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Activation-Informed Merging of Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Model merging, a method that combines the parameters and embeddings of multiple fine-tuned large language models (LLMs), offers a promising approach to enhance model performance across various tasks while maintaining computational efficiency. This paper introduces Activation-Informed Merging (AIM), a technique that integrates the information from the activation space of LLMs into the merging process to improve performance and robustness. AIM is designed as a flexible, complementary solution that is applicable to any existing merging method. It aims to preserve critical weights from the base model, drawing on principles from continual learning (CL) and model compression. Utilizing a task-agnostic calibration set, AIM selectively prioritizes essential weights during merging. We empirically demonstrate that AIM significantly enhances the performance of merged models across multiple benchmarks. Our findings suggest that considering the activationspace information can provide substantial advancements in the model merging strategies for LLMs with up to 40% increase in benchmark performance.


Dynamics-Aligned Latent Imagination in Contextual World Models for Zero-Shot Generalization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Contextual Markov Decision Processes (cMDP) model this challenge, but existing methods often require explicit context variables (e.g., friction, gravity), limiting their use when contexts are latent or hard to measure. We introduce Dynamics-Aligned Latent Imagination (DALI), a framework integrated within the Dreamer architecture that infers latent context representations from agent-environment interactions. By training a self-supervised encoder to predict forward dynamics, DALI generates actionable representations conditioning the world model and policy, bridging perception and control. We theoretically prove this encoder is essential for efficient context inference and robust generalization. DALI's latent space enables counterfactual consistency: Perturbing a gravity-encoding dimension alters imagined rollouts in physically plausible ways. On challenging cMDP benchmarks, DALI achieves significant gains over contextunaware baselines, often surpassing context-aware baselines in extrapolation tasks, enabling zero-shot generalization to unseen contextual variations.


ProxySPEX: Inference-Efficient Interpretability via Sparse Feature Interactions in LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance by capturing complex interactions between input features. To identify these interactions, most existing approaches require enumerating all possible combinations of features up to a given order, causing them to scale poorly with the number of inputs n. Recently, Kang et al. (2025) proposed SPEX, an information-theoretic approach that uses interaction sparsity to scale to n 103 features. SPEX greatly improves upon prior methods but requires tens of thousands of model inferences, which can be prohibitive for large models. In this paper, we observe that LLM feature interactions are often hierarchical--higher-order interactions are accompanied by their lower-order subsets--which enables more efficient discovery.


Detoxifying Large Language Models via Autoregressive Reward Guided Representation Editing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks, yet they remain vulnerable to generating toxic content, necessitating detoxification strategies to ensure safe and responsible deployment. Test-time detoxification methods, which typically introduce static or dynamic interventions into LLM representations, offer a promising solution due to their flexibility and minimal invasiveness. However, current approaches often suffer from imprecise interventions, primarily due to their insufficient exploration of the transition space between toxic and non-toxic outputs. To address this challenge, we propose Autoregressive Reward Guided Representation Editing (ARGRE), a novel testtime detoxification framework that explicitly models toxicity transitions within the latent representation space, enabling stable and precise reward-guided editing. ARGRE identifies non-toxic semantic directions and interpolates between toxic and non-toxic representations to reveal fine-grained transition trajectories. These trajectories transform sparse toxicity annotations into dense training signals, enabling the construction of an autoregressive reward model that delivers stable and precise editing guidance. At inference, the reward model guides an adaptive two-step editing process to obtain detoxified representations: it first performs directional steering based on expected reward gaps to shift representations toward non-toxic regions, followed by lightweight gradient-based refinements. Extensive experiments across 8 widely used LLMs show that ARGRE significantly outperforms leading baselines in effectiveness (-62.21%


Mixtures of Subspaces for Bandwidth Efficient Context Parallel Training

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pretraining language models with extended context windows enhances their ability to leverage rich information during generation. Existing methods split input sequences into chunks, broadcast them across multiple devices, and compute attention block by block which incurs significant communication overhead. While feasible in high-speed clusters, these methods are impractical for decentralized training over low-bandwidth connections. We propose a compression method for communication-efficient context parallelism in decentralized settings, achieving a remarkable compression rate of over 95%with negligible overhead and no loss in convergence. Our key insight is to exploit the intrinsic low-rank structure of activation outputs by dynamically constraining them to learned mixtures of subspaces via efficient reparameterizations. We demonstrate scaling billion-parameter decentralized models to context lengths exceeding 100Ktokens on networks as slow as 300Mbps, matching the wall-clock convergence speed of centralized models on 100Gbps interconnects.


WebGen-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Generating Interactive and Functional Websites from Scratch

Neural Information Processing Systems

LLM-based agents have demonstrated great potential in generating and managing code within complex codebases. In this paper, we introduce WebGen-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to measure an LLM-based agent's ability to create multifile website codebases from scratch. It contains diverse instructions for website generation, created through the combined efforts of human annotators and GPT4o. These instructions span three major categories and thirteen minor categories, encompassing nearly all important types of web applications. To assess the quality of the generated websites, we generate test cases targeting each functionality described in the instructions. These test cases are then manually filtered, refined, and organized to ensure accuracy, resulting in a total of 647 test cases. Each test case specifies an operation to be performed on the website and the expected outcome of the operation. To automate testing and improve reproducibility, we employ a powerful web-navigation agent to execute test cases on the generated websites and determine whether the observed responses align with the expected results. We evaluate three high-performance code-agent frameworks--Bolt.diy,


Why 1 + 1 < 1 in Visual Token Pruning: Beyond Naรฏve Integration via Multi-Objective Balanced Covering

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing visual token pruning methods target prompt alignment and visual preservation with static strategies, overlooking the varying relative importance of these objectives across tasks, which leads to inconsistent performance. To address this, we derive the first closed-form error bound for visual token pruning based on the Hausdorff distance, uniformly characterizing the contributions of both objectives. Moreover, leveraging ฯต-covering theory, we reveal an intrinsic trade-off between these objectives and quantify their optimal attainment levels under a fixed budget. To practically handle this trade-off, we propose Multi-Objective Balanced Covering (MoB), which reformulates visual token pruning as a bi-objective covering problem. In this framework, the attainment trade-off reduces to budget allocation via greedy radius trading. MoB offers a provable performance bound and linear scalability with respect to the number of input visual tokens, enabling adaptation to challenging pruning scenarios. Extensive experiments show that MoB preserves 96.4% of performance for LLaVA-1.5-7B using only 11.1% of the original visual tokens and accelerates LLaVA-Next-7B by 1.3-1.5 with negligible performance loss. Additionally, evaluations on Qwen2-VL and Video-LLaVA confirm that MoB integrates seamlessly into advanced MLLMs and diverse vision-language tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/YChenL/MoB.



Watermarking Autoregressive Image Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Watermarking the outputs of generative models has emerged as a promising approach for tracking their provenance. Despite significant interest in autoregressive image generation models and their potential for misuse, no prior work has attempted the first such to watermark approach their by adapting outputs language at the tok model en level.


DAPO: Improving Multi-Step Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models with Direct Advantage-Based Policy Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

The role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly significant. Despite the success of RL in many scenarios, there are still many challenges in improving the reasoning of LLMs. One key challenge is the sparse reward, which introduces more training variance in policy optimization and makes it difficult to obtain a good estimation for value function in Actor-Critic (AC) methods. To address these issues, we introduce Direct Advantage-Based Policy Optimization (DAPO), a novel step-level offline RL algorithm with theoretical guarantees for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Unlike response-level methods (such as DPO and GRPO) that the update directions of all reasoning steps are governed by the outcome reward uniformly, DAPO employs a critic function to provide step-level dense signals for policy optimization. Additionally, the actor and critic in DAPO are trained independently, ensuring that critic is a good estimation of true state value function and avoiding the co-training instability observed in standard AC methods. We train DAPO on mathematical and code problems and then evaluate its performance on multiple benchmarks. Our results show that DAPO can effectively enhance the mathematical and code capabilities on both SFT models and RL models, demonstrating the effectiveness of DAPO.