ICLR 2026 Papers

Object-level manipulation—relocating or reorienting objects in images or videos while preserving scene realism—is central to film post-production, AR, and creative editing. Yet existing methods struggle to jointly achieve three core goals: background preservation, geometric consistency under viewpoint shifts, and user-controllable transformations. Geometry-based approaches offer precise control but require explicit 3D reconstruction and generalize poorly; diffusion-based methods generalize better but lack fine-grained geometric control. We present **Ctrl&Shift**, an end-to-end diffusion framework to achieve geometry-consistent object manipulation without explicit 3D representations. Our key insight is to decompose manipulation into two stages—object removal and reference-guided inpainting under explicit camera pose control—and encode both within a unified diffusion process. To enable precise, disentangled control, we design a multi-task, multi-stage training strategy that separates background, identity, and pose signals across tasks. To improve generalization, we introduce a scalable real-world dataset construction pipeline that generates paired image and video samples with estimated relative camera poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Ctrl&Shift** achieves state-of-the-art results in fidelity, viewpoint consistency, and controllability. *To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify fine-grained geometric control and real-world generalization for object manipulation—without relying on any explicit 3D modeling.*

Recent progress in aligning image and video generative models with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has improved human preference alignment, but existing variants remain inefficient due to sequential rollouts and large numbers of sampling steps, unreliable credit assignment,as sparse terminal rewards are uniformly propagated across timesteps, failing to capture the varying criticality of decisions during denoising. In this paper, we present BranchGRPO, a method that restructures the rollout process into a branching tree, where shared prefixes amortize computation and pruning removes low-value paths and redundant depths. BranchGRPO introduces three contributions: (1) a branching scheme that amortizes rollout cost through shared prefixes while preserving exploration diversity; (2) a reward fusion and depth-wise advantage estimator that transforms sparse terminal rewards into dense step-level signals; and (3) pruning strategies that cut gradient computation but leave forward rollouts and exploration unaffected. On HPSv2.1 image alignment, BranchGRPO improves alignment scores by up to \textbf{16\%} over DanceGRPO, while reducing per-iteration training time by nearly \textbf{55\%}. A hybrid variant, BranchGRPO-Mix, further accelerates training to 4.7× faster than DanceGRPO without degrading alignment. On WanX video generation, it further achieves higher motion quality reward with sharper and temporally consistent frames.

We propose a concept-based adversarial attack framework that extends beyond single-image perturbations by adopting a probabilistic perspective. Rather than modifying a single image, our method operates on an entire concept - represented by a distribution - to generate diverse adversarial examples. Preserving the concept is essential, as it ensures that the resulting adversarial images remain identifiable as instances of the original underlying category or identity. By sampling from this concept-based adversarial distribution, we generate images that maintain the original concept but vary in pose, viewpoint, or background, thereby misleading the classifier. Mathematically, this framework remains consistent with traditional adversarial attacks in a principled manner. Our theoretical and empirical results demonstrate that concept-based adversarial attacks yield more diverse adversarial examples and effectively preserve the underlying concept, while achieving higher attack efficiency.

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs), despite their promising performance, still suffer from inferior inference efficiency. This is because dLLMs rely on bidirectional attention and cannot directly benefit from the standard key-value (KV) cache as autoregressive models (ARMs) do. To tackle this issue, we introduce \textit{Dual aDaptive Cache} (d$^2$Cache), which is a training-free approximate KV cache framework for accelerating dLLM inference. d$^2$Cache features a two-stage fine-grained selection strategy to identify tokens and adaptively update their KV states at each decoding step, while caching the KV states of the remaining tokens for reuse. Furthermore, d$^2$Cache naturally offers a more reliable decoding alternative, which can enable quasi left-to-right generation and mitigate premature overconfidence in tokens at the end of the sequence. Extensive experimental results on two representative dLLMs (\ie, LLaDA and Dream) demonstrate that d$^2$Cache not only achieves substantial inference speedups, but also yields consistent improvements in generation quality. The anonymous evaluation codes are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/d2Cache-5538}.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models, excelling in text generation tasks due to their bidirectional attention mechanisms. However, their computational complexity, scaling as $\mathcal{O}(L^3)$ with sequence length $L$, poses significant challenges for long-sequence and real-time applications, primarily due to the lack of compatibility with key-value caching and the non-autoregressive nature of denoising steps. Existing acceleration methods rely on static caching or parallel decoding strategies, which fail to account for the dynamic behavior of token properties across layers and decoding steps. We propose \textbf{Dynamic-dLLM}, a training-free framework that enhances dLLM inference efficiency through two components: Dynamic Cache Updating (DCU), which adaptively allocates cache-update budgets based on layer-wise token dynamics, and Adaptive Parallel Decoding (APD), which dynamically calibrates decoding thresholds to balance generation quality and efficiency. Extensive experiments on models like LLaDA-8B-Instruct, LLaDA-1.5, and Dream-v0-7B-Instruct across benchmarks such as MMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval demonstrate that Dynamic-dLLM significantly improves inference speed, attaining an average speedup of exceeding 3$\times$ while maintaining performance. Dynamic-dLLM outperforms state-of-the-art acceleration methods and provides a plug-and-play solution for efficient dLLM deployment without compromising performance. Code and models will be made publicly available.

Multi-view generation with camera pose control and prompt-based customization are both essential elements for achieving controllable generative models. However, existing multi-view generation models do not support customization with geometric consistency, whereas customization models lack explicit viewpoint control, making them challenging to unify. Motivated by these gaps, we introduce a novel task, multi-view customization, which aims to jointly achieve multi-view camera pose control and customization. Due to the scarcity of training data in customization, existing multi-view generation models, which inherently rely on large-scale datasets, struggle to generalize to diverse prompts. To address this, we propose MVCustom, a novel diffusion-based framework explicitly designed to achieve both multi-view consistency and customization fidelity. In the training stage, MVCustom learns the subject's identity and geometry using a feature-field representation, incorporating the text-to-video diffusion backbone enhanced with dense spatio-temporal attention, which leverages temporal coherence for multi-view consistency. In the inference stage, we introduce two novel techniques: depth-aware feature rendering explicitly enforces geometric consistency, and consistent-aware latent completion ensures accurate perspective alignment of the customized subject and surrounding backgrounds. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVCustom achieves the most balanced and consistent competitive performance across multi-view consistency, customization fidelity, demonstrating effective solution of multi-objective generation task.

We introduce Purrception, a variational flow matching approach for vector-quantized image generation that provides explicit categorical supervision while maintaining continuous transport dynamics. Our method adapts Variational Flow Matching to vector-quantized latents by learning categorical posteriors over codebook indices while computing velocity fields in the continuous embedding space. This combines the geometric awareness of continuous methods with the discrete supervision of categorical approaches, enabling uncertainty quantification over plausible codes and temperature-controlled generation. We evaluate Purrception on ImageNet-1k $256 \times 256$ generation. Training converges faster than both continuous flow matching and discrete flow matching baselines while achieving competitive FID scores with state-of-the-art models. This demonstrates that Variational Flow Matching can effectively bridge continuous transport and discrete supervision for improved training efficiency in image generation.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective for autoregressive language models, but adapting these methods to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) presents fundamental challenges. The core difficulty lies in likelihood approximation: while autoregressive models naturally provide token-level conditional probabilities essential for token-level RL objectives (e.g., GRPO), dLLMs generate sequences through iterative non-autoregressive denoising steps that lack this factorization. To address this fundamental mismatch, we propose ELBO-based Sequence-level Policy Optimization (ESPO), a principled RL framework that treats entire sequence generation as a single action and uses the ELBO as a tractable sequence-level likelihood proxy. Our method incorporates per-token normalization of importance ratios and robust KL-divergence estimation to ensure stable large-scale training. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, coding, and planning tasks demonstrate that ESPO significantly outperforms token-level baselines, achieving dramatic improvements of 20-40 points on the Countdown task, while maintaining consistent gains on math and coding benchmarks. Our approach establishes sequence-level optimization as a principled and empirically effective paradigm for RL in dLLMs.

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) arises in many real-world applications where trade-offs between competing objectives must be carefully balanced. In the offline setting, where only a static dataset is available, the main challenge is generalizing beyond observed data. We introduce Pareto-Conditioned Diffusion (PCD), a novel framework that formulates offline MOO as a conditional sampling problem. By conditioning directly on desired trade-offs, PCD avoids the need for explicit surrogate models. To effectively explore the Pareto front, PCD employs a reweighting strategy that focuses on high-performing samples and a reference-direction mechanism to guide sampling towards novel, promising regions beyond the training data. Experiments on standard offline MOO benchmarks show that PCD achieves highly competitive performance and, importantly, demonstrates greater consistency across diverse tasks than existing offline MOO approaches.

The Schrödinger bridge problem is concerned with finding a stochastic dynamical system bridging two marginal distributions that minimises a certain transportation cost. This problem, which represents a generalisation of optimal transport to the stochastic case, has received attention due to its connections to diffusion models and flow matching, as well as its applications in the natural sciences. However, all existing algorithms allow to infer such dynamics only for cases where samples from both distributions are available. In this paper, we propose the first general method for modelling Schrödinger bridges when one (or both) distributions are given by their unnormalised densities, with no access to data samples. Our algorithm relies on a generalisation of the iterative proportional fitting (IPF) procedure to the data-free case, inspired by recent developments in off-policy reinforcement learning for training of diffusion samplers. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed data-to-energy IPF on synthetic problems, finding that it can successfully learn transports between multimodal distributions. As a secondary consequence of our reinforcement learning formulation, which assumes a fixed time discretisation scheme for the dynamics, we find that existing data-to-data Schrödinger bridge algorithms can be substantially improved by learning the diffusion coefficient of the dynamics. Finally, we apply the newly developed algorithm to the problem of sampling posterior distributions in latent spaces of generative models, thus creating a data-free image-to-image translation method.

Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models. However, existing methods often remove not only the target concept, but also benign co-occurring concepts. Unlearning nudity can unintentionally suppress the concept of person, preventing a model from generating images with person. We define these undesirably suppressed co-occurring concepts that must be preserved $\textbf{CARE}$ ($\textbf{C}$o-occurring $\textbf{A}$ssociated $\textbf{RE}$tained concepts). Then, we introduce the $\textbf{CARE score}$, a general metric that directly quantifies their preservation across unlearning tasks. With this foundation, we propose $\textbf{ReCARE}$ ($\textbf{R}$obust $\textbf{e}$rasure for $\textbf{CARE}$), a framework that explicitly safeguards CARE while erasing only the target concept. ReCARE automatically constructs the CARE-set, a curated vocabulary of benign co-occurring tokens extracted from target images, and leverages this vocabulary during training for stable unlearning. Extensive experiments across various target concepts ($\textit{Nudity}$, $\textit{Van Gogh}$ style, and $\textit{Tench}$ object) demonstrate that ReCARE achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in balancing robust concept erasure, overall utility, and CARE preservation.

Uniform-state discrete diffusion models excel at few-step generation and guidance due to their inherent ability to self-correct, making them more preferable than autoregressive or masked diffusion models in these settings. Yet, their sampling efficiency has been limited by reliance on standard posterior samplers, which plateau in quality as steps increase. In this work, we introduce a novel family of Predictor–Corrector (PC) samplers for discrete diffusion models that generalize prior methods and apply to arbitrary noise processes. When paired with uniform-state diffusion, our samplers significantly outperform ancestral sampling on both language and vision tasks: achieving lower generative perplexity at matched unigram entropy on OpenWebText and better FID/IS scores on CIFAR10. Crucially, unlike conventional samplers, our PC methods continue to improve generation quality with more sampling steps, narrowing the gap with Masked diffusion. Beyond sampling, we develop a fast and memory-efficient curriculum for Duo$^{++}$'s (our method) Gaussian relaxation phase, which avoids materializing large Gaussian-diffused one-hot vectors. This reduces training time by 25\% compared to Duo while maintaining similar validation perplexity on OpenWebText and LM1B and strong downstream performance.

Many learning problems require predicting sets of objects when the number of objects is not known beforehand. Examples include object detection, molecular modeling, and scientific inference tasks such as astrophysical source detection. Existing methods often rely on padded representations or must explicitly infer the set size, which often poses challenges. We present a novel strategy for addressing this challenge by casting prediction of variable-sized sets as a continuous inference problem. Our approach, CORDS (Continuous Representations of Discrete Structures), provides an invertible mapping that transforms a set of spatial objects into continuous fields: a density field that encodes object locations and count, and a feature field that carries their attributes over the same support. Because the mapping is invertible, models operate entirely in field space while remaining exactly decodable to discrete sets. We evaluate CORDS across molecular generation and regression, object detection, simulation-based inference, and a mathematical task involving recovery of local maxima, demonstrating robust handling of unknown set sizes with competitive accuracy.

Learning generative models directly from corrupted observations is a long-standing challenge across natural and scientific domains. We introduce *Distillation from Corrupted Data (DCD)*, a unified framework for learning high-fidelity, one-step generative models using **only** degraded data of the form $ y = \mathcal{A}(x) + \sigma \varepsilon, \ x\sim p_X,\ \varepsilon\sim \mathcal{N}(0,I_m), $ where the mapping $\mathcal{A}$ may be the identity or a non-invertible corruption operator (e.g., blur, masking, subsampling, Fourier acquisition). DCD first pretrains a *corruption-aware diffusion teacher* on the observed measurements, then *distills* it into an efficient one-step generator whose samples are statistically closer to the clean distribution $p_X$. The framework subsumes identity corruption (denoising task) as a special case of our general formulation. Empirically, DCD consistently reduces Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) relative to corruption-aware diffusion teachers across noisy generation (*CIFAR-10*, *FFHQ*, *CelebA-HQ*, *AFHQ-v2*), image restoration (Gaussian deblurring, random inpainting, super-resolution, and mixtures with additive noise), and multi-coil MRI—*without access to any clean images*. The distilled generator inherits one-step sampling efficiency, yielding up to $30\times$ speedups over multi-step diffusion while surpassing the teachers after substantially fewer training iterations. These results establish score distillation as a practical tool for generative modeling from corrupted data, *not merely for acceleration*. We also provide theoretical support for the use of distillation in enhancing generation quality in the Appendix.

Wireless Signal Recognition (WSR) aims to identify the property of received signals using Artificial Intelligence (AI) without any prior knowledge, which has been widely used in civil and military radios. The current AI trend of pre-training and fine-tuning has shown great performance, and the existing pre-trained WSR models also achieve impressive results. However, they either apply the "mask-reconstruction" pre-training strategy, which may disrupt intricate local dependencies of signals, or overlook latent spectral characteristics. Therefore, in this paper, we follow the diffusion models and propose a pre-training framework for WSR, named the Temporal-Spectral Denoising Diffusion AutoEncoder (TS-DDAE), which learns signal representations by corrupting signals with temporal and spectral noise, and then reconstructing the original data with a learned neural network. Moreover, we design a novel neural architecture, named TS-Net, which couples self-attention for temporal encoder with channel attention for spectral encoder. Extensive experiments on several datasets and WSR tasks show that TS-DDAE achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, which demonstrate the potential to be a foundation model for WSR.

Transport-based methods have emerged as a leading paradigm for building generative models from large, clean datasets. However, in many scientific and engineering domains, clean data are often unavailable: instead, we only observe measurements corrupted through a noisy, ill-conditioned channel. A generative model for the original data thus requires solving an inverse problem at the level of distributions. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to this task based on Stochastic Interpolants: we iteratively update a transport map between corrupted and clean data samples using only access to the corrupted dataset as well as black box access to the corruption channel. Under appropriate conditions, this iterative procedure converges towards a self-consistent transport map that effectively inverts the corruption channel, thus enabling a generative model for the clean data. The resulting method (i) is computationally efficient compared to variational alternatives, (ii) highly flexible, handling arbitrary nonlinear forward models with only black-box access, and (iii) enjoys theoretical guarantees. We demonstrate superior performance on inverse problems in natural image processing and scientific reconstruction, and establish convergence guarantees of the scheme under appropriate assumptions.

Recently, many generative models for de novo protein structure design have emerged. Yet, only few tackle the difficult task of directly generating fully atomistic structures jointly with the underlying amino acid sequence. This is challenging, for instance, because the model must reason over side chains that change in length during generation. We introduce La-Proteina for atomistic protein design based on a novel partially latent protein representation: coarse backbone structure is modeled explicitly, while sequence and atomistic details are captured via per-residue latent variables of fixed dimensionality, thereby effectively side-stepping challenges of explicit side-chain representations. Flow matching in this partially latent space then models the joint distribution over sequences and full-atom structures. La-Proteina achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple generation benchmarks, including all-atom co-designability, diversity, and structural validity, as confirmed through detailed structural analyses and evaluations. Notably, La-Proteina also surpasses previous models in atomistic motif scaffolding performance, unlocking critical atomistic structure-conditioned protein design tasks. Moreover, La-Proteina is able to generate co-designable proteins of up to 800 residues, a regime where most baselines collapse and fail to produce valid samples, demonstrating La-Proteina's scalability and robustness.

Text-to-image (T2I) models offer great potential for creating virtually limitless synthetic data, a valuable resource compared to fixed and finite real datasets. Previous works evaluate the utility of synthetic data from T2I models on three key desiderata: quality, diversity, and consistency. While prompt engineering is the primary means of interacting with T2I models, the systematic impact of prompt complexity on these critical utility axes remains underexplored. In this paper, we first conduct synthetic experiments to motivate the difficulty of generalization w.r.t. prompt complexity and explain the observed difficulty with theoretical derivations. Then, we introduce a new evaluation framework that can compare the utility of real data and synthetic data, and present a comprehensive analysis of how prompt complexity influences the utility of synthetic data generated by commonly used T2I models. We conduct our study across diverse datasets, including CC12M, ImageNet-1k, and DCI, and evaluate different inference-time intervention methods. Our synthetic experiments show that generalizing to more general conditions is harder than the other way round, since the former needs an estimated likelihood that is not learned by diffusion models. Our large-scale empirical experiments reveal that increasing prompt complexity results in lower conditional diversity and prompt consistency, while reducing the synthetic-to-real distribution shift, which aligns with the synthetic experiments. Moreover, current inference-time interventions can augment the diversity of the generations at the expense of moving outside the support of real data. Among those interventions, prompt expansion, by deliberately using a pre-trained language model as a likelihood estimator, consistently achieves the highest performance in both image diversity and aesthetics, even higher than that of real data. Combining advanced guidance interventions with prompt expansion results in the most appealing utility trade-offs of synthetic data.

Diffusion-based policies have gained growing popularity in solving a wide range of decision-making tasks due to their superior expressiveness and controllable generation during inference. However, effectively training large diffusion policies using reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging. Existing methods either suffer from unstable training due to directly maximizing value objectives, or face computational issues due to relying on crude Gaussian likelihood approximation, which requires a large amount of sufficiently small denoising steps. In this work, we propose DIPOLE (Dichotomous diffusion Policy improvement), a novel RL algorithm designed for stable and controllable diffusion policy optimization. We begin by revisiting the KL-regularized objective in RL, which offers a desirable weighted regression objective for diffusion policy extraction, but often struggles to balance greediness and stability. We then formulate a greedified policy regularization scheme, which naturally enables decomposing the optimal policy into a pair of stably learned dichotomous policies: one aims at reward maximization, and the other focuses on reward minimization. Under such a design, optimized actions can be generated by linearly combining the scores of dichotomous policies during inference, thereby enabling flexible control over the level of greediness.Evaluations in offline and offline-to-online RL settings on ExORL and OGBench demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We also use DIPOLE to train a large vision-language-action (VLA) model for end-to-end autonomous driving (AD) and evaluate it on the large-scale real-world AD benchmark NAVSIM, highlighting its potential for complex real-world applications.