ICML 2026 Papers

Standard cells form the building blocks of digital circuits, so their delay and power critically influence chip-level performance; yet characterization (can be understood as evaluation of cell delay and power) still relies on slow simulation sweeps, and many fast predictors ignore layout geometry, missing coupling and layout-dependent effects. The challenge is to jointly represent layout geometry and netlist topology so models capture fine-grained spatial details together with structural connectivity for accurate performance prediction. We introduce \textbf{FusionCell}, a dual-modality predictor that treats routed layout geometry and netlist topology as inputs and fuses them explicitly in a unified model. A DeiT encoder processes three-layer routed layouts, while a graph transformer models heterogeneous device/net graphs. The modalities are integrated through a \textbf{topology-guided} mechanism, where the netlist acts as a structural ``map'' to actively query relevant physical regions in the layout for joint geometric and topological reasoning. We build a 7nm dataset based on the ASAP7 PDK with over 19.5k cells spanning 149 types using automatic tools, targeting six metrics: signal rise/fall delay, transition, and power. Experimental results demonstrate that \textbf{FusionCell} reduces regression error (average MAPE 0.92\%) and improves Spearman/Kendall ranking over baselines, while accelerating the characterization process by orders of magnitude compared to circuit simulation.

Accurate 6D pose estimation and tracking are core capabilities for physical AI systems, yet real-world deployment remains brittle and labor-intensive. Many pipelines rely on CAD models, manual masking, or per-object adaptation, and still fail under occlusion or fast motion without a principled way to recognize failure. We propose STORM, a unified framework for reference-conditioned 6D tracking that can operate from a single reference image, with minimal manual input and improved robustness. STORM combines: (i) Hierarchical Spatial Fusion Attention (HSFA), a task-driven reference-query fusion architecture that supports both single-reference and multi-reference conditioning and can optionally use vision-language semantic conditioning to resolve instance ambiguities; and (ii) a BCE-trained tracking verifier whose continuous compatibility logit is used as an energy-like score to detect drift and trigger automatic re-initialization. Experiments on LM-O and YCB-Video show that STORM improves annotation-free pose tracking accuracy over strong baselines and recovers reliably from severe occlusions and rapid viewpoint changes with minimal overhead.

Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to bridge perception and action. While effective, this paradigm suffers from high computational costs and error propagation in multi-step tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Variable Alignment VLA (AVA-VLA), a novel Latent Reasoning VLA framework that models reasoning as a sequence of unobservable latent variables, bypassing the need for explicit text generation. However, latent trajectories are inherently susceptible to noise interference and misalignment with downstream objectives. To address this, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning-based Denoising mechanism that treats latent state generation as a sequential decision process, optimizing reasoning trajectories via task-level rewards. Furthermore, we incorporate an Early-Exit Strategy that adaptively terminates reasoning based on state confidence, enabling a dynamic trade-off between depth and efficiency. Extensive experiments on embodied decision benchmarks demonstrate that AVA-VLA significantly reduces inference latency while achieving superior stability and success rates compared to full-reasoning baselines.

Can we determine someone’s geographic location solely from the sounds they hear? Are acoustic signals enough to localize within a country, state, or even city? In this work, we tackle the challenge of global-scale audio geolocation, with a particular focus on wildlife and natural sounds. We posit that bioacoustic signals contain informative geolocation cues because of well-defined geographic ranges of species. To test this hypothesis, we benchmark image geolocation and soundscape mapping methods, design oracles and species-centric baselines, and propose a hybrid approach that combines species range prediction with retrieval-based geolocation. We further ask whether geolocation improves with species-diverse recordings and spatiotemporal aggregation across neighboring samples. Finally, we extend our study to multimodal geolocation with case studies from movies that combine both audio and visual content. Our results highlight the potential of incorporating bioacoustic signals into geospatial tasks, motivating future work on species recognition and audio geolocation.

Learning permutation-invariant functions over sets of $N$ elements, where the output is independent of the input ordering, is fundamental to many deep learning applications. While sum-decomposable architectures like DeepSets offer universal approximation for such functions, existing constructive bounds require a latent dimension of $\mathcal{O}(N)$, posing a significant scalability bottleneck. We break this barrier for *Wasserstein-stable* functions, i.e., those that are Lipschitz continuous with respect to the Wasserstein-1 metric on input distributions. We constructively prove that a latent dimension of $\mathcal{O}\left(C_D\varepsilon^{-(3D+4)}\log(N+\varepsilon^{-D})\right)$ suffices for uniform approximation as $ \varepsilon\to 0 $, where $D$ is the element dimension and $C_D$ is a constant depending only on $D$. We first discretize the input space into a finite net of measures with covering number polynomial in $N$. We then embed it via a multiscale Random Fourier Feature encoder that guarantees both Lipschitz stability and Hölder separation. Finally, we recover the target function via a McShane-extended Hölder decoder. This result advances the theoretical understanding of the expressivity and scalability of set-based neural architectures.

Recurring Pattern Bugs (RPBs) are defined as bugs where a single root cause appears repeatedly across multiple code segments. These bugs remain a persistent security threat even after individual instances are patched. Various static analyzers exist for finding specific bug patterns but require significant engineering effort and fail to generalize well beyond their predefined template, preventing them from detecting RPBs. To tackle RPBs, we introduce BugStone, a hybrid framework combining LLVM-based program analysis with Large Language Models to automate RPB detection. BugStone leverages a single patched instance to synthesize abstract error patterns and retrieves semantically similar bugs throughout the codebase. To evaluate BugStone, we create a ground truth dataset by analyzing over 1.9K security bugs reports, on which BugStone achieves 92.2% precision and 79.1% pairwise accuracy. We further validated BugStone through a large-scale real-world deployment. In the Linux kernel, BugStone identified over 22K potential issues; a manual audit of 400 samples confirmed 246 valid bugs, including invalid pointer dereferences, resource leaks, type errors, performance issues, and others. To evaluate the generalizability of BugStone, we further applied it to the top 100 Python projects, discovering multiple critical command injection vulnerabilities.

Precision oncology requires forecasting clinical events and trajectories, yet modeling sparse, multi-modal clinical time series remains a critical challenge. We introduce TwinWeaver, an open-source framework that serializes longitudinal patient histories into text, enabling unified event prediction as well as forecasting with large language models, and use it to build Genie Digital Twin (GDT) on 93,054 patients across 20 cancer types. In benchmarks, GDT significantly reduces forecasting errors, achieving a median Mean Absolute Scaled Error (MASE) of 0.87 compared to 0.97 for the strongest time-series baseline ($p<0.001$). Furthermore, GDT improves risk stratification, achieving an average concordance index (C-index) of 0.703 across survival, progression, and therapy switching tasks, surpassing the best baseline of 0.662. GDT also generalizes to out-of-distribution clinical trials, matching trained baselines at zero-shot and surpassing them with fine-tuning, achieving a median MASE of 0.75–0.88 and outperforming the strongest baseline in event prediction with an average C-index of 0.672 versus 0.648. Finally, TwinWeaver enables an interpretable clinical reasoning extension, providing a scalable and transparent foundation for longitudinal clinical modeling.

Open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM) requires long-horizon navigation in unseen environments and object-centric manipulation. Most existing methods treat navigation and manipulation as separate stages, which can yield navigation endpoints that are poor for manipulation or manipulation-friendly poses that are globally inefficient. We address this mismatch with 3D Interaction Chains (3D-IC), a unified framework that couples multi-stage navigation and manipulation planning. 3D-IC maintains a shared 3D feature map for both skills, generates stage-aligned interaction waypoints, and links them into candidate multi-stage chains. A hierarchical policy then scores these chains by jointly considering feasibility (via VLM reasoning over waypoint-centric 3D features) and transition cost, selecting the best trade-off between success and path efficiency. The robot executes the next waypoint and replans as new observations arrive. Experiments in simulation and on a real Stretch 3 robot demonstrate consistent gains in both task success and trajectory efficiency.

In this work, we address the critical yet underexplored challenge of symmetric multimodal-to-multimodal (MM2MM) retrieval, where queries and contexts are interchangeable. Existing universal multimodal retrieval works struggle with this task, as they are constrained by the labeled asymmetric datasets used. We produce SOLAR (Self-supervised jOint LeArning for symmetric multimodal Retrieval), a novel two-stage self-supervised framework that leverages readily available unlabeled web-scale image-text pairs. Based on the observation that both semantic alignment and discrepancies exist between two modalities, in the first stage, we learn the intersection mask of image-text pair, allowing us to align intersection while preserving semantic of difference. In the second stage, the learned mask is further utilized to construct positive and hardnegative samples via masking different parts of image/text, which enable us to conduct self-supervised multimodal embedding learning. Complementing this framework, we present a new benchmark featuring high-quality human-verified positive and hard-negative pairs to evaluate symmetric MM2MM retrieval under realistic conditions, as well as the corresponding pipeline. Extensive experiments against ten SOTA methods show SOLAR surpasses the strongest supervised VLM by 7.08 points on this benchmark, with over 50x fewer model parameters and a 5x smaller embedding dimension. Code will be available upon publication.

Large Language Models have shown strong generalization across natural language tasks but remain underexplored for longitudinal clinical profiles. In sports anti-doping, biological profiles are analyzed to support early detection of prohibited substance use and identification of anomalous biological patterns, both of which require joint modeling of temporal dynamics and metabolic relationships. We propose STT-LLM, a structural-temporal tokenization framework that adapts LLMs to longitudinal clinical analysis without modifying their backbone architectures. STT-LLM constructs biologically grounded structural-temporal embeddings and transforms them into LLM-compatible tokens via specialized tokenizers that explicitly encode pathway structure and temporal evolution. We evaluate STT-LLM on real-world longitudinal datasets from athletes, showing consistent improvements over native LLM tokenization strategies in sequence prediction and anomaly detection. In addition, we present a case study where STT-LLM provides contextual reasoning that aligns more closely with expert assessments compared to baseline models. These results highlight tokenization as a key bottleneck and opportunity for adapting LLMs to clinical data.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to long visual sequences. To enable efficient, on-demand utilization of visual information, we argue that visual necessity should be assessed by its semantic impact on the output distribution, rather than inferred from intermediate interaction signals such as attention weights. We propose a training-free framework based on token embedding subspace decomposition, which we term a prediction-conditioned Semantic Lens. Specifically, at fixed decoding intervals, we perform QR decomposition on the Top-K candidate token embeddings to construct an orthogonal semantic basis. We then introduce Semantic IImpact–Driven Visual Scheduling (SIVS), which measures how visual inputs impact model predictions by projecting visual-induced hidden-state variations onto this semantic lens. SIVS provides a geometrically grounded, impact-driven criterion for dynamic visual KV scheduling. Empirical results demonstrate that SIVS achieves ~87% visual KV compression while maintaining over 99% of model performance.

Protein automodeling from cryo-EM density maps faces unique challenges in enforcing physicochemical validity and managing conformational heterogeneity. Current solvers are often limited to static predictions or require computationally intensive heuristic searches. We present CryoACE, an end-to-end framework that reconstructs precise atomic graphs for both homogeneous and heterogeneous structures. Our method features two key innovations: an atom-centric reconstruction paradigm, where density features are sampled directly at atomic coordinates and iteratively recycled to refine structures—replacing expensive voxel convolutions for efficient multimodal fusion—and a training-free guidance mechanism that leverages predicted local resolution priors to resolve dynamic ambiguity. Validated on a newly constructed high-quality dataset, CryoACE significantly outperforms existing baselines on static benchmarks and, for the first time, unveils atomic-level dynamic conformations on complex real-world datasets like EMPIAR-10345 without relying on pre-built static structures. We release our code, model weights, and dataset to facilitate future research.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for long-context question answering is bottlenecked by inference-time prefilling over large retrieved contexts. A common strategy is to precompute key–value (KV) caches for individual documents and selectively recompute a small subset of tokens to restore global causal dependencies, but existing methods rely on heuristics or representation discrepancies without modeling whether selected tokens can effectively influence generation. We cast selective KV recomputation as an information flow problem and show that a simple attention-norm signal from the query reliably identifies tokens that are both semantically relevant and structurally positioned to propagate information, when computed under an inference-consistent RoPE geometry. We therefore reconstruct global positional assignments for retrieved chunks and introduce an information-flow–guided chunk reordering strategy. Experiments on Large Language Model and Vision-Language Model benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over prior methods under comparable latency.

The quadratic cost of attention limits the scalability of long-context LLMs, especially under limited hardware memory budgets. While attention is often sparse, existing static sparse methods cannot adapt to task- or input-dependent variations, and recent dynamic approaches rely on predefined templates or heuristics that may sacrifice generality. We propose Dynamic Hierarchical Sparse Attention (DHSA), a data-driven framework that predicts attention sparsity online while keeping the LLM backbone frozen. DHSA performs hierarchical routing by estimating importance at the chunk level and propagating it to token-level interactions, preserving causally important dependencies while enabling efficient sparsification. Across Needle-in-a-Haystack test, LongBench and RULER, DHSA maintains near-dense accuracy in highly sparse regimes, achieving 12--20% relative accuracy gains over Block Sparse Attention at comparable prefill cost. With a memory-efficient tiled backend, DHSA delivers up to $10\times$ prefill speedup at 128K context length. On LLaMA-3.1-8B (4-bit), DHSA scales to 100K context on a single 24GB GPU, where dense attention fails. We provide complementary GPU and CPU backends, enabling DHSA to run across diverse hardware environments and multiple open-weight model families. These results demonstrate DHSA as an efficient and adaptable solution for memory-constrained long-context LLM inference. Code is available at: https://github.com/xiongsiheng/DHSA.

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization, yet remain highly vulnerable to adversarial examples (AEs). While test-time defenses are promising, existing methods fail to provide sufficient robustness against strong attacks and are often hampered by high inference latency and task-specific applicability. To address these limitations, we start by investigating the intrinsic properties of AEs, which reveals that AEs exhibit severe feature inconsistency under progressive frequency attenuation. We further attribute this to the model's inherent spectral bias. Leveraging this insight, we propose an efficient test-time defense named Contrastive Spectral Rectification (CSR). CSR optimizes a rectification perturbation to realign the input with the natural manifold under a spectral-guided contrastive objective, which is applied input-adaptively. Extensive experiments across 16 classification benchmarks demonstrate that CSR outperforms the SOTA by an average of 18.1% against strong APGD with modest inference overhead. Furthermore, CSR exhibits broad applicability across diverse visual tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Summu77/CSR.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models and Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual generation. However, their reliance on a single-pass generation paradigm limits their ability to handle complex prompts requiring iterative refinement. To enable multi-round Reflective Visual Generation (RVG), we formalize the *Reason--Reflect--Rectify* (R$^3$) loop as a core framework and introduce R$^3$-Bench, a benchmark of over 600 expert-annotated instances that quantifies iterative reasoning and rectification capabilities. Evaluation on R$^3$-Bench reveals a critical gap: while state-of-the-art models can identify generation errors, they fail to generate actionable rectification instructions. To bridge this gap, we propose R$^3$-Refiner, a dual-stage framework leveraging Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and a Hierarchical Reward Mechanism (HRM) to better align rectification with reflective reasoning. Experiments show that R$^3$-Refiner achieves significant improvements on R$^3$-Bench (+12.0% in Reflective Verdict Score, +9.0% in Rectification Score), and can be seamlessly integrated with various MLLMs to enhance the generation quality of different T2I models on GenEval++ and T2I-CompBench. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaomoguhz/R3-Bench.

Existing scaling laws for Large Language Models (LLMs), predominantly monotonic power laws, fail to explain emerging non-monotonic phenomena such as *catastrophic overtraining* and *quantization-induced degradation*, where performance deteriorates despite increased compute. We propose the Shannon Scaling Law, a unified theoretical framework that models LLM training as information transmission over a noisy channel, grounded in the Shannon–Hartley theorem. By mapping model parameters to channel bandwidth and training tokens to signal power, our formulation explicitly captures the interaction between learning signal and intrinsic noise. This perspective reveals a fundamental Shannon capacity for LLMs: scaling model size or data without preserving a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) inevitably amplifies noise, inducing a transition from monotonic improvement to U-shaped performance degradation. We validate our theory through experiments on Pythia and OLMo2 under perturbations, including Gaussian noise, quantization and supervised fine-tuning on math, QA and code tasks. The Shannon Scaling Law consistently outperforms classical scaling laws and recent perturbation-aware laws, achieving strong $R^2$ scores and accurately capturing loss basins missed by prior approaches. It also extrapolates: fitted on $\leq$6.9B Pythia models with $\leq$180B tokens, it predicts the unseen 12B model up to 307B tokens at pooled $R^2{=}0.847$, while monotonic baselines collapse.

Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) enable test-time scaling, with dataset-level accuracy improving as the token budget increases, motivating adaptive reasoning---spending tokens when they improve reliability and stopping early when additional computation is unlikely to help. However, setting the token budget, as well as the threshold for adaptive reasoning, is a practical challenge that entails a fundamental risk-accuracy trade-off. We re-frame the budget setting problem as risk control, limiting the error rate while minimizing compute. Our framework introduces an upper threshold that stops reasoning when the model is confident (risking incorrect output) and a novel parametric \emph{lower} threshold that preemptively stops unsolvable instances (risking premature stoppage). Given a target risk and a validation set, we use distribution-free risk control to optimally specify these stopping mechanisms. Empirical results across diverse reasoning tasks and models demonstrate the effectiveness of our risk control approach, demonstrating computational efficiency gains from the lower threshold and ensemble stopping mechanisms, all while adhering to the user-specified risk target.

A central challenge in large-scale decision-making under incomplete information is estimating reliable probabilities. Recent approaches use Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate explanatory factors and coarse-grained probability estimates, which are then refined by a Naïve Bayes model over factor combinations. However, sparse factor spaces often yield ''unknown'' predictions, while expanding factors increases noise and spurious correlations, weakening conditional independence and degrading reliability. To address these limitations, we propose Anchor, an aggregated Bayesian inference framework over a hierarchical factor space. It constructs dense factor hierarchies through iterative generation and clustering, maps contexts via hierarchical retrieval and refinement, and augments Naïve Bayes with a Causal Bayesian Network to model latent factor dependencies. Experiments show that Anchor markedly reduces ''unknown'' predictions and produces more reliable probability estimates than direct LLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing time and token overhead.