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OptiTree: Hierarchical Thoughts Generation with Tree Search for LLMOptimization Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Optimization modeling is one of the most crucial but technical parts of operations research (OR). To automate the modeling process, existing works have leveraged large language models (LLMs), prompting them to break down tasks into steps for generating variables, constraints, and objectives. However, due to the highly complex mathematical structures inherent in OR problems, standard fixed-step decomposition often fails to achieve high performance. To address this challenge, we introduce OptiTree, a novel tree search approach designed to enhance modeling capabilities for complex problems through adaptive problem decomposition into simpler subproblems. Specifically, we develop a modeling tree that organizes a wide range of OR problems based on their hierarchical problem taxonomy and complexity, with each node representing a problem category and containing relevant high-level modeling thoughts. Given a problem to model, we recurrently search the tree to identify a series of simpler subproblems and synthesize the global modeling thoughts by adaptively integrating the hierarchical thoughts. Experiments show that OptiTree significantly improves the modeling accuracy compared to the state-of-theart, achieving over 10% improvements on the challenging benchmarks.


Predictable Scale (Part II) -- Farseer: ARefined Scaling Law in LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is prohibitively expensive, creating a critical scaling gap where insights from small-scale experiments often fail to transfer to resource-intensive production systems, thereby hindering efficient innovation. To bridge this, we introduce Farseer, a novel and refined scaling law offering enhanced predictive accuracy across scales. By systematically constructing a model loss surface L(N,D), Farseer achieves a significantly better fit to empirical data than prior laws (e.g., Chinchilla's law). Our methodology yields accurate, robust, and highly generalizable predictions, demonstrating excellent extrapolation capabilities, outperforming Chinchilla's law, whose extrapolation error is 433% higher. This allows for the reliable evaluation of competing training strategies across all (N,D) settings, enabling conclusions from small-scale ablation studies to be confidently extrapolated to predict large-scale performance. Furthermore, Farseer provides new insights into optimal compute allocation, better reflecting the nuanced demands of modern LLM training. To validate our approach, we trained an extensive suite of approximately 1,000 LLMs across diverse scales and configurations, consuming roughly 3 million NVIDIAH100 GPU hours. To foster further research, we are comprehensively open-sourcing all code, data, results 3, all training logs4, all models used in scaling law fitting 5.


Block-Biased Mamba for Long-Range Sequence Processing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Mamba extends earlier state space models (SSMs) by introducing input-dependent dynamics, and has demonstrated strong empirical performance across a range of domains, including language modeling, computer vision, and foundation models. However, a surprising weakness remains: despite being built on architectures designed for long-range dependencies, Mamba performs poorly on long-range sequential tasks. Understanding and addressing this gap is important for improving Mamba's universality and versatility. In this work, we analyze Mamba's limitations through three perspectives: expressiveness, inductive bias, and training stability. Our theoretical results show how Mamba falls short in each of these aspects compared to earlier SSMs such as S4D. To address these issues, we propose B2S6, a simple extension of Mamba's S6 unit that combines block-wise selective dynamics with a channel-specific bias. We prove that these changes equip the model with a better-suited inductive bias and improve its expressiveness and stability. Empirically, B2S6 outperforms S4 and S4D on Long-Range Arena (LRA) tasks while maintaining Mamba's performance on language modeling benchmarks.


Extremely Simple Multimodal Outlier Synthesis for Out-of-Distribution Detection and Segmentation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and segmentation are crucial for deploying machine learning models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robot-assisted surgery. While prior research has primarily focused on unimodal image data, real-world applications are inherently multimodal, requiring the integration of multiple modalities for improved OOD detection. A key challenge is the lack of supervision signals from unknown data, leading to overconfident predictions on OOD samples. To address this challenge, we propose Feature Mixing, an extremely simple and fast method for multimodal outlier synthesis with theoretical support, which can be further optimized to help the model better distinguish between in-distribution (ID) and OOD data. Feature Mixing is modality-agnostic and applicable to various modality combinations. Additionally, we introduce CARLA-OOD, a novel multimodal dataset for OOD segmentation, featuring synthetic OOD objects across diverse scenes and weather conditions. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, CARLA-OOD datasets, and the MultiOOD benchmark demonstrate that Feature Mixing achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 10 to 370 speedup.


Tight Lower Bounds and Improved Convergence in Performative Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Performative prediction is a framework accounting for the shift in the data distribution induced by the prediction of a model deployed in the real world. Ensuring convergence to a stable solution--one at which the post-deployment data distribution no longer changes--is crucial in settings where model predictions can influence future data. This paper, for the first time, extends the Repeated Risk Minimization (RRM) algorithm class by utilizing historical datasets from previous retraining snapshots, yielding a class of algorithms that we call Affine Risk Minimizers that converges to a performatively stable point for a broader class of problems. We introduce a new upper bound for methods that use only the final iteration of the dataset and prove for the first time the tightness of both this new bound and the previous existing bounds within the same regime. We also prove that our new algorithm class can surpass the lower bound for standard RRM, thus breaking the prior lower bound, and empirically observe faster convergence to the stable point on various performative prediction benchmarks. We offer at the same time the first lower bound analysis for RRM within the class of Affine Risk Minimizers, quantifying the potential improvements in convergence speed that could be achieved with other variants in our scheme.


MIND: Material Interface Generation from UDFs for Non-Manifold Surface Reconstruction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unsigned distance fields (UDFs) are widely used in 3D deep learning due to their ability to represent shapes with arbitrary topology. While prior work has largely focused on learning UDFs from point clouds or multi-view images, extracting meshes from UDFs remains challenging, as the learned fields rarely attain exact zero distances. A common workaround is to reconstruct signed distance fields (SDFs) locally from UDFs to enable surface extraction via Marching Cubes. However, this often introduces topological artifacts such as holes or spurious components. Moreover, local SDFs are inherently incapable of representing non-manifold geometry, leading to complete failure in such cases.


Combinatorial Ski Rental Problem: Robust and Learning-Augmented Algorithms

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce and study the Combinatorial Ski Rental (CSR) problem, which involves multiple items that can be rented or purchased, either individually or in combination. At each time step, a decision-maker must make an irrevocable buy-orrent decision for items that have not yet been purchased, without knowing the end of the time horizon. We propose a randomized online algorithm, Sorted Optimal Amortized Cost (SOAC), that achieves the optimal competitive ratio. Moreover, SOACcan be extended to address various well-known ski rental variants, including the multi-slope, multi-shop, multi-commodity ski rental and CSRwith upgrading problems. Building on the proposed SOACalgorithm, we further develop a learningaugmented algorithm that leverages machine-learned predictions to improve the performance of CSR. This algorithm is capable of recovering or improving upon existing results of learning-augmented algorithms in both the classic ski rental and multi-shop ski rental problems. Experimental results validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the advantages of our algorithms over baseline methods for ski rental problems.


WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capability

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate impressive long-horizon reasoning capabilities. However, their reliance on static internal knowledge limits their performance on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks and hinders their ability to produce comprehensive research reports requiring synthesis of diverse web information. To address this, we propose WebThinker, a deep research agent that empowers LRMs to autonomously search the web, navigate among web pages, and draft reports during the reasoning process. WebThinker integrates a Deep Web Explorer module, enabling LRMs to dynamically search, navigate, and extract information from the web when encountering knowledge gaps. It also employs an Autonomous Think-Search-and-Draft strategy, allowing the model to seamlessly interleave reasoning, information gathering, and report writing in real time. To further enhance research tool utilization, we introduce an RL-based training strategy via iterative online Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments on complex reasoning benchmarks (GPQA, GAIA, WebWalkerQA, HLE) and scientific report generation tasks (Glaive) demonstrate that WebThinker significantly outperforms existing methods and strong proprietary systems. Our approach enhances LRM reliability and applicability in complex scenarios, paving the way for more capable and versatile deep research systems.


Robust Federated Finetuning of LLMs via Alternating Optimization of LoRA

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose RoLoRA, a federated framework using alternating optimization to fine-tune LoRA adapters. Our approach emphasizes the importance of learning up and down projection matrices to enhance expressiveness and robustness. We use both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages of RoLoRA over prior approaches that either generate imperfect model updates or limit expressiveness of the model. We provide a theoretical analysis on a linear model to highlight the importance of learning both the down-projection and up-projection matrices in LoRA. We validate the insights on a non-linear model and separately provide a convergence proof under general conditions. To bridge theory and practice, we conducted extensive experimental evaluations on language models including RoBERTa-Large, Llama-2-7B on diverse tasks and FL settings to demonstrate the advantages of RoLoRA over other methods.