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Geometry Aware Operator Transformer As An Efficient And Accurate Neural Surrogate For PDEs On Arbitrary Domains

Neural Information Processing Systems

The very challenging task of learning solution operators of PDEs on arbitrary domains accurately and efficiently is of vital importance to engineering and industrial simulations. Despite the existence of many operator learning algorithms to approximate such PDEs, we find that accurate models are not necessarily computationally efficient and vice versa. We address this issue by proposing a geometry aware operator transformer (GAOT) for learning PDEs on arbitrary domains. GAOT combines novel multiscale attentional graph neural operator encoders and decoders, together with geometry embeddings and (vision) transformer processors to accurately map information about the domain and the inputs into a robust approximation of the PDE solution. Multiple innovations in the implementation of GAOT also ensure computational efficiency and scalability. We demonstrate this significant gain in both accuracy and efficiency of GAOT over several baselines on a large number of learning tasks from a diverse set of PDEs, including achieving state of the art performance on three large scale three-dimensional industrial CFD datasets. Our project page for accessing the source code is available at camlab-ethz.github.io/GAOT.


Adaptive Fission: Post-training Encoding for Low-latency Spike Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) often rely on rate coding, where high-precision inference depends on long time-steps, leading to significant latency and energy cost--especially for ANN-to-SNN conversions. To address this, we propose Adaptive Fission, a post-training encoding technique that selectively splits highsensitivity neurons into groups with varying scales and weights. This enables neuron-specific, on-demand precision and threshold allocation while introducing minimal spatial overhead. As a generalized form of population coding, it seamlessly applies to a wide range of pretrained SNN architectures without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. Experiments on neuromorphic hardware demonstrate up to 80% reductions in latency and power consumption without degrading accuracy.


MI-TRQR: Mutual Information-Based Temporal Redundancy Quantification and Reduction for Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) provide energy-efficient computation through event-driven processing. However, the shared weights across multiple timesteps lead to serious temporal feature redundancy, limiting both efficiency and performance. This issue is further aggravated when processing static images due to the duplicated input. To mitigate this problem, we propose a parameter-free and plug-and-play module named Mutual Information-based Temporal Redundancy Quantification and Reduction (MI-TRQR), constructing energy-efficient SNNs. Specifically, Mutual Information (MI) is properly introduced to quantify redundancy between discrete spike features at different timesteps on two spatial scales: pixel (local) and the entire spatial features (global). Based on the multi-scale redundancy quantification, we apply a probabilistic masking strategy to remove redundant spikes. The final representation is subsequently recalibrated to account for the spike removal. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our MI-TRQR achieves sparser spiking firing, higher energy efficiency, and better performance concurrently with different SNN architectures in tasks of neuromorphic data classification, static data classification, and time-series forecasting.


Unleashing Foundation Vision Models: Adaptive Transfer for Diverse Data-Limited Scientific Domains

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the big data era, the computer vision field benefits from large-scale datasets such as LAION-2B, LAION-400M, and ImageNet-21K, Kinetics, on which popular models like the ViT and ConvNeXt series have been pre-trained, acquiring substantial knowledge. However, numerous downstream tasks in specialized and data-limited scientific domains continue to pose significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel Cluster Attention Adapter (CLAdapter), which refines and adapts the rich representations learned from large-scale data to various data-limited downstream tasks. Specifically, CLAdapter introduces attention mechanisms and cluster centers to personalize the enhancement of transformed features through distribution correlation and transformation matrices. This enables models finetuned with CLAdapter to learn distinct representations tailored to different feature sets, facilitating the models' adaptation from rich pre-trained features to various downstream scenarios effectively. In addition, CLAdapter's unified interface design allows for seamless integration with multiple model architectures, including CNNs and Transformers, in both 2D and 3D contexts. Through extensive experiments on 10 datasets spanning domains such as generic, multimedia, biological, medical, industrial, agricultural, environmental, geographical, materials science, out-of-distribution (OOD), and 3D analysis, CLAdapter achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse data-limited scientific domains, demonstrating its effectiveness in unleashing the potential of foundation vision models via adaptive transfer.


Masked Gated Linear Unit

Neural Information Processing Systems

Gated Linear Units (GLUs) have become essential components in the feed-forward networks of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they require twice as many memory reads compared to feed-forward layers without gating, due to the use of separate weight matrices for the gate and value streams. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Masked Gated Linear Units (MGLUs), a novel family of GLUs with an efficient kernel implementation. The core contribution of MGLUs include: (1) the Mixture of Element-wise Gating (MoEG) architecture that learns multiple binary masks, each determining gate or value assignments at the element level on a single shared weight matrix resulting in reduced memory transfer, and (2) FlashMGLU, a hardware-friendly kernel that yields up to a 19.7 inference-time speed-up over a naรฏve PyTorch MGLU and is 47% more memory-efficient and 34% faster than standard GLUs despite added architectural complexity on an RTX5090 GPU. In LLM experiments, the Swish-activated variant SwiMGLU preserves its memory advantages while matching--or even surpassing--the downstream accuracy of the SwiGLU baseline.


Searching Efficient Semantic Segmentation Architectures via Dynamic Path Selection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing NAS methods for semantic segmentation typically apply uniform optimization to all candidate networks (paths) within a one-shot supernet. However, the concurrent existence of both promising and suboptimal paths often results in inefficient weight updates and gradient conflicts. This issue is particularly severe in semantic segmentation due to its complex multi-branch architectures and large search space, which further degrade the supernet's ability to accurately evaluate individual paths and identify high-quality candidates. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Path Selection (DPS), a selective training strategy that leverages multiple performance proxies to guide path optimization. DPS follows a stagewise paradigm, where each phase emphasizes a different objective: early stages prioritize convergence, the middle stage focuses on expressiveness, and the final stage emphasizes a balanced combination of expressiveness and generalization. At each stage, paths are selected based on these criteria, concentrating optimization efforts on promising paths, thus facilitating targeted and efficient model updates. Additionally, DPS integrates a dynamic stage scheduler and a diversity-driven exploration strategy, which jointly enable adaptive stage transitions and maintain structural diversity among selected paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under the same search space, DPS can discover efficient models with strong generalization and superior performance.


Paper Appendix for Nexus Scale and Benchmark for Subject Consistent Video Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

E.1 Limitations and Future Work - **1 -- Definitely AI-Generated**: Clear and frequent artifacts (e.g., blurry faces or objects, unnatural movements, inconsistent lighting), distorted shapes, 5) Exclude actions or descriptions (e.g., 'adjusting', 'imitating').


OPENS2V-NEXUS: ADetailed Benchmark and Million-Scale Dataset for Subject-to-Video Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Subject-to-Video (S2V) generation aims to create videos that faithfully incorporate reference content, providing enhanced flexibility in the production of videos. To establish the infrastructure for S2V generation, we propose OPENS2V-NEXUS, consisting of (i) OpenS2V-Eval, a fine-grained benchmark, and (ii) OpenS2V-5M, a million-scale dataset. In contrast to existing S2V benchmarks inherited from VBench [38] that focus on global and coarse-grained assessment of generated videos, OpenS2V-Eval focuses on the model's ability to generate subject-consistent videos with natural subject appearance and identity fidelity. For these purposes, OpenS2V-Eval introduces 180 prompts from seven major categories of S2V, which incorporate both real and synthetic test data. Furthermore, to accurately align human preferences with S2V benchmarks, we propose three automatic metrics, NexusScore, NaturalScore, and GmeScore, to separately quantify subject consistency, naturalness, and text relevance in generated videos. Building on this, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 18 representative S2V models, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses across different content. Moreover, we create the first open-source large-scale S2V generation dataset OpenS2V-5M, which consists of five million high-quality 720P subject-text-video triples. Specifically, we ensure subject-information diversity in our dataset by (1) segmenting subjects and building pairing information via cross-video associations and (2) prompting GPT-Image on raw frames to synthesize multi-view representations. Through OPENS2V-NEXUS, we deliver a robust infrastructure to accelerate future S2V generation research.


d6d26053b977f8c589669fd201615119-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a vast amount of human-written data, but data providers often remain uncredited. In response to this issue, data valuation (or data attribution2), which quantifies the contribution or value of each data to the model output, has been discussed as a potential solution. Nevertheless, applying existing data valuation methods to recent LLMs and their vast training datasets has been largely limited by prohibitive compute and memory costs. In this work, we focus on influence functions, a popular gradient-based data valuation method, and significantly improve its scalability with an efficient gradient projection strategy called LOGRA that leverages the gradient structure in backpropagation. We then provide a theoretical motivation of gradient projection approaches to influence functions to promote trust in the data valuation process. Lastly, we lower the barrier to implementing data valuation systems by introducing LOGIX, a software package that can transform existing training code into data valuation code with minimal effort. In our data valuation experiments, LOGRA achieves competitive accuracy against more expensive baselines while showing up to 6,500 /5 improvements in compute/memory efficiency in influence computations as well as 2 speed-up in gradient statistics logging when applied to Llama3-8B-Instruct and the 1B-token subset of the OpenWebText dataset.


Optimizing the Unknown: Black Box Bayesian Optimization with Energy-Based Model and Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

However, these methods often suffer from a significant one-step bias, which may lead to convergence towards local optima and poor performance in complex or high-dimensional tasks. Recently, Black-Box Optimization (BBO) has achieved success across various scientific and engineering domains, particularly when function evaluations are costly and gradients are unavailable. Motivated by this, we propose the Reinforced EnergyBased Model for Bayesian Optimization (REBMBO), which integrates Gaussian Processes (GP) for local guidance with an Energy-Based Model (EBM) to capture global structural information. Notably, we define each Bayesian Optimization iteration as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for adaptive multi-step lookahead, dynamically adjusting the depth and direction of exploration to effectively overcome the limitations of traditional BO methods. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, confirming the superior performance of REBMBO.