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 Deep Learning


SimWorld: An Open-ended Simulator for Agents in Physical and Social Worlds

Neural Information Processing Systems

While LLM/VLM-powered AI agents have advanced rapidly in math, coding, and computer use, their applications in complex physical and social environments remain challenging. Building agents that can survive and thrive in the real world (e.g., by autonomously earning income) requires massive-scale interaction, reasoning, training, and evaluation across diverse scenarios. However, existing world simulators for such development fall short: they often rely on limited hand-crafted environments, simulate simplified game-like physics and social rules, and lack native support for LLM/VLM agents. We introduce SimWorld, a new simulator built on Unreal Engine 5, designed for developing and evaluating LLM/VLM agents in rich, real-world-like settings. SimWorld offers three core capabilities: (1) realistic, open-ended world simulation, including accurate physical and social dynamics and language-driven procedural environment generation; (2) rich interface for LLM/VLM agents, with multi-modal world inputs/feedback and open-vocabulary action outputs at varying levels of abstraction; and (3) diverse physical and social reasoning scenarios that are easily customizable by users. We demonstrate SimWorld by deploying frontier LLM agents (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Flash,


Avoiding exp(R) scaling in RLHF through Preference-based Exploration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal technique for large language model (LLM) alignment. This paper studies the setting of online RLHF and focuses on improving its sample efficiency. All existing algorithms for online RLHF, whether doing passive exploration or active exploration, suffer from a sample complexity that scales exponentially with the range of the reward function. This statistical inefficiency hinders their effectiveness in scenarios with heavily skewed preferences, e.g.


RBench-V: A Primary Assessment for Visual Reasoning Models with Multimodal Outputs

Neural Information Processing Systems

The rapid advancement of native multi-modal models and omni-models, exemplified by GPT-4o, Gemini and o3 with their capability to process and generate content across modalities such as text and images, marks a significant milestone in the evolution of intelligence. Systematic evaluation of their multi-modal output capabilities in visual thinking process (a.k.a., multi-modal chain of thought, M-CoT) becomes critically important. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating multi-modal models primarily focus on assessing multi-modal inputs and text-only reasoning process while neglecting the importance of reasoning through multi-modal outputs. In this paper, we present a benchmark, dubbed as RBench-V, designed to assess models' vision-indispensable reasoning. To conduct RBench-V, we carefully hand-pick 803 questions covering math, physics, counting and games. Unlike problems in previous benchmarks, which typically specify certain input modalities, RBench-V presents problems centered on multi-modal outputs, which require image manipulation, such as generating novel images and constructing auxiliary lines to support reasoning process. We evaluate numerous open-and closed-source models on RBench-V, including o3, Gemini 2.5 pro, Qwen2.5-VL,


Human Texts Are Outliers: Detecting LLM-generated Texts via Out-of-distribution Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude has significantly increased the presence of AI-generated text in digital communication. This trend has heightened the need for reliable detection methods to distinguish between human-authored and machine-generated content.


Open-Reasoner-Zero: An Open Source Approach to Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning on the Base Model

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce Open-Reasoner-Zero, the first open source implementation of large-scale reasoning-oriented RL training on the base model focusing on scalability, simplicity and accessibility. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that a minimalist approach, vanilla PPO with GAE ($\lambda=1$, $\gamma=1$) and straightforward rule-based rewards, without any KL regularization, is sufficient to scale up both benchmark performance and response length, replicating the scaling phenomenon observed in DeepSeek-R1-Zero. Using the same base model as DeepSeek-R1-Zero-Qwen-32B, our implementation achieves superior performance across AIME2024, MATH500, and GPQA Diamond, while demonstrating remarkable efficiency--requiring only 1/10 of the training steps compared to the DeepSeek-R1-Zero pipeline.


The Rich and the Simple: On the Implicit Bias of Adam and SGD

Neural Information Processing Systems

Adam is the de facto optimization algorithm for several deep learning applications, but an understanding of its implicit bias and how it differs from other algorithms, particularly standard first-order methods such as (stochastic) gradient descent (GD), remains limited. In practice, neural networks (NNs) trained with SGD are known to exhibit simplicity bias --- a tendency to find simple solutions. In contrast, we show that Adam is more resistant to such simplicity bias. First, we investigate the differences in the implicit biases of Adam and GD when training two-layer ReLU NNs on a binary classification task with Gaussian data. We find that GD exhibits a simplicity bias, resulting in a linear decision boundary with a suboptimal margin, whereas Adam leads to much richer and more diverse features, producing a nonlinear boundary that is closer to the Bayes' optimal predictor. This richer decision boundary also allows Adam to achieve higher test accuracy both in-distribution and under certain distribution shifts. We theoretically prove these results by analyzing the population gradients. Next, to corroborate our theoretical findings, we present extensive empirical results showing that this property of Adam leads to superior generalization across various datasets with spurious correlations where NNs trained with SGD are known to show simplicity bias and do not generalize well under certain distributional shifts.


Robot-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced Embodied Reasoning in Robotics

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently shown great promise in advancing robotics by combining embodied reasoning with robot control. A common approach involves training on embodied reasoning tasks related to robot control using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, SFT datasets are often heuristically constructed and not explicitly optimized for improving robot control. Furthermore, SFT often leads to issues such as catastrophic forgetting and reduced generalization performance. To address these limitations, we introduce Robot-R1, a novel framework that leverages reinforcement learning to enhance embodied reasoning specifically for robot control. Robot-R1 learns to predict the next keypoint state required for task completion, conditioned on the current scene image and environment metadata derived from expert demonstrations. Inspired by the DeepSeek-R1 learning approach, Robot-R1 samples reasoning-based responses and reinforces those that lead to more accurate predictions. Our experiments show that models trained with Robot-R1 outperform SFT methods on embodied reasoning tasks. Despite having only 7B parameters, Robot-R1 even surpasses GPT-4o on reasoning tasks related to low-level action control, such as spatial and movement reasoning.


Consistency of Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Second-Order Elliptic Equations

Neural Information Processing Systems

The physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are widely applied in solving differential equations. However, few studies have discussed their consistency. In this paper, we consider the consistency of PINNs when applied to second-order elliptic equations with Dirichlet boundary conditions. We first provide the necessary and sufficient condition for the consistency of the physics-informed kernel gradient flow algorithm, and then as a direct corollary, when the neural network is sufficiently wide, we obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the consistency of PINNs based on the neural tangent kernel theory. We also estimate the non-asymptotic loss bounds of physics-informed kernel gradient flow and PINN under suitable stronger assumptions. Finally, these results inspires us to construct a notable pathological example where the PINN method is inconsistent.


Do Language Models Use Their Depth Efficiently?

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modern LLMs are increasingly deep, and depth correlates with performance, albeit with diminishing returns. However, do these models use their depth efficiently? Do they compose more features to create higher-order computations that are impossible in shallow models, or do they merely spread the same kinds of computation out over more layers? To address these questions, we analyze the residual stream of the Llama 3.1, Qwen 3, and OLMo 2 family of models. We find: First, comparing the output of the sublayers to the residual stream reveals that layers in the second half contribute much less than those in the first half, with a clear phase transition between the two halves.


Improving LLM General Preference Alignment via Optimistic Online Mirror Descent

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Many existing alignment approaches rely on the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumption, which assumes the existence of a ground-truth reward for each prompt-response pair. However, this assumption can be overly restrictive when modeling complex human preferences. In this paper, we drop the BT model assumption and study LLM alignment under general preferences, formulated as a two-player game. Drawing on theoretical insights from learning in games, we integrate optimistic online mirror descent into our alignment framework to approximate the Nash policy. Theoretically, we demonstrate that our approach achieves an $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1})$ bound on the duality gap, improving upon the previous $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/2})$ result. Meanwhile, it enjoys a linear convergence rate in the last iterate, a property not achieved by previous methods. More importantly, we implement our method and show through experiments that it outperforms state-of-the-art RLHF algorithms across multiple representative benchmarks.