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FreqPolicy: Frequency Autoregressive Visuomotor Policy with Continuous Tokens

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning effective visuomotor policies for robotic manipulation is challenging, as it requires generating precise actions while maintaining computational efficiency. Existing methods remain unsatisfactory due to inherent limitations in the essential action representation and the basic network architectures. We observe that representing actions in the frequency domain captures the structured nature of motion more effectively: low-frequency components reflect global movement patterns, while high-frequency components encode fine local details.


AbstentionBench Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions

Neural Information Processing Systems

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed in both everyday and high-stakes domains, knowing when not to answer is equally critical as answering correctly. Real-world user queries, which can be underspecified, ill-posed, or fundamentally unanswerable, require LLMs to reason about uncertainty and selectively abstain--i.e., refuse to answer definitively. However, abstention remains understudied, without a systematic evaluation framework for modern LLMs. In this work, we introduce AbstentionBench: a large-scale benchmark for holistically evaluating abstention across 20 diverse datasets, including questions with unknown answers, underspecification, false premises, subjective interpretations, and outdated information. Evaluating 20 frontier LLMs reveals abstention is an unsolved problem, and one where scaling models is of little use. While recent reasoning LLMs have shown impressive results in complex problem solving, surprisingly, we find that reasoning fine-tuning degrades abstention (by 24% on average), even for math and science domains on which reasoning models are explicitly trained. We find that while a carefully crafted system prompt can boost abstention in practice, it does not resolve models' fundamental inability to reason about uncertainty. We release AbstentionBenchto foster research into advancing LLM reliability.2


Irrational Complex Rotations Empower Low-bit Optimizers

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel optimizer state compression algorithm, namely π-Quant, which leverages the properties of irrational numbers (e.g., π) for memoryefficient training. The core idea is based on our mathematical findings, which show that a pair of parameters can be represented by a single rotation angle using the complex rotation scheme. Building on this insight, we map the parameters into a complex space and perform quantization using the corresponding rotation angles. To efficiently integrate it into optimization process, we develop an efficient system of geometric equations that computes the precise rotation angles with linear complexity. We evaluate π-Quant on a wide range of tasks. Our experiments show that it can reduce the bit-width of parameters to 3.32-bit, achieving a 41.8% decrease in GPU memory usage, all while maintaining full accuracy.


Understanding and Mitigating Numerical Sources of Nondeterminism in LLMInference

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now integral across various domains and have demonstrated impressive performance. Progress, however, rests on the premise that benchmark scores are both accurate and reproducible. We demonstrate that the reproducibility of LLM performance is fragile: changing system configuration, such as evaluation batch size, GPU count, and GPU version, can introduce significant differences in the generated responses. This issue is especially pronounced in reasoning models, where minor rounding differences in early tokens can cascade into divergent chains of thought, ultimately affecting accuracy. For instance, under bfloat16 precision with greedy decoding, a reasoning model like DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B can exhibit up to 9% variation in accuracy and 9,000 tokens difference in response length due to differences in GPU count, type, and evaluation batch size.


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Neural Information Processing Systems

Randomized experiments are the preferred approach for evaluating the effects of interventions, but they are costly and often yield estimates with substantial uncertainty. On the other hand, in silico experiments leveraging foundation models offer a cost-effective alternative that can potentially attain higher statistical precision. However, the benefits of in silico experiments come with a significant risk: statistical inferences are not valid if the models fail to accurately predict experimental responses to interventions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that integrates the predictions from multiple foundation models with experimental data while preserving valid statistical inference. Our estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal, with asymptotic variance no larger than the standard estimator based on experimental data alone. Importantly, these statistical properties hold even when model predictions are arbitrarily biased. Empirical results across several randomized experiments show that our estimator offers substantial precision gains, equivalent to a reduction of up to 20% in the sample size needed to match the same precision as the standard estimator based on experimental data alone.


Adaptive Fission: Post-training Encoding for Low-latency Spike Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) often rely on rate coding, where high-precision inference depends on long time-steps, leading to significant latency and energy cost--especially for ANN-to-SNN conversions. To address this, we propose Adaptive Fission, a post-training encoding technique that selectively splits highsensitivity neurons into groups with varying scales and weights. This enables neuron-specific, on-demand precision and threshold allocation while introducing minimal spatial overhead. As a generalized form of population coding, it seamlessly applies to a wide range of pretrained SNN architectures without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. Experiments on neuromorphic hardware demonstrate up to 80% reductions in latency and power consumption without degrading accuracy.



FP64 is All You Need: Rethinking Failure Modes in Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) often exhibit "failure modes" in which the PDE residual loss converges while the solution error stays large, a phenomenon traditionally blamed on local optima separated from the true solution by steep loss barriers. We challenge this understanding by demonstrate that the real culprit is insufficient arithmetic precision: with standard FP32, the L-BFGS optimizer prematurely satisfies its convergence test, freezing the network in a spurious failure phase. Simply upgrading to FP64 rescues optimization, enabling vanilla PINNs to solve PDEs without any failure modes. These results reframe PINN failure modes as precision-induced stalls rather than inescapable local minima and expose a three-stage training dynamic--un-converged, failure, success--whose boundaries shift with numerical precision. Our findings emphasize that rigorous arithmetic precision is the key to dependable PDE solving with neural networks.


HALO: Hadamard-Assisted Lower-Precision Optimization for LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Quantized training of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an open challenge, as maintaining accuracy while performing all matrix multiplications in low precision has proven difficult. This is particularly the case when fine-tuning pre-trained models, which can have large weight, activation, and error (output gradient) outlier values that make lower-precision optimization difficult. To address this, we present HALO, a new quantization-aware training approach for Transformers that enables accurate and efficient low-precision training by combining 1) strategic placement of Hadamard rotations in both forward and backward passes, which mitigate outliers, 2) high-performance kernel support, and 3) FSDP integration for low-precision communication. Our approach ensures that all large matrix multiplications during the forward and backward passes are executed in lower precision.


FRAM: Frobenius-Regularized Assignment Matching with Mixed-Precision Computing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph matching, usually cast as a discrete Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), aims to identify correspondences between nodes in two graphs. Since QAP is NPhard, many methods its discrete constraints by projecting the discrete feasible set onto its convex hull and solving the resulting continuous problem. However, these relaxations inevitably enlarge the feasible set and introduce two errors: sensitivity to numerical scales and geometric misalignment between the relaxed and original feasible domains. To address these issues, we propose a novel relaxation framework to reformulate the projection step as a Frobenius-Regularized Linear Assignment (FRA) problem. This formulation incorporates a tunable regularization term to curb the inflation of the feasible region and ensure numerical scale invariance.