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Can MLLMs Absorb Math Reasoning Abilities from LLMs as Free Lunch?

Neural Information Processing Systems

Math reasoning has been one crucial ability of large language models (LLMs), where significant advancements have been achieved in recent years. However, most efforts focus on LLMs by curating high-quality annotation data and intricate training (or inference) paradigms, while the math reasoning performance of multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remains lagging behind. Since the MLLM typically consists of an LLM and vision block, we wonder: \textit{Can MLLMs directly absorb math reasoning abilities from off-the-shelf math LLMs without tuning?} Recent model-merging approaches may offer insights into this question. However, they overlook the alignment between the MLLM and LLM, where we find that there is a large gap between their parameter spaces, resulting in lower performance. Our empirical evidence reveals two key factors behind this issue: the identification of crucial reasoning-associated layers in the model and the mitigation of the gaps in parameter space. Based on the empirical insights, we propose \textbf{IP-Merging} that first \textbf{I}dentifies the reasoning-associated parameters in both MLLM and Math LLM, then \textbf{P}rojects them into the subspace of MLLM aiming to maintain the alignment, finally merges parameters in this subspace. IP-Merging is a tuning-free approach since parameters are directly adjusted. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our IP-Merging method can enhance the math reasoning ability of MLLMs directly from Math LLMs without compromising their other capabilities.


NEP: Autoregressive Image Editing via Next Editing Token Prediction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Text-guided image editing involves modifying a source image based on a language instruction and, typically, requires changes to only small local regions. However, existing approaches generate the entire target image rather than selectively regenerate only the intended editing areas. This results in (1) unnecessary computational costs and (2) a bias toward reconstructing non-editing regions, which compromises the quality of the intended edits. To resolve these limitations, we propose to formulate image editing as $\textbf{N}$ext $\textbf{E}$diting-token $\textbf{P}$rediction (NEP) based on autoregressive image generation, where only regions that need to be edited are regenerated, thus avoiding unintended modification to the non-editing areas. To enable any-region editing, we propose to pre-train an any-order autoregressive text-to-image (T2I) model. Once trained, it is capable of zero-shot image editing and can be easily adapted to NEP for image editing, which achieves a new state-of-the-art on widely used image editing benchmarks. Moreover, our model naturally supports test-time scaling (TTS) through iteratively refining its generation in a zero-shot manner.


Trust, But Verify: A Self-Verification Approach to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Neural Information Processing Systems

However, a prevalent issue is ``superficial self-reflection'', where models fail to robustly verify their own outputs. We introduce RISE (Reinforcing Reasoning with Self-Verification), a novel online RL framework designed to tackle this. RISE explicitly and simultaneously trains an LLM to improve both its problem-solving and self-verification abilities within a single, integrated RL process. The core mechanism involves leveraging verifiable rewards from an outcome verifier to provide on-the-fly feedback for both solution generation and self-verification tasks. In each iteration, the model generates solutions, then critiques its own on-policy generated solutions, with both trajectories contributing to the policy update. Extensive experiments on diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that RISE consistently improves model's problem-solving accuracy while concurrently fostering strong self-verification skills. Our analyses highlight the advantages of online verification and the benefits of increased verification compute.


SAFEx: Analyzing Vulnerabilities of MoE-Based LLMs via Stable Safety-critical Expert Identification

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures achieve efficiency and scalability, yet their routing mechanisms introduce safety alignment challenges insufficiently addressed by techniques developed for dense models. In this work, the MoE-specific safety risk of positional vulnerability--that safety-aligned behaviors rely on specific expert modules--is formalized and systematically analyzed. An analytical framework, SAFEx, is presented to robustly identify, characterize, and validate safety-critical experts via a stability-based expert selection procedure, and to decompose them into two functional groups: the Harmful Content Detection Group (HCDG), which specializes in identifying and recognizing harmful content within user inputs, and the Harmful Response Control Group (HRCG), which specializes in controlling and enforcing model behaviors to generate appropriate safety responses. Expert-level interventions are conducted to probe causality and to test mitigation. Targeted masking of SAFEx-selected experts reveals that safety behavior is highly concentrated. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, configured with 48 MoE-FFN layers and 128 experts per layer under top-8 routing (48 128=6,144 experts in total), disabling 12 selected experts reduces the refusal rate by 22%. In addition, lightweight adaptation is performed using LoRA under three configurations--the HRCG, the union of HCDG and HRCG, and all experts--and the resulting updates are composed through negative weight merging targeted at the HRCG, leading to improved refusal under adversarial prompts without full-model retraining. These results establish positional vulnerability as a distinct MoE-specific safety challenge and provide a practical, compute-efficient pathway for expert-level safety interventions within routed architectures.


Taming generative video models for zero-shot optical flow extraction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Extracting optical flow from videos remains a core computer vision problem. Motivated by the recent success of large general-purpose models, we ask whether frozen self-supervised video models trained only to predict future frames can be prompted, without fine-tuning, to output flow. Prior attempts to read out depth or illumination from video generators required fine-tuning; that strategy is ill-suited for flow, where labeled data is scarce and synthetic datasets suffer from a sim-to-real gap. Inspired by the Counterfactual World Model (CWM) paradigm, which can obtain point-wise correspondences by injecting a small tracer perturbation into a next-frame predictor and tracking its propagation, we extend this idea to generative video models for zero-shot flow extraction. We explore several popular architectures and find that successful zero-shot flow extraction in this manner is aided by three model properties: (1) distributional prediction of future frames (avoiding blurry or noisy outputs); (2) factorized latents that treat each spatio-temporal patch independently; and (3) random-access decoding that can condition on any subset of future pixels. These properties are uniquely present in the recently introduced Local Random Access Sequence (LRAS) architecture. Building on LRAS, we propose KL-tracing: a novel test-time inference procedure that injects a localized perturbation into the first frame, rolls out the model one step, and computes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between perturbed and unperturbed predictive distributions. Without any flow-specific fine-tuning, our method is competitive with state-of-the-art, task-specific models on the real-world TAP-Vid DAVIS benchmark and the synthetic TAP-Vid Kubric. Our results show that counterfactual prompting of controllable generative video models is an effective alternative to supervised or photometric-loss methods for high-quality flow.


FGBench: A Dataset and Benchmark for Molecular Property Reasoning at Functional Group-Level in Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have gained significant attention in chemistry. However, most existing datasets center on molecular-level property prediction and overlook the role of fine-grained functional group (FG) information. Incorporating FG-level data can provide valuable prior knowledge that links molecular structures with textual descriptions, which can be used to build more interpretable, structure-aware LLMs for reasoning on molecule-related tasks. Moreover, LLMs can learn from such fine-grained information to uncover hidden relationships between specific functional groups and molecular properties, thereby advancing molecular design and drug discovery. Here, we introduce FGBench, a dataset comprising 625K molecular property reasoning problems with functional group information. Functional groups are precisely annotated and localized within the molecule, which ensures the dataset's interoperability thereby facilitating further multimodal applications. FGBench includes both regression and classification tasks on 245 different functional groups across three categories for molecular property reasoning: (1) single functional group impacts, (2) multiple functional group interactions, and (3) direct molecular comparisons. In the benchmark of state-of-the-art LLMs on 7K curated data, the results indicate that current LLMs struggle with FG-level property reasoning, highlighting the need to enhance reasoning capabilities in LLMs for chemistry tasks. We anticipate that the methodology employed in FGBench to construct datasets with functional group-level information will serve as a foundational framework for generating new question-answer pairs, enabling LLMs to better understand fine-grained molecular structure-property relationships.


OWMM-Agent: Open World Mobile Manipulation With Multi-modal Agentic Data Synthesis

Neural Information Processing Systems

The rapid progress of navigation, manipulation, and vision models has made mobile manipulators capable in many specialized tasks. However, the open-world mobile manipulation (OWMM) task remains a challenge due to the need for generalization to open-ended instructions and environments, as well as the systematic complexity to integrate high-level decision making with low-level robot control based on both global scene understanding and current agent state. To address this complexity, we propose a novel multi-modal agent architecture that maintains multi-view scene frames and agent states for decision-making and controls the robot by function calling. A second challenge is the hallucination from domain shift. To enhance the agent performance, we further introduce an agentic data synthesis pipeline for the OWMM task to adapt the VLM model to our task domain with instruction fine-tuning. We highlight our fine-tuned OWMM-VLM as the first dedicated foundation model for mobile manipulators with global scene understanding, robot state tracking, and multi-modal action generation in a unified model. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model achieves SOTA performance compared to other foundation models including GPT-4o and strong zero-shot generalization in real world. The project page is at https://hhyhrhy.github.io/owmm-agent-project.


FACT: Mitigating Inconsistent Hallucinations in LLMs via Fact-Driven Alternating Code-Text Training

Neural Information Processing Systems

Inconsistent hallucinations remain a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), undermining the accuracy and reliability of fact-based reasoning in real-world applications. Existing approaches often rely on task-specific training or adaptation, such as hand-crafted synthetic datasets for domain tasks or solutions mainly focused on numerical reasoning, thereby limiting generalizability to broader, unseen NLP tasks. Inspired by the structural rigor and logical consistency of programming languages, we observe that fact-based texts can be mapped to programming structures due to their inherent patterns. We further propose FACT, a novel Fact-driven Alternating Code-text Training framework that alternates between text-to-code and code-to-text prediction. FACT is the first task-agnostic paradigm that embeds code and natural language in a shared semantic space, thereby transferring the logical consistency of code to LLM outputs in NLP tasks. Experiments show that with only a small subset of Wiki-40B-en for training, FACT reduces inconsistent hallucinations by 2.7%-8.0%


AutoToM: Scaling Model-based Mental Inference via Automated Agent Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's minds based on their behavior, is key to developing socially intelligent agents. Current approaches to ToM reasoning either rely on prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), which are prone to systematic errors, or use handcrafted, rigid agent models for model-based inference, which are more robust but fail to generalize across domains. In this work, we introduce, an automated agent modeling method for scalable, robust, and interpretable mental inference. Given a ToM problem, first proposes an initial agent model and then performs automated Bayesian inverse planning based on this model, leveraging an LLM backend.


Silencer: From Discovery to Mitigation of Self-Bias in LLM-as-Benchmark-Generator

Neural Information Processing Systems

LLM-as-Benchmark-Generator methods have been widely studied as a supplement to human annotators for scalable evaluation, while the potential biases within this paradigm remain underexplored. In this work, we systematically define and validate the phenomenon of inflated performance in models evaluated on their self-generated benchmarks, referred to as self-bias, and attribute it to sub-biases arising from question domain, language style, and wrong labels. On this basis, we propose Silencer, a general framework that leverages the heterogeneity between multiple generators at both the sample and benchmark levels to neutralize bias and generate high-quality, self-bias-silenced benchmark. Experimental results across various settings demonstrate that Silencer can suppress self-bias to near zero, significantly improve evaluation effectiveness of the generated benchmark (with an average improvement from 0.655 to 0.833 in Pearson correlation with high-quality human-annotated benchmark), while also exhibiting strong generalizability.