ICLR 2026 Papers

The exponential growth of video content highlights the importance of video summarization, a task that efficiently extracts key information from long videos. However, existing video summarization studies face inherent limitations in understanding complex, multimodal videos. This limitation stems from the fact that most existing architectures employ static or modality-agnostic fusion, which fails to account for the dynamic and frame-dependent variation in modality saliency that naturally occurs within a video. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel architecture, TripleSumm, which adaptively weights and fuses the contributions of the three modalities at the frame level. Furthermore, a significant bottleneck for research into multimodal video summarization has been the lack of comprehensive benchmarks. Addressing this bottleneck, we introduce MoSu (Most Replayed Multimodal Video Summarization), the first large-scale benchmark that provides all three modalities. Our proposed TripleSumm demonstrates its superiority by achieving state-of-the-art performance by a large margin on four video summarization benchmarks, including MoSu.

While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance in multimodal tasks, hallucinations continue to affect their reliability. Among the three categories of hallucinations, which include object, attribute, and relation, relation hallucinations account for the largest proportion but have received the least attention. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{ChainMPQ} (\textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{P}erspective \textbf{Q}uestions guided Interleaved Text-image Reasoning \textbf{Chain}), a training-free method that improves relational inference in LVLMs by utilizing accumulated textual and visual memories. ChainMPQ first extracts subject and object keywords from the question to enhance the corresponding image regions. It then constructs multi-perspective questions that focus on the three core components of a relationship: the subject, the object, and the relation that links them. These questions are sequentially input to the model, with textual and visual memories from earlier steps providing supporting context for subsequent ones, thereby forming an interleaved chain of image and text that guides progressive relational reasoning. Experiments on multiple LVLMs and benchmarks show that ChainMPQ substantially reduces relation hallucinations, while ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of its three core modules.

Understanding human behavior traits is central to applications in human-computer interaction, computational social science, and personalized AI systems. Such understanding often requires integrating multiple modalities to capture nuanced patterns and relationships. However, existing resources rarely provide datasets that combine behavioral descriptors with complementary modalities such as facial attributes and biographical information. To address this gap, we present PersonaX, a curated collection of multimodal datasets designed to enable comprehensive analysis of public traits across modalities. PersonaX consists of (1) CelebPersona, featuring 9444 public figures from diverse occupations, and (2) AthlePersona, covering 4181 professional athletes across 7 major sports leagues. Each dataset includes behavioral trait assessments inferred by three high-performing large language models, alongside facial imagery and structured biographical features. We analyze PersonaX at two complementary levels. First, we abstract high-level trait scores from text descriptions and apply five statistical independence tests to examine their relationships with other modalities. Second, we introduce a novel causal representation learning (CRL) framework tailored to multimodal and multi-measurement data, providing theoretical identifiability guarantees. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. By unifying structured and unstructured analysis, PersonaX establishes a foundation for studying LLM-inferred behavioral traits in conjunction with visual and biographical attributes, advancing multimodal trait analysis and causal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/lokali/PersonaX.

We present SIGMA-GEN, a unified framework for multi-identity preserving image generation. Unlike prior approaches, SIGMA-GEN is the first to enable single-pass multi-subject identity-preserved generation guided by both structural and spatial constraints. A key strength of our method is its ability to support user guidance at various levels of precision — from coarse 2D or 3D boxes to pixel-level segmentations and depth — with a single model. To enable this, we introduce SIGMA-SET27K, a novel synthetic dataset that provides identity, structure, and spatial information for over 100k unique subjects across 27k images. Through extensive evaluation we demonstrate that SIGMA-GEN achieves state-of-the-art performance in identity preservation, image generation quality, and speed.

Humans invent new words when there is a rising demand for a new useful concept (e.g., doomscrolling). We explore and validate a similar idea in our communication with LLMs: introducing new words to better understand and control the models, expanding on the recently introduced neologism learning. This method introduces a new word by adding a new word embedding and training with examples that exhibit the concept with no other changes in model parameters. We show that adding a new word allows for control of concepts such as flattery, incorrect answers, text length, as well as more complex concepts in AxBench. We discover that neologisms can also further our understanding of the model via self-verbalization: models can describe what each new word means to them in natural language, like explaining that a word that represents a concept of incorrect answers means “a lack of complete, coherent, or meaningful answers. . . ” To validate self-verbalizations, we introduce plug-in evaluation: we insert the verbalization into the context of a model and measure whether it controls the target concept. In some self-verbalizations, we find machine-only synonyms: words that seem unrelated to humans but cause similar behavior in machines. Finally, we show how neologism learning can jointly learn multiple concepts in multiple words.

Gene expression prediction, which predicts mRNA expression levels from DNA sequences, presents significant challenges. Previous works often focus on extending input sequence length to locate distal enhancers, which may influence target genes from hundreds of kilobases away. Our work first reveals that for current models, long sequence modeling can decrease performance. Even carefully designed algorithms only mitigate the performance degradation caused by long sequences. Instead, we find that proximal multimodal epigenomic signals near target genes prove more essential. Hence we focus on how to better integrate these signals, which has been overlooked. We find that different signal types serve distinct biological roles, with some directly marking active regulatory elements while others reflect background chromatin patterns that may introduce confounding effects. Simple concatenation may lead models to develop spurious associations with these background patterns. To address this challenge, we propose Prism (**P**roximal **r**egulatory **i**ntegration of **s**ignals for **m**RNA expression levels prediction), a framework that learns multiple combinations of high-dimensional epigenomic features to represent distinct background chromatin states and uses backdoor adjustment to mitigate confounding effects. Our experimental results demonstrate that proper modeling of multimodal epigenomic signals achieves state-of-the-art performance using only short sequences for gene expression prediction.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong instruction-following capabilities; however, they often struggle with compositional instructions involving multiple interleaved yet logically independent sub-tasks. These sub-tasks are typically organized in mutually exclusive structures, such as branching, chaining, or paralleling, where only one sub-task should be active at each generation step, while the others remain dormant. Despite their inactivity, dormant sub-tasks can inadvertently attract the model's attention due to structural entanglement within the input context or intermediate representations, leading to interference that compromises output fidelity. To address this challenge, we propose ATA, a structure-aware dynamic attention mechanism grounded in compositional structures, which dynamically identifies the active sub-task during generation while suppressing attention to inactive ones. By precisely steering the model’s focus, ATA mitigates interference and explicitly enhances model adherence to the active sub-task. Importantly, ATA operates within a single forward pass without requiring parameter updates. Extensive experiments show that ATA consistently enhances LLMs' instruction-following ability across various compositional structures, effectively mitigating attention distraction and demonstrating a strong generalization ability.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is a powerful technique for scaling language models, yet it often suffers from expert homogenization, where experts learn redundant functionalities, thereby limiting MoE's full potential. To address this, we introduce Expert Divergence Learning, a novel pre-training strategy that explicitly encourages functional specialization among experts. Our method incorporates a label-driven auxiliary loss that leverages domain labels inherent in pre-training corpora to maximize the Jensen-Shannon Divergence between the expert routing distributions of different data domains. This optimization objective guides the model to develop diverged routing policies for varied domains and closer routing policies for the same domain, which leads to emergent and organized expert specialization. We validate our approach by pre-training MoE models of up to 15 billion parameters from scratch. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained with Expert Divergence Learning not only achieve a lower language modeling loss but also exhibit significant performance improvements across a diverse range of downstream benchmarks. Further analysis confirms that our method effectively mitigates expert homogenization and brings greater functional specialization, all with negligible computational overhead during training.

Video Foundation Models (VFMs) exhibit remarkable visual generation performance, but struggle in compositional scenarios (\eg, motion, numeracy, and spatial relation). In this work, we introduce **Test-Time Optimization and Memorization (TTOM)**, a training-free framework that aligns VFM outputs with spatiotemporal layouts during inference for better text-image alignment. Rather than direct intervention to latents or attention per-sample in existing work, we integrate and optimize new parameters guided by a general layout-attention objective. Furthermore, we formulate video generation within a streaming setting, and maintain historical optimization contexts with a parametric memory mechanism that supports flexible operations, such as insert, read, update, and delete. Notably, we found that TTOM disentangles compositional world knowledge, showing powerful transferability and generalization. Experimental results on the T2V-CompBench and Vbench benchmarks establish TTOM as an effective, practical, scalable, and efficient framework to achieve cross-modal alignment for compositional video generation on the fly.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks, yet they often default to their language prior (LP)---memorized textual patterns from pre-training while under-utilizing visual evidence. Prior analyses of LP mostly rely on input–output probing, which fails to reveal the internal mechanisms governing when and how vision influences model behavior. To address this gap, we present the first systematic analysis of language prior through the lens of chain-of-embedding, which examines the layer-wise representation dynamics within LVLMs. Our analysis reveals a universal phenomenon: each model exhibits a Visual Integration Point (VIP), a critical layer at which visual information begins to meaningfully reshape hidden representations and influence decoding for multimodal reasoning. Building on this observation, we introduce the Total Visual Integration (TVI) estimator, which aggregates representational discrepancy beyond the VIP to quantify how strongly visual query influences response generation. Across 60 model–dataset combinations spanning 10 contemporary LVLMs and 6 benchmarks, we demonstrate that VIP consistently emerges, and that TVI reliably predicts the strength of language prior. This offers a principled toolkit for diagnosing and understanding language prior in LVLMs.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified the need to deliver both rapid responses and high-quality outputs. More powerful models yield better results but incur higher inference latency, whereas smaller models are faster yet less capable. Recent work proposes balancing this latency–quality trade-off using model cascades, which route simpler queries to smaller models and more complex ones to larger models. However, enabling efficient cascade serving remains challenging. Current frameworks lack effective mechanisms for handling (i) the huge and varying resource demands of different LLMs, (ii) the inherent heterogeneity of LLM workloads, and (iii) the co-optimization of system deployment and routing strategy. Motivated by these observations, we introduce Cascadia, a novel cascade serving framework designed explicitly to schedule request routing and deploy model cascades for fast, quality-preserving LLM serving. Cascadia employs a bi-level optimization method: at the deployment level, it uses a mixed-integer linear program to select resource allocations and parallelism strategies based on LLM information and workload characteristics; at the routing level, it applies a Chebyshev-guided method to iteratively co-optimize the routing strategy and the system deployment produced by the deployment level. Our extensive evaluation on diverse workload traces and different model cascades (DeepSeek and the Llama series) demonstrates that Cascadia significantly outperforms both single-model deployments and the state-of-the-art cascade serving baseline, achieving up to 4$\times$ (2.3$\times$ on average) tighter latency SLOs and up to 5$\times$ (2.4$\times$ on average) higher throughput while maintaining target answer quality.

Data curriculums have become central to successful LLM training, yet principles governing optimal data placement remain unclear. We introduce the *training re-evaluation curve (TREC)*, a diagnostic that retrospectively evaluates training batches *using the final model weights*. The TREC characterizes how well a trained model retains training data as a function of *when* the data was encountered during training. Analyzing TRECs for models from 111M to 3.9B parameters, we show that placing high-quality data at low points on the TREC significantly improves performance. Importantly, while a TREC is initially observable only after training, we demonstrate it can be *predicted in advance* from AdamW’s implicit EMA coefficients, enabling proactive curriculum design. By predicting TRECs for published training recipes, we explain prior ablations and reveal suboptimal data placements. We also align high-quality data with TREC minima in order to improve continual pre-training of a 3.9B-parameter LLM trained on 900B tokens.

Large visual language models (VLMs) have shown strong multi-modal medical reasoning ability, but most operate as end-to-end black boxes, diverging from clinicians’ evidence-based, staged workflows and hindering clinical accountability. Complementarily, expert visual grounding models can accurately localize regions of interest (ROIs), providing explicit, reliable evidence that improves both reasoning accuracy and trust. In this paper, we introduce **CARE**, advancing **C**linical **A**ccountability in multi-modal medical **R**easoning with an **E**vidence-grounded agentic framework. Unlike existing approaches that couple grounding and reasoning within a single generalist model, CARE decomposes the task into coordinated sub-modules to reduce shortcut learning and hallucination: a compact VLM proposes relevant medical entities; an expert entity-referring segmentation model produces pixel-level ROI evidence; and a grounded VLM reasons over the full image augmented by ROI hints. The VLMs are optimized with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to align answers with supporting evidence. Furthermore, a VLM coordinator plans tool invocation and reviews evidence-answer consistency, providing agentic control and final verification. Evaluated on standard medical VQA benchmarks, our **CARE-Flow** (coordinator-free) improves average accuracy by **10.9%** over the same size (10B) state-of-the-art (SOTA). With dynamic planning and answer review, our **CARE-Coord** yields a further gain, outperforming the heavily pre-trained SOTA by **5.2%**. Our experiments demonstrate that an agentic framework that emulates clinical workflows, incorporating decoupled specialized models and explicit evidence, yields more accurate and accountable medical AI.

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a key technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference, but it typically requires training a draft model on a large dataset. We approach this problem from a data-centric perspective, finding that not all training samples contribute equally to the SD acceptance rate. Specifically, our theoretical analysis and empirical validation reveals that tokens inducing flatter predictive distributions from the target model are more valuable than those yielding sharply peaked distributions. Based on this insight, we propose flatness, a new metric to quantify this property, and develop the Sample-level-flatness-based Dataset Distillation (SFDD) approach, which filters the training data to retain only the most valuable samples. Experiments on the EAGLE framework demonstrate that SFDD can achieve over 2$\times$ training speedup using only 50\% of the data, while keeping the final model's inference speedup within 4\% of the full-dataset baseline. This work introduces an effective, data-centric approach that substantially improves the training efficiency for Speculative Decoding. Our code is available at https://github.com/fjm9933/Flatness.

LLM unlearning is essential for mitigating safety, copyright, and privacy concerns in pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs). Compared to preference alignment, it offers a more explicit way by removing undesirable knowledge characterized by specific unlearning datasets. In previous works, Gradient Ascent (GA) and its variants have shown promise for implementing unlearning, yet their untargeted nature results in unintended degradation of general capabilities, incomplete removal of knowledge, and the generation of incoherent responses, among many others. We argue that these issues stem from the absence of explicit guidance on what and how models should unlearn. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel unlearning target, *reasoning-based unlearning target*, which satisfies both the specified unlearning scope and the specified post-unlearning response. Building on this, we propose *Targeted Reasoning Unlearning* (TRU), which leverages reasoning-based unlearning target as guidance. We employ the target using a cross-entropy supervised loss combined with a GA-based loss, enabling the model to learn reasoning ability for precise knowledge removal while preserving unrelated abilities. We evaluate TRU against strong baselines across multiple benchmarks and LLM backbones, and find that it achieves more reliable unlearning while preserving general capabilities. Moreover, TRU exhibits superior robustness under diverse attack scenarios, stemming from the reasoning ability learned through reasoning-based targets. Overall, our study establishes reasoning-augmented unlearning as a practical paradigm for reliable and explainable LLM unlearning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, driving the need to evaluate the trustworthiness of their generated text. To this end, reliable uncertainty estimation is essential. Leading uncertainty estimation methods generate and analyze multiple output sequences, which is computationally expensive and impractical at scale. In this work, we inspect the theoretical foundations of these methods and explore new directions to enhance computational efficiency. Building on the framework of proper scoring rules, we find that the negative log-likelihood of the most likely output sequence constitutes a theoretically principled uncertainty measure. To approximate this alternative measure, we propose G-NLL, obtained using a single output sequence from greedy decoding. This approach streamlines uncertainty estimation while preserving theoretical rigor. Empirical results demonstrate that G-NLL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various scenarios. Our work lays the theoretical foundation for efficient and reliable uncertainty estimation in natural language generation, challenging the necessity of the prevalent methods that are more complex and resource-intensive.

Learning in the combinatorially large output space of sequence generation problems is challenging as providing expert demonstrations scales poorly with sequence length, and RL struggles with sparse rewards. Between dense demonstrations in supervised training and no demonstrations in reinforcement learning lies an underexplored regime: partial supervision. We ask whether some classes of sequence learning problems become efficiently learnable by exploiting this gap. We address this by introducing adaptive backtracking (AdaBack), a per-sample curriculum learning algorithm that reveals a partial prefix of the target output. The supervision length is adjusted dynamically for each sample based on the model’s past reward signal, allowing it to incrementally learn to complete reasoning chains by conditioning on correct partial solutions. We investigate this intermediate regime between SFT and RL and argue that per-sample curriculum learning is more than a trade-off between efficiency and generality—it can succeed in tasks with long sequences of latent dependencies where SFT and RL both fail to generalize. Using a synthetic task with latent parity constraints, we show that AdaBack reliably solves problems that are otherwise intractable. On two mathematical reasoning benchmarks, MATH and GSM8k, we find that AdaBack enables models to solve problems that RL alone cannot, acquiring new reasoning capabilities through incremental exposure to partial solutions.

Emotional information in speech plays a unique role in multimodal perception. However, current Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), similar to conventional speech emotion recognition (SER) systems, still treat emotion understanding as a simple classification problem. This provides limited interpretability of predictions, while leaving the LLMs’ expressive and reasoning capabilities underutilized. In this work, we take the first step to reformulate SER as a deep reasoning problem through reinforcement learning (RL). We propose EmotionThinker, which is designed to generate accurate emotion predictions with interpretable explanations grounded in fine-grained acoustic cues. To achieve this, we first construct EmotionCoT-35K, an emotional reasoning dataset with Chain-of-Thought annotations and detailed captions. Second, we observe that current SpeechLLMs exhibit weak prosody perception, whereas prosodic cues constitute fundamental signals for interpreting emotions. To address this, we develop the prosody-enhanced foundation model EmotionThinker-Base, and demonstrate that prosody enhancement improves emotion understanding. Third, we introduce Group-Relative-Policy-Optimization with Progressive-Trust-aware-Reasoning-Reward (GRPO-PTR}) for RL. Different from standard GRPO, which relies only on rule-based outcome rewards, GRPO-PTR progressively introduces reasoning reward, dynamically adjusts it with a trustworthiness weight reflecting the alignment between reasoning and outcome, and evaluates the overall reasoning quality with a reward model based on multi-dimensional criteria. EmotionThinker outperforms previous state-of-the-art evaluation models both in emotion accuracy and explanation quality, advancing SER toward interpretable multimodal reasoning.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) show immense promise as planners for embodied AI, their stochastic nature and lack of formal reasoning capabilities prevent the strict safety guarantees required for physical deployment. Current approaches fall short: they either rely on other unreliable LLMs for safety checks or simply reject unsafe plans without offering a path to success. This work bridges this critical gap by introducing the Verifiable Iterative Refinement Framework (VIRF), a neuro-symbolic architecture that shifts the paradigm from a passive safety gatekeeper to an active safety collaborator. Where prior verifiers simply reject failures, our framework provides causal, pedagogical feedback that teaches the LLM why its plan was unsafe, enabling intelligent repairs rather than mere avoidance.Our core contribution is a novel tutor-apprentice dialogue, where a deterministic Logic Tutor, grounded in a formal safety ontology, provides causal and explanatory feedback to an LLM Apprentice planner. This pedagogical interaction allows the apprentice to perform intelligent, creative plan repairs, resolving safety conflicts rather than merely avoiding them. To ground this dialogue in verifiable truth, we introduce a scalable knowledge acquisition pipeline that synthesizes a comprehensive safety knowledge base from real-world documents, a process that simultaneously reveals and corrects significant blind spots in existing benchmarks. On a new suite of challenging home safety tasks, VIRF achieves a perfect 0\% Hazardous Action Rate (HAR), completely eliminating unsafe actions while attaining a 77.3\% Goal-Condition Rate (GCR)—the highest among all baselines. It does so with remarkable efficiency, requiring only 1.1 correction iterations on average. By acting as a verifiable safety scaffold, VIRF demonstrates a principled and robust pathway toward building embodied agents that are not just capable, but fundamentally trustworthy.