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Robust Graph Condensation via Classification Complexity Mitigation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph condensation (GC) has gained significant attention for its ability to synthesize smaller yet informative graphs. However, existing studies often overlook the robustness of GC in scenarios where the original graph is corrupted. In such cases, we observe that the performance of GC deteriorates significantly, while existing robust graph learning technologies offer only limited effectiveness. Through both empirical investigation and theoretical analysis, we reveal that GC is inherently an intrinsic-dimension-reducing process, synthesizing a condensed graph with lower classification complexity. Although this property is critical for effective GC performance, it remains highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations.


scGeneScope: A Treatment-Matched Single Cell Imaging and Transcriptomics Dataset and Benchmark for Treatment Response Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Understanding cellular responses to chemical interventions is critical to the discovery of effective therapeutics. Because individual biological techniques often measure only one axis of cellular response at a time, high-quality multimodal datasets are needed to unlock a holistic understanding of how cells respond to treatments and to advance computational methods that integrate modalities. However, many techniques destroy cells and thus preclude paired measurements, and attempts to match disparate unimodal datasets are often confounded by data being generated in incompatible experimental settings. Here we introduce scGeneScope, a multimodal single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and Cell Painting microscopy image dataset conditionally paired by chemical treatment, designed to facilitate the development and benchmarking of unimodal, multimodal, and multiple profile machine learning methods for cellular profiling.


Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs

Neural Information Processing Systems

As AIs rapidly advance and become more agentic, the risk they pose is governed not only by their capabilities but increasingly by their propensities, including goals and values. Tracking the emergence of goals and values has proven a longstanding problem, and despite much interest over the years it remains unclear whether current AIs have meaningful values. We propose a solution to this problem, leveraging the framework of utility functions to study the internal coherence of AI preferences. Surprisingly, we find that independently-sampled preferences in current LLMs exhibit high degrees of structural coherence, and moreover that this emerges with scale. These findings suggest that value systems emerge in LLMs in a meaningful sense, a finding with broad implications.


Reparameterized LLM Training via Orthogonal Equivalence Transformation

Neural Information Processing Systems

While large language models (LLMs) are driving the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, effectively and reliably training these large models remains one of the field's most significant challenges. To address this challenge, we propose POET, a novel reParameterized training algorithm that uses Orthogonal Equivalence Transformation to optimize neurons. Specifically, POET reparameterizes each neuron with two learnable orthogonal matrices and a fixed random weight matrix. Because of its provable preservation of spectral properties of weight matrices, POET can stably optimize the objective function with improved generalization. We further develop efficient approximations that make POET flexible and scalable for training large-scale neural networks.


SpatialReasoner: Towards Explicit and Generalizable 3D Spatial Reasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite recent advances on multi-modal models, 3D spatial reasoning remains a challenging task for state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models. Recent studies explore data-driven approaches and achieve enhanced spatial reasoning performance by fine-tuning models on 3D-related visual question-answering data. However, these methods typically perform spatial reasoning in an implicit manner and often fail on questions that are trivial to humans, even with long chain-of-thought reasoning. In this work, we introduce SpatialReasoner, a novel large vision-language model (LVLM) that addresses 3D spatial reasoning with explicit 3D representations shared between multiple stages--3D perception, computation, and reasoning. Explicit 3D representations provide a coherent interface that supports advanced 3D spatial reasoning and improves the generalization ability to novel question types. Furthermore, by analyzing the explicit 3D representations in multi-step reasoning traces of SpatialReasoner, we study the factual errors and identify key shortcomings of current LVLMs. Results show that our SpatialReasoner achieves improved performance on a variety of spatial reasoning benchmarks, outperforming Gemini 2.0 by 9.2% on 3DSRBench, and generalizes better when evaluating on novel 3D spatial reasoning questions.


FedRW: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Data Reweighting for Enhancing Federated Learning of Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Data duplication within large-scale corpora often impedes large language models' (LLMs) performance and privacy. In privacy-concerned federated learning scenarios, conventional deduplication methods typically rely on trusted third parties to perform uniform deletion, risking loss of informative samples while introducing privacy vulnerabilities. To address these gaps, we propose Federated ReWeighting (FedRW), the first privacy-preserving framework, to the best of our knowledge, that performs soft deduplication via sample reweighting instead of deletion in federated LLM training, without assuming a trusted third party. At its core, FedRW proposes a secure, frequency-aware reweighting protocol through secure multi-party computation, coupled with a parallel orchestration strategy to ensure efficiency and scalability. During training, FedRW utilizes an adaptive reweighting mechanism with global sample frequencies to adjust individual loss contributions, effectively improving generalization and robustness. Empirical results demonstrate that FedRW outperforms the state-of-the-art method by achieving up to $28.78\times$ speedup in preprocessing and approximately $11.42$\% improvement in perplexity, while offering enhanced security guarantees. FedRW thus establishes a new paradigm for managing duplication in federated LLM training.


Two Experts Are All You Need for Steering Thinking: Reinforcing Cognitive Effort in MoE Reasoning Models Without Additional Training

Neural Information Processing Systems

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures within Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive reasoning capabilities by selectively activating experts to facilitate structured cognitive processes. Despite notable advances, existing reasoning models often suffer from cognitive inefficiencies like overthinking and underthinking. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel inference-time steering methodology called Reinforcing Cognitive Experts (RICE), designed to improve reasoning depth and efficiency without additional training or complex heuristics. Leveraging normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (nPMI), we systematically identify specialized experts, termed cognitive experts that orchestrate meta-level reasoning operations characterized by tokens like . Empirical evaluations with leading MoE-based LRMs (DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-235B) on rigorous quantitative and scientific reasoning benchmarks (AIME and GPQA Diamond) demonstrate noticeable and consistent improvements in reasoning accuracy, cognitive efficiency, and cross-domain generalization. Crucially, our lightweight approach substantially outperforms prevalent reasoning-steering techniques, such as prompt design and decoding constraints, while preserving the model's general instruction-following skills. These results highlight reinforcing cognitive experts as a promising, practical, and interpretable direction to enhance cognitive efficiency within advanced reasoning models.


Online Optimization for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (OSRL), where the goal is to learn a reward-maximizing policy from fixed data under a cumulative cost constraint. We propose a novel OSRL approach that frames the problem as a minimax objective and solves it by combining offline RL with online optimization algorithms. We prove the approximate optimality of this approach when integrated with an approximate offline RL oracle and no-regret online optimization. We also present a practical approximation that can be combined with any offline RL algorithm, eliminating the need for offline policy evaluation. Empirical results on the DSRL benchmark demonstrate that our method reliably enforces safety constraints under stringent cost budgets, while achieving high rewards.


ROVER: Recursive Reasoning Over Videos with Vision-Language Models for Embodied Tasks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-language models (VLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities across diverse image understanding tasks, but still struggle in settings that require reasoning over extended sequences of camera frames from a video. This limits their utility in embodied settings, which require reasoning over long frame sequences from a continuous stream of visual input at each moment of a task attempt. To address this limitation, we propose ROVER (Reasoning Over VidEo Recursively), a framework that enables the model to recursively decompose long-horizon video trajectories into segments corresponding to shorter subtasks within the trajectory.


What the Knicks' Championship Means to New York

TIME - Tech

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