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Rig3R: Rig-Aware Conditioning for Learned 3D Reconstruction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Estimating agent pose and 3D scene structure from multi-camera rigs is a central task in embodied AI applications such as autonomous driving. Recent learned approaches such as DUSt3R have shown impressive performance in multiview settings. However, these models treat images as unstructured collections, limiting effectiveness in scenarios where frames are captured from synchronized rigs with known or inferable structure. To this end, we introduce Rig3R, a generalization of prior multiview reconstruction models that incorporates rig structure when available, and learns to infer it when not. Rig3R conditions on optional rig metadata including camera IDs, timestamp, and rig calibrations to develop a rig-aware latent space that remains robust to missing information.


Cognitive Mirrors: Exploring the Diverse Functional Roles of Attention Heads in LLMReasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of tasks, but remain largely opaque in terms of their internal mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial to improve their reasoning abilities. Drawing inspiration from the interplay between neural processes and human cognition, we propose a novel interpretability framework to systematically analyze the roles and behaviors of attention heads, which are key components of LLMs. We introduce CogQA, a dataset that decomposes complex questions into step-by-step subquestions with a chain-of-thought design, each associated with specific cognitive functions such as retrieval or logical reasoning. By applying a multi-class probing method, we identify the attention heads responsible for these functions. Our analysis across multiple LLM families reveals that attention heads exhibit functional specialization, characterized as cognitive heads. These cognitive heads exhibit several key properties: they are universally sparse, and vary in number and distribution across different cognitive functions, and they display interactive and hierarchical structures. We further show that cognitive heads play a vital role in reasoning tasks--removing them leads to performance degradation, while augmenting them enhances reasoning accuracy. These insights offer a deeper understanding of LLM reasoning and suggest important implications for model design, training and fine-tuning strategies.


MOSDT: Self-Distillation-Based Decision Transformer for Multi-Agent Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce MOSDT, the first algorithm designed for multi-agent offline safe reinforcement learning (MOSRL), alongside MOSDB, the first dataset and benchmark for this domain. Different from most existing knowledge distillation-based multiagent RL methods, we propose policy self-distillation (PSD) with a new global information reconstruction scheme by fusing the observation features of all agents, streamlining training and improving parameter efficiency. We adopt full parameter sharing across agents, significantly slashing parameter count and boosting returns up to 38.4-fold by stabilizing training. We propose a new plug-and-play cost binary embedding (CBE) module, which binarizes cumulative costs as safety signals and embeds the signals into return features for efficient information aggregation. On the strong MOSDB benchmark, MOSDT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) returns in 14 out of 18 tasks (across all base environments including MuJoCo, Safety Gym, and Isaac Gym) while ensuring complete safety, with only 65%of the execution parameter count of a SOTA single-agent offline safe RL method CDT.


Train to Defend: First Defense Against Cryptanalytic Neural Network Parameter Extraction Attacks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural networks are valuable intellectual property due to the significant computational cost, expert labor, and proprietary data involved in their development. Consequently, protecting their parameters is critical not only for maintaining a competitive advantage but also for enhancing the model's security and privacy. Prior works have demonstrated the growing capability of cryptanalytic attacks to scale to deeper models. In this paper, we present the first defense mechanism against cryptanalytic parameter extraction attacks. Our key insight is to eliminate the neuron uniqueness necessary for these attacks to succeed. We achieve this by a novel, extraction-aware training method.


Breaking the Performance Ceiling in Reinforcement Learning requires Inference Strategies

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems have countless applications, from energygrid management to protein design. However, such real-world scenarios are often extremely difficult, combinatorial in nature, and require complex coordination between multiple agents. This level of complexity can cause even state-of-theart RL systems, trained until convergence, to hit a performance ceiling which they are unable to break out of with zero-shot inference. Meanwhile, many digital or simulation-based applications allow for an inference phase that utilises a specific time and compute budget to explore multiple attempts before outputting a final solution. In this work, we show that such an inference phase employed at execution time, and the choice of a corresponding inference strategy, are key to breaking the performance ceiling observed in complex multi-agent RL problems. Our main result is striking: we can obtain up to a 126% and, on average, a 45% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art across 17 tasks, using only a couple seconds of extra wall-clock time during execution. We also demonstrate promising compute scaling properties, supported by over 60k experiments, making it the largest study on inference strategies for complex RL to date.


DoseSurv: Predicting Personalized Survival Outcomes under Continuous-Valued Treatments

Neural Information Processing Systems

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) of continuous-valued interventions on survival, that is, time-to-event (TTE) outcomes, is crucial in various fields, notably in clinical decision-making and in driving the advancement of nextgeneration clinical trials. However, while HTE estimation for continuous-valued (i.e., dosage-dependent) interventions and for TTE outcomes have been separately explored, their combined application remains largely overlooked in the machine learning literature. We propose DoseSurv, a varying-coefficient network designed to estimate HTEs for different dosage-dependent and non-dosage treatment options from TTE data. DoseSurv uses radial basis functions to model continuity in doseresponse relationships and learns balanced representations to address covariate shifts arising in HTE estimation from observational TTE data.


This man with ALS is "the first power user" of a brain implant that lets him speak

MIT Technology Review

Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for almost three years. Harrell, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and is paralyzed, first used his brain-computer interface (BCI) to "speak" sentences with the help of a research team in 2023. Since then, Harrell has clocked thousands of hours of use. He can use the device largely independently, once he's been "plugged in" with the help of a carer. His team has added new features to it, and Harrell also uses it to surf the web and perform his job.


FocalCodec: Low-Bitrate Speech Coding via Focal Modulation Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models have revolutionized natural language processing through self-supervised pretraining on massive datasets. Inspired by this success, researchers have explored adapting these methods to speech by discretizing continuous audio into tokens using neural audio codecs. However, existing approaches face limitations, including high bitrates, the loss of either semantic or acoustic information, and the reliance on multi-codebook designs when trying to capture both, which increases architectural complexity for downstream tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce FocalCodec, an efficient low-bitrate codec based on focal modulation that utilizes a single binary codebook to compress speech between 0.16 and 0.65 kbps. FocalCodec delivers competitive performance in speech resynthesis and voice conversion at lower bitrates than the current state-of-the-art, while effectively handling multilingual speech and noisy environments. Evaluation on downstream tasks shows that FocalCodec successfully preserves sufficient semantic and acoustic information, while also being well-suited for generative modeling.


Spark Transformer: Reactivating Sparsity in Transformer FFN and Attention

Neural Information Processing Systems

The discovery of the lazy neuron phenomenon [54], where fewer than 10% of the feedforward networks (FFN) parameters in trained Transformers are activated per token, has spurred significant interests in activation sparsity for enhancing large model efficiency. While notable progress has been made in translating such sparsity to wall-time benefits across CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs, modern Transformers have moved away from the ReLU activation function crucial to this phenomenon. Existing efforts on re-introducing activation sparsity, e.g., by reverting to ReLU, applying top-kmasking or a sparse predictor, often degrade model quality, increase parameter count, complicate training.


POCO: Scalable Neural Forecasting through Population Conditioning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Predicting future neural activity is a core challenge in modeling brain dynamics, with applications ranging from scientific investigation to closed-loop neurotechnology. While recent models of population activity emphasize interpretability and behavioral decoding, neural forecasting--particularly across multi-session, spontaneous calcium recordings--remains underexplored. We introduce POCO, a unified forecasting model that combines a lightweight univariate forecaster with a population-level encoder to capture both neuron-specific and brain-wide dynamics in calcium imaging recordings. Trained across five calcium imaging datasets spanning zebrafish, mice, and C. elegans, POCO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy at cellular resolution in spontaneous behaviors.