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 Deep Learning


2b76873e897f3de3069b2f360c65e0c2-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress, particularly in enhancing their reasoning capabilities. However, existing reasoning benchmarks still primarily assess language-based reasoning, often treating visual input as replaceable context. To address this gap, we introduce BLINK-Twice, a vision-centric reasoning benchmark grounded in challenging perceptual tasks. Instead of relying on external knowledge, our tasks require models to reason from visual content alone, shifting the focus from language-based to image-grounded reasoning. Compared to prior perception benchmarks, it moves beyond shallow perception ("see") and requires fine-grained observation and analytical reasoning ("observe").


KGGen: Extracting Knowledge Graphs from Plain Text with Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent interest in building foundation models for knowledge graphs has highlighted a fundamental challenge: knowledge graph data is scarce. The best-known knowledge graphs are primarily human-labeled, created by pattern-matching, or extracted using early NLP techniques. While human-generated knowledge graphs are in short supply, automatically extracted ones are of questionable quality. We present KGGen, a novel text-to-knowledge-graph generator that uses language models to extract high-quality graphs from plain text with a novel entity resolution approach that clusters related entities, significantly reducing the sparsity problem that plagues existing extractors. Unlike other KG generators, KGGen clusters and de-duplicates related entities to reduce sparsity in extracted KGs. Along with KGGen, we release Measure of Information in Nodes and Edges (MINE), the first benchmark to test an extractor's ability to produce a useful KG from plain text. We benchmark our new tool against leading existing generators such as Microsoft's GraphRAG; we achieve comparable retrieval accuracy on the generated graphs and better information retention.


Generative Graph Pattern Machine

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been predominantly driven by messagepassing, where node representations are iteratively updated via local neighborhood aggregation. Despite their success, message-passing suffers from fundamental limitations--including constrained expressiveness, over-smoothing, oversquashing, and limited capacity to model long-range dependencies. These issues hinder scalability: increasing data size or model size often fails to yield improved performance. To this end, we explore pathways beyond message-passing and introduce Generative Graph Pattern Machine (G2PM), a generative Transformer pre-training framework for graphs. G2PM represents graph instances (nodes, edges, or entire graphs) as sequences of substructures, and employs generative pre-training over the sequences to learn generalizable and transferable representations. Empirically, G2PM demonstrates strong scalability: on the ogbn-arxivbenchmark, it continues to improve with model sizes up to 60M parameters, outperforming prior generative approaches that plateau at significantly smaller scales (e.g., 3M). In addition, we systematically analyze the model design space, highlighting key architectural choices that contribute to its scalability and generalization. Across diverse tasks--including node/link/graph classification, transfer learning, and crossgraph pretraining--G2PM consistently outperforms strong baselines, establishing a compelling foundation for scalable graph learning.


Distributional LLM-as-a-Judge

Neural Information Processing Systems

LLMs have emerged as powerful evaluators in the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, offering significant efficiency and flexibility compared to human judgments. However, previous methods primarily rely on single-point evaluations, overlooking the inherent diversity and uncertainty in human evaluations. This approach leads to information loss and decreases the reliability of evaluations. To address this limitation, we propose a novel training framework that explicitly aligns the LLMgenerated judgment distribution with human evaluation distributions. Specifically, we propose a distributional alignment objective based on KL divergence, combined with an auxiliary cross-entropy regularization to stabilize the training process. Furthermore, due to limited human annotations, empirical human distributions are merely noisy estimates of the true underlying distribution. We therefore incorporate adversarial training to ensure a robust alignment with this true distribution, rather than overfitting to its imperfect approximation. Extensive experiments across various LLM backbones and evaluation tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing closed-source LLMs and conventional singlepoint alignment methods, with superior alignment quality, strong robustness, and competitive evaluation accuracy.


SHAP Meets Tensor Networks: Provably Tractable Explanations with Parallelism

Neural Information Processing Systems

Although Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) can be computed in polynomial time for simple models like decision trees, they unfortunately become NP-hard to compute for more expressive black-box models like neural networks -- where generating explanations is often most critical. In this work, we analyze the problem of computing SHAP explanations for Tensor Networks (TNs), a broader and more expressive class of models than those for which current exact SHAP algorithms are known to hold, and which is widely used for neural network abstraction and compression. First, we introduce a general framework for computing provably exact SHAP explanations for general TNs with arbitrary structures. Interestingly, we show that, when TNs are restricted to a Tensor Train (TT) structure, SHAP computation can be performed in poly-logarithmic time using parallel computation. Thanks to the expressiveness power of TTs, this complexity result can be generalized to many other popular ML models such as decision trees, tree ensembles, linear models, and linear RNNs, therefore tightening previously reported complexity results for these families of models. Finally, by leveraging reductions of binarized neural networks to Tensor Network representations, we demonstrate that SHAP computation can become efficiently tractable when the network's width is fixed, while it remains computationally hard even with constant depth. This highlights an important insight: for this class of models, width -- rather than depth -- emerges as the primary computational bottleneck in SHAP computation.


Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this work, we aim to develop an MLLM that understands and solves questions by learning to create each intermediate step of the reasoning involved till the final answer. To this end, we propose Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search (CoMCTS), a new learning-to-reason method for MLLMs, which introduces the concept of collective learning into "tree search" for effective and efficient reasoning-path searching and learning. The core idea of CoMCTS is to leverage collective knowledge from multiple models to collaboratively conjecture, search and identify effective reasoning paths toward correct answers via four iterative operations including Expansion, Simulation and Error Positioning, Backpropagation, and Selection. Using CoMCTS, we construct Mulberry-260k, a multimodal dataset with a tree of rich, explicit and well-defined reasoning nodes for each question. With Mulberry-260k, we perform collective SFT to train our model, Mulberry, a series of MLLMs with o1-like step-by-step Reasoning and Reflection capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods on various benchmarks.


FrameShield: Adversarially Robust Video Anomaly Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection (WSVAD) has achieved notable advancements, yet existing models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, limiting their reliability. Due to the inherent constraints of weak supervision--where only video-level labels are provided despite the need for frame-level predictions--traditional adversarial defense mechanisms, such as adversarial training, are not effective since video-level adversarial perturbations are typically weak and inadequate. To address this limitation, pseudo-labels generated directly from the model can enable frame-level adversarial training; however, these pseudo-labels are inherently noisy, significantly degrading performance. We therefore introduce a novel Pseudo-Anomaly Generation method called Spatiotemporal Region Distortion (SRD), which creates synthetic anomalies by applying severe augmentations to localized regions in normal videos while preserving temporal consistency. Integrating these precisely annotated synthetic anomalies with the noisy pseudolabels substantially reduces label noise, enabling effective adversarial training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the robustness of WSVAD models against adversarial attacks, outperforming state-ofthe-art methods by an average of 71.0% in overall AUROC performance across multiple benchmarks.


Increase

Neural Information Processing Systems

Weight decay is a standard regularization technique for training large language models (LLMs). While it is common to assign a uniform decay rate to every layer, this approach overlooks the structural diversity of LLMs and the varying spectral properties across modules. In this paper, we introduce AlphaDecay, a simple yet effective method that adaptively assigns different weight decay strengths to each module of an LLM. Our approach is guided by Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) theory, which analyzes the empirical spectral density (ESD) of weight correlation matrices to quantify "heavy-tailedness." Modules exhibiting more pronounced heavy-tailed ESDs, reflecting stronger feature learning, are assigned weaker decay, while modules with lighter-tailed spectra receive stronger decay. Our method leverages tailored weight decay assignments to balance the module-wise differences in spectral properties, leading to improved performance. Extensive pre-training tasks with various model sizes from 60M to 1B demonstrate that AlphaDecay achieves better perplexity and generalization than conventional uniform decay and other adaptive decay baselines.


MUVR: AMulti-Modal Untrimmed Video Retrieval Benchmark with Multi-Level Visual Correspondence

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose the Multi-modal Untrimmed Video Retrieval task, along with a new benchmark (MUVR) to advance video retrieval for long-video platforms. MUVR aims to retrieve untrimmed videos containing relevant segments using multi-modal queries. It has the following features: 1) Practical retrieval paradigm: MUVR supports video-centric multi-modal queries, expressing fine-grained retrieval needs through long text descriptions, video tag prompts, and mask prompts. It adopts a one-to-many retrieval paradigm and focuses on untrimmed videos, tailored for long-video platform applications.


Hyperbolic Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks. However, it remains an open question whether the default Euclidean space is the most suitable choice for LLMs. In this study, we investigate the geometric characteristics of LLMs, focusing specifically on tokens and their embeddings. Our findings reveal that token frequency follows a power-law distribution, where high-frequency tokens (e.g., "the," "that") constitute the minority, while low-frequency tokens (e.g., "apple," "dog") constitute the majority. Furthermore, high-frequency tokens cluster near the origin, whereas low-frequency tokens are positioned farther away in the embedding space.