ICLR 2025 Papers

We study the problem of learning an approximate equilibrium in the offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) setting. We introduce a structural assumption---the interaction rank---and establish that functions with low interaction rank are significantly more robust to distribution shift compared to general ones. Leveraging this observation, we demonstrate that utilizing function classes with low interaction rank, when combined with regularization and no-regret learning, admits decentralized, computationally and statistically efficient learning in cooperative and competitive offline MARL. Our theoretical results are complemented by experiments that showcase the potential of critic architectures with low interaction rank in offline MARL, contrasting with commonly used single-agent value decomposition architectures.

In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for memory-efficient and privacy-preserving continual learning in 3D object classification. Unlike conventional memory-based approaches in continual learning that require storing numerous exemplars, our method constructs a compact shape model for each class, retaining only the mean shape along with a few key modes of variation. This strategy not only enables the generation of diverse training samples while drastically reducing memory usage but also enhances privacy by eliminating the need to store original data. To further improve model robustness against input variations—an issue common in 3D domains due to the absence of strong backbones and limited training data—we incorporate Gradient Mode Regularization. This technique enhances model stability and broadens classification margins, resulting in accuracy improvements. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on the ModelNet40, ShapeNet, and ScanNet datasets, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our method consumes only 15% of the memory required by competing methods on the ModelNet40 and ShapeNet, while achieving comparable performance on the challenging ScanNet dataset with just 8.5% of the memory. These results underscore the scalability, effectiveness, and privacy-preserving strengths of our framework for 3D object classification.

This paper introduces StreamV2V, a diffusion model that achieves real-time streaming video-to-video (V2V) translation with user prompts. Unlike prior V2V methods using batches to process limited frames, we opt to process frames in a streaming fashion, to support unlimited frames. At the heart of StreamV2V lies a backward-looking principle that relates the present to the past. This is realized by maintaining a feature bank, which archives information from past frames. For incoming frames, StreamV2V extends self-attention to include banked keys and values, and directly fuses similar past features into the output. The feature bank is continually updated by merging stored and new features, making it compact yet informative. StreamV2V stands out for its adaptability and efficiency, seamlessly integrating with image diffusion models without fine-tuning. It can run 20 FPS on one A100 GPU, being 15$\times$, 46$\times$, 108$\times$, and 158$\times$ faster than FlowVid, CoDeF, Rerender, and TokenFlow, respectively. Quantitative metrics and user studies confirm StreamV2V's exceptional ability to maintain temporal consistency.

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods typically rely on random image augmentations, or views, to make models invariant to different transformations. We hypothesize that the efficacy of pretraining pipelines based on conventional random view sampling can be enhanced by explicitly selecting views that benefit the learning progress. A simple yet effective approach is to select hard views that yield a higher loss. In this paper, we propose Hard View Pretraining (HVP), a learning-free strategy that extends random view generation by exposing models to more challenging samples during SSL pretraining. HVP encompasses the following iterative steps: 1) randomly sample multiple views and forward each view through the pretrained model, 2) create pairs of two views and compute their loss, 3) adversarially select the pair yielding the highest loss according to the current model state, and 4) perform a backward pass with the selected pair. In contrast to existing hard view literature, we are the first to demonstrate hard view pretraining's effectiveness at scale, particularly training on the full ImageNet-1k dataset, and evaluating across multiple SSL methods, Convolutional Networks, and Vision Transformers. As a result, HVP sets a new state-of-the-art on DINO ViT-B/16, reaching 78.8% linear evaluation accuracy (a 0.6% improvement) and consistent gains of 1% for both 100 and 300 epoch pretraining, with similar improvements across transfer tasks in DINO, SimSiam, iBOT, and SimCLR.

Language models are increasingly being used in important decision pipelines, so ensuring the correctness of their outputs is crucial. Recent work has proposed evaluating the “factuality” of claims decomposed from a language model generation and applying conformal prediction techniques to filter out those claims that are not factual. This can be effective for tasks such as information retrieval, where constituent claims may be evaluated in isolation for factuality, but is not appropriate for reasoning tasks, as steps of a logical argument can be evaluated for correctness only within the context of the claims that precede them. To capture this, we define “coherent factuality” and develop a conformal-prediction-based method to guarantee coherent factuality for language model outputs. Our approach applies split conformal prediction to subgraphs within a "deducibility" graph that represents the steps of a reasoning problem. We evaluate our method on mathematical reasoning problems from the MATH and FELM datasets and find that our algorithm consistently produces correct and substantiated orderings of claims, achieving coherent factuality across target coverage levels. Moreover, we achieve 90\% factuality on our stricter definition while retaining 80\% or more of the original claims, highlighting the utility of our deducibility-graph-guided approach.

We consider the decentralized minimization of a separable objective $\sum_{i=1}^{n} f_i(x_i)$, where the variables are coupled through an affine constraint $\sum_{i=1}^n\left(\mathbf{A}_i x_i - b_i\right) = 0$. We assume that the functions $f_i$, matrices $\mathbf{A}_i$, and vectors $b_i$ are stored locally by the nodes of a computational network, and that the functions $f_i$ are smooth and strongly convex. This problem has significant applications in resource allocation and systems control and can also arise in distributed machine learning. We propose lower complexity bounds for decentralized optimization problems with coupled constraints and a first-order algorithm achieving the lower bounds. To the best of our knowledge, our method is also the first linearly convergent first-order decentralized algorithm for problems with general affine coupled constraints.

The "pre-train, prompt-tuning'' paradigm has demonstrated impressive performance for tuning pre-trained heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) by mitigating the gap between pre-trained models and downstream tasks. However, most prompt-tuning-based works may face at least two limitations: (i) the model may be insufficient to fit the graph structures well as they are generally ignored in the prompt-tuning stage, increasing the training error to decrease the generalization ability; and (ii) the model may suffer from the limited labeled data during the prompt-tuning stage, leading to a large generalization gap between the training error and the test error to further affect the model generalization. To alleviate the above limitations, we first derive the generalization error bound for existing prompt-tuning-based methods, and then propose a unified framework that combines two new adapters with potential labeled data extension to improve the generalization of pre-trained HGNN models. Specifically, we design dual structure-aware adapters to adaptively fit task-related homogeneous and heterogeneous structural information. We further design a label-propagated contrastive loss and two self-supervised losses to optimize dual adapters and incorporate unlabeled nodes as potential labeled data. Theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed method achieves a lower generalization error bound than existing methods, thus obtaining superior generalization ability. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method on different downstream tasks.

EEG-based connectomes offer a low-cost and portable method to identify brain disorders using deep learning. With the growing interest in model interpretability and transparency, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is widely applied to understand the decision of deep learning models. However, most research focuses solely on interpretability analysis based on the insights from XAI, overlooking XAI’s potential to improve model performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a dynamical-system-inspired architecture, XAI guided transformer (XAIguiFormer), where XAI not only provides explanations but also contributes to enhancing the transformer by refining the originally coarse information in self-attention mechanism to capture more relevant dependency relationships. In order not to damage the connectome’s topological structure, the connectome tokenizer treats the single-band graphs as atomic tokens to generate a sequence in the frequency domain. To address the limitations of conventional positional encoding in understanding the frequency and mitigating the individual differences, we integrate frequency and demographic information into tokens via a rotation matrix, resulting in a richly informative representation. Our experiment demonstrates that XAIguiFormer achieves superior performance over all baseline models. In addition, XAIguiFormer provides valuable interpretability through visualization of the frequency band importance. Our code is available at https://github.com/HanningGuo/XAIguiFormer.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based generative recommendation has achieved notable success, yet its practical deployment is costly particularly due to excessive inference latency caused by autoregressive decoding. For lossless LLM decoding acceleration, Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising solution. However, applying SD to generative recommendation presents unique challenges due to the requirement of generating top-K items (i.e., K distinct token sequences) as a recommendation list by beam search. This leads to more stringent verification in SD, where all the top-K sequences from the target LLM must be successfully drafted by the draft model at each decoding step. To alleviate this, we consider 1) boosting top-K sequence alignment between the draft model and the target LLM, and 2) relaxing the verification strategy to reduce trivial LLM calls. To this end, we propose an alignment framework named AtSpeed, which presents the AtSpeed-S optimization objective for top-K alignment under the strict top-K verification. Moreover, we introduce a relaxed sampling verification strategy that allows high-probability non-top-K drafted sequences to be accepted, significantly reducing LLM calls. Correspondingly, we propose AtSpeed-R for top-K alignment under this relaxed sampling verification. Empirical results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that AtSpeed significantly accelerates LLM-based generative recommendation, e.g., near 2x speedup under strict top-K verification and up to 2.5x speedup under relaxed sampling verification. The codes and datasets are available at~\url{https://github.com/Linxyhaha/AtSpeed}.

The robustness of LLMs to jailbreak attacks, where users design prompts to circumvent safety measures and misuse model capabilities, has been studied primarily for LLMs acting as simple chatbots. Meanwhile, LLM agents---which use external tools and can execute multi-stage tasks---may pose a greater risk if misused, but their robustness remains underexplored. To facilitate research on LLM agent misuse, we propose a new benchmark called AgentHarm. The benchmark includes a diverse set of 110 explicitly malicious agent tasks (440 with augmentations), covering 11 harm categories including fraud, cybercrime, and harassment. In addition to measuring whether models refuse harmful agentic requests, scoring well on AgentHarm requires jailbroken agents to maintain their capabilities following an attack to complete a multi-step task. We evaluate a range of leading LLMs, and find (1) leading LLMs are surprisingly complaint with malicious agent requests without jailbreaking, (2) simple universal jailbreak strings can be adapted to effectively jailbreak agents, and (3) these jailbreaks enable coherent and malicious multi-step agent behavior and retain model capabilities. To enable simple and reliable evaluation of attacks and defenses for LLM-based agents, we publicly release AgentHarm at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ai-safety-institute/AgentHarm.

Knowledge distillation (KD) compresses deep neural networks by transferring task-related knowledge from cumbersome pre-trained teacher models to more compact student models. However, vanilla KD for image super-resolution (SR) networks yields only limited improvements due to the inherent nature of SR tasks, where the outputs of teacher models are noisy approximations of high-quality label images. In this work, we show that the potential of vanilla KD has been underestimated and demonstrate that the ingenious application of data augmentation methods can close the gap between it and more complex, well-designed methods. Unlike conventional training processes typically applying image augmentations simultaneously to both low-quality inputs and high-quality labels, we propose AugKD utilizing unpaired data augmentations to 1) generate auxiliary distillation samples and 2) impose label consistency regularization. Comprehensive experiments show that the AugKD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art KD methods across a range of SR tasks.

In this paper, we present GGSD, a novel graph generative model based on 1) the spectral decomposition of the graph Laplacian matrix and 2) a diffusion process. Specifically, we propose to use a denoising model to sample eigenvectors and eigenvalues from which we can reconstruct the graph Laplacian and adjacency matrix. Using the Laplacian spectrum allows us to naturally capture the structural characteristics of the graph and work directly in the node space while avoiding the quadratic complexity bottleneck that limits the applicability of other diffusion-based methods. This, in turn, is accomplished by truncating the spectrum, which, as we show in our experiments, results in a faster yet accurate generative process, and by designing a novel transformer-based architecture linear in the number of nodes. Our permutation invariant model can also handle node features by concatenating them to the eigenvectors of each node. An extensive set of experiments on both synthetic and real-world graphs demonstrates the strengths of our model against state-of-the-art alternatives.

In the post-AlphaGo era, there has been a renewed interest in search techniques such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), particularly in their application to Large Language Models (LLMs). This renewed attention is driven by the recognition that current next-token prediction models often lack the ability for long-term planning. Is it possible to instill search-like abilities within the models to enhance their planning abilities without relying on explicit search? We propose DiffuSearch , a model that does \textit{implicit search} by looking into the future world via discrete diffusion modeling. We instantiate DiffuSearch on a classical board game, Chess, where explicit search is known to be essential. Through extensive controlled experiments, we show DiffuSearch outperforms both the searchless and explicit search-enhanced policies. Specifically, DiffuSearch outperforms the one-step policy by 19.2\% and the MCTS-enhanced policy by 14\% on action accuracy. Furthermore, DiffuSearch demonstrates a notable 30\% enhancement in puzzle-solving abilities compared to explicit search-based policies, along with a significant 540 Elo increase in game-playing strength assessment. These results indicate that implicit search via discrete diffusion is a viable alternative to explicit search over a one-step policy. All codes are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/HKUNLP/DiffuSearch}{https://github.com/HKUNLP/DiffuSearch}.

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has made significant strides in distilling image-generative models for 3D generation. However, its maximum-likelihood-seeking behavior often leads to degraded visual quality and diversity, limiting its effectiveness in 3D applications. In this work, we propose Consistent Flow Distillation (CFD), which addresses these limitations. We begin by leveraging the gradient of the diffusion ODE or SDE sampling process to guide the 3D generation. From the gradient-based sampling perspective, we find that the consistency of 2D image flows across different viewpoints is important for high-quality 3D generation. To achieve this, we introduce multi-view consistent Gaussian noise on the 3D object, which can be rendered from various viewpoints to compute the flow gradient. Our experiments demonstrate that CFD, through consistent flows, significantly outperforms previous methods in text-to-3D generation.

Conditional Neural Fields (CNFs) are increasingly being leveraged as continuous signal representations, by associating each data-sample with a latent variable that conditions a shared backbone Neural Field (NeF) to reconstruct the sample. However, existing CNF architectures face limitations when using this latent downstream in tasks requiring fine-grained geometric reasoning, such as classification and segmentation. We posit that this results from lack of explicit modelling of geometric information (e.g. locality in the signal or the orientation of a feature) in the latent space of CNFs. As such, we propose Equivariant Neural Fields (ENFs), a novel CNF architecture which uses a geometry-informed cross-attention to condition the NeF on a geometric variable—a latent point cloud of features—that enables an equivariant decoding from latent to field. We show that this approach induces a steerability property by which both field and latent are grounded in geometry and amenable to transformation laws: if the field transforms, the latent representation transforms accordingly—and vice versa. Crucially, this equivariance relation ensures that the latent is capable of (1) representing geometric patterns faitfhully, allowing for geometric reasoning in latent space, (2) weight-sharing over similar local patterns, allowing for efficient learning of datasets of fields. We validate these main properties in a range of tasks including classification, segmentation, forecasting, reconstruction and generative modelling, showing clear improvement over baselines with a geometry-free latent space.

Bilevel optimization has recently attracted considerable attention due to its abundant applications in machine learning problems. However, existing methods rely on prior knowledge of problem parameters to determine stepsizes, resulting in significant effort in tuning stepsizes when these parameters are unknown. In this paper, we propose two novel tuning-free algorithms, D-TFBO and S-TFBO. D-TFBO employs a double-loop structure with stepsizes adaptively adjusted by the "inverse of cumulative gradient norms" strategy. S-TFBO features a simpler fully single-loop structure that updates three variables simultaneously with a theory-motivated joint design of adaptive stepsizes for all variables. We provide a comprehensive convergence analysis for both algorithms and show that D-TFBO and S-TFBO respectively require $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ and $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\log^4(\frac{1}{\epsilon}))$ iterations to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, (nearly) matching their well-tuned counterparts using the information of problem parameters. Experiments on various problems show that our methods achieve performance comparable to existing well-tuned approaches, while being more robust to the selection of initial stepsizes. To the best of our knowledge, our methods are the first to completely eliminate the need for stepsize tuning, while achieving theoretical guarantees.

In this paper, we use the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) combined with the {\fontfamily{lmtt}\selectfont \textit{supercomputer}} support to create a \textbf{C}ombustion \textbf{K}inetics (CK) dataset for machine learning and scientific research. This dataset captures the development of fires in industrial parks with high-precision Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. It includes various physical fields such as temperature and pressure, and covers multiple environmental combinations for exploring \underline{multi-physics} field coupling phenomena. Additionally, we evaluate several advanced machine learning architectures across our {\fontfamily{lmtt}\selectfont {Open-CK}} benchmark using a substantial computational setup of 64 NVIDIA A100 GPUs: \ding{182} vision backbone; \ding{183} spatio-temporal predictive models; \ding{184} operator learning frameworks. These architectures uniquely excel at handling complex physical field data. We also introduce three benchmarks to demonstrate their potential in enhancing the exploration of downstream tasks: (a) capturing continuous changes in combustion kinetics; (b) a neural partial differential equation solver for learning temperature fields and turbulence; (c) reconstruction of sparse physical observations. The Open-CK dataset and benchmarks aim to advance research in combustion kinetics driven by machine learning, providing a reliable baseline for developing and comparing cutting-edge technologies and models. We hope to further promote the application of deep learning in earth sciences. Our project is available at \url{https://github.com/whscience/Open-CK}.

Accurately predicting protein-ligand binding affinity is a critical challenge in drug discovery, crucial for understanding drug efficacy. While existing models typically rely on atom-level interactions, they often fail to capture the complex, higher-order interactions, resulting in noise and computational inefficiency. Transitioning to modeling these interactions at the cluster level is challenging because it is difficult to determine which atoms form meaningful clusters that drive the protein-ligand interactions. To address this, we propose CheapNet, a novel interaction-based model that integrates atom-level representations with hierarchical cluster-level interactions through a cross-attention mechanism. By employing differentiable pooling of atom-level embeddings, CheapNet efficiently captures essential higher-order molecular representations crucial for accurate binding predictions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that CheapNet not only achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple binding affinity prediction tasks but also maintains prediction accuracy with reasonable computational efficiency. The code of CheapNet is available at https://github.com/hyukjunlim/CheapNet.

Do Large Vision Models (LVMs) extract medically and semantically relevant features similar to those identified by human experts? Currently, only biased, qualitative approaches with limited, small-scale expert evaluations are available to answer this question. In this study, we propose the Boltzmann Semantic Score (BSS), a novel method inspired by state space modeling, to evaluate the encoding space of LVMs from medical images using the encoding space of Large Language Models (LLMs) from medical reports. Through extensive experimentation on 32 datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas collection using five state-of-the-art LLMs, we first establish a baseline of LLMs' performance in digital pathology and show that LLMs' encoding can be linked to patient outcomes. Then, we compared seven LVMs with BSS and showed that LVMs suffer from poor semantic capability when compared with encoded expert knowledge from pathology reports. We also found statistically significant correlations between BSS (as a measure of structural similarity) and performance in two downstream tasks: information retrieval and survival prediction tasks. Our study also investigates the consensus among LLMs in evaluating LVMs using BSS, indicating that LLMs generally reach substantial consensus in rating LVMs, with some variation dependant on the cancer type. We believe the BSS metric proposed here holds significant potential for application in other domains with similar contexts. Data and code can be found in \footnotesize \url{ https://github.com/AIMLab-UBC/Boltzmann}