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AdaSTaR: Adaptive Data Sampling for Training Self-Taught Reasoners

Neural Information Processing Systems

Self-Taught Reasoners (STaR), synonymously known as Rejection sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT), is an integral part of the training pipeline of self-improving reasoning Language Models (LMs). The self-improving mechanism often employs random observation (data) sampling. However, this results in trained observation imbalance; inefficiently over-training on solved examples while under-training on challenging ones. In response, we introduce Adaptive STaR (AdaSTaR), a novel algorithm that rectifies this by integrating two adaptive sampling principles: (1) Adaptive Sampling for Diversity: promoting balanced training across observations, and (2) Adaptive Sampling for Curriculum: dynamically adjusting data difficulty to match the model's evolving strength. Across six benchmarks, AdaSTaR achieves best test accuracy in all instances (6/6) and reduces training FLOPs by an average of 58.6\% against an extensive list of baselines. These improvements in performance and efficiency generalize to different pre-trained LMs and larger models, paving the way for more efficient and effective self-improving LMs.


SparseDiT: Token Sparsification for Efficient Diffusion Transformer

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) are renowned for their impressive generative performance; however, they are significantly constrained by considerable computational costs due to the quadratic complexity in self-attention and the extensive sampling steps required. While advancements have been made in expediting the sampling process, the underlying architectural inefficiencies within DiT remain underexplored. We introduce SparseDiT, a novel framework that implements token sparsification across spatial and temporal dimensions to enhance computational efficiency while preserving generative quality. Spatially, SparseDiT employs a tri-segment architecture that allocates token density based on feature requirements at each layer: Poolingformer in the bottom layers for efficient global feature extraction, Sparse-Dense Token Modules (SDTM) in the middle layers to balance global context with local detail, and dense tokens in the top layers to refine high-frequency details. Temporally, SparseDiT dynamically modulates token density across denoising stages, progressively increasing token count as finer details emerge in later timesteps. This synergy between SparseDiT's spatially adaptive architecture and its temporal pruning strategy enables a unified framework that balances efficiency and fidelity throughout the generation process. Our experiments demonstrate SparseDiT's effectiveness, achieving a 55\% reduction in FLOPs and a 175\% improvement in inference speed on DiT-XL with similar FID score on 512$\times$512 ImageNet, a 56\% reduction in FLOPs across video generation datasets, and a 69\% improvement in inference speed on PixArt-$\alpha$ on text-to-image generation task with a 0.24 FID score decrease. SparseDiT provides a scalable solution for high-quality diffusion-based generation compatible with sampling optimization techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/changsn/SparseDiT.


Global Minimizers of \ell p -Regularized Objectives Yield the Sparsest ReLU Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Overparameterized neural networks can interpolate a given dataset in many different ways, prompting the fundamental question: which among these solutions should we prefer, and what explicit regularization strategies will provably yield these solutions? This paper addresses the challenge of finding the sparsest interpolating ReLU network--i.e., the network with the fewest nonzero parameters or neurons--a goal with wide-ranging implications for efficiency, generalization, interpretability, theory, and model compression. Unlike post hoc pruning approaches, we propose a continuous, almost-everywhere differentiable training objective whose global minima are guaranteed to correspond to the sparsest single-hidden-layer ReLU networks that fit the data. This result marks a conceptual advance: it recasts the combinatorial problem of sparse interpolation as a smooth optimization task, potentially enabling the use of gradient-based training methods. Our objective is based on minimizing $\ell^p$ quasinorms of the weights for $0 < p < 1$, a classical sparsity-promoting strategy in finite-dimensional settings. However, applying these ideas to neural networks presents new challenges: the function class is infinite-dimensional, and the weights are learned using a highly nonconvex objective. We prove that, under our formulation, global minimizers correspond exactly to sparsest solutions. Our work lays a foundation for understanding when and how continuous sparsity-inducing objectives can be leveraged to recover sparse networks through training.


ASDSV: Multimodal Generation Made Efficient with Approximate Speculative Diffusion and Speculative Verification

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion in transformer is central to advances in high-quality multimodal generation but suffer from high inference latency due to their iterative nature. Inspired by speculative decoding's success in accelerating large language models, we propose Approximate Speculative Diffusion with Speculative Verification (ASDSV), a novel method to enhance the efficiency of diffusion models. Adapting speculative execution to diffusion processes presents unique challenges. First, the substantial computational cost of verifying numerous speculative steps for continuous, high-dimensional outputs makes traditional full verification prohibitively expensive. Second, determining the optimal number of speculative steps $K$ involves a trade-off between potential acceleration and verification success rates. To address these, ASDSV introduces two key innovations: 1) A speculative verification technique, which leverages the observed temporal correlation between draft and target model outputs, efficiently validates $K$ speculative steps by only checking the alignment of the initial and final states, significantly reducing verification overhead.


Cloud4D: Estimating Cloud Properties at a High Spatial and Temporal Resolution

Neural Information Processing Systems

There has been great progress in improving numerical weather prediction and climate models using machine learning. However, most global models act at a kilometer-scale, making it challenging to model individual clouds and factors such as extreme precipitation, wind gusts, turbulence, and surface irradiance. Therefore, there is a need to move towards higher-resolution models, which in turn require high-resolution real-world observations that current instruments struggle to obtain. We present Cloud4D, the first learning-based framework that reconstructs a physically consistent, four-dimensional cloud state using only synchronized ground based cameras.


Learning to price with resource constraints: from full information to machine-learned prices

Neural Information Processing Systems

Dynamic pricing with resource constraints is a critical challenge in online learning, requiring a delicate balance between exploring unknown demand patterns and exploiting known information to maximize revenue. We propose three tailored algorithms to address this problem across varying levels of prior knowledge: (1) a Boundary Attracted Re-solve Method for the full information setting, achieving logarithmic regret without the restrictive non-degeneracy condition; (2) an online learning algorithm for the no information setting, delivering an optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret; and (3) an estimate-then-select re-solve algorithm for the informed price setting, leveraging machine-learned prices with known error bounds to bridge the gap between full and no information scenarios. Moreover, through numerical experiments, we demonstrate the robustness and practical applicability of our approaches. This work advances dynamic pricing by offering scalable solutions that adapt to diverse informational contexts while relaxing classical assumptions.


High Dynamic Range Imaging with Time-Encoding Spike Camera

Neural Information Processing Systems

As a bio-inspired vision sensor, spike camera records light intensity by accumulating photons and firing a spike once a preset threshold is reached. For high-light regions, the accumulated photons may reach the threshold multiple times within a readout interval, while only one spike can be stored and read out, resulting in incorrect intensity representation and a limited dynamic range. Multi-level (ML) spike camera enhances the dynamic range by introducing a spike-firing counter (SFC) to count spikes within each readout interval for each pixel, and uses different spike symbols to represent the arrival of different amounts of photons. However, when the light intensity becomes even higher, each pixel requires an SFC with a higher bit depth, causing great cost to the manufacturing process. To address these issues, we propose time-encoding (TE) spike camera, which transforms the counting of spikes to recording of the time at which a specific number of spikes (i.e., an overflow) is reached.


DOVTrack: Data-Efficient Open-Vocabulary Tracking

Neural Information Processing Systems

Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Tracking (OVMOT) aims to detect and track multi-category objects including both seen and unseen categories during training. Currently, a significant challenge in this domain is the lack of large-scale annotated video data for training. To address this challenge, this work aims to effectively train the OV tracker using only the existing limited and sparsely annotated video data. We propose a comprehensive training sample space expansion strategy that addresses the fundamental limitation of sparse annotations in OVMOT training. Specifically, for the association task, we develop a diffusion-based feature generation framework that synthesizes intermediate object features between sparsely annotated frames, effectively expanding the training sample space by approximately 3 and enabling robust association learning from temporally continuous features. For the detection task, we introduce a dynamic group contrastive learning approach that generates diverse sample groups through affinity, dispersion, and adversarial grouping strategies, tripling the effective training samples for classification while maintaining sample quality. Additionally, we propose an adaptive localization loss that expands positive sample coverage by lowering IoU thresholds while mitigating noise through confidence-based weighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OVMOT benchmark, surpassing existing methods by 3.8\% in TETA metric, without requiring additional data or annotations.


FP4 All the Way: Fully Quantized Training of Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

We demonstrate, for the first time, fully quantized training (FQT) of large language models (LLMs) using predominantly 4-bit floating-point (FP4) precision for weights, activations, and gradients on datasets up to 200 billion tokens. We extensively investigate key design choices for FP4, including block sizes, scaling formats, and rounding methods. Our analysis shows that the NVFP4 format, where each block of 16 FP4 values (E2M1) shares a scale represented in E4M3, provides optimal results. We use stochastic rounding for backward and update passes and round-to-nearest for the forward pass to enhance stability. Additionally, we identify a theoretical and empirical threshold for effective quantized training: when the gradient norm falls below approximately $\sqrt{3}$ times the quantization noise, quantized training becomes less effective. Leveraging these insights, we successfully train a 7-billion-parameter model on 256 Intel Gaudi2 accelerators. The resulting FP4-trained model achieves downstream task performance comparable to a standard BF16 baseline, confirming that FP4 training is a practical and highly efficient approach for large-scale LLM training.


Situat3DChange: Situated 3D Change Understanding Dataset for Multimodal Large Language Model

Neural Information Processing Systems

Physical environments and circumstances are fundamentally dynamic, yet current 3D datasets and evaluation benchmarks tend to concentrate on either dynamic scenarios or dynamic situations in isolation, resulting in incomplete comprehension. To overcome these constraints, we introduce Situat3DChange, an extensive dataset supporting three situation-aware change understanding tasks following the perception-action model: 121K question-answer pairs, 36K change descriptions for perception tasks, and 17K rearrangement instructions for the action task. To construct this large-scale dataset, Situat3DChange leverages 11K human observations of environmental changes to establish shared mental models and shared situational awareness for human-AI collaboration. These observations, enriched with egocentric and allocentric perspectives as well as categorical and coordinate spatial relations, are integrated using an LLM to support understanding of situated changes. To address the challenge of comparing pairs of point clouds from the same scene with minor changes, we propose SCReasoner, an efficient 3D MLLM approach that enables effective point cloud comparison with minimal parameter overhead and no additional tokens required for the language decoder. Comprehensive evaluation on Situat3DChange tasks highlights both the progress and limitations of MLLMs in dynamic scene and situation understanding. Additional experiments on data scaling and cross-domain transfer demonstrate the task-agnostic effectiveness of using Situat3DChange as a training dataset for MLLMs.