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Inside interoception: The hidden sense of how you feel inside

MIT Technology Review

Researchers are decoding how signals move between body and brain, with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to anxiety. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is racing, when your gut tightens with fear. It's also, right now, predicting what you'll read next as your eyes move across this page. It's picking up signals that help it make sense of what's happening around you and prepare you to act if you need to stay safe. You aren't usually aware that your brain is doing all that. Our senses take in information at a staggering rate--roughly 11 million bits flood in every second from our skin, eyes, ears, and more. Only a sliver reaches our conscious awareness. Researchers estimate that our conscious minds can process roughly 10 to 60 bits of information per second, about the rate at which you're reading this sentence. As Moriah Thomason, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone, says, "Thank we're built like this. There's a layer of what we have access to in conscious awareness. And then we have a right-under-the-surface amount. There is only a certain amount we are meant to'hold in mind' in order to function successfully."


SolidGeo: Measuring Multimodal Spatial Math Reasoning in Solid Geometry

Neural Information Processing Systems

Geometry is a fundamental branch of mathematics and plays a crucial role in evaluating the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing multimodal mathematics benchmarks mainly focus on plane geometry and largely ignore solid geometry, which requires spatial reasoning and is more challenging than plane geometry.


Web-Shepherd: Advancing PRMs for Reinforcing Web Agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Web navigation is a unique domain that can automate many repetitive real-life tasks and is challenging as it requires long-horizon sequential decision making beyond typical multimodal large language model (MLLM) tasks. Yet, specialized reward models for web navigation that can be utilized during both training and test-time have been absent until now. Despite the importance of speed and cost-effectiveness, prior works have utilized MLLMs as reward models, which poses significant constraints for real-world deployment. To address this, in this work, we propose the first process reward model (PRM) called Web-Shepherd which could assess web navigation trajectories in a step-level. To achieve this, we first construct the WebPRM Collection, a large-scale dataset with 40K step-level preference pairs and annotated checklists spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels. Next, we also introduce the WebRewardBench, the first meta-evaluation benchmark for evaluating PRMs. In our experiments, we observe that our Web-Shepherd achieves about 30 points better accuracy compared to using GPT-4o on WebRewardBench. Furthermore, when testing on WebArena-lite by using GPT-4o-mini as the policy and Web-Shepherd as the verifier, we achieve 10.9 points better performance, in 10x less cost compared to using GPT-4o-mini as the verifier.


Knot So Simple: A Minimalistic Environment for Spatial Reasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose KnotGym, an interactive environment for complex, spatial reasoning and manipulation. KnotGym includes goal-oriented rope manipulation tasks with varying levels of complexity, all requiring acting from pure image observations.Tasks are defined along a clear and quantifiable axis of complexity based on the number of knot crossings, creating a natural generalization test.KnotGym has a simple observation space, allowing for scalable development, yet it highlights core challenges in integrating acute perception, spatial reasoning, and grounded manipulation.We evaluate methods of different classes, including model-based RL, model-predictive control, and chain-of-thought reasoning, and illustrate the challenges KnotGym presents.


Can We Infer Confidential Properties of Training Data from LLMs?

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned on domain-specific datasets to support applications in fields such as healthcare, finance, and law. These fine-tuning datasets often have sensitive and confidential dataset-level properties -- such as patient demographics or disease prevalence--that are not intended to be revealed. While prior work has studied property inference attacks on discriminative models (e.g., image classification models) and generative models (e.g., GANs for image data), it remains unclear if such attacks transfer to LLMs. In this work, we introduce PropInfer, a benchmark task for evaluating property inference in LLMs under two fine-tuning paradigms: question-answering and chat-completion. Built on the ChatDoctor dataset, our benchmark includes a range of property types and task configurations. We further propose two tailored attacks: a prompt-based generation attack and a shadow-model attack leveraging word frequency signals.


Progressive Inference-Time Annealing of Diffusion Models for Sampling from Boltzmann Densities

Neural Information Processing Systems

Sampling efficiently from a target unnormalized probability density remains a core challenge, with relevance across countless high-impact scientific applications. A promising approach towards this challenge is the design of amortized samplers that borrow key ideas, such as probability path design, from state-of-the-art generative diffusion models. However, all existing diffusion-based samplers remain unable to draw samples from distributions at the scale of even simple molecular systems. In this paper, we propose Progressive Inference-Time Annealing (PITA) a novel framework to learn diffusion-based samplers that combines two complementary interpolation techniques: I.) Annealing of the Boltzmann distribution and II.)


Revising and Falsifying Sparse Autoencoder Feature Explanations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Mechanistic interpretability research seeks to reverse-engineer large language models (LLMs) by uncovering the internal representations of concepts within their activations. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a valuable tool for disentangling polysemantic neurons into more monosemantic, interpretable features. However, recent work on automatic explanation generation for these features has faced challenges: explanations tend to be overly broad and fail to take polysemanticity into consideration. This work addresses these limitations by introducing a similarity-based strategy for sourcing close negative sentences that more effectively falsify generated explanations. Additionally, we propose a structured, component-based format for feature explanations and a tree-based, iterative explanation method that refines explanations. We demonstrate that our structured format and tree-based explainer improve explanation quality, while our similarity-based evaluation strategy exposes biases in existing interpretability methods. We also analyze the evolution of feature complexity and polysemanticity across LLM layers, offering new insights into information content within LLMs' residual streams.


AVCD: Mitigating Hallucinations in Audio-Visual Large Language Models through Contrastive Decoding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Hallucination remains a major challenge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To address this, various contrastive decoding (CD) methods have been proposed that contrasts original logits with hallucinated logits generated from perturbed inputs. While CD has shown promise in vision-language models (VLMs), it is not well-suited for AV-LLMs, where hallucinations often emerge from both unimodal and cross-modal combinations involving audio, video, and language. These intricate interactions call for a more adaptive and modality-aware decoding strategy. In this paper, we propose Audio-Visual Contrastive Decoding (AVCD)--a novel, training-free decoding framework designed to model trimodal interactions and suppress modality-induced hallucinations in AV-LLMs.


Enhancing Safety in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback via Rectified Policy Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Balancing helpfulness and safety (harmlessness) is a critical challenge in aligning large language models (LLMs). Current approaches often decouple these two objectives, training separate preference models for helpfulness and safety, while framing safety as a constraint within a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) framework. This paper identifies a potential issue when using the widely adopted expected safety constraints for LLM safety alignment, termed safety compensation'', where the constraints are satisfied on expectation, but individual prompts may trade off safety, resulting in some responses being overly restrictive while others remain unsafe.


GSRF: Complex-Valued 3D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Radio-Frequency Data Synthesis

Neural Information Processing Systems

Synthesizing radio-frequency (RF) data given the transmitter and receiver positions, e.g., received signal strength indicator (RSSI), is critical for wireless networking and sensing applications, such as indoor localization. However, it remains challenging due to complex propagation interactions, including reflection, diffraction, and scattering. State-of-the-art neural radiance field (NeRF)-based methods achieve high-fidelity RF data synthesis but are limited by long training times and high inference latency. We introduce GSRF, a framework that extends 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) from the optical domain to the RF domain, enabling efficient RF data synthesis. GSRF realizes this adaptation through three key innovations: First, it introduces complex-valued 3D Gaussians with a hybrid Fourier-Legendre basis to model directional and phase-dependent radiance. Second, it employs orthographic splatting for efficient ray-Gaussian intersection identification. Third, it incorporates a complex-valued ray tracing algorithm, executed on RF-customized CUDA kernels and grounded in wavefront propagation principles, to synthesize RF data in real time. Evaluated across various RF technologies, GSRF preserves high-fidelity RF data synthesis while achieving significant improvements in training efficiency, shorter training time, and reduced inference latency.