ICML 2025 Papers

We study universal properties in real-world complex and synthetically generated datasets. Our approach is to analogize data to a physical system and employ tools from statistical physics and Random Matrix Theory (RMT) to reveal their underlying structure. Examining the local and global eigenvalue statistics of feature-feature covariance matrices, we find: (i) bulk eigenvalue power-law scaling vastly differs between uncorrelated Gaussian and real-world data, (ii) this power law behavior is reproducible using Gaussian data with long-range correlations, (iii) all dataset types exhibit chaotic RMT universality, (iv) RMT statistics emerge at smaller dataset sizes than typical training sets, correlating with power-law convergence, (v) Shannon entropy correlates with RMT structure and requires fewer samples in strongly correlated datasets. These results suggest natural image Gram matrices can be approximated by Wishart random matrices with simple covariance structure, enabling rigorous analysis of neural network behavior.

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) underpins real-time monitoring in cloud services and web systems, allowing rapid identification of anomalies to prevent costly failures. Most TSAD methods driven by forecasting models tend to overfit by emphasizing minor fluctuations. Our analysis reveals that effective TSAD should focus on modeling "normal" behavior through smooth local patterns. To achieve this, we reformulate time series modeling as approximating the series with smooth univariate functions. The local smoothness of each univariate function ensures that the fitted time series remains resilient against local disturbances. However, a direct KAN implementation proves susceptible to these disturbances due to the inherently localized characteristics of B-spline functions. We thus propose KAN-AD, replacing B-splines with truncated Fourier expansions and introducing a novel lightweight learning mechanism that emphasizes global patterns while staying robust to local disturbances. On four popular TSAD benchmarks, KAN-AD achieves an average 15% improvement in detection accuracy (with peaks exceeding 27%) over state-of-the-art baselines. Remarkably, it requires fewer than 1,000 trainable parameters, resulting in a 50% faster inference speed compared to the original KAN, demonstrating the approach's efficiency and practical viability.

Our ability to continuously acquire, organize, and leverage knowledge is a key feature of human intelligence that AI systems must approximate to unlock their full potential. Given the challenges in continual learning with large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become the dominant way to introduce new information. However, its reliance on vector retrieval hinders its ability to mimic the dynamic and interconnected nature of human long-term memory. Recent RAG approaches augment vector embeddings with various structures like knowledge graphs to address some of these gaps, namely sense-making and associativity. However, their performance on more basic factual memory tasks drops considerably below standard RAG. We address this unintended deterioration and propose HippoRAG 2, a framework that outperforms standard RAG comprehensively on factual, sense-making, and associative memory tasks. HippoRAG 2 builds upon the Personalized PageRank algorithm used in HippoRAG and enhances it with deeper passage integration and more effective online use of an LLM. This combination pushes this RAG system closer to the effectiveness of human long-term memory, achieving a 7% improvement in associative memory tasks over the state-of-the-art embedding model while also exhibiting superior factual knowledge and sense-making memory capabilities. This work paves the way for non-parametric continual learning for LLMs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/HippoRAG.

Bilevel optimization is widely applied in many machine learning tasks such as hyper-parameter learning and meta learning. Recently, many algorithms have been proposed to solve these bilevel optimization problems, which rely on the smoothness condition of objective functions of the bilevel optimization. In fact, some machine learning tasks such as learning language model do not satisfy the smoothness condition of objective functions. More recently, some methods have begun to study generalized smooth bilevel optimization. However, these proposed methods for generalized smooth bilevel optimization only focus on the (strongly) convex lower objective function. Meanwhile, these methods only consider the generalized-smooth upper-level objective, but still require the standard smooth lower-level objective in the bilevel optimization. To fill this gap, in the paper, thus we study the generalized-smooth bilevel optimization with the nonconvex lower-level objective function, where both upper-level and lower-level objectives are generalized-smooth. We propose an efficient single-loop Hessian/Jacobian-free penalty normalized gradient (i.e., PNGBiO) method. Moreover, we prove that our PNGBiO obtains a fast convergence rate of $O(\frac{1}{T^{1/4}})$ for finding a stationary solution, where $T$ denotes the iteration number. Meanwhile, we also propose a stochastic version of our PNGBiO (i.e., S-PNGBiO) method to solve stochastic bilevel problems, and prove that our S-PNGBiO has a fast convergence rate of $O(\frac{1}{T^{1/6}})$. Some experimental results on hyper-parameter learning and meta learning demonstrate efficiency of our proposed methods.

Recent breakthroughs in solving reasoning, math and coding problems with Large Language Models (LLMs) have been enabled by investing substantial computation budgets at inference time. Therefore, inference speed is one of the most critical properties of LLM architectures, and there is a growing need for LLMs that are efficient and fast at inference. Recently, LLMs built on the xLSTM architecture have emerged as a powerful alternative to Transformers, offering linear compute scaling with sequence length and constant memory usage, both highly desirable properties for efficient inference. However, such xLSTM-based LLMs have yet to be scaled to larger models and assessed and compared with respect to inference speed and efficiency. In this work, we introduce xLSTM 7B, a 7-billion-parameter LLM that combines xLSTM’s architectural benefits with targeted optimizations for fast and efficient inference. Our experiments demonstrate that xLSTM 7B achieves performance on downstream tasks comparable to other similar-sized LLMs, while providing significantly faster inference speeds and greater efficiency compared to Llama- and Mamba-based LLMs. These results establish xLSTM 7B as the fastest and most efficient 7B LLM, offering a solution for tasks that require large amounts of test-time computation. Our work highlights xLSTM’s potential as a foundational architecture for methods building on heavy use of LLM inference. Our model weights, model code and training code are open-source. Model: https://huggingface.co/NX-AI/xLSTM-7b Code: https://github.com/NX-AI/xlstm and https://github.com/NX-AI/xlstm-jax.

Pre-training Transformers in FP4 precision is becoming a promising approach to gain substantial speedup, but it comes with a considerable loss of accuracy. Microscaling (MX) data format provides a fine-grained per-group quantization method to improve the representation ability of the FP4 format and is supported by the next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture. However, training with MXFP4 data format still results in significant degradation and there is a lack of systematic research on the reason. In this work, we propose a novel training method TetraJet for a more accurate FP4 training. We comprehensively evaluate all of the quantizers involved in the training, and identify the weight oscillation problem in the forward pass as the main source of the degradation in MXFP4 training. Therefore, we introduce two novel methods, EMA Quantizer (Q-EMA) and Adaptive Ramping Optimizer (Q-Ramping), to resolve the oscillation problem. Extensive experiments on Vision Transformers demonstrate that TetraJet consistently outperforms the existing 4-bit training methods, and Q-EMA \& Q-Ramping can provide additional enhancement by effectively reducing oscillation. We decreased the accuracy degradation by more than 50% compared to the baseline, and can even achieve competitive performance compared to full precision training.

Although numerous complex algorithms for treatment effect estimation have been developed in recent years, their effectiveness remains limited when handling insufficiently labeled training sets due to the high cost of labeling the post-treatment effect, e.g., the expensive tumor imaging or biopsy procedures needed to evaluate treatment effects. Therefore, it becomes essential to actively incorporate more high-quality labeled data, all while adhering to a constrained labeling budget. To enable data-efficient treatment effect estimation, we formalize the problem through rigorous theoretical analysis within the active learning context, where the derived key measures -- factual and counterfactual covering radii determine the risk upper bound. To reduce the bound, we propose a greedy radius reduction algorithm, which excels under an idealized, balanced data distribution. To generalize to more realistic data distributions, we further propose FCCM, which transforms the optimization objective into the Factual and Counterfactual Coverage Maximization to ensure effective radius reduction during data acquisition. Furthermore, benchmarking FCCM against other baselines demonstrates its superiority across both fully synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets. Code: https://github.com/uqhwen2/FCCM.

Out-Of-Domain (OOD) generalization is a significant challenge in learning dynamical systems, especially when they exhibit bifurcation, a sudden topological transition triggered by a model parameter crossing a critical threshold. A prevailing belief is that machine learning models, unless equipped with strong priors, struggle to generalize across bifurcations due to the abrupt changes in data characteristics. Contrary to this belief, we demonstrate that context-dependent Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs), trained solely on localized, pre-bifurcation, symmetric data and without physics-based priors, can still identify post-bifurcation, symmetry-breaking behaviors, even in a zero-shot manner. We interpret this capability to the model's implicit utilization of topological invariants, particularly the Poincaré index, and offer a formal explanation based on the Poincaré–Hopf theorem. We derive the conditions under which NODEs can recover—or erroneously hallucinate—broken symmetries without explicit training. Building on this insight, we showcase a topological regularizer inspired by the Poincaré–Hopf theorem and validate it empirically on phase transitions of systems described by the Landau–Khalatnikov equation.

Offline Opponent Modeling (OOM) aims to learn an adaptive autonomous agent policy that dynamically adapts to opponents using an offline dataset from multi-agent games. Previous work assumes that the dataset is optimal. However, this assumption is difficult to satisfy in the real world. When the dataset is suboptimal, existing approaches struggle to work. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple and general algorithmic improvement framework, Truncated Q-driven Instant Policy Refinement (TIPR), to handle the suboptimality of OOM algorithms induced by datasets. The TIPR framework is plug-and-play in nature. Compared to original OOM algorithms, it requires only two extra steps: (1) Learn a horizon-truncated in-context action-value function, namely Truncated Q, using the offline dataset. The Truncated Q estimates the expected return within a fixed, truncated horizon and is conditioned on opponent information. (2) Use the learned Truncated Q to instantly decide whether to perform policy refinement and to generate policy after refinement during testing. Theoretically, we analyze the rationale of Truncated Q from the perspective of No Maximization Bias probability. Empirically, we conduct extensive comparison and ablation experiments in four representative competitive environments. TIPR effectively improves various OOM algorithms pretrained with suboptimal datasets.

Methods with adaptive stepsizes, such as AdaGrad and Adam, are essential for training modern Deep Learning models, especially Large Language Models. Typically, the noise in the stochastic gradients is heavy-tailed for the later ones. Gradient clipping provably helps to achieve good high-probability convergence for such noises. However, despite the similarity between AdaGrad/Adam and Clip-SGD, the current understanding of the high-probability convergence of AdaGrad/Adam-type methods is limited in this case. In this work, we prove that AdaGrad/Adam (and their delayed version) can have provably bad high-probability convergence if the noise is heavy-tailed. We also show that gradient clipping fixes this issue, i.e., we derive new high-probability convergence bounds with polylogarithmic dependence on the confidence level for AdaGrad-Norm and Adam-Norm with clipping and with/without delay for smooth convex/non-convex stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed noise. We extend our results to the case of AdaGrad/Adam with delayed stepsizes. Our empirical evaluations highlight the superiority of clipped versions of AdaGrad/Adam in handling the heavy-tailed noise.

Training large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on geographically distributed accelerators, causing prohibitive communication costs across regions and uneven utilization of heterogeneous hardware. We propose HALoS, a hierarchical asynchronous optimization framework that tackles these issues by introducing local parameter servers (LPSs) within each region and a global parameter server (GPS) that merges updates across regions. This hierarchical design minimizes expensive inter-region communication, reduces straggler effects, and leverages fast intra-region links. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis for HALoS under non-convex objectives, including theoretical guarantees on the role of hierarchical momentum in asynchronous training. Empirically, HALoS attains up to 7.5× faster convergence than synchronous baselines in geo-distributed LLM training and improves upon existing asynchronous methods by up to 2.1×. Crucially, HALoS preserves the model quality of fully synchronous SGD—matching or exceeding accuracy on standard language modeling and downstream benchmarks—while substantially lowering total training time. These results demonstrate that hierarchical, server-side update accumulation and global model merging are powerful tools for scalable, efficient training of new-era LLMs in heterogeneous, geo-distributed environments.

Real-world time series are often governed by complex nonlinear dynamics. Understanding these underlying dynamics is crucial for precise future prediction. While deep learning has achieved major success in time series forecasting, many existing approaches do not explicitly model the dynamics. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepEDM, a framework that integrates nonlinear dynamical systems modeling with deep neural networks. Inspired by empirical dynamic modeling (EDM) and rooted in Takens' theorem, DeepEDM presents a novel deep model that learns a latent space from time-delayed embeddings, and employs kernel regression to approximate the underlying dynamics, while leveraging efficient implementation of softmax attention and allowing for accurate prediction of future time steps. To evaluate our method, we conduct comprehensive experiments on synthetic data of nonlinear dynamical systems as well as real-world time series across domains. Our results show that DeepEDM is robust to input noise, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in forecasting accuracy. Our code is available at: https://abrarmajeedi.github.io/deep_edm.

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has demonstrated success in online planning for deterministic environments, yet significant challenges remain in adapting it to stochastic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), particularly in continuous state-action spaces. Existing methods, such as HOOT, which combines MCTS with the Hierarchical Optimistic Optimization (HOO) bandit strategy, address continuous spaces but rely on a logarithmic exploration bonus that lacks theoretical guarantees in non-stationary, stochastic settings. Recent advancements, such as Poly-HOOT, introduced a polynomial bonus term to achieve convergence in deterministic MDPs, though a similar theory for stochastic MDPs remains undeveloped. In this paper, we propose a novel MCTS algorithm, Stochastic-Power-HOOT, designed for continuous, stochastic MDPs. Stochastic-Power-HOOT integrates a power mean as a value backup operator, alongside a polynomial exploration bonus to address the non-stationarity inherent in continuous action spaces. Our theoretical analysis establishes that Stochastic-Power-HOOT converges at a polynomial rate of $\mathcal{O}(n^{-1/2})$, where \( n \) is the number of visited trajectories, thereby extending the non-asymptotic convergence guarantees of Poly-HOOT to stochastic environments. Experimental results on synthetic and stochastic tasks validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Stochastic-Power-HOOT in continuous, stochastic domains.

Patients have long sought health information online, and increasingly, they are turning to generative AI to answer their health-related queries. Given the high stakes of the medical domain, techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and citation grounding have been widely promoted as methods to reduce hallucinations and improve the accuracy of AI-generated responses and have been widely adopted into search engines. However, we argue that even when these methods produce literally accurate content drawn from source documents sans hallucinations, they can still be highly misleading. Patients may derive significantly different interpretations from AI-generated outputs than they would from reading the original source material, let alone consulting a knowledgeable clinician. Through a large-scale query analysis on topics including disputed diagnoses and procedure safety, we support our argument with quantitative and qualitative evidence of the suboptimal answers resulting from current systems. In particular, we highlight how these models tend to decontextualize facts, omit critical relevant sources, and reinforce patient misconceptions or biases. We propose a series of recommendations---such as the incorporation of communication pragmatics and enhanced comprehension of source documents---that could help mitigate these issues and extend beyond the medical domain.

Armijo line-search (Armijo-LS) is a standard method to set the step-size for gradient descent (GD). For smooth functions, Armijo-LS alleviates the need to know the global smoothness constant $L$ and adapts to the ``local'' smoothness, enabling GD to converge faster. Existing theoretical analyses show that GD with Armijo-LS ($\texttt{GD-LS}$) can result in constant factor improvements over GD with a $1/L$ step-size (denoted as $\texttt{GD(1/L)}$). We strengthen these results and show that if the objective function satisfies a certain non-uniform smoothness condition, $\texttt{GD-LS}$ can result in a faster convergence rate than $\texttt{GD(1/L)}$. In particular, we prove that for convex objectives corresponding to logistic regression and multi-class classification, $\texttt{GD-LS}$ can converge to the optimum at a linear rate, and hence improves over the sublinear convergence of $\texttt{GD(1/L)}$. Furthermore, for non-convex objectives satisfying gradient domination (e.g., those corresponding to the softmax policy gradient in RL or generalized linear models with a logistic link function), $\texttt{GD-LS}$ can match the fast convergence of algorithms tailored for these specific settings. Finally, we prove that under the interpolation assumption, for convex losses, stochastic GD with a stochastic line-search can match the fast convergence of $\texttt{GD-LS}$.

Optimal stopping is a fundamental problem in optimization with applications in risk management, finance, robotics, and machine learning. We extend the standard framework to a multi-agent setting, named multi-agent optimal stopping (MAOS), where agents cooperate to make optimal stopping decisions in a finite-space, discrete-time environment. Since solving MAOS becomes computationally prohibitive as the number of agents is very large, we study the mean-field optimal stopping (MFOS) problem, obtained as the number of agents tends to infinity. We establish that MFOS provides a good approximation to MAOS and prove a dynamic programming principle (DPP) based on mean-field control theory. We then propose two deep learning approaches: one that learns optimal stopping decisions by simulating full trajectories and another that leverages the DPP to compute the value function and to learn the optimal stopping rule using backward induction. Both methods train neural networks to approximate optimal stopping policies. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the scalability of our work through numerical experiments on 6 different problems in spatial dimension up to 300. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to formalize and computationally solve MFOS in discrete time and finite space, opening new directions for scalable MAOS methods.

PDE-Constrained Optimization (PDECO) problems can be accelerated significantly by employing gradient-based methods with surrogate models like neural operators compared to traditional numerical solvers. However, this approach faces two key challenges: (1) **Data inefficiency**: Lack of efficient data sampling and effective training for neural operators, particularly for optimization purpose. (2) **Instability**: High risk of optimization derailment due to inaccurate neural operator predictions and gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework: (1) **Optimization-oriented training**: we leverage data from full steps of traditional optimization algorithms and employ a specialized training method for neural operators. (2) **Enhanced derivative learning**: We introduce a **Virtual-Fourier** layer to enhance derivative learning within the neural operator, a crucial aspect for gradient-based optimization. (3) **Hybrid optimization**: We implement a hybrid approach that integrates neural operators with numerical solvers, providing robust regularization for the optimization process. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in accurately learning operators and their derivatives. Furthermore, our hybrid optimization approach exhibits robust convergence.

Decomposing hard problems into subproblems often makes them easier and more efficient to solve. With the high cost of running LLMs at scale, there is an increasing effort to decompose systems into sets of LLM-based agents, each of whom can be delegated sub-tasks. However, this decomposition (even when automated) is often intuitive, e.g., based on how a human might assign roles to members of a human team. How close are these role decompositions to optimal? This position paper argues that asymptotic analysis with LLM primitives is needed to reason about the efficiency of such problem decompositions, and that insights from such analysis will unlock opportunities for scaling such systems. By treating the LLM forward pass as the atomic unit of computational cost, one can separate out the (often opaque) inner workings of a particular LLM from the inherent efficiency of how a set of LLMs are orchestrated to solve hard problems. In other words, if we want to scale the deployment of LLMs to the limit, instead of anthropomorphizing LLMs, asymptotic analysis with LLM primitives should be used to reason about and develop more powerful decompositions of large problems into LLM agents.

We address the problem of quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) under model-free settings with quantum oracle access to the Markov Decision Process (MDP). This paper introduces a Quantum Natural Policy Gradient (QNPG) algorithm, which replaces the random sampling used in classical Natural Policy Gradient (NPG) estimators with a deterministic gradient estimation approach, enabling seamless integration into quantum systems. While this modification introduces a bounded bias in the estimator, the bias decays exponentially with increasing truncation levels. This paper demonstrates that the proposed QNPG algorithm achieves a sample complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-1.5})$ for queries to the quantum oracle, significantly improving the classical lower bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$ for queries to the MDP.