinatorial Semi-Bandits

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the combinatorial semi-bandit problem where an agent selects a subset of base arms and receives individual feedback. While this generalizes the classical multi-armed bandit and has broad applicability, its scalability is limited by the high cost of combinatorial optimization, requiring oracle queries at every round. To tackle this, we propose oracle-efficient frameworks that significantly reduce oracle calls while maintaining tight regret guarantees. For the worst-case linear reward setting, our algorithms achieve eO( T) regret using only O(loglogT) oracle queries. We also propose covariance-adaptive algorithms that leverage noise structure for improved regret, and extend our approach to general (nonlinear) rewards. Overall, our methods reduce oracle usage from linear to (doubly) logarithmic in time, with strong theoretical guarantees.


Fuz-RL: AFuzzy-Guided Robust Framework for Safe Reinforcement Learning under Uncertainty

Neural Information Processing Systems

Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for achieving high performance while ensuring safety in real-world applications. However, the complex interplay of multiple uncertainty sources in real environments poses significant challenges for interpretable risk assessment and robust decision-making. To address these challenges, we propose Fuz-RL, a fuzzy measure-guided robust framework for safe RL. Specifically, our framework develops a novel fuzzy Bellman operator for estimating robust value functions using Choquet integrals. Theoretically, we prove that solving the Fuz-RL problem (in Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) form) is equivalent to solving distributionally robust safe RL problems (in robust CMDP form), effectively reformulating the min-max optimization problem into a tractable CMDP with Choquet-integrated value functions. Empirical analyses on safe-control-gym and safety-gymnasium scenarios demonstrate that Fuz-RL effectively integrates with existing safe RL baselines in a model-free manner, significantly improving both safety and control performance under various types of uncertainties in observation, action, and dynamics. The code is available in https://github.com/waunx/FuzRL.


Sekai: AVideo Dataset towards World Exploration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video generation techniques have made remarkable progress, promising to be the foundation of interactive world exploration. However, existing video generation datasets are not well-suited for world exploration training as they suffer from some limitations: limited locations, short duration, static scenes, and a lack of annotations about exploration and the world. In this paper, we introduce Sekai (meaning "world" in Japanese), a high-quality first-person view worldwide video dataset with rich annotations for world exploration. It consists of over 5,000 hours of walking or drone view (FPV and UVA) videos from over 100 countries and regions across 750 cities. We develop an efficient and effective toolbox to collect, pre-process and annotate videos with location, scene, weather, crowd density, captions, and camera trajectories. Comprehensive analyses and experiments demonstrate the dataset's scale, diversity, annotation quality, and effectiveness for training video generation models. We believe Sekai will benefit the area of video generation and world exploration, and motivate valuable applications.


Personalized Subgraph Federated Learning with Differentiable Auxiliary Projections

Neural Information Processing Systems

Federated Learning (FL) on graph-structured data typically faces non-IID challenges, particularly in scenarios where each client holds a distinct subgraph sampled from a global graph. In this paper, we introduce Federated learning with Auxiliary projections (FedAux), a personalized subgraph FL framework that learns to align, compare, and aggregate heterogeneously distributed local models without sharing raw data or node embeddings. In FedAux, each client jointly trains (i) a local GNN and (ii) a learnable auxiliary projection vector (APV) that differentiably projects node embeddings onto a 1D space. A soft-sorting operation followed by a lightweight 1D convolution refines these embeddings in the ordered space, enabling the APVto effectively capture client-specific information. After local training, these APVs serve as compact signatures that the server uses to compute inter-client similarities and perform similarity-weighted parameter mixing, yielding personalized models while preserving cross-client knowledge transfer. Moreover, we provide rigorous theoretical analysis to establish the convergence and rationality of our design. Empirical evaluations across diverse graph benchmarks demonstrate that FedAux substantially outperforms existing baselines in both accuracy and personalization performance. The code is available at https://github.com/JhuoW/FedAux.