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 Deep Learning


Understanding and Enhancing Mask-Based Pretraining towards Universal Representations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Mask-based pretraining has become a cornerstone of modern large-scale models across language, vision, and recently biology. Despite its empirical success, its role and limits in learning data representations have been unclear. In this work, we show that the behavior of mask-based pretraining can be directly characterized by test risk in high-dimensional minimum-norm ("ridge-less") linear regression, without relying on further model specifications.


PlanU: Large Language Model Reasoning through Planning under Uncertainty

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored across a range of reasoning tasks. However, LLMs sometimes struggle with reasoning tasks under uncertainty that are relatively easy for humans, such as planning actions in stochastic environments. The adoption of LLMs for reasoning is impeded by uncertainty challenges, such as LLM uncertainty and environmental uncertainty. LLM uncertainty arises from the stochastic sampling process inherent to LLMs. Most LLM-based Decision-Making (LDM) approaches address LLM uncertainty through multiple reasoning chains or search trees. However, these approaches overlook environmental uncertainty, which leads to poor performance in environments with stochastic state transitions.


HELM: Hyperbolic Large Language Models via Mixture-of-Curvature Experts

Neural Information Processing Systems

Frontier large language models (LLMs) have shown great success in text modeling and generation tasks across domains. However, natural language exhibits inherent semantic hierarchies and nuanced geometric structure, which current LLMs do not capture completely owing to their reliance on Euclidean operations such as dotproducts and norms. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that not respecting the underlying geometry of token embeddings leads to training instabilities and degradation of generative capabilities. These findings suggest that shifting to non-Euclidean geometries can better align language models with the underlying geometry of text. We thus propose to operate fully in Hyperbolic space, known for its expansive, scale-free, and low-distortion properties.


Demystifying Network Foundation Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

This work presents a systematic investigation into the latent knowledge encoded within Network Foundation Models (NFMs). Different from existing efforts, we focus on hidden representations analysis rather than pure downstream task performance and analyze NFMs through a three-part evaluation: Embedding Geometry Analysis to assess representation space utilization, Metric Alignment Assessment to measure correspondence with domain-expert features, and Causal Sensitivity Testing to evaluate robustness to protocol perturbations. Using five diverse network datasets spanning controlled and real-world environments, we evaluate four stateof-the-art NFMs, revealing that they all exhibit significant anisotropy, inconsistent feature sensitivity patterns, an inability to separate the high-level context, payload dependency, and other properties. Our work identifies numerous limitations across all models and demonstrates that addressing them can significantly improve model performance (up to 0.35 increase in F1 scores without architectural changes).


WKV-sharing embraced random shuffle RWKV high-order modeling for pan-sharpening

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pan-sharpening aims to generate a spatially and spectrally enriched multi-spectral image by integrating information from low-resolution multi-spectral image and texture-rich panchromatic counterpart. In this work, we propose a WKVsharing embraced random shuffle RWKV high-order modeling paradigm for pansharpening from Bayesian perspective, coupled with random weight manifold distribution training strategy derived from Functional theory to regularize the solution space adhering to the following principles: 1) Random-shuffle RWKV. Recently, the Vision RWKV model, with its inherent linear complexity in global modeling, has inspired us to explore its untapped potential in pan-sharpening tasks. However, its attention mechanism, relying on a recurrent bidirectional scanning strategy, suffers from biased effects and demands significant processing time. To address this, we propose a novel Bayesian-inspired scanning strategy called Random Shuffle, complemented by a theoretically-sound inverse shuffle to preserve information coordination invariance, effectively eliminating biases associated with fixed sequence scanning.


SOMBRL: Scalable and Optimistic Model-Based RL

Neural Information Processing Systems

We address the challenge of efficient exploration in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), where the system dynamics are unknown and the RL agent must learn directly from online interactions. We propose Scalable and Optimistic MBRL (SOMBRL), an approach based on the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty. SOMBRL learns an uncertainty-aware dynamics model and greedily maximizes a weighted sum of the extrinsic reward and the agent's epistemic uncertainty. SOMBRL is compatible with any policy optimizers or planners, and under common regularity assumptions on the system, we show that SOMBRL has sublinear regret for nonlinear dynamics in the (i) finite-horizon, (ii) discounted infinite-horizon, and (iii) non-episodic settings. Additionally, SOMBRL offers a flexible and scalable solution for principled exploration. We evaluate SOMBRL on state-based and visual-control environments, where it displays strong performance across all tasks and baselines. We also evaluate SOMBRL on a dynamic RC car hardware and show SOMBRL outperforms the state-of-the-art, illustrating the benefits of principled exploration for MBRL.


STAR: ABenchmark for Astronomical Star Fields Super-Resolution

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose STAR, a large-scale astronomical SR dataset containing 54,738 flux-consistent star field image pairs covering wide celestial regions. These pairs combine Hubble Space Telescope high-resolution observations with physically faithful low-resolution counterparts generated through a flux-preserving data generation pipeline, enabling systematic development of field-level ASR models. To further empower the ASR community, STAR provides a novel Flux Error (FE) to evaluate SR models in physical view. Leveraging this benchmark, we propose a Flux-Invariant Super Resolution (FISR) model that could accurately infer the flux-consistent highresolution images from input photometry, suppressing several SR state-of-the-art methods by 24.84% on a novel designed flux consistency metric, showing the priority of our method for astrophysics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and the value of our dataset. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GuoCheng12/STAR


JavisGPT: AUnified Multi-modal LLM for Sounding-Video Comprehension and Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper presents JavisGPT, the first unified multimodal large language model (MLLM) for joint audio-video (JAV) comprehension and generation. JavisGPT has a concise encoderLLM-decoder fusion and synchron architecture, y-aware which learnable has a queries SyncFusion to bridge module a pretrained for spatio-temporal JAV-DiT generator audio-video . This design enables temporally coherent video-audio understanding and generation from multimodal instructions. We design an effective three-stage training pipeline consisting of multimodal pretraining, audio-video fine-tuning, and large-scale instruction-tuning, to progressively build multimodal comprehension and generation from existing vision-language models. For instruction tuning, we construct JavisInst-Omni, a high-quality instruction dataset with over 200K GPT and generation -4o-curated scenarios.


Rethinking the Role of Verbatim Memorization in LLMPrivacy

Neural Information Processing Systems

Conventional wisdom in machine learning privacy research states that memorization directly implies a loss of privacy. In contrast, a well-generalized model only remembers distributional patterns and preserves privacy of its training data. In this work, we show that this relationship is much more complex for LLMs trained for chat, and depends heavily on how knowledge is encoded and manipulated. To this end, we fine-tune language models on synthetically generated biographical information including PIIs, and try to extract them in different ways after instruction fine-tuning. We find counter to conventional wisdom that better verbatim memorization does not necessarily increase data leakage via chat. We also find that it is easier to extract information via chat from an LLM that is better able to manipulate and process knowledge even if it is smaller, and that not all attributes are equally extractable. This suggests that the relationship between privacy, memorization and language understanding of LLMs is very intricate, and that examining memorization in isolation can lead to misleading conclusions.


Enhancing Privacy in Multimodal Federated Learning with Information Theory

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multimodal federated learning (MMFL) has gained increasing popularity due to its ability to leverage the correlation between various modalities, meanwhile preserving data privacy for different clients. However, recent studies show that correlation between modalities increase the vulnerability of federated learning against Gradient Inversion Attack (GIA). The complicated situation of MMFL privacy preserving can be summarized as follows: 1) different modality transmits different amounts of information, thus requires various protection strength; 2) correlation between modalities should be taken into account. This paper introduces an information theory perspective to analyze the leaked privacy in process of MMFL, and tries to propose a more reasonable protection method Sec-MMFL based on assessing different information leakage possibilities of each modality by conditional mutual information and adjust the corresponding protection strength. Moreover, we use mutual information to reduce the cross-modality information leakage in MMFL. Experiments have proven that our method can bring more balanced and comprehensive protection at an acceptable cost.