Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Industry


Robust learning of halfspaces under log-concave marginals

Neural Information Processing Systems

We say that a classifier is adversarially robust to perturbations of norm r if, with high probability over a point xdrawn from the input distribution, there is no point within distance rfrom xthat is classified differently. The boundary volume is the probability that a point falls within distance r of a point with a different label. This work studies the task of computationally efficient learning of hypotheses with small boundary volume, where the input is distributed as a subgaussian isotropic log-concave distribution over Rd. Linear threshold functions are adversarially robust; they have boundary volume proportional to r. Such concept classes are efficiently learnable by polynomial regression, which produces a polynomial threshold function (PTF), but PTFs in general may have boundary volume โ„ฆ(1), even for r 1. We give an algorithm that agnostically learns linear threshold functions and returns a classifier with boundary volume O(r+ฮต)at radius of perturbation r.


AtAtT!T" O!O" Al-to-AlE!E" E# E$ AtT!T" O!O"FFNAtGaT!T" O!O" GaGaE!E" E# E$ Al-to-Al(a(b(clllltetetete))) tetete((DCnnnnDTMoiomttttrsiiiiiaoooopsnnnnansbEttricnihbfe)o)urtmede rMoE

Neural Information Processing Systems

The computational sparsity of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enables sublinear growth in compute cost as model size increases, thus offering a scalable path to training massive neural networks. However, existing implementations suffer from low GPU utilization, significant latency overhead, and a fundamental inability to leverage task locality, primarily due to CPU-managed scheduling, host-initiated communication, and frequent kernel launches. To overcome these limitations, we develop FlashMoE, a fully GPU-resident MoE operator that fuses expert computation and inter-GPU communication into a single persistent GPU kernel. FlashMoE enables fine-grained pipelining of dispatch, compute, and combine phases, eliminating launch overheads and reducing idle gaps. Unlike existing work, FlashMoE obviates bulk-synchronous collectives for one-sided, device-initiated, inter-GPU (R)DMA transfers, thus unlocking payload efficiency, where we eliminate bloated or redundant network payloads in sparsely activated layers. When evaluated on an 8-H100 GPU node with MoE models having up to 128 experts and 16K token sequences, FlashMoE achieves up to 9 higher GPU utilization, 6 lower latency, 5.7 higher throughput, and 4 better overlap efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines--despite using FP32 while baselines use FP16. FlashMoE shows that principled GPU kernel-hardware co-design is key to unlocking the performance ceiling of large-scale distributed ML.


Efficient Last-Iterate Convergence in Solving Extensive-Form Games

Neural Information Processing Systems

To establish last-iterate convergence for Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) algorithms in learning a Nash equilibrium (NE) of extensive-form games (EFGs), recent studies reformulate learning an NE of the original EFG as learning the NEs of a sequence of (perturbed) regularized EFGs. Hence, proving last-iterate convergence in solving the original EFG reduces to proving last-iterate convergence in solving (perturbed) regularized EFGs. However, these studies only establish last-iterate convergence for Online Mirror Descent (OMD)-based CFR algorithms instead of Regret Matching (RM)-based CFR algorithms in solving perturbed regularized EFGs, resulting in a poor empirical convergence rate, as RM-based CFR algorithms typically outperform OMD-based CFR algorithms. In addition, as solving multiple perturbed regularized EFGs is required, fine-tuning across multiple perturbed regularized EFGs is infeasible, making parameter-free algorithms highly desirable. This paper show that CFR+, a classical parameter-free RM-based CFR algorithm, achieves last-iterate convergence in learning an NE of perturbed regularized EFGs. This is the first parameter-free last-iterate convergence for RM-based CFR algorithms in perturbed regularized EFGs. Leveraging CFR+ to solve perturbed regularized EFGs, we get Reward Transformation CFR+ (RTCFR+). Importantly, we extend prior work on the parameter-free property of CFR+, enhancing its stability, which is vital for the empirical convergence of RTCFR+. Experiments show that RTCFR+ exhibits a significantly faster empirical convergence rate than existing algorithms that achieve theoretical last-iterate convergence.


Neural-Driven Image Editing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Traditional image editing typically relies on manual prompting, making it laborintensive and inaccessible to individuals with limited motor control or language abilities. Leveraging recent advances in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and generative models, we propose LoongX, a hands-free image editing approach driven by multimodal neurophysiological signals. LoongX utilizes state-of-the-art diffusion models trained on a comprehensive dataset of 23,928 image editing pairs, each paired with synchronized electroencephalography (EEG), functional nearinfrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), photoplethysmography (PPG), and head motion signals that capture user intent. To effectively address the heterogeneity of these signals, LoongX integrates two key modules.


9118ad115831e52cfeec1acd40c6e0f3-Paper-Position_Paper_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Science progresses by iteratively advancing and correcting humanity's understanding of the world. In machine learning (ML) research, rapid advancements have led to an explosion of publications, but have also led to misleading, incorrect, flawed or perhaps even fraudulent studies being accepted and sometimes highlighted at ML conferences due to the fallibility of peer review. While such mistakes are understandable, ML conferences do not offer robust processes to help the field systematically correct when such errors are made. This position paper argues that ML conferences should establish a dedicated "Refutations and Critiques" (R&C) Track. This R&CTrack would provide a high-profile, reputable platform to support vital research that critically challenges prior research, thereby fostering a dynamic self-correcting research ecosystem. We discuss key considerations including track design, review principles, potential pitfalls, and provide an illustrative example submission concerning a recent ICLR 2025 Oral. We conclude that ML conferences should create official, reputable mechanisms to help ML research self-correct.


AGC-Drive: ALarge-Scale Dataset for Real-World Aerial-Ground Collaboration in Driving Scenarios

Neural Information Processing Systems

By sharing information across multiple agents, collaborative perception helps autonomous vehicles mitigate occlusions and improve overall perception accuracy. While most previous work focus on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure collaboration, with limited attention to aerial perspectives provided by UAVs, which uniquely offer dynamic, top-down views to alleviate occlusions and monitor large-scale interactive environments. A major reason for this is the lack of highquality datasets for aerial-ground collaborative scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present AGC-Drive, the first large-scale real-world dataset for Aerial-Ground Cooperative 3D perception. The data collection platform consists of two vehicles, each equipped with five cameras and one LiDAR sensor, and one UAV carrying a forward-facing camera and a LiDAR sensor, enabling comprehensive multi-view and multi-agent perception.


ParamMute: Suppressing Knowledge-Critical FFNs for Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) integrated with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have improved factuality by grounding outputs in external evidence. However, they remain susceptible to unfaithful generation, where outputs contradict retrieved context despite its relevance and accuracy. Existing approaches aiming to improve faithfulness primarily focus on enhancing the utilization of external context, but often overlook the persistent influence of internal parametric knowledge during generation. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms behind unfaithful generation and identify a subset of mid-to-deep feed-forward networks (FFNs) that are disproportionately activated in such cases. Building on this insight, we propose Parametric Knowledge Muting through FFNSuppression (ParamMute), a framework that improves contextual faithfulness by suppressing the activation of unfaithfulness-associated FFNs and calibrating the model toward retrieved knowledge. To evaluate our approach, we introduce CoFaithfulQA, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate faithfulness in scenarios where internal knowledge conflicts with accurate external evidence. Experimental results show that ParamMute significantly enhances faithfulness across both CoFaithfulQA and the established ConFiQA benchmark, achieving substantial reductions in reliance on parametric memory. These findings underscore the importance of mitigating internal knowledge dominance and provide a new direction for improving LLM trustworthiness in RAG.


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.


Sheetpedia: A300K-Spreadsheet Corpus for Spreadsheet Intelligence and LLMFine-Tuning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spreadsheets are widely used for data analysis and reporting, yet their complex structure and formula logic pose significant challenges for AI systems. We introduce Sheetpedia, a large-scale corpus of over 290,000 diverse spreadsheets (from 324,000+ workbooks) compiled from enterprise email archives and online forums. We detail a rigorous collection and preprocessing pipeline (integrating the Enron email spreadsheet archive and the Fuse web corpus, plus a new crawl of Excel forums) to standardize formats, filter languages, and remove duplicates. Sheetpedia provides extensive coverage of real formulas and annotations - addressing a gap left by prior table datasets (e.g.


BlockScan: Detecting Anomalies in Blockchain Transactions

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose BlockScan, a customized Transformer for anomaly detection in blockchain transactions. Unlike existing methods that rely on rule-based systems or directly apply off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs), BlockScan introduces a series of customized designs to effectively model the unique data structure of blockchain transactions. First, a blockchain transaction is multi-modal, containing blockchain-specific tokens, texts, and numbers. We design a novel modularized tokenizer to handle these multi-modal inputs, balancing the information across different modalities. Second, we design a customized masked language modeling mechanism for pretraining the Transformer architecture, incorporating RoPE embedding and FlashAttention for handling longer sequences. Finally, we design a novel anomaly detection method based on the model outputs.