ICML 2026 Papers

Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision “anchors” and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large step sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

Causal discovery is essential for advancing data-driven fields such as scientific AI and data analysis, yet existing approaches face significant time- and space-efficiency bottlenecks when scaling to large graphs. To address this challenge, we present CauScale, a neural architecture designed for efficient causal discovery that scales inference to graphs with up to 1000 nodes. CauScale improves time efficiency via a reduction unit that compresses data embeddings and improves space efficiency by adopting tied attention weights to avoid maintaining axis-specific attention maps. To keep high causal discovery accuracy, CauScale adopts a two-stream design: a data stream extracts relational evidence from high-dimensional observations, while a graph stream integrates statistical graph priors and preserves key structural signals. CauScale successfully scales to 500-node graphs during training, where prior work fails due to space limitations. Across testing data with varying graph scales and causal mechanisms, CauScale achieves 99.6\% mAP on in-distribution data and 84.4\% on out-of-distribution data, while delivering 4$\times$–13,000$\times$ inference speedups over prior methods.

Reliable long-horizon precipitation nowcasting requires preserving fine-scale echo structures while maintaining coherent transport. Although Rectified Flow (RF) can generate detail-preserving future sequences, numerical ODE integration compounds velocity estimation errors and induces progressive off-manifold drift, causing morphological distortions at extended lead times. We propose Physically-guided Data-space Rectified Flow (PDRF), which re-parameterizes the generative ODE in data space: the network predicts the clean future sequence, analytically inducing a coupled vector field with an implicit restoring effect that suppresses drift. We also introduce a soft Semi-Lagrangian teacher based on an advection prior to regularize large-scale transport, while allowing local growth/decay/deformation to be learned from data. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in event-based skill and better preservation of intense-echo morphology over long horizons.

Unlike conventional "black-box" transformers with classical self-attention mechanisms, we build a lightweight and interpretable transformer-like neural network by unrolling a mixed-graph-based optimization algorithm to forecast traffic with spatial and temporal dimensions. We construct two graphs: an undirected graph $\mathcal{G}^u$ capturing spatial correlations across geography, and a directed graph $\mathcal{G}^d$ capturing sequential relationships over time. We predict future samples of signal $\mathbf{x}$, assuming it is "smooth" with respect to both $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathcal{G}^d$, where we design new $\ell_2$- and $\ell_1$-norm variational terms to quantify and promote signal smoothness (low-frequency reconstruction) on a directed graph. We design an iterative algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and unroll it into a feed-forward network for data-driven parameter learning. We periodically insert graph learning modules for $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathcal{G}^d$ that play the role of self-attention. Experiments show that our unrolled networks achieve competitive traffic forecast performance as state-of-the-art prediction schemes, while reducing parameter counts drastically. Code: https://github.com/SingularityUndefined/Unrolling-GSP-STForecast.

Software engineering agents (SWE) are improving rapidly, with recent gains largely driven by reinforcement learning (RL). However, RL training is constrained by the scarcity of large-scale task collections with reproducible execution environments and reliable test suites. Although a growing number of benchmarks have emerged, datasets suitable for training remain limited in scale and diversity or often target a limited set of high-resource language ecosystems. We introduce SWE-rebench V2, a language-agnostic automated pipeline for harvesting executable real-world SWE tasks and constructing RL training environments at scale. The pipeline synthesizes repository-specific installation and test procedures via an interactive setup agent, and filters unsound instances using an ensemble of LLM judges, validated against human-verified SWE-bench annotations. Using this pipeline, we construct a dataset of 32,079 tasks spanning 20 languages and 3,617 repositories, with pre-built images for reproducible execution. To further scale training data, we additionally release 120,000+ tasks with installation instructions, fail-to-pass tests and rich metadata, where the problem statement is generated based on the original pull request description. We validate the collected instances through a diagnostic study that covers a subset of tasks in five programming languages across seven popular models, and provide instance-level metadata that flags common confounders such as overly restrictive tests and underspecified descriptions. We release the datasets, the collection and execution code, and associated artifacts to enable large-scale training of SWE agents across diverse languages and repositories.

To address the increasing long-context compute limitations of softmax attention, several subquadratic recurrent operators have been developed. This work includes models such as Mamba-2, DeltaNet, Gated DeltaNet (GDN), and Kimi Delta Attention (KDA). As the space of recurrences grows, a parallel line of work has arisen to taxonomize them. One compelling view is the test-time regression (TTR) framework, which interprets recurrences as performing online least squares updates that learn a linear map from the keys to values. Existing delta-rule recurrences can be seen as first-order approximations to this objective, but notably ignore the curvature of the least-squares loss during optimization. In this work, we address this by introducing preconditioning to these recurrences. Starting from the theory of online least squares, we derive equivalences between linear attention and the delta rule in the exactly preconditioned case. Next, we realize this theory in practice by proposing a diagonal approximation: this enables us to introduce preconditioned variants of DeltaNet, GDN, and KDA alongside efficient chunkwise parallel algorithms for computing them. Empirically, we find that our preconditioned delta-rule recurrences yield consistent performance improvements across synthetic recall benchmarks and language modeling at the 340M and 1B scale.

Differentially private (DP) stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used in privacy-preserving deep learning, where per-sample gradient clipping and noise injection protect sensitive information. However, these operations limit existing DP algorithms to converge within a constant-radius neighborhood of the first-order stationary point, leading to solution bias and the well-known privacy-utility trade-off. To enhance model utility, we propose a novel algorithmic framework called DP-C4, which is designed to be error-Consistently-vanishing, Coupledly-clipped, solution-Calibrated, and Convergence-guaranteed. Specifically, it incorporates a carefully designed coupled clipping scheme with shifted threshold strategy, ensuring that both clipping bias and noise variance asymptotically vanish, thereby eliminating the DP-induced solution bias. Moreover, we extend existing sensitivity analysis techniques and develop a tailored privacy budget allocation to guarantee the privacy of DP-C4. Compared with the well-recognized DP-SGD, our framework injects significantly less noise under the same privacy level. In addition, we prove that our framework converges to the optimum in strongly-convex case and to a diminishing neighborhood of the first-order stationary point in non-convex case. Experiments show that DP-C4 achieves superior privacy-utility trade-off over existing baselines across various tasks and datasets.

Proximal constraints are fundamental to the stability of the Large Language Model reinforcement learning. While the canonical clipping mechanism in PPO serves as an efficient surrogate for trust regions, we identify a critical bottleneck: fixed bounds strictly constrain the upward update margin of low-probability actions, disproportionately suppressing high-advantage tail strategies and inducing rapid entropy collapse. To address this, we introduce **Band-constrained Policy Optimization** (BandPO). BandPO replaces canonical clipping with **Band**, a unified theoretical operator that projects trust regions defined by $f$-divergences into dynamic, probability-aware clipping intervals. Theoretical analysis confirms that Band effectively resolves this exploration bottleneck. We formulate this mapping as a convex optimization problem, guaranteeing a globally optimal numerical solution while deriving closed-form solutions for specific divergences. Extensive experiments across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that BandPO consistently outperforms canonical clipping and Clip-Higher, while robustly mitigating entropy collapse. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/BandPO.

We propose DynVLA, a driving VLA model that introduces a new CoT paradigm termed Dynamics CoT. DynVLA forecasts compact world dynamics before action generation, enabling more informed and physically grounded decision-making. To obtain compact dynamics representations, DynVLA introduces a Dynamics Tokenizer that compresses future evolution into a small set of dynamics tokens. Considering the rich environment dynamics in interaction-intensive driving scenarios, DynVLA decouples ego-centric and environment-centric dynamics, yielding more accurate world dynamics modeling. We then train DynVLA to generate dynamics tokens before actions through SFT and RFT, improving decision quality while maintaining latency-efficient inference. Compared to Textual CoT, which lacks fine-grained spatiotemporal understanding, and Visual CoT, which introduces substantial redundancy due to dense image prediction, Dynamics CoT captures the evolution of the world in a compact, interpretable, and efficient form. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM, Bench2Drive, and a large-scale in-house dataset demonstrate that DynVLA consistently outperforms Textual CoT and Visual CoT methods, validating the effectiveness and practical value of Dynamics CoT.

AI agents increasingly execute procedural workflows as sequential action traces, which obscures latent concurrency and induces repeated step-by-step reasoning. We introduce BPOP, a Bayesian framework that infers a latent dependency partial order from noisy linearized traces. BPOP models traces as stochastic linear extensions of an underlying graph and performs efficient MCMC inference via a tractable frontier-softmax likelihood that avoids \#P-hard marginalization over linear extensions. We evaluate on our open-sourced Cloud-IaC-6, a suite of cloud provisioning tasks with heterogeneous LLM-generated traces, and WFCommons scientific workflows. BPOP recovers dependency structure more accurately than trace-only and process-mining baselines, and the inferred graphs support a compiled executor that prunes irrelevant context, yielding substantial reductions in token usage and execution time.

We introduce Context Tuning, a simple and effective method to significantly enhance few-shot adaptation of language models (LLMs) without fine-tuning model parameters. While prompt-based adaptation techniques have demonstrated the effectiveness of lightweight adaptation methods for LLMs, they typically initialize a trainable prompt or prefix with irrelevant tokens for the task at hand. In contrast, Context Tuning initializes the trainable prompt or prefix with task-specific demonstration examples, leveraging the model’s inherent In-Context Learning (ICL) ability to extract relevant information for improved few-shot learning performance. Extensive evaluations on benchmarks such as CrossFit, UnifiedQA, MMLU, BIG-Bench Hard, and ARC demonstrate that Context Tuning outperforms traditional prompt-based adaptation methods and achieves competitive accuracy with Test-Time Training at significantly higher training efficiency.

Reward-maximizing RL methods have shown to be capable of enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs, but often lead to reduced generation diversity. Recent works address this issue by adopting GFlowNets, training LLMs to match a target distribution while jointly learning its partition function. In contrast to prior works that treat this partition function solely as a normalizer, we reinterpret it as a per-prompt expected-reward (i.e., online accuracy) signal, leveraging this unused information to improve sample efficiency. Specifically, we first establish a theoretical relationship between the partition function and per-prompt accuracy estimates. Building on this key insight, we propose \textbf{Pa}rtition Fun\textbf{c}tion-Guid\textbf{ed} \textbf{RL} (PACED-RL), a post-training framework that leverages accuracy estimates to prioritize informative question prompts during training, and further improves sample efficiency through an accuracy estimate error–prioritized replay. Crucially, both components reuse information already produced during GFlowNet training, effectively amortizing the compute overhead into the existing optimization process. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate strong performance improvements over GRPO and prior GFlowNet approaches, highlighting PACED-RL as a promising direction for a more sample efficient distribution-matching training for LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for knowledge synthesis, yet their capacity for compositional generalization in scientific knowledge remains under-characterized. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-turn restricted scenarios, failing to capture the capability boundaries exposed by real-world interactive scientific workflows. To address this, we introduce XDomainBench, a diagnostic benchmark for interactive interdisciplinary scientific reasoning. We formalize the composition order and mixture structure to enable systematic stress-testing from single-discipline to inter-disciplinary, comprising 8,598 interactive sessions across 20 domains and 4 task categories, with 8 realistic trajectory patterns covering difficulty and domain-mixture dynamics, simulating real AI4S scenarios. Large-scale evaluation of LLMs reveals a systematic reasoning collapse as composition order increases, stemming from two root causes: (i) direct difficulty increases induced by domain composition, and (ii) indirect interaction-amplified failures where trajectory patterns trigger error accumulation, reasoning breaks, and domain confusion, ultimately leading to session collapse.

Most deep video codecs emphasize low-level motion modeling and remain largely semantics-agnostic, which can degrade perceptual quality in complex scenes. We propose **MoVie**, a **M**ultim**o**dal **Vi**d**e**o compression framework built on a Text-guided Video Transformer–CNN Mixed block (*Text-VideoTCM*). MoVie adopts a video-centric architecture that jointly models local spatial structures and temporal dynamics via window-based processing, delivering a favorable computation--perception trade-off. To incorporate semantics, we introduce dual-stage text fusion with *Extractor* and *Injector* modules. We further present history-conditioned coding that leverages both previous and aggregated historical frames, and a spatial--channel factorized entropy model that estimates probabilities over spatial neighborhoods and channel groups for adaptive bit allocation. Together, these designs reduce redundancy and improve rate control and temporal coherence, yielding reconstructions at low bitrates. On UVG and MCL-JCV, MoVie achieves **$-$50.23\%** BD-rate for FID and **$-$14.64\%** for LPIPS (VGGNet) relative to HM, while requiring only **55.76\%** of DCVC-FM's per-pixel kMACs. A human perceptual study further confirms consistent subjective preference over strong baselines.

Existing forgery detection methods are often limited to uni-modal or bi-modal settings, failing to handle the interleaved text, images, and videos prevalent in real-world misinformation. To bridge this gap, we propose **OmniVL-Guard**, a unified framework for omni vision-language forgery detection and grounding. In this unified setting, the interplay between diverse modalities and the dual requirements of simultaneous detection and localization pose significant optimization challenges. Through extensive investigations, we identify a critical difficulty bias in this multi-task optimization: the simpler veracity classification task tends to dominate the gradients, leading to suboptimal performance in fine-grained grounding. To address this imbalance, we first develop a Self-Evolving CoT Generation pipeline to synthesize high-quality reasoning paths, effectively overcoming the cold-start challenge. Building upon this, we propose **A**daptive **R**eward **S**caling **P**olicy **O**ptimization (**ARSPO**). By dynamically modulating reward scales and task weights, ARSPO ensures a balanced joint optimization that prioritizes challenging grounding objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniVL-Guard significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization across out-of-domain scenarios.

Batch inference for agentic workloads stresses the GPU key–value (KV) cache in a sustained and cumulative manner, often causing severe throughput degradation well before memory capacity is exhausted. We identify this phenomenon as middle-phase thrashing, a previously under-characterized pathology in which cache efficiency collapses as long-lived agents accumulate state over time. We argue that mitigating this pathology requires moving beyond reactive, request-level cache management to proactive, agent-level admission control. Drawing inspiration from congestion control in distributed systems, we view the KV cache as a shared resource whose efficient utilization depends on feedback-driven regulation. Based on this insight, we present CONCUR, a lightweight control layer that regulates agent admission to bound aggregate cache pressure while preserving execution continuity. CONCUR adapts a cache-aware control algorithm to dynamically adjust the number of active agents using runtime cache signals. Across large models and real-world agent workloads, CONCUR prevents middle-phase thrashing and improves batch inference throughput by up to 4.09× on Qwen3-32B and 1.90× on DeepSeek-V3, while remaining compatible with existing LLM serving systems.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit remarkable general capabilities but struggle significantly with spatial reasoning tasks. In this paper, we uncover a critical representation-output misalignment via linear probing: LVLMs correctly encode spatial features internally, but generate incorrect results in the final text. To address this, we pioneer the Inference-time Geometric Manifold Adaptation paradigm and propose **GRASP** (**G**eometric **R**ectification for **A**ctive **S**patial **P**erception), a training-free framework to awaken these latent capabilities. GRASP employs Manifold Differential Search to identify optimal geometric counterfactuals, which then drive a dual-level rectification mechanism: Implicit Trajectory Correction to rectify attenuated intrinsic geometric features in intermediate decoder layers, and Explicit Distribution Alignment to break the dominance of language priors at the output layer. Extensive experiments spanning diverse architectures (LLaVA, Qwen 2.5/3-VL) and positional encoding paradigms (1D APE, 2D/3D RoPE) across image and video benchmarks (WhatsUp, VSR, VSI-Bench) demonstrate that GRASP significantly mitigates spatial hallucinations without parameter updates, achieving accuracy gains of up to 26.1% on image benchmarks and 9.7% on video reasoning tasks, consistently outperforming baseline methods.

Magnitude-based stability proxies such as parameter drift are widely used in narrow-task fine-tuning, yet they do not reliably indicate degradation of broad capabilities. We identify trajectory lock-in: under fixed training conditions for narrow adaptation, the joint evolution of task loss and broad generalization collapses onto a shared low-dimensional degradation curve, so many stabilizers primarily change the rate of progress along this curve rather than altering the curve itself. This yields a drift paradox, in which comparable Euclidean displacement can still correspond to divergent generalization outcomes. To diagnose the underlying structure, we introduce objective-agnostic geometric probes that track the effective update subspace, together with an online harm signal that reflects curvature-dominated channeling toward directions associated with broad degradation. Finally, we show that escaping lock-in requires a spectral bifurcation, namely a qualitative reorientation of the update subspace toward softer curvature modes, thereby improving broad generalization while maintaining matched training performance. We validate these findings across model scales and modalities in narrow-task settings, and report practical deployment procedures and overhead measurements.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered attention for their biological plausibility, energy efficiency, and temporal modeling capability. Due to the non-differentiability of spike generation, a widely used training method for SNNs is backpropagation through time with surrogate gradients, achieving competitive performance with few timesteps. Intuitively, scaling timesteps should improve performance by enriching temporal dynamics. However, we observe timestep scaling paradox (TSP), a counter-intuitive accuracy degradation when scaling timesteps. We investigate TSP and link it to long-term temporal gradient vanishing and weakened cross-timestep dependencies. To address this, we propose the Timestep-Scalable (TS) neuron model. It introduces long-term memory reconsolidation to enhance cross-timestep information flow and enable effective learning with more timesteps. In parallel, a temporal forgetting mechanism periodically truncates the accumulation path, suppressing excessive temporal buildup and improving training stability. Supported by theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, TS consistently improves performance when scaling timesteps. In addition, it attains state-of-the-art results on time-series and event-based tasks, while remaining strong on static image classification and object detection.