ICLR 2026 Papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising approach for binary decompilation. However, the existing LLM-based decompilers still are somewhat limited in effectively presenting a program's source-level structure with its original identifiers. To mitigate this, we introduce SK2Decompile, a novel two-phase approach to decompile from the skeleton (semantic structure) to the skin (identifier) of programs. Specifically, we first apply a Structure Recovery model to translate a program's binary code to an Intermediate Representation (IR) as deriving the program's "skeleton", i.e., preserving control flow and data structures while obfuscating all identifiers with generic placeholders. We also apply reinforcement learning to reward the model for producing program structures that adhere to the syntactic and semantic rules expected by compilers. Second, we apply an Identifier Naming model to produce meaningful identifiers which reflect actual program semantics as deriving the program's "skin". We train the Identifier Naming model with a separate reinforcement learning objective that rewards the semantic similarity between its predictions and the reference code. Such a two-phase decompilation process facilitates advancing the correctness and readability of decompilation independently. Our evaluations indicate that SK2Decompile, significantly outperforms the SOTA baselines, achieving 21.6% average re-executability rate gain over GPT-5-mini on the HumanEval dataset and 29.4% average R2I improvement over Idioms on the GitHub2025 benchmark.

With the accelerated popularization of electric vehicles (EV), battery safety issues have become an important research focus. Data-driven battery fault diagnosis algorithms, built on real-world operational data, are critical methods for reducing safety risks. However, existing battery datasets have limitations such as insufficient scale, coarse-grained labels, and lack of coverage of real-world operating conditions, which seriously restrict the development of data-driven fault diagnosis algorithms. To address these issues, this paper introduces a large-scale benchmark dataset named CH-BatteryGen, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first EV battery system fault diagnosis dataset based on real-world operating conditions. This dataset integrates real on-board operation data with mechanism-constrained generative modeling technology, balancing authenticity and scalability. It covers two mainstream battery chemistries, namely nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) lithium batteries and lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, and involves charging, discharging, and operation data of 1000 electric vehicles. It provides four fault labels (normal, self-discharge, high-resistance, low-capacity) and three severity level annotations, supporting two benchmark tasks: fault classification and fault grading. Through systematic validation using traditional machine learning methods (random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM)) and deep learning models (long short-term memory (LSTM), convolutional neural network (CNN)), the results show that the CNN model performs best in the fault classification task, achieving an F1-score of 0.9280 in the LFP discharging scenario; in the fault grading task, the F1-score reaches 0.8813. The CH-BatteryGen dataset has been open-sourced, aiming to provide a standardized evaluation platform for battery fault diagnosis algorithms, promote research development in this field, and contribute to the transformation of sustainable transportation systems.

A fundamental challenge in graph learning is understanding how models generalize to new, unseen graphs. While synthetic benchmarks offer controlled settings for analysis, existing approaches are confined to single-graph, transductive settings where models train and test on the same graph structure. Addressing this gap, we introduce GraphUniverse, a framework for generating entire families of graphs to enable the first systematic evaluation of inductive generalization at scale. Our core innovation is the generation of graphs with persistent semantic communities, ensuring conceptual consistency while allowing fine-grained control over structural properties like homophily and degree distributions. This enables crucial but underexplored robustness tests, such as performance under controlled distribution shifts. Benchmarking a wide range of architectures—from GNNs to graph transformers and topological architectures—reveals that strong transductive performance is a poor predictor of inductive generalization. Furthermore, we find that robustness to distribution shift is highly sensitive not only to model architecture choice but also to the initial graph regime (e.g., high vs. low homophily). Beyond benchmarking, GraphUniverse’s flexibility and scalability can facilitate the development of robust and truly generalizable architectures. An interactive demo is available at https://graphuniverse.streamlit.app.

Transition Matching (TM) is an emerging paradigm for generative modeling that generalizes diffusion and flow-matching models as well as continuous-state autoregressive models. TM, similar to previous paradigms, gradually transforms noise samples to data samples, however it uses a second ``internal'' generative model to implement the transition steps, making the transitions more expressive compared to diffusion and flow models. To make this paradigm tractable, TM employs a large backbone network and a smaller "head" module to efficiently execute the generative transition step. In this work, we present a large-scale, systematic investigation into the design, training and sampling of the head in TM frameworks, focusing on its time-continuous bidirectional variant. Through comprehensive ablations and experimentation involving training 56 different 1.7B text-to-image models (resulting in 549 unique evaluations) we evaluate the affect of the head module architecture and modeling during training as-well as a useful family of stochastic TM samplers. We analyze the impact on generation quality, training, and inference efficiency. We find that TM with an MLP head, trained with a particular time weighting and sampled with high frequency sampler provides best ranking across all metrics reaching state-of-the-art among all tested baselines, while Transformer head with sequence scaling and low frequency sampling is a runner up excelling at image aesthetics. Lastly, we believe the experiments presented highlight the design aspects that are likely to provide most quality and efficiency gains, while at the same time indicate what design choices are not likely to provide further gains.

Molecular Dynamics (MD) is a powerful computational microscope for probing protein functions. However, the need for fine-grained integration and the long timescales of biomolecular events make MD computationally expensive. To address this, several generative models have been proposed to generate surrogate trajectories at lower cost. Yet, these models typically learn a fixed-lag transition density, causing the training signal to be dominated by frequent but uninformative transitions. We introduce a new class of generative models, **MSM Emulators**, which instead learn to sample transitions across discrete states defined by an underlying Markov State Model (MSM). We instantiate this class with Markov Space Flow Matching (MarS-FM), whose sampling offers more than two orders of magnitude speedup compared to implicit- or explicit-solvent MD simulations. We benchmark Mars-FM ability to reproduce MD statistics through structural observables such as RMSD, radius of gyration, and secondary structure content. Our evaluation spans protein domains (up to 500 residues) with significant chemical and structural diversity, including unfolding events, and enforces strict sequence dissimilarity between training and test sets to assess generalization. Across all metrics, MarS-FM outperforms existing methods, often by a substantial margin.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked concerns over their potential to acquire and misuse dangerous capabilities, posing frontier risks to society. Current safety evaluations primarily test for what a model *can* do---its capabilities---without assessing what it *would* do if endowed with high-risk capabilities. This leaves a critical blind spot: models may strategically conceal capabilities or rapidly acquire them, while harboring latent inclinations toward misuse. We argue that **propensity**---the likelihood of a model to pursue harmful actions if empowered---is a critical, yet underexplored, axis of safety evaluation. We present **PropensityBench**, a novel benchmark framework that assesses the proclivity of models to engage in risky behaviors when equipped with simulated dangerous capabilities using proxy tools. Our framework includes 5,874 scenarios with 6,648 tools spanning four high-risk domains: self-proliferation, cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical security. We simulate access to powerful capabilities via a controlled agentic environment and evaluate the models' choices under varying operational pressures that reflect real-world constraints or incentives models may encounter, such as resource scarcity or gaining more autonomy. Across open-source and proprietary frontier models, we uncover alarming signs of propensity: models frequently choose high-risk tools when under pressure, despite lacking the capability to execute such actions unaided. These findings call for a shift from static capability audits toward dynamic propensity assessments as a prerequisite for deploying frontier AI systems safely.

We propose a method for evaluating the robustness of widely used LLM ranking systems---variants of a Bradley--Terry model---to dropping a worst-case very small fraction of preference data. Our approach is computationally fast and easy to adopt. When we apply our method to matchups from popular LLM ranking platforms, including Chatbot Arena and derivatives, we find that the rankings of top-performing models can be remarkably sensitive to the removal of a small fraction of preferences; for instance, dropping just 0.003% of human preferences can change the top-ranked model on Chatbot Arena. Our robustness check identifies the specific preferences most responsible for such ranking flips, allowing for inspection of these influential preferences. We observe that the rankings derived from MT-bench preferences are notably more robust than those from Chatbot Arena, likely due to MT-bench's use of expert annotators and carefully constructed prompts. Finally, we find that neither rankings based on crowdsourced human evaluations nor those based on LLM-as-a-judge preferences are systematically more sensitive than the other.

Using a nearly-frozen pretrained model, the continual representation learning paradigm reframes parameter updates as a similarity-matching problem to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, directly leveraging pretrained features for downstream tasks often suffers from multicollinearity in the similarity-matching stage, and more advanced methods can be computationally prohibitive for real-time, low-latency applications. Inspired by the fly olfactory circuit, we propose Fly-CL, a bio-inspired framework compatible with a wide range of pretrained backbones. Fly-CL substantially reduces training time while achieving performance comparable to or exceeding that of current state-of-the-art methods. We theoretically show how Fly-CL progressively resolves multicollinearity, enabling more effective similarity matching with low time complexity. Extensive simulation experiments across diverse network architectures and data regimes validate Fly-CL’s effectiveness in addressing this challenge through a biologically inspired design.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently emerged as general architectures capable of reasoning over diverse modalities. Benchmarks for MLLMs should measure their ability for cross‑modal integration. However, current benchmarks are filled with shortcut questions, which can be solved using only single modality, and thereby yielding unreliable rankings. For example, in vision-language cases, we can find the correct answer without either the image or the text. These low-quality questions unnecessarily increase the size and computational requirements of benchmarks. We introduce a multi-modal and multidimensional item response theory framework (M$^3$-IRT) that extends classical IRT by decomposing both model ability and item difficulty into image‑only, text‑only, and cross‑modal components. M$^3$-IRT estimates cross‑modal ability of MLLMs and each question’s cross‑modal difficulty, enabling compact, high‑quality subsets that better reflect multimodal reasoning. Across 24 VLMs on three benchmarks, M$^3$-IRT prioritizes genuinely cross‑modal questions over shortcuts and preserves ranking fidelity even when 50\% of items are artificially generated low‑quality questions, thereby reducing evaluation cost while improving reliability. M$^3$-IRT thus offers a practical tool for assessing cross‑modal reasoning and refining multimodal benchmarks.

Domain generalization methods can effectively enhance network performance on test samples with unknown distributions by isolating gradients between unstable and stable parameters. However, existing methods employ relatively coarse-grained partitioning of stable versus unstable parameters, leading to misclassified unstable parameters that degrade network feature processing capabilities. We first provide a theoretical analysis of gradient perturbations caused by unstable parameters. Based on this foundation, we propose Layer-Decomposition Training (LDT), which conducts fine-grained layer-wise partitioning guided by parameter instability levels, substantially improving parameter update stability. Furthermore, to address gradient amplitude disparities within stable layers and unstable layers respectively, we introduce a Dynamic Parameter Update (DPU) strategy that adaptively determines layer-specific update coefficients according to gradient variations, optimizing feature learning efficiency. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks (super-resolution, classification, semantic segmentation) and architectures (Transformer, Mamba, CNN) demonstrate LDT's superior generalization capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZaizuoTang/LDT.

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) aims to further adapt models to unlabeled test sets arriving in a sequential datastream, thereby progressively strengthening the model's generalization ability. While existing TTA methods for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are primarily designed and evaluated on (nearly) balanced dataset configurations, real-world test sets may exhibit a long-tailed distribution where major classes dominate the decision boundaries of minor classes, presenting unique challenges. As the first attempt to solve this problem, this paper proposes Long-tailed Test-Time Adaptation (dubbed as L-TTA), which consists of three co-designed mechanisms: Synergistic Prototypes (SyPs), Rebalancing Shortcuts (RSs), and Balanced Entropy Minimization (BEM). SyPs introduce two fine-grained prototypes to enrich tail classes with extra inter-class knowledge; RSs employ learnable shortcuts to achieve learnable adaptation, regularized by class re-allocation loss to enforce distinct feature clustering; BEM restrains excessive entropy minimization of confident classes with extra penalty term, with theoretical propositions to justify its rebalancing capabilities. Extensive experiments over 15 datasets under various long-tailed settings highlight the superior performance of L-TTA in both accuracy and class balancing.

With the growing adoption of large language model (LLM) agents in persistent, real-world roles, they naturally encounter continuous streams of tasks and interactions. A key limitation, however, is their failure to learn from this accumulated experience, forcing them to discard valuable insights and repeat past errors. Unlike prior works that primarily store raw experience or successful routines, we propose ReasoningBank, a novel memory framework that allows an agent to self-curate generalizable reasoning strategies from both its successful and failed experiences for future leverage. This mechanism enables agents to generalize across tasks and become more capable over time. To accelerate and diversify this test-time learning process, we further propose memory-aware test-time scaling (MaTTS), which leverages a powerful synergy between memory and test-time scaling. On one hand, relevant memory from ReasoningBank guides the scaling process toward more effective exploration and improved reliability. On the other, scaling, in both parallel and sequential settings, generates abundant, diverse experiences that provide rich contrastive signals for synthesizing higher-quality memory. Experiments on web browsing and software engineering tasks show that ReasoningBank consistently outperforms existing memory mechanisms in both effectiveness and efficiency, with MaTTS further amplifying the gains. These findings position memory-driven experience as a new dimension of test-time scaling, where emergent behaviors naturally arise and agents acquire self-evolving capabilities.

Fluid-solid interaction (FSI) problems are fundamental in many scientific and engineering applications, yet effectively capturing the highly nonlinear two-way interactions remains a significant challenge. Most existing deep learning methods are limited to simplified one-way FSI scenarios, often assuming rigid and static solid to reduce complexity. Even in two-way setups, prevailing approaches struggle to capture dynamic, heterogeneous interactions due to the lack of cross-domain awareness. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{Fisale}, a data-driven framework for handling complex two-way \textbf{FSI} problems. It is inspired by classical numerical methods, namely the Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (\textbf{ALE}) method and the partitioned coupling algorithm. Fisale explicitly models the coupling interface as a distinct component and leverages multiscale latent ALE grids to provide unified, geometry-aware embeddings across domains. A partitioned coupling module (PCM) further decomposes the problem into structured substeps, enabling progressive modeling of nonlinear interdependencies. Compared to existing models, Fisale introduces a more flexible framework that iteratively handles complex dynamics of solid, fluid and their coupling interface on a unified representation, and enables scalable learning of complex two-way FSI behaviors. Experimentally, Fisale excels in three reality-related challenging FSI scenarios, covering 2D, 3D and various tasks. The code is included in the supplementary material for reproductivity.

Integrating Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with Transformer architectures offers a promising pathway to balance energy efficiency and performance, particularly for edge vision applications. However, existing Spiking Transformers face two critical challenges: i) a substantial performance gap relative to their Artificial Neural Network (ANN) counterparts, and ii) considerable memory overhead. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evidence indicate that these limitations arise from the unfocused global attention paradigm of Spiking Self Attention (SSA) and the storage cost of large attention matrices. Inspired by the localized receptive fields and membrane potential dynamics of biological visual neurons, we propose LRF-Dyn, which enables attention computation via spiking neurons endowed with localized receptive fields. Specifically, we integrate a LRF mechanism into SSA, enabling the model to allocate greater attention to neighboring regions and thereby enhance local modeling capacity. Moreover, LRF-Dyn approximates the charge–fire–reset dynamics of spiking neurons within the LRF-SSA, substantially reducing memory requirements during inference. Extensive experiments on visual tasks confirm that our method lowers memory overhead while delivering significant performance improvements. These results establish LRF-Dyn as a key component for achieving energy-efficient Spiking Transformers.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the core paradigm for aligning and strengthening large language models (LLMs). Yet, applying RL in off-policy settings—where stale data from past policies are used for training—improves sample efficiency, but remains challenging: policy entropy declines sharply, optimization often becomes unstable and may even collapse. Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we identify two key insights: (i) an imbalance in optimization, where negative-advantage samples dominate the policy gradient, suppressing useful behaviors and risking gradient explosions; and (ii) the derived Entropy-Clip Rule, which reveals that the fixed clipping mechanism in PPO-like objectives systematically blocks entropy-increasing updates, thereby driving the policy toward over-exploitation at the expense of exploration. Building on these insights, we propose BAlanced Policy Optimization with Adaptive Clipping (BAPO), a simple yet effective method that dynamically adjusts clipping bounds to adaptively re-balance positive and negative contributions, preserve entropy, and stabilize RL optimization. Across diverse off-policy scenarios—including sample replay and partial rollout—BAPO achieves fast, stable, and data-efficient training. On AIME 2024 and AIME 2025 benchmarks, our 7B BAPO model surpasses open-source counterparts such as SkyWork-OR1-7B, while our 32B BAPO model not only achieves state-of-the-art results among models of the same scale but also outperforms leading proprietary systems like o3-mini and Gemini-2.5-Flash-Thinking.

While recent advances in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have significantly advanced text-to-image generation, text-driven image editing remains challenging. Existing approaches either struggle to balance structural preservation with flexible modifications or require costly fine-tuning of large models. To address this, We introduce W-Edit, a training-free framework for text-driven image editing based on wavelet-based frequency-aware feature decomposition. W-Edit employs wavelet transforms to decompose diffusion features into multi-scale frequency bands, disentangling structural anchors from editable details. A lightweight replacement module selectively injects these components into pretrained models, while an inversion-based frequency modulation strategy refines sampling trajectories using structural cues from attention features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that W-Edit achieves high-quality results across a wide range of editing scenarios, outperforming previous training-free approaches. Our method establishes frequency-based modulation as both a sound and efficient solution for controllable image editing.

Learning nonlinear dynamical models from data is central to control. Two fundamental challenges exist: (1) how to learn accurate models from limited data, and (2) how to ensure the learned models are suitable for control design of the nominal system. We address both by enforcing a critical \emph{a priori} property of the nominal system during learning: \emph{controllability}. Controllability guarantees the existence of control policies that can drive the learned model from any initial state to any desired state. From a modeling perspective, it captures key structural features of the nominal system, thereby improving data efficiency. For downstream control, it enables the use of modern techniques such as model predictive control (MPC). Our approach is based on controllability-preserving Koopman representation learning. Rather than learning dynamics directly in the nominal state space, we learn in a latent space where the system admits a linear representation. We prove that controllability of the learned latent model implies controllability in the nominal state space. To enforce this property, we introduce a novel canonical parameterization of the latent dynamics matrices. We further incorporate Gramian-based regularization to shape the degree of controllability, yielding well-conditioned models for control. Implemented as an end-to-end Neural ODE framework, our method learns models that are both predictive and controllable from limited data. Experiments on nonlinear benchmarks demonstrate accurate long-horizon prediction, reliable MPC performance, and substantially improved data efficiency.

In this paper, we present FSOD-VFM: Few-Shot Object Detectors with Vision Foundation Models, a framework that leverages vision foundation models to tackle the challenge of few-shot object detection. FSOD-VFM integrates three key components: a universal proposal network (UPN) for category-agnostic bounding box generation, SAM2 for accurate mask extraction, and DINOv2 features for efficient adaptation to new object categories. Despite the strong generalization capabilities of foundation models, the bounding boxes generated by UPN often suffer from overfragmentation, covering only partial object regions and leading to numerous small, false-positive proposals rather than accurate, complete object detections. To address this issue, we introduce a novel graph-based confidence reweighting method. In our approach, predicted bounding boxes are modeled as nodes in a directed graph, with graph diffusion operations applied to propagate confidence scores across the network. This reweighting process refines the scores of proposals, assigning higher confidence to whole objects and lower confidence to local, fragmented parts. This strategy improves detection granularity and effectively reduces the occurrence of false-positive bounding box proposals. Through extensive experiments on Pascal-5$^i$, COCO-20$^i$, and CD-FSOD datasets, we demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior performance without requiring additional training. Notably, on the challenging CD-FSOD dataset, which spans multiple datasets and domains, our FSOD-VFM achieves 31.6 AP in the 10-shot setting, substantially outperforming previous training-free methods that reach only 21.4 AP. The source code will be released publicly upon publication.

Recent advancements in long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, particularly through the Group Relative Policy Optimization algorithm used by DeepSeek-R1, have led to significant interest in the potential of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Large Language Models (LLMs). While RLVR promises to improve reasoning by allowing models to learn from free exploration, there remains debate over whether it truly enhances reasoning abilities or simply boosts sampling efficiency. This paper systematically investigates the impact of RLVR on LLM reasoning. We revisit Pass@K experiments and demonstrate that RLVR can extend the reasoning boundary for both mathematical and coding tasks. This is supported by our introduction of a novel evaluation metric, CoT-Pass@K, which captures reasoning success by accounting for both the final answer and intermediate reasoning steps. Furthermore, we present a theoretical framework explaining RLVR’s incentive mechanism, demonstrating how it can encourage correct reasoning even when rewards are based solely on answer correctness. Our analysis of RLVR’s training dynamics reveals that it incentivizes correct reasoning early in the process, with substantial improvements in reasoning quality confirmed through extensive evaluations. These findings provide strong evidence of RLVR’s potential to enhance LLM reasoning, offering valuable insights into its mechanisms and performance improvements.