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SteerConf: Steering LLMs for Confidence Elicitation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across diverse domains but often suffer from overconfidence, limiting their reliability in critical applications. We propose SteerConf, a novel framework that systematically steers LLMs' confidence scores to improve their calibration and reliability. SteerConf introduces three key components: (1) a steering prompt strategy that guides LLMs to produce confidence scores in specified directions (e.g., conservative or optimistic) by leveraging prompts with varying steering levels; (2) a steered confidence consistency measure that quantifies alignment across multiple steered confidences to enhance calibration; and (3) a steered confidence calibration method that aggregates confidence scores using consistency measures and applies linear quantization for answer selection. SteerConf operates without additional training or fine-tuning, making it broadly applicable to existing LLMs. Experiments on seven benchmarks spanning professional knowledge, common sense, ethics, and reasoning tasks, using advanced LLM models (GPT-3.5, LLaMA 3, GPT-4), demonstrate that SteerConf significantly outperforms existing methods, often by a significant margin. Our findings highlight the potential of steering the confidence of LLMs to enhance their reliability for safer deployment in real-world applications.


Mamba Modulation On the Length Generalization of Mamba

Neural Information Processing Systems

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism in Transformer models has motivated the development of alternative architectures with sub-quadratic scaling, such as state-space models. Among these, Mamba has emerged as a leading architecture, achieving state-of-the-art results across a range of language modeling tasks. However, Mambas performance significantly deteriorates when applied to contexts longer than those seen during pre-training, revealing a sharp sensitivity to context length extension. Through detailed analysis, we attribute this limitation to the out-of-distribution behavior of its state-space dynamics, particularly within the parameterization of the state transition matrix A. Unlike recent works which attribute this sensitivity to the vanished accumulation of discretization time steps, exp( PN t=1 t), we establish a connection between state convergence behavior as the input length approaches infinity and the spectrum of the transition matrix A, offering a well-founded explanation of its role in length extension. Next, to overcome this challenge, we propose an approach that applies spectrum scaling to pre-trained Mamba models to enable robust long-context generalization by selectively modulating the spectrum of Amatrices in each layer. We show that this can significantly improve performance in settings where simply modulating t fails, validating our insights and providing avenues for better length generalization of state-space models with structured transition matrices.


1bf3dbbd6346f50627e2ab1795f90435-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the foundation for vision generative models, but their scalability is limited by the high cost of hyperparameter (HP) tuning at large scales. Recently, Maximal Update Parametrization (ยตP) was proposed for vanilla Transformers, which enables stable HP transfer from small to large language models, and dramatically reduces tuning costs. However, it remains unclear whether ยตP of vanilla Transformers extends to diffusion Transformers, which differ architecturally and objectively. In this work, we generalize standard ยตP to diffusion Transformers and validate its effectiveness through large-scale experiments. First, we rigorously prove that ยตP of mainstream diffusion Transformers, including DiT, U-ViT, PixArt-ฮฑ, and MMDiT, aligns with that of the vanilla Transformer, enabling the direct application of existing ยตP methodologies. Leveraging this result, we systematically demonstrate that DiT-ยตP enjoys robust HP transferability. Notably, DiT-XL-2-ยตP with transferred learning rate achieves 2.9 faster convergence than the original DiT-XL-2.



LoRO: Real-Time on-Device Secure Inference for LLMs via TEE-Based Low Rank Obfuscation

Neural Information Processing Systems

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained remarkable success, they are consistently at risk of being stolen when deployed on untrusted edge devices. As a solution, TEE-based secure inference has been proposed to protect valuable model property. However, we identify a statistical vulnerability in existing protection methods, and furtherly compromise their security guarantees by proposed Model Stealing Attack with Prior. To eliminate this vulnerability, LoRO is presented in this paper, which leverages dense mask to completely obfuscate parameters. LoRO includes two innovations: (1) Low Rank Mask, which uses low-rank factors to generate dense masks efficiently. The computing complexity in TEE is hence reduced by an exponential amount to achieve inference speed up, while providing robust model confidentiality.


Matching Markets Meet LLMs: Algorithmic Reasoning with Ranked Preferences

Neural Information Processing Systems

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven progress in reasoning tasks, from program synthesis to scientific hypothesis generation, yet their ability to handle ranked preferences and structured algorithms in combinatorial domains remains underexplored. We study matching markets, a core framework behind applications like resource allocation and ride-sharing, which require reconciling individual ranked preferences to ensure stable outcomes. We evaluate seven stateof-the-art models on a hierarchy of preference-based reasoning tasks--ranging from stable-matching generation to instability detection, instability resolution, and finegrained preference queries--to systematically expose their logical and algorithmic limitations in handling ranked inputs. Surprisingly, even top-performing models with advanced reasoning struggle to resolve instability in large markets, often failing to identify blocking pairs or execute algorithms iteratively. We further show that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA) significantly improves performance in small markets, but fails to bring about a similar improvement in large instances, suggesting the need for more sophisticated strategies to improve LLMs' reasoning with larger-context inputs.


Synergy over Discrepancy: APartition-Based Approach to Multi-Domain LLMFine-Tuning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive generalization abilities, yet adapting them effectively across multiple heterogeneous domains remains challenging due to inter-domain interference. To overcome this challenge, we propose a partition-based multi-stage fine-tuning framework designed to exploit inter-domain synergies while minimizing negative transfer.


On the Empirical Power of Goodness-of-Fit Tests in Watermark Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) raise concerns about content authenticity and integrity because they can generate human-like text at scale. Text watermarks, which embed detectable statistical signals into generated text, offer a provable way to verify content origin. Many detection methods rely on pivotal statistics that are i.i.d.


Unextractable Protocol Models: Collaborative Training and Inference without Weight Materialization

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider a decentralized setup in which the participants collaboratively train and serve a large neural network, and where each participant only processes a subset of the model. In this setup, we explore the possibility of unmaterializable weights, where a full weight set is never available to any one participant. We introduce Unextractable Protocol Models (UPMs): a training and inference framework that leverages the sharded model setup to ensure model shards (i.e., subsets) held by participants are incompatible at different time steps. UPMs periodically inject timevarying, random, invertible transforms at participant boundaries; preserving the overall network function yet rendering cross-time assemblies incoherent. On Qwen2.5-0.5B and Llama-3.2-1B, 10 000 transforms leave FP32 perplexity unchanged ( PPL< 0.01; Jensen-Shannon drift < 4 10 5), and we show how to control growth for lower precision datatypes. Applying a transform every 30s adds 3% latency, 0.1% bandwidth, and 10% GPU-memory overhead at inference, while training overhead falls to 1.6% time and < 1% memory. We consider several attacks, showing that the requirements of direct attacks are impractical and easy to defend against, and that gradient-based fine-tuning of stitched partitions consumes 60% of the tokens required to train from scratch. By enabling models to be collaboratively trained yet not extracted, UPMs make it practical to embed programmatic incentive mechanisms in community-driven decentralized training.


1af83ab66b4f07a3f55788e67dab5782-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive applications such as virtual and augmented reality, where a first-person (egocentric) view captured by head-mounted cameras serves as key input. While this view offers fine-grained cues about user attention and hand-object interactions, its narrow field of view and lack of global context often lead to failures on spatially or contextually demanding queries. To address this, we introduce a framework that augments egocentric inputs with third-person (exocentric) views, providing complementary information such as global scene layout and object visibility to LVLMs. We present E3VQA, the first benchmark for multi-view question answering with 4K high-quality question-answer pairs grounded in synchronized ego-exo image pairs. Additionally, we propose M3CoT, a training-free prompting technique that constructs a unified scene representation by integrating scene graphs from three complementary perspectives. M3CoT enables LVLMs to reason more effectively across views, yielding consistent performance gains (4.84% for GPT4o and 5.94% for Gemini 2.0 Flash) over a recent CoT baseline. Our extensive evaluation reveals key strengths and limitations of LVLMs in multi-view reasoning and highlights the value of leveraging both egocentric and exocentric inputs. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/Leeinsu1/