A Spectral Theory of Neural Prediction and Alignment Jenelle Feather 1,2 Albert J. Wakhloo 1,3 SueYeon Chung

Neural Information Processing Systems

The representations of neural networks are often compared to those of biological systems by performing regression between the neural network responses and those measured from biological systems. Many different state-of-the-art deep neural networks yield similar neural predictions, but it remains unclear how to differentiate among models that perform equally well at predicting neural responses. To gain insight into this, we use a recent theoretical framework that relates the generalization error from regression to the spectral properties of the model and the target. We apply this theory to the case of regression between model activations and neural responses and decompose the neural prediction error in terms of the model eigenspectra, alignment of model eigenvectors and neural responses, and the training set size. Using this decomposition, we introduce geometrical measures to interpret the neural prediction error. We test a large number of deep neural networks that predict visual cortical activity and show that there are multiple types of geometries that result in low neural prediction error as measured via regression. The work demonstrates that carefully decomposing representational metrics can provide interpretability of how models are capturing neural activity and points the way towards improved models of neural activity.


Depth Anywhere: Enhancing 360 Monocular Depth Estimation via Perspective Distillation and Unlabeled Data Augmentation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Accurately estimating depth in 360-degree imagery is crucial for virtual reality, autonomous navigation, and immersive media applications. Existing depth estimation methods designed for perspective-view imagery fail when applied to 360-degree images due to different camera projections and distortions, whereas 360-degree methods perform inferior due to the lack of labeled data pairs. We propose a new depth estimation framework that utilizes unlabeled 360-degree data effectively. Our approach uses state-of-the-art perspective depth estimation models as teacher models to generate pseudo labels through a six-face cube projection technique, enabling efficient labeling of depth in 360-degree images.


Model LEGO: Creating Models Like Disassembling and Assembling Building Blocks

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the rapid development of deep learning, the increasing complexity and scale of parameters make training a new model increasingly resource-intensive. In this paper, we start from the classic convolutional neural network (CNN) and explore a paradigm that does not require training to obtain new models. Similar to the birth of CNN inspired by receptive fields in the biological visual system, we draw inspiration from the information subsystem pathways in the biological visual system and propose Model Disassembling and Assembling (MDA). During model disassembling, we introduce the concept of relative contribution and propose a component locating technique to extract task-aware components from trained CNN classifiers. For model assembling, we present the alignment padding strategy and parameter scaling strategy to construct a new model tailored for a specific task, utilizing the disassembled task-aware components.The entire process is akin to playing with LEGO bricks, enabling arbitrary assembly of new models, and providing a novel perspective for model creation and reuse.



RClicks: Realistic Click Simulation for Benchmarking Interactive Segmentation Anton Antonov 1 Denis Shepelev 1 1, 2

Neural Information Processing Systems

The emergence of Segment Anything (SAM) sparked research interest in the field of interactive segmentation, especially in the context of image editing tasks and speeding up data annotation. Unlike common semantic segmentation, interactive segmentation methods allow users to directly influence their output through prompts (e.g.


A Experimental details

Neural Information Processing Systems

Table 3: Experimental details for all results reported. In rows where GPU-hours are given as a range, different runs with identical settings took varying times due to varying performance of our computational infrastructure. The total compute required for this project, including all training, evaluation, and preliminary runs, was roughly 3.5 GPU-years. We used a mixture of NVIDIA RTX A5000s (on an internal cluster) and NVIDIA A100s (from a cloud provider). Due to the expensive nature of drawing samples from both FDM and our baselines, we compute all quantitative metrics reported over the first 100 videos of the test set for GQN-Mazes and MineRL.



Label Free Language Model Routing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in applications where LLM inputs may span many different tasks. Recent work has found that the choice of LLM is consequential, and different LLMs may be good for different input samples. Prior approaches have thus explored how engineers might select an LLM to use for each sample (i.e.



Probabilistic Emulation of a Global Climate Model with Spherical DYffusion

Neural Information Processing Systems

Data-driven deep learning models are transforming global weather forecasting. It is an open question if this success can extend to climate modeling, where the complexity of the data and long inference rollouts pose significant challenges. Here, we present the first conditional generative model that produces accurate and physically consistent global climate ensemble simulations by emulating a coarse version of the United States' primary operational global forecast model, FV3GFS. Our model integrates the dynamics-informed diffusion framework (DYffusion) with the Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) architecture, enabling stable 100-year simulations at 6-hourly timesteps while maintaining low computational overhead compared to single-step deterministic baselines. The model achieves near gold-standard performance for climate model emulation, outperforming existing approaches and demonstrating promising ensemble skill. This work represents a significant advance towards efficient, data-driven climate simulations that can enhance our understanding of the climate system and inform adaptation strategies.