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DualOptim: Enhancing Efficacy and Stability in Machine Unlearning with Dual Optimizers

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this work, we first empirically demonstrate the instability and suboptimal performance of existing popular MU methods when deployed in different scenarios. To address this issue, we propose Dual Optimizer (DualOptim), which incorporates adaptive learning rate and decoupled momentum factors. Empirical and theoretical evidence demonstrates that DualOptim contributes to effective and stable unlearning. Through extensive experiments, we show that DualOptim can significantly boost MU efficacy and stability across diverse tasks, including image classification, image generation, and large language models, making it a versatile approach to empower existing MU algorithms.


Sample Complexity of Distributionally Robust Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Motivated by practical applications where stable long-term performance is critical--such as robotics, operations research, and healthcare--we study the problem of distributionally robust (DR) average-reward reinforcement learning. We propose two algorithms that achieve near-optimal sample complexity. The first reduces the problem to a DR discounted Markov decision process (MDP), while the second, Anchored DR Average-Reward MDP, introduces an anchoring state to stabilize the controlled transition kernels within the uncertainty set. Assuming the nominal MDP is uniformly ergodic, we prove that both algorithms attain a sample complexity of $\widetilde{O}\left(|\mathbf{S}||\mathbf{A}| t_{\mathrm{mix}}^2\varepsilon^{-2}\right)$ for estimating the optimal policy as well as the robust average reward under KL and $f_k$-divergence-based uncertainty sets, provided the uncertainty radius is sufficiently small. Here, $\varepsilon$ is the target accuracy, $|\mathbf{S}|$ and $|\mathbf{A}|$ denote the sizes of the state and action spaces, and $t_{\mathrm{mix}}$ is the mixing time of the nominal MDP. This represents the first finite-sample convergence guarantee for DR average-reward reinforcement learning.


Knowledge Graph Enhanced Generative Multi-modal Models for Class-Incremental Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Continual learning in computer vision faces the critical challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where models struggle to retain prior knowledge while adapting to new tasks. Although recent studies have attempted to leverage the generalization capabilities of pre-trained models to mitigate overfitting on current tasks, models still tend to forget details of previously learned categories as tasks progress, leading to misclassification. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Knowledge Graph Enhanced Generative Multi-modal model (KG-GMM) that builds an evolving knowledge graph throughout the learning process. Our approach utilizes relationships within the knowledge graph to augment the class labels and assigns different relations to similar categories to enhance model differentiation. During testing, we propose a Knowledge Graph Augmented Inference method that locates specific categories by analyzing relationships within the generated text, thereby reducing the loss of detailed information about old classes when learning new knowledge and alleviating forgetting. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively leverages relational information to help the model correct mispredictions, achieving state-of-the-art results in both conventional CIL and few-shot CIL settings, confirming the efficacy of knowledge graphs at preserving knowledge in the continual learning scenarios.


Graph Data Selection for Domain Adaptation: A Model-Free Approach

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph domain adaptation (GDA) is a fundamental task in graph machine learning, with techniques like shift-robust graph neural networks (GNNs) and specialized training procedures to tackle the distribution shift problem. Although these model-centric approaches show promising results, they often struggle with severe shifts and constrained computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model-free framework, GRADATE (GRAph DATa sElection), that selects the best training data from the source domain for the classification task on the target domain. GRADATE picks training samples without relying on any GNN model's predictions or training recipes, leveraging optimal transport theory to capture and adapt to distribution changes. GRADATE is data-efficient, scalable and meanwhile complements existing model-centric GDA approaches. Through comprehensive empirical studies on several real-world graph-level datasets and multiple covariate shift types, we demonstrate that GRADATE outperforms existing selection methods and enhances off-the-shelf GDA methods with much fewer training data.


Private Geometric Median in Nearly-Linear Time

Neural Information Processing Systems

Estimating the geometric median of a dataset is a robust counterpart to mean estimation, and is a fundamental problem in computational geometry.


ReSearch: Learning to Reason with Search for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in reasoning, exemplified by the success of OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. However, integrating reasoning with external search processes remains challenging, especially for complex multi-hop questions requiring multiple retrieval steps. We propose ReSearch, a novel framework that trains LLMs to Reason with Search via reinforcement learning without using any supervised data on reasoning steps. Our approach treats search operations as integral components of the reasoning chain, where when and how to perform searches is guided by text-based thinking, and search results subsequently influence further reasoning. We train ReSearch on Qwen2.5-7B(-Instruct) and Qwen2.5-32B(-Instruct)


OSCAR: One-Step Diffusion Codec Across Multiple Bit-rates

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pretrained latent diffusion models have shown strong potential for lossy image compression, owing to their powerful generative priors. Most existing diffusion-based methods reconstruct images by iteratively denoising from random noise, guided by compressed latent representations. While these approaches have achieved high reconstruction quality, their multi-step sampling process incurs substantial computational overhead. Moreover, they typically require training separate models for different compression bit-rates, leading to significant training and storage costs. To address these challenges, we propose a one-step diffusion codec across multiple bit-rates.


Generalizable Reasoning through Compositional Energy Minimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generalization is a key challenge in machine learning, specifically in reasoning tasks, where models are expected to solve problems more complex than those encountered during training. Existing approaches typically train reasoning models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping input instances to solutions. While this allows models to learn useful heuristics from data, it often results in limited generalization beyond the training distribution. In this work, we propose a novel approach to reasoning generalization by learning energy landscapes over the solution spaces of smaller, more tractable subproblems. At test time, we construct a global energy landscape for a given problem by combining the energy functions of multiple subproblems. This compositional approach enables the incorporation of additional constraints during inference, allowing the construction of energy landscapes for problems of increasing difficulty. To improve the sample quality from this newly constructed energy landscape, we introduce Parallel Energy Minimization (PEM). We evaluate our approach on a wide set of reasoning problems. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its ability to generalize to larger and more complex problems.


DOVE: Efficient One-Step Diffusion Model for Real-World Video Super-Resolution

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion models have demonstrated promising performance in real-world video super-resolution (VSR). However, the dozens of sampling steps they require, make inference extremely slow. Sampling acceleration techniques, particularly single-step, provide a potential solution. Nonetheless, achieving one step in VSR remains challenging, due to the high training overhead on video data and stringent fidelity demands. To tackle the above issues, we propose DOVE, an efficient one-step diffusion model for real-world VSR.


Online Inverse Linear Optimization: Efficient Logarithmic-Regret Algorithm, Robustness to Suboptimality, and Lower Bound

Neural Information Processing Systems

In online inverse linear optimization, a learner observes time-varying sets of feasible actions and an agent's optimal actions, selected by solving linear optimization over the feasible actions. The learner sequentially makes predictions of the agent's true linear objective function, and their quality is measured by the *regret*, the cumulative gap between optimal objective values and those achieved by following the learner's predictions. A seminal work by Bärmann et al. (2017) obtained a regret bound of $O(\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ is the time horizon. Subsequently, the regret bound has been improved to $O(n^4 \ln T)$ by Besbes et al. (2021, 2025) and to $O(n \ln T)$ by Gollapudi et al. (2021), where $n$ is the dimension of the ambient space of objective vectors. However, these logarithmic-regret methods are highly inefficient when $T$ is large, as they need to maintain regions specified by $O(T)$ constraints, which represent possible locations of the true objective vector.