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Appendix412 Table of Contents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Starting from Grobid's XML output, peS2o filters papers that are too short, have453 incorrect metadata, are in languages other than English, and contain OCR errors using a combination454 of heuristic-and model-based filtering steps. We refer the reader to the datasheet and code for more455 details on this processing pipeline.456 The subset of peS2o included in the Common Pile starts from v3 of the corpus, which contains457 documents from January 1, 1970 to October 6, 2024. We retain full-text papers with CCBY,458 CCBY-SA, or CC0 licenses, or that have been labeled as public domain; metadata is provided459 by the Semantic Scholar APIs [85]. After filtering, this set contains 6.3 million papers, or 35.7460 billion whitespace-separated segments.


The Common Pile v0.1: An8TBDataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text

Neural Information Processing Systems

Training LLMs on openly licensed text presents a first step towards addressing these issues, but prior data collection efforts have yielded datasets too small or low-quality to produce performant LLMs. To address this gap, we collect, curate, and release the Common Pile v0.1, an eight terabyte collection of openly licensed text designed for LLM pretraining. The Common Pile comprises content from 30 sources that span diverse domains including research papers, code, books, encyclopedias, educational materials, audio transcripts, and more. Crucially, we validate our efforts by training two 7 billion parameter LLMs on text from the Common Pile: Comma v0.1-1T and Comma v0.1-2T, trained on 1 and 2 trillion tokens respectively. Both models attain competitive performance to LLMs trained on unlicensed text with similar computational budgets, such as Llama 1 and 2 7B. In addition to releasing the Common Pile v0.1 itself, we also release the code used in its creation as well as the training mixture and checkpoints for the Comma v0.1 models.


System Prompt Optimization with Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, with optimizing their input prompts playing a pivotal role in maximizing their performance. However, while LLM prompts consist of both the task-agnostic system prompts and task-specific user prompts, existing work on prompt optimization has focused on user prompts specific to individual queries or tasks, and largely overlooked the system prompt that is, once optimized, applicable across different tasks and domains. Motivated by this, we introduce the novel problem of bilevel system prompt optimization, whose objective is to design system prompts that are robust to diverse user prompts and transferable to unseen tasks. To tackle this problem, we then propose a meta-learning framework, which meta-learns the system prompt by optimizing it over various user prompts across multiple datasets, while simultaneously updating the user prompts in an iterative manner to ensure synergy between them. We conduct experiments on 14 unseen datasets spanning 5 different domains, on which we show that our approach produces system prompts that generalize effectively to diverse user prompts. Also, our findings reveal that the optimized system prompt enables rapid adaptation even to unseen tasks, requiring fewer optimization steps for test-time user prompts while achieving improved performance.


Tracing the Representation Geometry of Language Models from Pretraining to Post-training

Neural Information Processing Systems

Standard training metrics like loss fail to explain the emergence of complex capabilities in large language models. We take a spectral approach to investigate the geometry of learned representations across pretraining and post-training, measuring effective rank (RankMe) and eigenspectrum decay (ฮฑReQ). With OLMo (1B-7B) and Pythia (160M-12B) models, we uncover a consistent non-monotonic sequence of three geometric phases during autoregressive pretraining. The initial "warmup" phase exhibits rapid representational collapse. This is followed by an "entropy-seeking" phase, where the manifold's dimensionality expands substantially, coinciding with peak n-gram memorization. Subsequently, a "compression-seeking" phase imposes anisotropic consolidation, selectively preserving variance along dominant eigendirections while contracting others, a transition marked with significant improvement in downstream task performance. We show these phases can emerge from a fundamental interplay of cross-entropy optimization under skewed token frequencies and representational bottlenecks (d |V|). Post-training further transforms geometry: SFT and DPO drive "entropy-seeking" dynamics to integrate specific instructional or preferential data, improving in-distribution performance while degrading out-of-distribution robustness. Conversely, RLVR induces "compression-seeking", enhancing reward alignment but reducing generation diversity.


CameraMovingobjectFlickerdistributionTimeAC-powerintensityAC-poweredlightsourceSunFlickeringBlurryCleanFastshutterspeedSlow shutter speedOurmethod

Neural Information Processing Systems

Flicker artifacts in short-exposure images are caused by the interplay between the row-wise exposure mechanism of rolling shutter cameras and the temporal intensity variations of alternating current (AC)-powered lighting. These artifacts typically appear as non-uniform brightness distribution across the image, forming noticeable dark bands. Beyond compromising image quality, this structured noise also impacts high-level tasks, such as object detection and tracking, where reliable lighting is crucial. Despite the prevalence of flicker, the lack of a large-scale, realistic dataset has been a significant barrier to advancing research in flicker removal. To address this issue, we present BurstDeflicker, a scalable benchmark constructed using three complementary data acquisition strategies. First, we develop a Retinexbased synthesis pipeline that redefines the goal of flicker removal and enables controllable manipulation of key flicker-related attributes (e.g., intensity, area, and frequency), thereby facilitating the generation of diverse flicker patterns. Second, we capture 4,000 real-world flickering images from different scenes, which help the model better understand the spatial and temporal characteristics of real flicker artifacts and generalize more effectively to wild scenarios. Finally, due to the non-repeatable nature of dynamic scenes, we propose a green-screen method to incorporate motion into image pairs while preserving real flicker degradation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and its potential to advance research in flicker removal.


4e582b104248a396a703646755071329-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Ho can wev intuiti er, can vely adv compose anced AI and image arrange generators scenes plan in the scenes 3D space with for similar photog3D spatial GenSpace, awareness a novel when benchmark creating and images evaluation from te pipeline xt or image to comprehensi prompts? W vely e present assess the spatial awareness of current image generation models. Furthermore, standard e ture valuations the detailed using spatial general errors. Vision-Language To handle this Models challenge, (VLMs) we propose frequently a speciali fail to capzed e tiple valuation visual pipeline foundation and models metric, and which pro reconstructs vides a more 3D accurate scene geometry and human-aligned using mulmetric of spatial faithfulness. Our findings show that while AI models create visually specific 3D appealing details images like object and can placement, follow general relationships, instructions, and measurements.


SoftBank finds fewer tech bets for venture capital in Latin America

The Japan Times

The firm is targeting consumer-oriented AI companies with strong proprietary data, growing operations and technology teams capable of competing globally.


The Indian workers training AI robots to take their jobs

The Japan Times

Developers think feeding first-person footage, called โ€œegocentric data,โ€ into specialized AI models will help robots copy humans.


OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning General Multi-Agent Assistance for Real-World Task Automation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise for automating real-world tasks but struggle to transfer across domains due to their domain-specific nature. Current approaches face two critical shortcomings: they require complete architectural redesign and full retraining of all components when applied to new domains. We introduce WORKFORCE, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decouples strategic planning from specialized execution through a modular architecture comprising: (i) a domain-agnostic Planner for task decomposition, (ii) a Coordinator for subtask management, and (iii) specialized Workers with domain-specific tool-calling capabilities.


Large Language Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are widely regarded as relying on autoregressive models (ARMs). We challenge this notion by introducing LLaDA, a diffusion model trained from scratch under the pre-training and supervised finetuning (SFT) paradigm. LLaDA employs a forward data masking process and a reverse generation process, parameterized by a Transformer to predict masked tokens. It provides a principled generative approach for probabilistic inference by optimizing a likelihood lower bound. Across extensive benchmarks on general tasks, math, code, and so on, LLaDA demonstrates strong scalability and performs comparably to our self-constructed ARM baselines. Remarkably, LLaDA 8B is competitive with strong LLMs like LLaMA3 8B in in-context learning and, after SFT, exhibits impressive instruction-following abilities in case studies such as multiturn dialogue. Moreover, LLaDA addresses the reversal curse, surpassing GPT-4o in a reversal poem completion task. Our findings show the promise of diffusion models for language modeling at scale and challenge the common assumption that core LLM capabilities discussed above inherently depend on ARMs.