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PLEIADES: Building Temporal Kernels with Orthogonal Polynomials

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce a class of neural networks named PLEIADES (PoLynomial Expansion In Adaptive Distributed Event-based Systems), which contains temporal convolution kernels generated from orthogonal polynomial basis functions. We focus on interfacing these networks with event-based data to perform online spatiotemporal classification and detection with low latency. By virtue of using structured temporal kernels and event-based data, we have the freedom to vary the sample rate of the data along with the discretization step-size of the network without additional finetuning. We experimented with three event-based benchmarks and obtained state-of-the-art results on all three by large margins with significantly smaller memory and compute costs. We achieved: 1) 99.59% accuracy with 192K parameters on the DVS128 hand gesture recognition dataset and 100% with a small additional output filter; 2) 99.58% test accuracy with 277K parameters on the AIS 2024 eye tracking challenge; and 3) 0.556 mAP with 576k parameters on the PROPHESEE 1 Megapixel Automotive Detection Dataset.


Learning Human Preferences without Interaction for Cooperative AI: AHybrid Offline-Online Approach

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement learning (RL) for collaborative agents capable of cooperating with humans to accomplish tasks has long been a central goal in the RL community. While prior approaches have made progress in adapting collaborative agents to diverse human partners, they often focus solely on optimizing task performance and overlook human preferences--despite the fact that such preferences often diverge from the reward-maximization objective of the environment. Addressing this discrepancy poses significant challenges: humans typically provide only a small amount of offline, preference-related feedback and are unable to engage in online interactions, resulting in a distributional mismatch between the agent's online learning process and the offline human data. To tackle this, we formulate the problem as an online&offline reinforcement learning problem that jointly integrates online generalization and offline preference learning, entirely under an offline training regime. We propose a simple yet effective training framework built upon existing RL algorithms that alternates between offline preference learning and online generalization recovery, ensuring the stability and alignment of both learning objectives. We evaluate our approach on a benchmark built upon the Overcooked environment--a standard environment for human-agent collaboration--and demonstrate remarkable performance across diverse preference styles and cooperative scenarios.


Caption This, Reason That: VLMs Caught in the Middle

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable progress in visual understanding in recent years. Yet, they still lag behind human capabilities in specific visual tasks such as counting or relational reasoning. To understand the underlying limitations, we adopt methodologies from cognitive science, analyzing VLM performance along core cognitive axes: Perception, Attention, and Memory. Using a suite of tasks targeting these abilities, we evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs, including GPT-4o. Our analysis reveals distinct cognitive profiles: while advanced models approach ceiling performance on some tasks (e.g.


All that structure matches does not glitter

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generative models for materials, especially inorganic crystals, hold potential to transform the theoretical prediction of novel compounds and structures. Advancement in this field depends critically on robust benchmarks and minimal, information-rich datasets that enable meaningful model evaluation. This paper critically examines common datasets and reported metrics for a crystal structure prediction task--generating the most likely structures given the chemical composition of a material. We focus on three key issues: First, materials datasets should contain unique crystal structures; for example, we show that the widely-utilized carbon-24 dataset only contains 40%unique structures. Second, materials datasets should not be split randomly if polymorphs of many different compositions are numerous, which we find to be the case for the perov-5 and MP-20 datasets.


Reinforcing Image Generation with Collaborative Semantic level and Token level CoT

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advancements in large language models have demonstrated how chain-ofthought (CoT) and reinforcement learning (RL) can improve performance. However, applying such reasoning strategies to the visual generation domain remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present T2I-R1, a novel reasoning-enhanced text-to-image generation model, powered by RL with a bi-level CoT reasoning process. Specifically, we identify two levels of CoT that can be utilized to enhance different stages of generation: (1) the semantic-level CoT for high-level planning of the prompt and (2) the token-level CoT for low-level pixel processing during patch-by-patch generation. To better coordinate these two levels of CoT, we introduce BiCoT-GRPO with an ensemble of generation rewards, which seamlessly optimizes both generated CoTs within the same training step. By applying our reasoning strategies to the baseline model, Janus-Pro, we achieve superior performance with 13% improvement on T2I-CompBench and 19% improvement on the WISE benchmark, even surpassing the state-of-the-art model FLUX.1. All the training code and data are available at https://github.com/CaraJ7/T2I-R1.


Generalized and Invariant Single-Neuron In-Vivo Activity Representation Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

In neuroscience, models that learn representations of single-neuron in-vivo activity are essential for understanding the functional identities of individual neurons. The primary goal of these models--spanning Transformer-based, contrastive, and variational autoencoder frameworks, is not to predict neural activity, but to distill it into a stable, low-dimensional embedding that captures a neuron's intrinsic features. These learned identity embeddings should be invariant to changing experimental conditions while reflecting the neuron's molecular type and anatomical location, thus enabling downstream tasks like in-vivo cell type prediction. However, current models suffer from limited generalizability due to batch effects: non-biological variations arising from differences in experimental design, animal subjects, or recording platforms. These batch effects cause overfitting, reducing model robustness and utility.


KnowMol: Advancing Molecular Large Language Models with Multi-Level Chemical Knowledge

Neural Information Processing Systems

Tthesehe challenges, we introduce cKnoarbwMol-100K,oxylate group and the polarizable sulfur atom, methylsulfanyl group attaalarchge-scaed tole tdatasethe sixwithth c100Karbofine-grainedn and molecular annotations Theacross polamriultiplety of the molecule is increased by the polar verum with data available.


Don't Just Chase " Highlighted Tokens " in MLLMs: Revisiting Visual Holistic Context Retention

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite their powerful capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from considerable computational overhead due to their reliance on massive visual tokens. Recent studies have explored token pruning to alleviate this problem, which typically uses text-vision cross-attention or [CLS] attention to assess and discard redundant visual tokens. In this work, we identify a critical limitation of such attention-first pruning approaches, i.e., they tend to preserve semantically similar tokens, resulting in pronounced performance drops under high pruning ratios. To this end, we propose HoloV, a simple yet effective, plug-and-play visual token pruning framework for efficient inference.


DAMamba: Vision State Space Model with Dynamic Adaptive Scan

Neural Information Processing Systems

State space models (SSMs) have recently garnered significant attention in computer vision. However, due to the unique characteristics of image data, adapting SSMs from natural language processing to computer vision has not outperformed the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Existing vision SSMs primarily leverage manually designed scans to flatten image patches into sequences locally or globally. This approach disrupts the original semantic spatial adjacency of the image and lacks flexibility, making it difficult to capture complex image structures. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Adaptive Scan (DAS), a data-driven method that adaptively allocates scanning orders and regions. This enables more flexible modeling capabilities while maintaining linear computational complexity and global modeling capacity. Based on DAS, we further propose the vision backbone DAMamba, which significantly outperforms popular vision Mamba models in vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation.


Efficient Fairness-Performance Pareto Front Computation

Neural Information Processing Systems

There is a well known intrinsic trade-off between the fairness of a representation and the performance of classifiers derived from the representation. In this paper we propose a new method to compute the optimal Pareto front of this trade off. In contrast to the existing methods, this approach does not require the training of complex fair representation models. Our approach is derived through three main steps: We analyze fair representations theoretically, and derive several structural properties of optimal representations. We then show that these properties enable a reduction of the computation of the Pareto Front to a compact discrete problem. Finally, we show that these compact approximating problems can be efficiently solved via off-the shelf concave-convex programming methods.