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RADAR: Benchmarking Language Models on Imperfect Tabular Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Language models (LMs) are increasingly being deployed to perform autonomous data analyses. However, their data awareness--the ability to recognize, reason over, and appropriately handle data artifacts such as missing values, outliers, and logical inconsistencies--remains underexplored. These artifacts are especially common in real-world tabular data and, if mishandled, can significantly compromise the validity of analytical conclusions. To address this gap, we present RADAR, a benchmark for systematically evaluating data-aware reasoning on tabular data. We develop a framework to simulate data artifacts via programmatic perturbations to enable targeted evaluation of model behavior. RADAR comprises 2980 table query pairs, grounded in real-world data spanning 9 domains and 5 data artifact types. In addition to evaluating artifact handling, RADAR systematically varies table size to study how reasoning performance holds when increasing table size. Our evaluation reveals that, despite decent performance on tables without data artifacts, frontier models degrade significantly when data artifacts are introduced, exposing critical gaps in their capacity for robust, data-aware analysis. Designed to be flexible and extensible, RADAR supports diverse perturbation types and controllable table sizes, offering a valuable resource for advancing tabular reasoning.1


Mysteries of the Deep: Role of Intermediate Representations in Out of Distribution Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for reliably deploying machine learning models in the wild. Yet, most methods treat large pre-trained models as monolithic encoders and rely solely on their final-layer representations for detection.


Learning Grouped Lattice Vector Quantizers for Low-Bit LLMCompression

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but typically require extensive computational resources and memory for inference. Post-training quantization (PTQ) can effectively reduce these demands by storing weights in lower bit-width formats. However, standard uniform quantization often leads to notable performance degradation, particularly in low-bit scenarios. In this work, we introduce a Grouped Lattice Vector Quantization (GLVQ) framework that assigns each group of weights a customized lattice codebook, defined by a learnable generation matrix. To address the non-differentiability of the quantization process, we adopt Babai rounding to approximate nearest-lattice-point search during training, which enables stable optimization of the generation matrices. Once trained, decoding reduces to a simple matrix-vector multiplication, yielding an efficient and practical quantization pipeline. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that our approach achieves a better trade-off between model size and accuracy compared to existing post-training quantization baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in deploying large models under stringent resource constraints. Our source code is available on GitHub repository: https://github.com/xzhang9308/GLVQ.


Beyond the Seen: Bounded Distribution Estimation for Open-Vocabulary Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Open-vocabulary learning requires modeling the data distribution in open environments, which consists of both seen-class and unseen-class data. Existing methods estimate the distribution in open environments using seen-class data, where the absence of unseen classes makes the estimation error inherently unidentifiable. Intuitively, learning beyond the seen classes is crucial for distribution estimation to bound the estimation error. We theoretically demonstrate that the distribution can be effectively estimated by generating unseen-class data, through which the estimation error is upper-bounded. Building on this theoretical insight, we propose a novel open-vocabulary learning method, which generates unseen-class data for estimating the distribution in open environments. The method consists of a class-domain-wise data generation pipeline and a distribution alignment algorithm. The data generation pipeline generates unseen-class data under the guidance of a hierarchical semantic tree and domain information inferred from the seen-class data, facilitating accurate distribution estimation. With the generated data, the distribution alignment algorithm estimates and maximizes the posterior probability to enhance generalization in open-vocabulary learning. Extensive experiments on 11datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches by up to 14%, highlighting its effectiveness and superiority.


Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network

Neural Information Processing Systems

Heterogeneous temporal graphs (HTGs) are ubiquitous data structures in the real world. Recently, to enhance representation learning on HTGs, numerous attentionbased neural networks have been proposed. Despite these successes, existing methods rely on a decoupled temporal and spatial learning paradigm, which weakens interactions of spatio-temporal information and leads to a high model complexity. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel learning paradigm for HTGs called Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network (SE-HTGNN). Specifically, we innovatively integrate temporal modeling into spatial learning via a novel dynamic attention mechanism, which substantially reduces model complexity while enhancing discriminative representation learning on HTGs. Additionally, to comprehensively and adaptively understand HTGs, we leverage large language models to prompt SE-HTGNN, enabling the model to capture the implicit properties of node types as prior knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SE-HTGNN achieves up to 10 speed-up over the state-of-the-art and latest baseline while maintaining the best forecasting accuracy.


impacts

Neural Information Processing Systems

The primary goal of PACBench is to catalyze the development of more capable, reliable, and physically grounded VLMs and their fine-tuned variants, often called VLAs for real-world robotic applications. Because VLA fine-tuning typically relies on low-level trajectory data rather than higher level reasoning, probing the underlying VLM's understanding of object Properties, action Affordances, and physical Constraints (PAC) gives us a grounded lens into the capabilities that downstream robotic policies will inherit. By diagnosing PAC weaknesses in the base model, researchers can distinguish whether a VLA's performance stems from genuine physical common sense or simply memorized motion patterns, and thus guide targeted improvements in model architectures, training methodologies, and dataset curation. In doing so, PACBench helps ensure that robotic systems become more predictable, less prone to errors from a lack of physical understanding, and better equipped for safe, effective collaboration in complex, everyday environments. By providing a fine-grained diagnostic tool, PACBench can help researchers and developers identify specific weaknesses in current models, thereby guiding targeted improvements in model architectures, training methodologies, and dataset curation. This, in turn, can lead to robotic systems that are more predictable, less prone to errors stemming from a lack of physical common sense, and better able to perform a wide range of useful tasks. The open release of our benchmark and its diverse data sources (including web-scale images, real-world humanoid captures, and simulated scenarios) is intended to foster broad community engagement and accelerate progress in this crucial area of AI. While any advancement in AI capabilities warrants ongoing consideration of its societal implications, our work focuses on enhancing the fundamental understanding and robustness of AI systems, which we see as a positive step towards more responsible AI development.


9ecafb09de180aaad7b7205be7eb24a4-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly pivotal for generalist robot manipulation, enabling tasks such as physical reasoning, policy generation, and failure detection. However, their proficiency in these high-level applications often assumes a deep understanding of low-level physical prerequisites, a capability that is largely unverified. To perform actions reliably, robots must comprehend intrinsic object properties (e.g., material, weight), action affordances (e.g., graspable, stackable), and physical constraints (e.g., stability, reachability, or an object's state like being closed). Despite their ubiquitous use in manipulation, we argue that off-the-shelf VLMs may lack this granular, physically-grounded understanding, as these specific prerequisites are often overlooked during training. Addressing this critical gap, we introduce PACBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate VLMs on their understanding of these core Properties, Affordances, and Constraints (PAC) from a task executability perspective. PAC Bench features a diverse dataset with more than 30,000 annotations, comprising 673 real-world images (115 object classes, 15 property types, 1-3 affordances defined per object class), 100 real-world humanoid view scenarios, and 120 unique simulated constraint scenarios across four tasks. Our evaluations reveal significant gaps in the ability of VLMs to grasp fundamental physical concepts, underscoring their current limitations for reliable robot manipulation and pointing to key areas that require targeted research. PACBench also serves as a standardized benchmark for rigorously evaluating the physical reasoning capabilities of VLMs guiding the development of more robust and physically grounded models for robot manipulation.


HypoBootstrap: ABootstrapping Framework for Inductive Reasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Inductive reasoning infers general rules from observed evidence, which is one of the most critical intelligence abilities. Previous works have succeeded in formal languages but suffer from onerous and error-prone conversions between a particular formal language and the working language. As large language models (LLMs) have emerged, direct reasoning with various kinds of languages, especially natural languages, without formal language involvement has become feasible. However, existing LLM-based inductive reasoning usually relies on LLM's intrinsic generation ability, which is prone to LLM's hallucination and lacks systematic guidance according to the nature of inductive reasoning. To this end, we propose HypoBootstrap, an integrated framework for inductive reasoning that generates and confirms hypotheses both in a bootstrapping manner. Regarding hypothesis generation, we propose a novel bootstrapping generation strategy, bootstrapping object hypotheses, relational hypotheses, and functional hypotheses successively, which assists LLM in observing the evidence from trivial patterns to non-trivial patterns. Regarding hypothesis confirmation, we utilize Glymour's theory of bootstrap confirmation, a hypothesis confirmation theory from the philosophy of science that can confirm a set of hypotheses. We use its principles to confirm the object hypotheses, relational hypotheses, and functional hypotheses. Empirical studies on four inductive reasoning scenarios of different natures, involving causal induction, concept learning, grammar learning, and abstract reasoning, demonstrate that HypoBootstrap significantly outperforms existing methods.


ARIA: Training Language Agents with Intention-Driven Reward Aggregation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to perform complex reasoning and decision-making through free-form language interactions. However, in openended language action environments (e.g., negotiation or question-asking games), the action space can be formulated as a joint distribution over tokens, resulting in an exponentially large action space. Sampling actions in such a space can lead to extreme reward sparsity, which brings large reward variance, hindering effective reinforcement learning (RL). To address this, we propose ARIA, a method that Aggregates Rewards in Intention space to enable efficient and effective language Agents training. ARIA aims to project natural language actions from the highdimensional joint token distribution space into a low-dimensional intention space, where semantically similar actions are clustered and assigned shared rewards. This intention-aware reward aggregation reduces reward variance by densifying reward signals, fostering better policy optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARIA not only significantly reduces policy gradient variance, but also delivers substantial performance gains of an average of 9.95% across four downstream tasks, consistently outperforming offline and online RL baselines.


Probabilistic Reasoning with LLMs for Privacy Risk Estimation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Probabilistic reasoning is a key aspect of both human and artificial intelligence that allows for handling uncertainty and ambiguity in decision-making. In this paper, we introduce a new numerical reasoning task under uncertainty for large language models, focusing on estimating the privacy risk of user-generated documents containing privacy-sensitive information. We propose BRANCH, a new LLM methodology that estimates the k-privacy value of a text--the size of the population matching the given information.