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Towards Compositional Model Editing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Model editing has become a de-facto practice to address hallucinations and outdated knowledge of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods are predominantly evaluated in isolation, i.e., one edit at a time, failing to consider a critical scenario of compositional model editing, where multiple edits must be integrated and jointly utilized to answer real-world multifaceted questions. For instance, in medical domains, if one edit informs LLMs that COVID-19 causes "fever" and another that it causes "loss of taste", a qualified compositional editor should enable LLMs to answer the question "What are the symptoms of COVID-19?" with both "fever" and "loss of taste" (and potentially more). In this work, we define and systematically benchmark this compositional model editing (CME) task, identifying three key undesirable issues that existing methods struggle with: knowledge loss, incorrect preceding and knowledge sinking. To overcome these issues, we propose A3E, a novel compositional editor that (1) adaptively combines and adaptively regularizes pre-trained foundation knowledge in LLMs in the stage of edit training and (2) adaptively merges multiple edits to better meet compositional needs in the stage of edit composing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that A3E improves the composability by at least 22.45% without sacrificing the performance of non-compositional model editing.


3d3a9e085540c65dd3e5731361f9320e-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) has emerged as a ubiquitous strategy for specializing large language models (LLMs), yet it implicitly assumes a single, coherent "groundtruth" preference behind all human-written instructions. In practice, annotators differ in the styles, emphases, and granularities they prefer, introducing preference bias that can erode both robustness and generalization. We propose Dynamic Cross-Layer Preference Correction (DCPC), it couples (i) a preference-sensitive similarity estimator that detects mismatched instructional cues, (ii) cross-layer prefix alignment to reconcile semantic representations across transformer layers, and (iii) a lightweight Preference Correction Module (PCM) that dynamically adjusts hidden states to honor the inferred dominant preference. On five Super/GLUE tasks and the ALPACA set--plus six preference-shifted variants--DCPC boosts accuracy/F1-EM by 4.0-6.7 points and gpt-score by +0.7, while cutting inter-seed variance up to 35% on LlaMA-2 13B and Mistral-7B, setting a new state of the art for robust instruction tuning.


Bohdi: Heterogeneous LLMFusion with Automatic Data Exploration

Neural Information Processing Systems

While promising, existing methods suffer from two major limitations: 1) reliance on real data from limited domain for knowledge fusion, preventing the target LLM from fully acquiring knowledge across diverse domains, and 2) fixed data allocation proportions across domains, failing to dynamically adjust according to the target LLM's varying capabilities across domains, leading to a capability imbalance. To overcome these limitations, we propose Bohdi, a synthetic-data-only heterogeneous LLM fusion framework. Through the organization of knowledge domains into a hierarchical tree structure, Bohdi enables automatic domain exploration and multi-domain data generation through multimodel collaboration, thereby comprehensively extracting knowledge from source LLMs. By formalizing domain expansion and data sampling proportion allocation on the knowledge tree as a Hierarchical Multi-Armed Bandit problem, Bohdi leverages the designed DynaBranches mechanism to adaptively adjust sampling proportions based on the target LLM's performance feedback across domains. Integrated with our proposed Introspection-Rebirth (IR) mechanism, DynaBranches dynamically tracks capability shifts during target LLM's updates via Sliding Window Binomial Likelihood Ratio Testing (SWBLRT), further enhancing its online adaptation capability. Comparative experimental results on a comprehensive suite of benchmarks demonstrate that Bohdi significantly outperforms existing baselines on multiple target LLMs, exhibits higher data efficiency, and virtually eliminates the imbalance in the target LLM's capabilities. Our code is available at Bohdi.


as Mamba [16(a, 11) ],MRWKVixed [31Do, 32, 33m],aiGated n PreDeltaNet-Trai[51].ningThese architectures primarily inherit (b) Limited Domain Pre-Training

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pre-trained language models represented by the Transformer have been proven to possess strong base capabilities, and the representative self-attention mechanism in the Transformer has become a classic in sequence modeling architectures. Different from the work of proposing sequence modeling architecture to improve the efficiency of attention mechanism, this work focuses on the impact of sequence modeling architectures on base capabilities. Specifically, our concern is: How exactly do sequence modeling architectures affect the base capabilities of pretrained language models? In this work, we first point out that the mixed domain pre-training setting commonly adopted in existing architecture design works fails to adequately reveal the differences in base capabilities among various architectures. To address this, we propose a limited domain pre-training setting with out-of-distribution testing, which successfully uncovers significant differences in base capabilities among architectures at an early stage. Next, we analyze the base capabilities of stateful sequence modeling architectures, and find that they exhibit significant degradation in base capabilities compared to the Transformer. Then, through a series of architecture component analysis, we summarize a key architecture design principle: A sequence modeling architecture need possess full-sequence arbitrary selection capability to avoid degradation in base capabilities. Finally, we empirically validate this principle using an extremely simple Top-1 element selection architecture and further generalize it to a more practical Top-1 chunk selection architecture. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed sequence modeling architecture design principle and suggest that our work can serve as a valuable reference for future architecture improvements and novel designs.


Self-alignment of Large Video Language Models with Refined Regularized Preference Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite recent advances in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs), they still struggle with fine-grained temporal understanding, hallucinate, and often make simple mistakes on even simple video question-answering tasks, all of which pose significant challenges to their safe and reliable deployment in real-world applications. To address these limitations, we propose a self-alignment framework that enables LVLMs to learn from their own errors. Our proposed framework first obtains a training set of preferred and non-preferred response pairs, where non-preferred responses are generated by incorporating common error patterns that often occur due to inadequate spatio-temporal understanding, spurious correlations between co-occurring concepts, and over-reliance on linguistic cues while neglecting the vision modality, among others. To facilitate self-alignment of LVLMs with the constructed preferred and non-preferred response pairs, we introduce Refined Regularized Preference Optimization (RRPO), a novel preference optimization method that utilizes sub-sequence-level refined rewards and token-wise KL regularization to address the limitations of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We demonstrate that RRPO achieves more precise alignment and more stable training compared to DPO.


3D-SynthPlace Dataset OptiScene Room Editing Synthetic Instructions Layout JsonUser Input Open Source LLM There is a bedroom with Add 1 stylish [Objects ]{ 1 Black bed: {

Neural Information Processing Systems

Automatic indoor layout generation has attracted increasing attention due to its potential in interior design, virtual environment construction, and embodied AI. Existing methods fall into two categories: prompt-driven approaches that leverage proprietary LLM services (e.g., GPTAPIs), and learning-based methods trained on layout data upon diffusion-based models. Prompt-driven methods often suffer from methods spatial are typically inconsistenc constrained y and high by coarse computational relational cos graphs ts, while and limited learning-based datasets, restricting their generalization to diverse room categories.


Beyond Single-Task: Robust Multi-Task Length Generalization for LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Length generalization--the ability to solve problems longer than those seen during training--remains a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). Previous work modifies positional encodings (PEs) and data formats to improve length generalization on specific symbolic tasks such as addition and sorting. However, these approaches are fundamentally limited to special tasks, often degrading general language performance. Furthermore, they are typically evaluated on small transformers trained from scratch on single tasks and can cause performance drop when applied during post-training stage of practical LLMs with general capabilities. Hu et al. [19] proposed Rule-Following Fine-Tuning (RFFT) to improve length generalization in the post-training stage of LLMs.


Physics of Language Models: Part 4.1, Architecture Design and the Magic of Canon Layers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Understanding architectural differences in language models is challenging, especially at academic-scale pretraining (e.g., 1.3B parameters, 100B tokens), where results are often dominated by noise and randomness. To overcome this, we introduce controlled synthetic pretraining tasks that isolate and evaluate core model capabilities. Within this framework, we discover Canon layers: lightweight architectural components--named after the musical term "canon"--that promote horizontal information flow across neighboring tokens. Canon layers compute weighted sums of nearby token representations and integrate seamlessly into Transformers, linear attention, state-space models, or any sequence architecture.


OmniDraft: A cross-vocabulary, online adaptive drafter for on-device speculative decoding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Speculative decoding generally dictates having a small, efficient draft model that is either pretrained or distilled offline to a particular target model series, for instance, Llama or Qwen models. However, within online deployment settings, there are two major challenges: 1) usage of a target model that is incompatible with the draft model; 2) expectation of latency improvements over usage and time. In this work, we propose OmniDraft, a unified framework that enables a single draft model to operate with any target model and adapt dynamically to user data. We introduce an online n-gram cache with hybrid distillation fine-tuning to address the cross-vocabulary mismatch across draft and target models; and further improve decoding speed by leveraging adaptive drafting techniques. OmniDraft is particularly suitable for on-device LLM applications where model cost, efficiency and user customization are the major points of contention. This further highlights the need to tackle the above challenges and motivates the "one drafter for all" paradigm.


UniTraj: Learning a Universal Trajectory Foundation Model from Billion-Scale Worldwide Traces

Neural Information Processing Systems

Building a universal trajectory foundation model is a promising solution to address the limitations of existing trajectory modeling approaches, such as task specificity, regional dependency, and data sensitivity.