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UGM2N: An Unsupervised and Generalizable Mesh Movement Network via M-Uniform Loss

Neural Information Processing Systems

Partial differential equations (PDEs) form the mathematical foundation for modeling physical systems in science and engineering, where numerical solutions demand rigorous accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs. Mesh movement techniques address this challenge by dynamically relocating mesh nodes to rapidly-varying regions, enhancing both simulation accuracy and computational efficiency. However, traditional approaches suffer from high computational complexity and geometric inflexibility, limiting their applicability, and existing supervised learning-based approaches face challenges in zero-shot generalization across diverse PDEs and mesh topologies. In this paper, we present an Unsupervised and Generalizable Mesh Movement Network (UGM2N). We first introduce unsupervised mesh adaptation through localized geometric feature learning, eliminating the dependency on pre-adapted meshes. We then develop a physics-constrained loss function, M-Uniform loss, that enforces mesh equidistribution at the nodal level. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network exhibits equation-agnostic generalization and geometric independence in efficient mesh adaptation. It demonstrates consistent superiority over existing methods, including robust performance across diverse PDEs and mesh geometries, scalability to multi-scale resolutions and guaranteed error reduction without mesh tangling.


Model Reconciliation via Cost-Optimal Explanations in Probabilistic Logic Programming

Neural Information Processing Systems

In human-AI interaction, effective communication relies on aligning the AI agent's model with the human user's mental model, a process known as model reconciliation. However, existing model reconciliation approaches predominantly assume deterministic models, overlooking the fact that human knowledge is often uncertain or probabilistic. To bridge this gap, we present a probabilistic model reconciliation framework that resolves inconsistencies in MPE outcome probabilities between an agent's and a user's models. Our approach is built on probabilistic logic programming (PLP) using ProbLog, where explanations are generated as cost-optimal model updates that reconcile these probabilistic differences. We develop two search algorithms - a generic baseline and an optimized version. The latter is guided by theoretical insights and further extended with greedy and weighted variants to enhance scalability and efficiency. Our approach is validated through a user study on explanation types and computational experiments showing that the optimized version consistently outperforms the generic baseline.


ATLAS: Autoformalizing Theorems through Lifting, Augmentation, and Synthesis of Data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Autoformalization, the automatic translation of mathematical content from natural language into machine-verifiable formal languages, has seen significant progress driven by advances in large language models (LLMs). Nonetheless, a primary barrier to further improvements is the limited availability of parallel corpora that map informal mathematical text to its formal counterpart. To address this limitation, we propose ATLAS (Autoformalizing Theorems through Lifting, Augmentation, and Synthesis of Data), a novel data generation framework designed to produce large-scale, high-quality parallel corpora of theorem statements. Distinct from prior approaches, ATLAS begins with a concept repository, accelerates the improvement of the student model through expert iteration combined with knowledge distillation, and introduces two novel augmentation strategies that exploit the structural characteristics of formal languages. Running the proposed ATLAS framework for 10 iterations, we construct an undergraduate-level dataset of 117k theorem statements and develop the ATLASTranslator by fine-tuning Llama3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA. This model establishes a new state of the art, demonstrating statistically significant improvements over both the Herald Translator and the Kimina-Autoformalizer across all benchmarks (p < 0.05, two-sided t-test). Furthermore, we demonstrate that the full-parameter fine-tuning of a stronger base model on the ATLAS dataset leads to superior performance.


Tree Ensemble Explainability through the Hoeffding Functional Decomposition and TreeHFD Algorithm

Neural Information Processing Systems

Tree ensembles have demonstrated state-of-the-art predictive performance across a wide range of problems involving tabular data. Nevertheless, the black-box nature of tree ensembles is a strong limitation, especially for applications with critical decisions at stake. The Hoeffding or ANOVA functional decomposition is a powerful explainability method, as it breaks down black-box models into a unique sum of lower-dimensional functions, provided that input variables are independent. In standard learning settings, input variables are often dependent, and the Hoeffding decomposition is generalized through hierarchical orthogonality constraints. Such generalization leads to unique and sparse decompositions with well-defined main effects and interactions. However, the practical estimation of this decomposition from a data sample is still an open problem. Therefore, we introduce the TreeHFD algorithm to estimate the Hoeffding decomposition of a tree ensemble from a data sample. We show the convergence of TreeHFD, along with the main properties of orthogonality, sparsity, and causal variable selection.



Distribution-Aligned Decoding for Efficient LLMTask Adaptation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Adapting billion-parameter language models to a downstream task is still costly, even with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We re-cast task adaptation as output-distribution alignment: the objective is to steer the output distribution toward the task distribution directly during decoding rather than indirectly through weight updates. Building on this view, we introduce Steering Vector Decoding (SVDecode), a lightweight, PEFT-compatible, and theoretically grounded method. We start with a short warm-start fine-tune and extract a task-aware steering vector from the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence gradient between the output distribution of the warm-started and pre-trained models. This steering vector is then used to guide the decoding process to steer the model's output distribution towards the task distribution. We theoretically prove that SVDecode is first-order equivalent to the gradient step of full fine-tuning and derive a globally optimal solution for the strength of the steering vector. Across three tasks and nine benchmarks, SVDecode paired with four standard PEFT methods improves multiple-choice accuracy by up to 5 percentage points and open-ended truthfulness by 2 percentage points, with similar gains (1-2 percentage points) on commonsense datasets without adding trainable parameters beyond the PEFT adapter. SVDecode thus offers a lightweight, theoretically grounded path to stronger task adaptation for large language models.


Adaptive Sigmoid Clipping for Balancing the Direction-Magnitude Mismatch Trade-off in Differentially Private Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Differential privacy (DP) limits the impact of individual training data samples by bounding their gradient norms through clipping. Conventional clipping operations assign unequal scaling factors to sample gradients with different norms, leading to a direction mismatch between the true batch gradient and the aggregation of the clipped gradients.


DiEP: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts Compression through Differentiable Expert Pruning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite the significant breakthrough of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), the increasing scale of these MoE models presents huge memory and storage challenges. Existing MoE pruning methods, which involve reducing parameter size with a uniform sparsity across all layers, often lead to suboptimal outcomes and performance degradation due to varying expert redundancy in different MoE layers. To address this, we propose a non-uniform pruning strategy, dubbed Differentiable Expert Pruning (DiEP), which adaptively adjusts pruning rates at the layer level while jointly learning inter-layer importance, effectively capturing the varying redundancy across different MoE layers. By transforming the global discrete search space into a continuous one, our method handles exponentially growing non-uniform expert combinations, enabling adaptive gradient-based pruning. Extensive experiments on five advanced MoE models demonstrate the efficacy of our method across various NLP tasks. Notably, DiEP retains around 92% of original performance on Mixtral 8 7B with only half the experts, outperforming other pruning methods by up to 7.1% on the challenging MMLU dataset.


Neural Thermodynamics: Entropic Forces in Deep and Universal Representation Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the rapid discovery of emergent phenomena in deep learning and large language models, understanding their cause has become an urgent need. Here, we propose a rigorous entropic-force theory for understanding the learning dynamics of neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Building on the theory of parameter symmetries and an entropic loss landscape, we show that representation learning is crucially governed by emergent entropic forces arising from stochasticity and discrete-time updates. These forces systematically break continuous parameter symmetries and preserve discrete ones, leading to a series of gradient balance phenomena that resemble the equipartition property of thermal systems. These phenomena, in turn, (a) explain the universal alignment of neural representations between AI models and lead to a proof of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, and (b) reconcile the seemingly contradictory observations of sharpness-and flatness-seeking behavior of deep learning optimization. Our theory and experiments demonstrate that a combination of entropic forces and symmetry breaking is key to understanding emergent phenomena in deep learning.


BTL-UI: Blink-Think-Link Reasoning Modelfor GUIAgent

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the field of AI-driven human-GUI interaction automation, while rapid advances in multimodal large language models and reinforcement fine-tuning techniques have yielded remarkable progress, a fundamental challenge persists: their interaction logic significantly deviates from natural human-GUI communication patterns. To address this gap, we propose Blink-Think-Link (BTL), a brain-inspired framework for human-GUI interaction that mimics the human cognitive process between users and graphical interfaces. The system decomposes interactions into three biologically plausible phases: (1) Blink - rapid detection and attention to relevant screen areas, analogous to saccadic eye movements; (2) Think - higher-level reasoning and decision-making, mirroring cognitive planning; and (3) Link - generation of executable commands for precise motor control, emulating human action selection mechanisms. Additionally, we introduce two key technical innovations for BTL framework: (1) Blink Data Generation - an automated annotation pipeline specifically optimized for blink data, and (2) BTLReward - the first rule-based reward mechanism that enables reinforcement learning driven by both process and outcome. Building upon this framework, we develop a GUI agent model named BTL-UI, which demonstrates competitive performance across both static GUI understanding and dynamic interaction tasks in comprehensive benchmarks. These results provide conclusive empirical validation of the framework's efficacy in developing advanced GUI agents.