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Popular Science

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How to Make an Impact in the AI Economy

TIME - Tech

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ViSPLA: Visual Iterative Self-Prompting for Language-Guided 3DAffordance Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We address the problem of language-guided 3D affordance prediction, a core capability for embodied agents interacting with unstructured environments. Existing methods often rely on fixed affordance categories or require external expert prompts, limiting their ability to generalize across different objects and interpret multi-step instructions. In this work, we introduce ViSPLA, a novel iterative selfprompting framework that leverages the intrinsic geometry of predicted masks for continual refinement. We redefine affordance detection as a language-conditioned segmentation task: given a 3D point cloud and language instruction, our model predicts a sequence of refined affordance masks, each guided by differential geometric feedback including Laplacians, normal derivatives, and curvature fields. This feedback is encoded into visual prompts that drive a multi-stage refinement decoder, enabling the model to self-correct and adapt to complex spatial structures. To further enhance precision and coherence, we introduce Implicit Neural Affordance Fields, which define continuous probabilistic regions over the 3D surface without additional supervision. Additionally, our Spectral Convolutional Self-Prompting module operates in the frequency domain of the point cloud, enabling multi-scale refinement that captures both coarse and fine affordance structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViSPLA achieves state-of-the-art results on both seen and unseen objects on two benchmark datasets. Our framework establishes a new paradigm for open-world 3D affordance reasoning by unifying language comprehension with low-level geometric perception through iterative refinement.


Out-of-Distribution Generalized Graph Anomaly Detection with Homophily-aware Environment Mixup

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) is widely prevalent in scenarios such as financial fraud detection, anti-money laundering and social bot detecion. However, structural distribution shifts are commonly observed in real-world GAD data due to selection bias, resulting in reduced homophily. Existing GAD methods tend to rely on homophilic shortcuts when trained on high-homophily structures, limiting their ability to generalize well to data with low homophily under structural distribution shifts. In this study, we propose to handle structural distribution shifts by generating novel environments characterized by diverse homophilic structures and utilizing invariant patterns, i.e., features and structures with the capability of stable prediction across structural distribution shifts, which face two challenges: (1) How to discover invariant patterns from entangled features and structures, as structures are sensitive to varying homophilic distributions.


HYPERION: Fine-Grained Hypersphere Alignment for Robust Federated Graph Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Robust Federated Graph Learning (FGL) provides an effective decentralized framework for training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in noisy-label environments. However, the subtlety of noise during training presents formidable obstacles for developing robust FGL systems. Previous robust FL approaches neither adequately constrain edge-mediated error propagation nor account for intra-class topological differences. At the client level, we innovatively demonstrate that hyperspherical embedding can effectively capture graph structures in a fine-grained manner. Correspondingly, our method effectively addresses the aforementioned issues through fine-grained hypersphere alignment. Moreover, we uncover undetected noise arising from localized perspective constraints and propose the geometricaware hyperspherical purification module at the server level. Combining both level strategies, we present our robust FGL framework, HYPERION, which operates all components within a unified hyperspherical space. HYPERION demonstrates remarkable robustness across multiple datasets, for instance, achieving a 29.7% F1-macro score with 50%-pair noise on Cora.


CHPO: Constrained Hybrid-action Policy Optimization for Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Constrained hybrid-action reinforcement learning (RL) promises to learn a safe policy within a parameterized action space, which is particularly valuable for safety-critical applications involving discrete-continuous hybrid action spaces. However, existing hybrid-action RL algorithms primarily focus on reward maximization, which faces significant challenges for tasks involving both cost constraints and hybrid action spaces. In this work, we propose a novel Constrained Hybrid-action Policy Optimization algorithm (CHPO) to address the problems of constrained hybrid-action RL. Concretely, we rethink the limitations of hybridaction RL in handling safe tasks with parameterized action spaces and reframe the objective of constrained hybrid-action RL by introducing the concept of Constrained Parameterized-action Markov Decision Process (CPMDP). Subsequently, we present a constrained hybrid-action policy optimization algorithm to confront the constrained hybrid-action problems and conduct theoretical analyses demonstrating that the CHPO converges to the optimal solution while satisfying safety constraints. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the CHPO achieves competitive performance across multiple experimental tasks. Our code is available at github.CHPO.


Loquetier: AVirtualized Multi-LoRA Framework for Unified LLMFine-tuning and Serving

Neural Information Processing Systems

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) technique for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. While prior work has explored strategies for integrating LLM training and serving, there still remains a gap in unifying fine-tuning and inference for LoRA-based models.


Non-stationary Bandit Convex Optimization: AComprehensive Study

Neural Information Processing Systems

Bandit Convex Optimization is a fundamental class of sequential decision-making problems, where the learner selects actions from a continuous domain and observes a loss (but not its gradient) at only one point per round. We study this problem in non-stationary environments, and aim to minimize the regret under three standard measures of non-stationarity: the number of switches S in the comparator sequence, the total variation! of the loss functions, and the path-length P of the comparator sequence. We propose a polynomial-time algorithm, Tilted Exponentially Weighted Average with Sleeping Experts (TEWA-SE), which adapts the sleeping experts framework from online convex optimization to the bandit setting. For strongly convex losses, we prove that TEWA-SE is minimax-optimal with respect to known S and! by establishing matching upper and lower bounds. By equipping TEWA-SE with the Bandit-over-Bandit framework, we extend our analysis to environments with unknown non-stationarity measures. For general convex losses, we introduce a second algorithm, clipped Exploration by Optimization (cExO), based on exponential weights over a discretized action space. While not polynomial-time computable, this method achieves minimax-optimal regret with respect to known S and!, and improves on the best existing bounds with respect to P.


Revisiting Multi-Agent World Modeling from a Diffusion-Inspired Perspective

Neural Information Processing Systems

World models have recently attracted growing interest in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) due to their ability to improve sample efficiency for policy learning. However, accurately modeling environments in MARL is challenging due to the exponentially large joint action space and highly uncertain dynamics inherent in multi-agent systems. To address this, we reduce modeling complexity by shifting from jointly modeling the entire state-action transition dynamics to focusing on the state space alone at each timestep through sequential agent modeling. Specifically, our approach enables the model to progressively resolve uncertainty while capturing the structured dependencies among agents, providing a more accurate representation of how agents influence the state. Interestingly, this sequential revelation of agents' actions in a multi-agent system aligns with the reverse process in diffusion models--a class of powerful generative models known for their expressiveness and training stability compared to autoregressive or latent variable models. Leveraging this insight, we develop a flexible and robust world model for MARL using diffusion models. Our method, Diffusion-Inspired Multi-Agent world model (DIMA), achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple multi-agent control benchmarks, significantly outperforming prior world models in terms of final return and sample efficiency, including MAMuJoCo and Bi-DexHands. DIMA establishes a new paradigm for constructing multi-agent world models, advancing the frontier of MARL research.