ICLR 2026 Papers

International Conference on Learning Representations

Decision breakdown

5,358papers

Counted from the official paper list; may differ slightly from the number the conference announced.

  • Oral
    2244.2%
  • Poster
    5,13495.8%

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AutoSP: Unlocking Long-Context LLM Training Via Compiler-Based Sequence Parallelism

Ahan Gupta, Zhihao Wang, Neel Dani, Masahiro Tanaka, Olatunji Ruwase, Minjia Zhang

Expand abstract

Large-language-models (LLMs) demonstrate enormous utility in long-context tasks which require processing prompts that consist of tens to hundreds of thousands of tokens. However, existing LLM training libraries do not provide easy to use abstractions to optimize for long-context training, instead focusing on optimizations for models with large parameter counts through ZeRO-3/FSDP, Tensor and Pipeline parallelism. This forces users to rewrite LLM training libraries to incorporate compositions of various complex long-context optimizations, such as sequence-parallelism, to training pipelines; a process that requires in-depth expertise, reducing developer productivity. To tackle these challenges, we introduce AutSP: the first automated solution to automatically optimize LLM training for longer-contexts. AutoSP compiles models and applies a targeted set of optimizations: automated sequence parallelism, and long-context aware activation-checkpointing, to drastically enhance LLM trainability at negligible cost to throughput. Our evaluation demonstrates AutoSP's capability on both NVIDIA and AMD hardware, increasing training contexts by upto 2.7$\times$ and 2.5$\times$ respectively at negligible cost to runtime performance over competitive hand-written baselines.

Poster
Context and Diversity Matter: The Emergence of In-Context Learning in World Models

Fan Wang, Zhiyuan Chen, YUXUAN ZHONG, Sunjian Zheng, Pengtao Shao, Bo Yu, Shaoshan Liu, Jianan Wang, Ning Ding, Yang Cao, Yu Kang

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The capability of predicting environmental dynamics underpins both biological neural systems and general embodied AI in adapting to their surroundings. Yet prevailing approaches rest on static world models that falter when confronted with novel or rare configurations. We investigate in-context learning (ICL) of world models, shifting attention from zero-shot performance to the growth and asymptotic limits of the world model. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we formalize ICL of a world model and identify two core mechanisms: environment recognition (ER) and environment learning (EL); (2) we derive error upper-bounds for both mechanisms that expose how the mechanisms emerge; and (3) we empirically confirm that distinct ICL mechanisms exist in the world model, and we further investigate how data distribution and model architecture affect ICL in a manner consistent with theory. These findings demonstrate the potential of self-adapting world models and highlight the key factors behind the emergence of EL/ER, most notably the necessity of long context and diverse environments.

Poster