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ORIGAMISPACE: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs in Multi-Step Spatial Reasoning with Mathematical Constraints

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spatial reasoning is a key capability in the field of artificial intelligence, especially crucial in areas such as robotics, computer vision, and natural language understanding. However, evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in complex spatial reasoning still faces challenges, particularly in scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning and precise mathematical constraints.


On Epistemic Uncertainty of Visual Tokens for Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large vision-language models (LVLMs), which integrate a vision encoder (VE) with a large language model, have achieved remarkable success across various tasks. However, there are still crucial challenges in LVLMs such as object hallucination, generating descriptions of objects that are not in the input image. Here, we argue that uncertain visual tokens within the VE is a key factor that contributes to object hallucination. Our statistical analysis found that there are positive correlations between visual tokens with high epistemic uncertainty and the occurrence of hallucinations. Furthermore, we show theoretically and empirically that visual tokens in early VE layers that exhibit large representation deviations under small adversarial perturbations indicate high epistemic uncertainty. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet effective strategy to mitigate object hallucination by modifying the VE only. Our method comprises a proxy method with adversarial perturbations for identifying uncertain visual tokens efficiently and a method to mask these uncertain visual tokens during the self-attention process in the middle layers of the VE, suppressing their influence on visual encoding and thus alleviating hallucinations. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly reduces object hallucinations in LVLMs and can synergistically work with other prior arts.


SDPGO: Efficient Self-Distillation Training Meets Proximal Gradient Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Self-knowledge distillation (SKD) enables single-model training by distilling knowledge from the model's own output, eliminating the need for a separate teacher network required in conventional distillation methods. However, current SKD methods focus mainly on replicating common features in the student model, neglecting the extraction of key features that significantly enhance student learning. Inspired by this, we devise a self-knowledge distillation framework entitled Self-Distillation training via Proximal Gradient Optimization or SDPGO, which utilizes gradient information to identify and assign greater weight to features that significantly impact classification performance, enabling the network to learn the most relevant features during training. Specifically, the proposed framework refines the gradient information into a dynamically changing weighting factor to evaluate the distillation knowledge via the dynamic weight adjustment scheme. Meanwhile, we devise the sequential iterative learning module to dynamically optimize knowledge transfer by leveraging historical predictions and real-time gradients, stabilizing training through mini-batch-based KL divergence refinement while adaptively prioritizing task-critical features for efficient self-distillation. Comprehensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation demonstrate that our method consistently surpasses recent state-of-the-art knowledge distillation techniques.


RADAR: Benchmarking Language Models on Imperfect Tabular Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Language models (LMs) are increasingly being deployed to perform autonomous data analyses. However, their data awareness--the ability to recognize, reason over, and appropriately handle data artifacts such as missing values, outliers, and logical inconsistencies--remains underexplored. These artifacts are especially common in real-world tabular data and, if mishandled, can significantly compromise the validity of analytical conclusions. To address this gap, we present RADAR, a benchmark for systematically evaluating data-aware reasoning on tabular data. We develop a framework to simulate data artifacts via programmatic perturbations to enable targeted evaluation of model behavior. RADAR comprises 2980 table query pairs, grounded in real-world data spanning 9 domains and 5 data artifact types. In addition to evaluating artifact handling, RADAR systematically varies table size to study how reasoning performance holds when increasing table size. Our evaluation reveals that, despite decent performance on tables without data artifacts, frontier models degrade significantly when data artifacts are introduced, exposing critical gaps in their capacity for robust, data-aware analysis. Designed to be flexible and extensible, RADAR supports diverse perturbation types and controllable table sizes, offering a valuable resource for advancing tabular reasoning.1


Video shows scene of Bedford train crash as passenger describes aftermath

BBC News

Emergency services are at the scene of a collision involving two trains in the Bedford area, British Transport Police has confirmed. Operator East Midlands Railway has said two of its trains were involved in the crash. Footage taken from the scene shows where the two trains collided and passengers who appear to have been evacuated. Speaking to the BBC, passenger Pete Knapp said the crash felt like [he'd] been in a bomb explosion. The designer behind DR Congo's World Cup suit: 'I wanted to change people's views on Africa' Alvin Junior Mak explains the inspiration behind the stylish suits he designed for DR Congo's World Cup team.


2028 Mercedes-Benz VLE first drive: Your 8K living room on wheels has arrived

Engadget

Benz's electric Grand Limousine might just make minivans cool. The concept of a living room on wheels is something of a modern clichรฉ in the automotive world, a vision for a car so comfortable, well-appointed and ultimately luxurious that you'd be just as happy to spend hours there as you would lounging at home. The problem is that most of those concepts, like the Cadillac InnerSpace or Mini Urbanaut, have depended on the availability of self-driving technology, something that still only exists in the limited circles of Waymo, Zoox and their ilk. We're still years away from you or I being able to buy a car that can drive itself unsupervised, but that isn't stopping Mercedes from releasing what could be the most compelling of the rolling living spaces. It's called the VLE, and while it requires a human behind the wheel, passengers in the second row will be treated to reclining, massaging seats, a 22-speaker Dolby Atmos sound system and a 31.3-inch


Appendix for " CaMiT: ATime-Aware Car Model Dataset for Classification and Generation "

Neural Information Processing Systems

Filtering Step Remaining Instances Raw images collected 7.5Mimages After deduplication and car detection 4.9M images Initial car bounding boxes 13.22M boxes After score/size thresholding 6.97M boxes After Qwen2.5-7B


CaMiT: ATime-Aware Car Model Dataset for Classification and Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

AI systems must adapt to the evolving visual landscape, especially in domains where object appearance shifts over time. While prior work on time-aware vision models has primarily addressed commonsense-level categories, we introduce Car Models in Time (CaMiT).


Beyond Scalars: Concept-Based Alignment Analysis in Vision Transformers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Measuring the alignment between representations lets us understand similarities between the feature spaces of different models, such as Vision Transformers trained under diverse paradigms. However, traditional measures for representational alignment yield only scalar values that obscure how these spaces agree in terms of learned features. To address this, we combine alignment analysis with concept discovery, allowing a fine-grained breakdown of alignment into individual concepts. This approach reveals both universal concepts across models and each representation's internal concept structure. We introduce a new definition of concepts as non-linear manifolds, hypothesizing they better capture the geometry of the featurespace. A sanity check demonstrates the advantage of this manifold-based definition over linear baselines for concept-based alignment. Finally, our alignment analysis of four different ViTs shows that increased supervision tends to reduce semantic organization in learned representations.


'We had to get out of the way': The backlash over delivery robots

BBC News

'We had to get out of the way': The backlash over delivery robots The first time Chicago resident John Roberts saw a delivery robot trundling down the sidewalk on his street he was impressed. I actually thought they were kind of neat - it felt futuristic, he says. But his attitude started to change when, soon after, he was out for a walk with his family. As another robot approached, they found themselves having to dodge it. To us it felt a little off - the fact that we were on the one strip reserved for walking, and we were having to get out of the way, says Roberts.