ICLR 2026 Papers

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) enables the study of cellular heterogeneity. Yet, clustering accuracy, and with it downstream analyses based on cell labels, remain challenging due to measurement noise and biological variability. In standard latent spaces (e.g., obtained through PCA), data from different cell types can be projected close together, making accurate clustering difficult. We introduce a latent plug-and-play diffusion framework that separates the observation and denoising space. This separation is operationalized through a novel Gibbs sampling procedure: the learned diffusion prior is applied in a low-dimensional latent space to perform denoising, while to steer this process, noise is reintroduced into the original high-dimensional observation space. This unique ``input-space steering'' ensures the denoising trajectory remains faithful to the original data structure. Our approach offers three key advantages: (1) adaptive noise handling via a tunable balance between prior and observed data; (2) uncertainty quantification through principled uncertainty estimates for downstream analysis; and (3) generalizable denoising by leveraging clean reference data to denoise noisier datasets, and via averaging, improve quality beyond the training set. We evaluate robustness on both synthetic and real single-cell genomics data. Our method improves clustering accuracy on synthetic data across varied noise levels and dataset shifts. On real-world single-cell data, our method demonstrates improved biological coherence in the resulting cell clusters, with cluster boundaries that better align with known cell type markers and developmental trajectories.

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) promise parallel generation via iterative denoising, yet their practical speed is often throttled by \emph{schedulers} that accept scattered high-confidence tokens, fragmenting KV caches and forcing repeated local repairs. We present \emph{Prefix Absorption}, a training-free inference principle operationalized by the \emph{Longest Stable Prefix} (LSP) scheduler. In each iteration, LSP performs a single forward pass to locate the longest left-aligned run whose predictions are both high-margin and temporally stable, then snaps the candidate boundary to natural structural delimiters (e.g., punctuation or code boundaries) before atomically committing the block. This prefix-first topology preserves a single frozen/active boundary, converts KV updates into contiguous appends, and concentrates attention on a rapidly shrinking suffix. As a consequence, the active sequence length decays geometrically and the total work bends from an effectively cubic $O(N^3)$ regime toward near-quadratic $O(N^2)$ while maintaining coherence. On code generation (HumanEval, MBPP) and complex reasoning (GSM8K, GPQA) with LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B, LSP substantially reduces end-to-end latency and denoiser calls while matching or improving task quality relative to strong scattered-acceptance baselines. Ablations isolate the gains to LSP’s core components—adaptive block sizing, structural boundary snapping, and the prefix-first commitment topology—demonstrating that faster DLM inference can be achieved without retraining and is complementary to existing diffusion schedules.

While multi-concept unlearning has shown progress, extending to large-scale scenarios remains difficult, as existing methods face three persistent challenges: **(i)** they often introduce conflicting weight updates, making some targets difficult to unlearn or causing degradation of generative capability; **(ii)** they lack precise mechanisms to keep unlearning strictly confined to target concepts, resulting in collateral damage on similar content; **(iii)** many approaches rely on additional data or auxiliary modules, causing scalability and efficiency bottlenecks as the number of concepts grows. To simultaneously address these challenges, we propose **Scalable-Precise Concept Unlearning (ScaPre)**, a unified and lightweight framework tailored for scalable and precise large-scale unlearning. ScaPre introduces a *conflict-aware stable design*, which integrates the spectral trace regularizer and geometry alignment to stabilize the optimization space, suppress conflicting updates, and preserve the pretrained global structure. Furthermore, the *Informax Decoupler* identifies concept-relevant parameters and adaptively reweights updates, ensuring that unlearning is confined to the target subspace without collateral damage. ScaPre yields an efficient closed-form solution, requiring no additional data or auxiliary sub-models, while maintaining both scalability and precision. Comprehensive experiments across large-scale objects, styles, and explicit content benchmarks demonstrate that ScaPre effectively removes target concepts while maintaining generation quality. It can forget up to **×5** more concepts than the best baseline within the limits of acceptable generative quality, and outperforms existing multi-concept approaches in precision and efficiency, achieving a new state of the art for large-scale unlearning.

As humans increasingly share environments with diverse agents powered by RL, LLMs, and beyond, the ability to explain agent policies in natural language is vital for reliable coexistence. We introduce a general-purpose framework that trains explanation-generating LLMs via reinforcement learning from AI feedback, with distributional rewards generated by generative continuous normalizing flows (CNFs). CNFs capture the pluralistic and probabilistic nature of human judgments about explanations. Moreover, under mild assumptions, CNFs provably bound deviations from true human reward distributions when trained on noisy proxy rewards from LLMs. We design a specialized CNF architecture that selectively attends to linguistic cues in decision context and explanations when generating rewards. Human and LLM evaluators find that our method delivers explanations that enable more accurate predictions of true agent decisions, exhibit greater logical soundness and actionability, and impose lower cognitive load than explanations trained with proxy LLM rewards or state-of-the-art RLHF and RLAIF baselines.

We present **Captain Cinema**, a generation framework for short movie generation. Given a detailed textual description of a movie storyline, our approach firstly generates a sequence of keyframes that outline the entire narrative, which ensures long-range coherence in both the storyline and visual appearance (e.g., scenes and characters). We refer to this step as top-down keyframe planning. These keyframes then serve as conditioning signals for a video synthesis model, which supports long context learning, to produce the spatio-temporal dynamics between them. This step is referred to as bottom-up video synthesis. To support stable and efficient generation of multi-scene long narrative cinematic works, we introduce an interleaved training strategy for Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiT), specifically adapted for long-context video data. Our model is trained on a curated cinematic dataset consisting of interleaved samples for video generation. Our experiments demonstrate that Captain Cinema performs favorably in the automated creation of visually coherent and narratively consistent short films.

This work studies how to adaptively recompute key–value (KV) caches for diffusion large language models (DLMs) to maximize prediction accuracy while minimizing decoding latency. Prior methods' decoders recompute QKV for all tokens at every denoising step and layer, despite KV states changing little across most steps, especially in shallow layers, leading to substantial redundancy. We make three observations: (1) distant MASK tokens primarily act as a length-bias and can be cached block-wise beyond the active prediction window; (2) KV dynamics increase with depth, suggesting that selective refresh starting from deeper layers is sufficient; and (3) the most-attended token exhibits the smallest KV drift, providing a conservative lower bound on cache change for other tokens. Building on these, we propose Elastic-Cache, a training-free, architecture-agnostic strategy that jointly decides ${when}$ to refresh (via an attention-aware drift test on the most-attended token) and ${where}$ to refresh (via a depth-aware schedule that recomputes from a chosen layer onward while reusing shallow-layer caches and off-window MASK caches). Unlike fixed-period schemes, Elastic-Cache performs adaptive, layer-aware cache updates for diffusion LLMs, reducing redundant computation and accelerating decoding with negligible loss in generation quality. Experiments on LLaDA-Instruct, LLaDA-1.5, and LLaDA-V across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks demonstrate consistent speedups: $8.7\times$ on GSM8K (256 tokens), $45.1\times$ on longer sequences, and $4.8\times$ on HumanEval, while consistently maintaining higher accuracy than the baseline. Our method achieves significantly higher throughput ($6.8\times$ on GSM8K) than existing confidence-based approaches while preserving generation quality, enabling practical deployment of diffusion LLMs.

We propose Lavida-O, a unified Masked Diffusion Model (MDM) for multimodal understanding and generation. Unlike existing multimodal MDMs such as MMaDa and Muddit which only support simple image-level understanding tasks and low-resolution image generation, Lavida-O presents a single framework that enables image-level understanding, object grounding, image editing, and high-resolution (1024px) text-to-image synthesis. Lavida-O incorporates a novel Elastic Mixture-of-Transformers (Elastic-MoT) architecture that couples a lightweight generation branch with a larger understanding branch, supported by token compression, universal text conditioning and stratified sampling for efficient and high-quality generation. Lavida-O further incorporates planning and iterative self-reflection in image generation and editing tasks, seamlessly boosting generation quality with its understanding capabilities. Lavida-O achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of benchmarks including RefCOCO object grounding, GenEval text-to-image generation, and ImgEdit image editing, outperforming existing autoregressive models and continuous diffusion models such as Qwen2.5-VL and FluxKontext-dev, while offering considerable speedup at inference. These advances establish Lavida-O as a new paradigm for scalable multimodal reasoning and generation.

Despite strong single-turn performance, diffusion-based image compositing often struggles to preserve coherent spatial relations in pairwise or sequential edits, where subsequent insertions may overwrite previously generated content and disrupt physical consistency. We introduce PICS, a self-supervised composition-by-decomposition paradigm that composes objects in parallel while explicitly modeling the compositional interactions among (fully-/partially-)visible objects and background. At its core, an Interaction Transformer employs mask-guided Mixture-of-Experts to route background, exclusive, and overlap regions to dedicated experts, with an adaptive $\alpha$-blending strategy that infers a compatibility-aware fusion of overlapping objects while preserving boundary fidelity. To further enhance robustness to geometric variations, we incorporate geometry-aware augmentations covering both out-of-plane and in-plane pose changes of objects. Our method delivers superior pairwise compositing quality and substantially improved stability, with extensive evaluations across virtual try-on, indoor, and street scene settings showing consistent gains over state-of-the-art baselines.

Embodied navigation is a foundational challenge for intelligent robots, demanding the ability to comprehend visual environments, follow natural language instructions, and explore autonomously. However, existing models struggle to provide a unified solution across heterogeneous navigation paradigms, often yielding low success rates and limited generalization. We present OmniNav, a unified framework that handles instruct-goal, object-goal, point-goal navigation, and frontier-based exploration within a single architecture. First, we introduce a lightweight, low-latency policy that predicts continuous-space waypoints (coordinates and orientations) with high accuracy, outperforming action-chunk methods in precision and supporting real-world deployment with control frequencies up to 5 Hz. Second, at the architectural level, OmniNav proposes a fast-slow system design: a fast module performs waypoint generation from relatively short-horizon visual context and subtasks, while a slow module conducts deliberative planning using long-horizon observations and candidate frontiers to select the next subgoal and subtask. This collaboration improves path efficiency and maintains trajectory coherence in exploration and memory-intensive settings. Notably, we find that the primary bottleneck lies not in navigation policy learning per se, but in robust understanding of general instructions and objects. To enhance generalization, we incorporate large-scale general-purpose training datasets including those used for image captioning and referring/grounding into a joint multi-task regimen, which substantially boosts success rates and robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse navigation benchmarks, and real-world deployment further validates the approach. OmniNav offers practical insights for embodied navigation and points to a scalable path toward versatile, highly generalizable robotic intelligence.

Generative classifiers, which leverage conditional generative models for classification, have recently demonstrated desirable properties such as robustness to distribution shifts. However, recent progress in this area has been largely driven by diffusion-based models, whose substantial computational cost limits their scalability in practice. To address the efficiency concern, we investigate generative classifier built upon recent advances in visual autoregressive (VAR) modeling. Owing to their tractable likelihood, VAR-based generative classifier enable significantly more efficient inference compared to diffusion-based counterparts. Building on this foundation, we introduce the Adaptive VAR Classifier$^+$ (A-VARC$^+$), which further improves accuracy while reducing computational cost, substantially enhancing practical usability. Beyond efficiency, we also study several properties of VAR-based generative classifiers that distinguish them from conventional discriminative models. In particular, the tractable likelihood facilitates visual explainability via token-wise mutual information, and the model naturally adapts to class-incremental learning without requiring additional replay data.

Recent advancements in diffusion-based text synthesis have demonstrated significant performance in inserting and editing text within images via inpainting. However, despite the potential of text inpainting methods, three key limitations hinder their applicability to broader Text Image Manipulation (TIM) tasks: (i) the inability to remove text, (ii) the lack of control over the style of rendered text, and (iii) a tendency to generate duplicated letters. To address these challenges, we propose OmniText, a training-free generalist capable of performing a wide range of TIM tasks. Specifically, we investigate two key properties of cross- and self-attention mechanisms to enable text removal and to provide control over both text styles and content. Our findings reveal that text removal can be achieved by applying self-attention inversion, which mitigates the model's tendency to focus on surrounding text, thus reducing text hallucinations. Additionally, we redistribute cross-attention, as increasing the probability of certain text tokens reduces text hallucination. For controllable inpainting, we introduce novel loss functions in a latent optimization framework: a cross-attention content loss to improve text rendering accuracy and a self-attention style loss to facilitate style customization. Furthermore, we present OmniText-Bench, a benchmark dataset for evaluating diverse TIM tasks. It includes input images, target text with masks, and style references, covering diverse applications such as text removal, rescaling, repositioning, and insertion and editing with various styles. Our OmniText framework is the first generalist method capable of performing diverse TIM tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks and metrics compared to other text inpainting methods and is comparable with specialist methods.

We propose a statistical benchmark for diffusion posterior sampling (DPS) algorithms in linear inverse problems. Our test signals are discretized Lévy processes whose posteriors admit efficient Gibbs methods. These Gibbs methods provide gold-standard posterior samples for direct, distribution-level comparisons with DPS algorithms. They can also sample the denoising posteriors in the reverse diffusion, which enables the arbitrary-precision Monte Carlo estimation of various objects that may be needed in the DPS algorithms, such as the expectation or the covariance of the denoising posteriors. In turn, this can be used to isolate algorithmic errors from the errors due to learned components. We instantiate the benchmark with the minimum-mean-squared-error optimality gap and posterior-coverage tests and evaluate popular algorithms on the inverse problems of denoising, deconvolution, imputation, and reconstruction from partial Fourier measurements. We release the benchmark code at https://github.com/emblem-saying/dps-benchmark and invite the community to contribute and report results.

Catastrophic forgetting remains a central obstacle for continual learning in neural models. Popular approaches---replay and elastic weight consolidation (EWC)---have limitations: replay requires a strong generator and is prone to distributional drift, while EWC implicitly assumes a shared optimum across tasks and typically uses a diagonal Fisher approximation. In this work, we study the gradient geometry of diffusion models, which can already produce high-quality replay data. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that, in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, per-sample gradients become strongly collinear, yielding an empirical Fisher that is effectively rank-1 and aligned with the mean gradient. Leveraging this structure, we propose a rank-1 variant of EWC that is as cheap as the diagonal approximation yet captures the dominant curvature direction. We pair this penalty with a replay-based approach to encourage parameter sharing across tasks while mitigating drift. On class-incremental image generation datasets (MNIST, FashionMNIST, CIFAR-10, ImageNet-1k), our method consistently improves average FID and reduces forgetting relative to replay-only and diagonal-EWC baselines. In particular, forgetting is nearly eliminated on MNIST and FashionMNIST and is roughly halved on ImageNet-1k. These results suggest that diffusion models admit an approximately rank-1 Fisher. With a better Fisher estimate, EWC becomes a strong complement to replay: replay encourages parameter sharing across tasks, while EWC effectively constrains replay-induced drift.

The rapid advancement of Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduces unprecedented vulnerabilities that are fundamentally distinct from Autoregressive LLMs, stemming from their iterative and parallel generation mechanisms. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of dLLM vulnerabilities to jailbreak attacks across two distinct dimensions: *intra-step* and *inter-step* dynamics. Experimental results reveal a harmful bias inherent in the standard greedy remasking strategy and identify a critical phenomenon we term Denoising-path Dependence, where the safety of early-stage tokens decisively influences the final output. These findings also indicate that while current decoding strategies constitute a significant vulnerability, dLLMs possess a substantial intrinsic safety potential. To unlock this potential, we propose **DiffuGuard**, a training-free defense framework that addresses vulnerabilities through a dual-stage approach: **Stochastic Annealing Remasking** dynamically introduces controlled randomness to mitigate greedy selection bias, while **Block-level Audit and Repair** exploits internal model representations for autonomous risk detection and guided correction. Comprehensive experiments on four dLLMs demonstrate DiffuGuard's exceptional effectiveness, reducing Attack Success Rate against six diverse jailbreak methods from **47.9%** to **14.7%** while preserving model utility and efficiency.

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a cornerstone of text-to-image diffusion models, yet its effectiveness is limited by the use of static guidance scales. This ``one-size-fits-all'' approach fails to adapt to the diverse requirements of different prompts; moreover, prior solutions like gradient-based correction or fixed heuristic schedules introduce additional complexities and fail to generalize. In this work, we challenge this static paradigm by introducing a framework for dynamic CFG scheduling. Our method leverages online feedback from a suite of general-purpose and specialized small-scale latent-space evaluators—such as CLIP for alignment, a discriminator for fidelity and a human preference reward model—to assess generation quality at each step of the reverse diffusion process. Based on this feedback, we perform a greedy search to select the optimal CFG scale for each timestep, creating a unique guidance schedule tailored to every prompt and sample. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both small-scale models and the state-of-the-art Imagen 3, showing significant improvements in text alignment, visual quality, text rendering and numerical reasoning. Notably, when compared against the default Imagen 3 baseline, our method achieves up to 53.8% human preference win-rate for overall preference, a figure that increases up to to 55.5% on prompts targeting specific capabilities like text rendering. Our work establishes that the optimal guidance schedule is inherently dynamic and prompt-dependent, and provides an efficient and generalizable framework to achieve it.

Diffusion-based image generation models excel at producing high-quality synthetic content, but suffer from slow and computationally expensive inference. Prior work has attempted to mitigate this by caching and reusing features within diffusion transformers across inference steps. These methods, however, often rely on rigid heuristics that result in limited acceleration or poor generalization across architectures. We propose **E**volutionary **C**aching to **A**ccelerate **D**iffusion models (ECAD), a genetic algorithm that learns efficient, per-model, caching schedules forming a Pareto frontier, using only a small set of calibration prompts. ECAD requires no modifications to network parameters or reference images. It offers significant inference speedups, enables fine-grained control over the quality-latency trade-off, and adapts seamlessly to different diffusion models. Notably, ECAD's learned schedules can generalize effectively to resolutions and model variants not seen during calibration. We evaluate ECAD on PixArt-alpha, PixArt-Sigma, and FLUX-1.dev using multiple metrics (FID, CLIP, Image Reward) across diverse benchmarks (COCO, MJHQ-30k, PartiPrompts), demonstrating consistent improvements over previous approaches. On PixArt-alpha, ECAD identifies a schedule that outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 4.47 COCO FID while increasing inference speedup from 2.35x to 2.58x. Our results establish ECAD as a scalable and generalizable approach for accelerating diffusion inference.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate their reasoning ability through chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. However, LLM's autoregressive decoding may limit the ability to revisit and refine earlier tokens in a holistic manner, which can also lead to inefficient exploration for diverse solutions. In this paper, we propose \textit{LaDiR} (\textbf{La}tent \textbf{Di}ffusion \textbf{R}easoner), a novel reasoning framework that unifies the expressiveness of continuous latent representation with the iterative refinement capabilities of latent diffusion models while operating effectively without large-scale pretraining. We first construct a structured latent reasoning space using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that encodes text reasoning steps into blocks of thought tokens, preserving semantic information and interpretability while offering compact but expressive representations. Subsequently, we utilize a latent diffusion model that learns to denoise a block of latent \textit{thought tokens} with a blockwise bidirectional attention mask, enabling longer horizon and iterative refinement with adaptive test-time compute. This design allows efficient parallel generation of diverse reasoning trajectories, allowing the model to plan and revise the reasoning process holistically. We conduct evaluations on a suite of mathematical reasoning and planning benchmarks. Empirical results show that LaDiR consistently improves accuracy, diversity, and interpretability over existing autoregressive, diffusion-based, and latent reasoning methods.

The use of latent diffusion models (LDMs) such as Stable Diffusion has significantly improved the perceptual quality of All-in-One image Restoration (AiOR) methods, while also enhancing their generalization capabilities. However, these LDM-based frameworks suffer from slow inference due to their iterative denoising process, rendering them impractical for time-sensitive applications. Visual autoregressive modeling (VAR), a recently introduced approach for image generation, performs scale-space autoregression and achieves comparable performance to that of state-of-the-art diffusion transformers with drastically reduced computational costs. Moreover, our analysis reveals that coarse scales in VAR primarily capture degradations while finer scales encode scene detail, simplifying the restoration process. Motivated by this, we propose RestoreVAR, a novel VAR-based generative approach for AiOR that significantly outperforms LDM-based models in restoration performance while achieving over $\mathbf{10\times}$ faster inference. To optimally exploit the advantages of VAR for AiOR, we propose architectural modifications and improvements, including intricately designed cross-attention mechanisms and a latent-space refinement module, tailored for the AiOR task. Extensive experiments show that RestoreVAR achieves state-of-the-art performance among generative AiOR methods, while also exhibiting strong generalization capabilities. The code will be made publicly available after the review process.

We describe Generative Blocks World to interact with the scene of a generated image by manipulating simple geometric abstractions. Our method represents scenes as assemblies of convex 3D primitives, and the same scene can be represented by different numbers of primitives, allowing an editor to move either whole structures or small details. Once the scene geometry has been edited, the image is generated by a flow-based method, which is conditioned on depth and a texture hint. Our texture hint takes into account the modified 3D primitives, exceeding the texture-consistency provided by existing techniques. These texture hints (a) allow accurate object and camera moves and (b) preserve the identity of objects. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior works in visual fidelity, editability, and compositional generalization. Code will be released.