ICLR 2026 Papers

Assessing the aesthetic quality of graphic design is central to visual communication, yet remains underexplored in vision–language models (VLMs). We investigate whether VLMs can evaluate design aesthetics in ways comparable to humans. Prior work faces three key limitations: benchmarks restricted to narrow principles and coarse evaluation protocols, a lack of systematic VLM comparisons, and limited training data for model improvement. In this work, we introduce AesEval-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning four dimensions, twelve indicators, and three fully quantifiable tasks: aesthetic judgment, region selection, and precise localization. Then, we systematically evaluate proprietary, open-source, and reasoning-augmented VLMs, revealing clear performance gaps against the nuanced demands of aesthetic assessment. Moreover, we construct a training dataset to fine-tune VLMs for this domain, leveraging human-guided VLM labeling to produce task labels at scale and indicator-grounded reasoning to tie abstract indicators to concrete design regions.Together, our work establishes the first systematic framework for aesthetic quality assessment in graphic design.

We introduce Flower, a solver for linear inverse problems. It leverages a pre-trained flow model to produce reconstructions that are consistent with the observed measurements. Flower operates through an iterative procedure over three steps: (i) a flow-consistent destination estimation, where the velocity network predicts a denoised target; (ii) a refinement step that projects the estimated destination onto a feasible set defined by the forward operator; and (iii) a time-progression step that re-projects the refined destination along the flow trajectory. We provide a theoretical analysis that demonstrates how Flower approximates Bayesian posterior sampling, thereby unifying perspectives from plug-and-play methods and generative inverse solvers. On the practical side, Flower achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality while using nearly identical hyperparameters across various linear inverse problems.

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has exhibited powerful zero-shot capacity in various single-label image classification tasks. However, when applying to the multi-label scenarios, CLIP suffers from significant performance declines due to the lack of explicit exploitation of co-occurrence information. In pretraining, due to the contrastive property of its used objective, the model focuses on the prominent object in an image, while overlooking other objects and their co-occurrence relationships; in inference, it uses a discriminative prompt containing only a target label name to make predictions, which does not introduce any co-occurrence information. Then, an important question is as follows: \textit{Do we need label co-occurrence in CLIP for achieving effective zero-shot multi-label learning?} In this paper, we propose to rewrite the original prompt into a correlative form consisting of both the target label and its co-occurring labels. An interesting finding is that such a simple modification can effectively introduce co-occurrence information into CLIP and it exhibits both good and bad effects. On the one hand, it can enhance the recognition capacity of CLIP by exploiting the correlative pattern activated by the correlative prompt; on the other hand, it leads to object hallucination in CLIP, where the model predicts objects that do not actually exist in the image, due to overfitting to co-occurrence. To address this problem, we proposed to calibrate CLIP predictions by keeping the positive effect while removing the negative effect caused by suspicious co-occurrence. This can be achieved by using dual prompts consisting of the discriminative and correlative prompts, which introduce label co-occurrence while emphasizing the discriminative pattern of the target object. Experimental results verify that our method can achieve performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

LLM-as-a-Judge has been widely adopted across various research and practical applications, yet the robustness and reliability of its evaluation remain a critical issue. A core challenge it faces is bias, which has primarily been studied in terms of known biases and their impact on evaluation outcomes, while automated and systematic exploration of potential unknown biases is still lacking. Nevertheless, such exploration is crucial for enhancing the robustness and reliability of evaluations. To bridge this gap, we propose BiasScope, a LLM-driven framework for automatically and at scale discovering potential biases that may arise during model evaluation. BiasScope can uncover potential biases across different model families and scales, with its generality and effectiveness validated on the JudgeBench dataset. It overcomes the limitations of existing approaches, transforming bias discovery from a passive process relying on manual effort and predefined bias lists into an active and comprehensive automated exploration. Moreover, based on BiasScope, we propose JudgeBench-Pro, an extended version of JudgeBench and a more challenging benchmark for evaluating the robustness of LLM-as-a-judge. Strikingly, even powerful LLMs as evaluators show error rates above 50\% on JudgeBench-Pro, underscoring the urgent need to strengthen evaluation robustness and to mitigate potential biases further.

While exocentric video synthesis has achieved great progress, egocentric video generation remains largely underexplored, which requires modeling first-person view content along with camera motion patterns induced by the wearer's body movements. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task of joint egocentric video and human motion generation, characterized by two key challenges: 1) Viewpoint Alignment: the camera trajectory in the generated video must accurately align with the head trajectory derived from human motion; 2) Causal Interplay: the synthesized human motion must causally align with the observed visual dynamics across adjacent video frames. To address these challenges, we propose EgoTwin, a joint video-motion generation framework built on the diffusion transformer architecture. Specifically, EgoTwin introduces a head-centric motion representation that anchors the human motion to the head joint and incorporates a cybernetics-inspired interaction mechanism that explicitly captures the causal interplay between video and motion within attention operations. For comprehensive evaluation, we curate a large-scale real-world dataset of synchronized text-video-motion triplets and design novel metrics to assess video-motion consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the EgoTwin framework. Qualitative results are available on our project page: https://egotwin.pages.dev/.

The one-epoch overfitting problem has drawn widespread attention, especially in CTR and CVR estimation models in search, advertising, and recommendation domains. These models which rely heavily on large-scale sparse categorical features, often suffer a significant decline in performance when trained for multiple epochs. Although recent studies have proposed heuristic solutions, the fundamental cause of this phenomenon remains unclear. In this work, we present a theoretical explanation grounded in Rademacher complexity, supported by empirical experiments, to explain why overfitting occurs in models with large-scale sparse categorical features. Based on this analysis, we propose a regularization method that constrains the norm budget of embedding layers adaptively. Our approach not only prevents the severe performance degradation observed during multi-epoch training, but also improves model performance within a single epoch. This method has already been deployed in online production systems.

Consider episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with adversarially chosen transition kernels, where the transition kernel is adversarially chosen at each episode. Prior works have established regret upper bounds of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T} + C^P)$, where $T$ is the number of episodes and $C^P$ quantifies the degree of adversarial change in the transition dynamics. This regret bound may scale as large as $\mathcal{O}(T)$, leading to a linear regret. This raises a fundamental question: *Can sublinear regret be achieved under fully adversarial transition kernels?* We answer this question affirmatively. First, we show that the optimal policy for MDPs with adversarial transition kernels must be history-dependent. We then design an algorithm of Adversarial Dynamics Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (AD-FTRL), and prove that it achieves a sublinear regret of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|)^K T})$, where $K$ is the horizon length, $|\mathcal{S}|$ is the number of states, and $|\mathcal{A}|$ is the number of actions. Such a regret cannot be achieved by simply solving this problem as a contextual bandit. We further construct a hard MDP instance and prove a matching lower bound on the regret, which thereby demonstrates the **minimax optimality** of our algorithm.

Current image immunization defense techniques against diffusion-based editing embed imperceptible noise into target images to disrupt editing models. However, these methods face scalability challenges, as they require time-consuming optimization for each image separately, taking hours for small batches. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffVax, a scalable, lightweight, and optimization-free framework for image immunization, specifically designed to prevent diffusion-based editing. Our approach enables effective generalization to unseen content, reducing computational costs and cutting immunization time from days to milliseconds, achieving a speedup of 250,000x. This is achieved through a loss term that ensures the failure of editing attempts and the imperceptibility of the perturbations. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our model is scalable, optimization-free, adaptable to various diffusion-based editing tools, robust against counter-attacks, and, for the first time, effectively protects video content from editing. More details are available in https://diffvax.github.io/.

Learning effective numerical representations, or embeddings, of programs is a fundamental prerequisite for applying machine learning to automate and enhance compiler optimization. Prevailing paradigms, however, present a dilemma. Static representations, derived from source code or intermediate representation (IR), are efficient and deterministic but offer limited insight into how a program will behave or evolve under complex code transformations. Conversely, dynamic representations, which rely on runtime profiling, provide profound insights into performance bottlenecks but are often impractical for large-scale tasks due to prohibitive overhead and inherent non-determinism. This paper transcends this trade-off by proposing a novel quasi-dynamic framework for program representation. The core insight is to model a program's optimization sensitivity. We introduce the Program Behavior Spectrum, a new representation generated by probing a program's IR with a diverse set of optimization sequences and quantifying the resulting changes in its static features. To effectively encode this high-dimensional, continuous spectrum, we pioneer a compositional learning approach. Product Quantization is employed to discretize the continuous reaction vectors into structured, compositional sub-words. Subsequently, a multi-task Transformer model, termed PQ-BERT, is pre-trained to learn the deep contextual grammar of these behavioral codes. Comprehensive experiments on two representative compiler optimization tasks---Best Pass Prediction and -Oz Benefit Prediction---demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art static baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PREP-311F/.

We construct benchmark signatures that capture the capacity required for strong performance to characterize large language model (LLM) benchmarks and their meaningful overlaps. Formally, we define them as sets of salient tokens drawn from **in-the-wild** corpora whose LLM token perplexity, reflecting training exposure, is highly predictive of benchmark performance. We extract benchmark signatures via stepwise forward selection with linear regression in a large-scale meta-evaluation across 32 LLMs and 89 benchmarks spanning knowledge, coding, logic, instruction following, math, language, reasoning, missing-information detection, and cultural/world modeling. We then analyze how these signatures relate to both the semantic similarity of benchmark questions and the correlation structure of model performance. Performance-level overlaps remain universally high and semantic overlaps stay in a narrow mid-range, but signatures distinguish between benchmarks and illuminate nuanced differences in their capacity demands. For instance, signatures uniquely reveal substantial overlap among knowledge and reasoning benchmarks, whereas humanity- and culture-oriented benchmarks show relatively low similarity, lower even than typical cross-category overlap. Notably, performance-level results are strongly shaped by benchmark-**orthogonal** factors such as question format, whereas benchmark signatures remain robust to such confounds. We further reveal cross-functional overlaps among logic, math, language, instruction following, and cultural/world modeling, with coding emerging as the least overlapping domain, interacting only moderately with the ability of detecting missing information. Qualitative inspection of signatures shows that only the knowledge signature is aligned with actual knowledge, suggesting that LLMs may exhibit a distinctive semantic organization that differs from that of humans. Together, these findings offer insights into benchmark validity, LLM sensitivities, and the broad landscape of interconnected LLM capacities.

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) extend the capabilities of vision-language models to spatiotemporal inputs, enabling tasks such as video question answering (VideoQA). Despite recent advances in VideoLLMs, their internal mechanisms on where and how they extract and propagate video and textual information remain less explored. In this study, we investigate the internal information flow of VideoLLMs using mechanistic interpretability techniques. Our analysis reveals consistent patterns across diverse VideoQA tasks: (1) temporal reasoning in VideoLLMs initiates with active cross-frame interactions in early-to-middle layers, (2) followed by progressive video-language integration in middle layers. This is facilitated by alignment between video representations and linguistic embeddings containing temporal concepts. (3) Upon completion of this integration, the model is ready to generate correct answers in middle-to-late layers. (4) Based on our analysis, we show that VideoLLMs can retain their VideoQA performance by selecting these effective information pathways while suppressing substantial amount of attention edges, e.g., 58% in LLaVA-NeXT-7B-Video-FT. These findings provide a blueprint on how VideoLLMs perform temporal reasoning and offer practical insights for improving model interpretability and downstream generalization.

Hybrid neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) integrate mechanistic models with neural ODEs, offering strong inductive bias and flexibility, and are particularly advantageous in data-scarce healthcare settings. However, excessive latent states and interactions from mechanistic models can lead to training inefficiency and over-fitting, limiting practical effectiveness of hybrid neural ODEs. In response, we propose a new hybrid pipeline for automatic state selection and structure optimization in mechanistic neural ODEs, combining domain-informed graph modifications with data-driven regularization to sparsify the model for improving predictive performance and stability while retaining mechanistic plausibility. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show improved predictive performance and robustness with desired sparsity, establishing an effective solution for hybrid model reduction in healthcare applications.

Learning-augmented scheduling uses ML predictions to improve decision-making under uncertainty. Many algorithms in this class have been proposed with better theoretical guarantees than the classic methods. Translating these theoretical results into practice, however, requires an understanding of real workloads. Such an understanding is hard to develop because existing production traces either lack the ground-truth processing times or are not publicly available, while synthetic benchmarks fail to represent real-world complexity. We fill this gap by introducing *Alibaba Trace for Learning-Augmented Scheduling (ATLAS)*, a research-ready dataset derived from Alibaba's Platform of Artificial Intelligence (PAI) cluster trace—a production system that processes hundreds of thousands of ML jobs per day. The ATLAS dataset has been cleaned and features engineered to represent the inputs and constraints of non-clairvoyant scheduling, including user tags, resource requests (CPU/GPU/memory), and job structures with ground-truth processing times. We develop a prediction benchmark reporting prediction error metrics, along with feature importance analysis, and introduce a novel multiple-stage ML model. We also provide a scheduling benchmark for minimizing the total completion time, max-stretch, and makespan. ATLAS is a reproducible foundation for researchers to study learning-augmented scheduling on real workloads, available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/non-clairvoyant-with-predictions-7BF8/.

Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, voters often cannot precisely quantify their affinity towards a given candidate. As a result, modern voting systems rely on ordinal rankings to simplistically represent preference profiles. In quantifying the suboptimality of solutions due to the loss of information when using ordinal preferences, the metric distortion framework models voters and candidates as points in a metric space, with distortion bounding the efficiency loss. Prior works within this framework use the distance between a voter and a candidate in the underlying metric as the cost of selecting the candidate for the given voter, with a goal of minimizing the sum (utilitarian) or maximum (egalitarian) of costs across voters. For deterministic election mechanisms selecting a single winning candidate, the best possible distortion is known to be 3 for any metric, as established by Gkatzelis, Halpern, and Shah (FOCS'20). In contrast, for randomized mechanisms, distortions cannot be lower than $2.112$, as shown by Charikar and Ramakrishnan (SODA'22), and there exists a mechanism with a distortion guarantee of $2.753$, according to Charikar, Ramakrishnan, Wang, and Wu (SODA'24 Best Paper Award). Our work asks: can one obtain a better approximation compared to an optimal candidate by selecting a committee of $k$ candidates ($k \ge 1$), where the cost of a voter is defined to be its distance to the closest candidate in the committee? We affirmatively answer this question by introducing the concept of bi-criteria approximation within the metric distortion framework. In the line metric, it is possible to achieve optimal cost with only $O(1)$ candidates. In contrast, we also prove that in both the two-dimensional and tree metrics -- which naturally generalize the line metric -- achieving optimal cost is impossible unless all candidates are selected. These results apply to both utilitarian and egalitarian objectives. Our results establish a stark separation between the line metric and the 2D or tree metric in the context of the metric distortion problem.

Gaussian Probability Path based Generative Models (GPPGMs) generate data by reversing a stochastic process that progressively corrupts samples with Gaussian noise. Despite state-of-the-art results in 3D molecular generation, their deployment is hindered by the high cost of long generative trajectories, often requiring hundreds to thousands of steps during training and sampling. In this work, we propose a principled method, named GAGA, to improve generation efficiency without sacrificing training granularity or inference fidelity of GPPGMs. Our key insight is that different data modalities obtain sufficient Gaussianity at markedly different steps during the forward process. Based on this observation, we analytically identify a characteristic step at which molecular data attains sufficient Gaussianity, after which the trajectory can be replaced by a closed-form Gaussian approximation. Unlike existing accelerators that coarsen or reformulate trajectories, our approach preserves full-resolution learning dynamics while avoiding redundant transport through truncated distributional states. Experiments on 3D molecular generation benchmarks demonstrate that our GAGA achieves substantial improvement on both generation quality and computational efficiency.

Large language model-based agents show promise for software engineering, but environment configuration remains a bottleneck due to heavy manual effort and scarce large-scale, high-quality datasets. Existing benchmarks assess only end-to-end build/test success, obscuring where and why agents succeed or fail. We introduce the Environment Configuration Diagnosis Benchmark, EnConda-bench, which provides process-level trajectory assessment of fine-grained agent capabilities during environment setup-planning, perception-driven error diagnosis, feedback-driven repair, and action to execute the final environment configuration. Our task instances are automatically constructed by injecting realistic README errors and are validated in Docker for scalable, high-quality evaluation. EnConda-bench combines process-level analysis with end-to-end executability to enable capability assessments beyond aggregate success rates. Evaluations across state-of-the-art LLMs and agent frameworks show that while agents can localize errors, they struggle to translate feedback into effective corrections, limiting end-to-end performance. To our knowledge, EnConda-bench is the first framework to provide process-level internal capability assessment for environment configuration, offering actionable insights for improving software engineering agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become valuable assistants for developers in code-related tasks. While LLMs excel at traditional programming tasks such as code generation and bug fixing, they struggle with visually-oriented coding tasks, often producing suboptimal aesthetics. In this paper, we introduce a new pipeline to enhance the aesthetic quality of LLM-generated code. We first construct AesCode-358K, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset focused on code aesthetics. Next, we propose agentic reward feedback, a multi-agent system that evaluates executability, static aesthetics, and interactive aesthetics. Building on this, we develop GRPO-AR, which integrates these signals into the GRPO algorithm for joint optimization of functionality and code aesthetics. Finally, we develop OpenDesign, a benchmark for assessing code aesthetics. Experimental results show that combining supervised fine-tuning on AesCode-358K with reinforcement learning using agentic reward feedback significantly improves performance on OpenDesign and enhances results on existing benchmarks such as PandasPlotBench. Notably, our AesCoder-4B surpasses GPT-4o and GPT-4.1, and achieves performance comparable to large open-source models with 480B–685B parameters, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach. We will release both the code and datasets to facilitate further research in code aesthetics.

The growing scale of deep learning models has rendered exhaustive hyperparameter (HP) optimization prohibitively expensive. A promising solution is the use of scale-aware HPs, which can enable direct transfer of optimal settings from small-scale grid searches to large models with minimal performance loss. Such approaches are useful when the optimal settings converge "fast" enough with scale. While approaches like the Maximal Update Parameterization ($\mu$P) have empirically displayed fast transfer when scaling model width, a deeper conceptual understanding of the mechanisms that enable this is still missing. Our work establishes a systematic conceptual framework for analyzing fast HP transfer across different synthetic and practical scenarios. In synthetic settings, we present various quantitative examples where transfer either offers a provable computational advantage or fails even under $\mu$P. We then propose a key property that enables the fast transfer often observed in practice: through a novel decomposition of the optimization trajectory, we identify one component that rapidly converges with model width and determines the optimal HPs, and the other that continues to improve the loss with increased width but has negligible impact on HP choice. We conjecture that this decomposition elucidates the key mechanisms behind fast transfer and empirically validate it in practical settings such as LLM training.

From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such "wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains, grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer reaching just 7\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and development in agentic search.