ICML 2026 Papers

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly power conversational agents, understanding how they model users' emotional states is critical for ethical deployment. Inspired by emotion wheels, i.e., a psychological framework that argues emotions organize hierarchically, we analyze probabilistic dependencies between emotional states in model outputs. We find that LLMs naturally form hierarchical emotion trees that align with human psychological models, and larger models develop more complex hierarchies. We also uncover systematic biases in emotion recognition across socioeconomic personas, with compounding misclassifications for intersectional, underrepresented groups. Human studies reveal striking parallels, suggesting that LLMs internalize aspects of social perception. Beyond highlighting emergent emotional reasoning in LLMs, our results hint at the potential of using cognitively-grounded theories for developing better model evaluations.

The scarcity of high-quality training data presents a fundamental bottleneck to scaling machine learning models. This challenge is particularly acute in recommendation systems, where extreme sparsity in user interactions leads to rugged optimization landscapes and poor generalization. We propose the Recursive Self-Improving Recommendation (RSIR) framework, a paradigm in which a model bootstraps its own performance without reliance on external data or teacher models. RSIR operates in a closed loop: the current model generates plausible user interaction sequences, a fidelity-based quality control mechanism filters them for consistency with user’s approximate preference manifold, and a successor model is augmented on the enriched dataset. Our theoretical analysis shows that RSIR acts as a data-driven implicit regularizer, smoothing the optimization landscape and guiding models toward more robust solutions. Empirically, RSIR yields consistent, cumulative gains across multiple benchmarks and architectures. Notably, even smaller models benefit, and weak models can generate effective training curricula for stronger ones. These results demonstrate that recursive self-improvement is a general, model-agnostic approach to overcoming data sparsity, suggesting a scalable path forward for recommender systems and beyond. Our code is available at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/RSIR.

Concept Embedding Models (CEMs) advance interpretable AI by extending Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) through semantic concept embeddings, providing an important solution in high-stakes domains such as medical diagnosis where accuracy and interpretability are critical. However, a fundamental limitation persists: existing CEMs inherently assume concept independence, critically overlooking the highly complex dependencies among concepts. To address this, we propose an Evidential Copula Concept Embedding Model (EC-CEM) that redefines the joint distribution over concepts, capturing inter-concept dependencies while maintaining a flexible structure that decouples the marginal concept distributions from their dependency structure. In particular, EC-CEM relaxes the concept independence assumption and uniquely integrates Copula theory with evidential deep learning to define a joint distribution over concepts. The proposed EC-CEM also develops two training objectives that aim at classification and concept modeling simultaneously. We provide theoretical justification via variational inference and demonstrate empirical superiority through extensive experiments.

Robust classification in noisy environments remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning. Standard approaches typically treat signal enhancement and classification as separate, sequential stages: first enhancing the signal and then applying a classifier. This approach fails to leverage the semantic information in the classifier's output during denoising. In this work, we propose a general, domain-agnostic framework that integrates two interacting diffusion models: one operating on the input signal and the other on the classifier's output logits, without requiring any retraining or fine-tuning of the classifier. This coupled formulation enables mutual guidance, where the enhancing signal refines the class estimation and, conversely, the evolving class logits guide the signal reconstruction towards discriminative regions of the manifold. We introduce three strategies to effectively model the joint distribution of the input and the logit. We evaluated our joint enhancement method for image classification and automatic speech recognition. The proposed framework surpasses traditional sequential enhancement baselines, delivering robust and flexible improvements in classification accuracy under diverse noise conditions.

Identifying and estimating causal relationships from data is a crucial component of empirical research. While large language model-powered tools have shown potential for assisting research workflows, their ability to perform end-to-end causal inference remains underexplored. We introduce CauSciBench, a benchmark that puts LLM-powered tools to the test on causality- driven research questions. Unlike previous related benchmarks that focus on coding alone, CauSciBench enables evaluation across the full pipeline of causal inference: from method and variable selection to computation of causal effects and statistical interpretation in the context of real-world research problems. We evaluated 7 frontier models on over 300 queries derived from scientific publications, textbook problems, sem- inal datasets, and synthetic scenarios. Results show that models consistently perform worse on real datasets, with the key bottleneck being the selection of an appropriate causal inference method.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies from pre-collected datasets. A bottleneck of this paradigm is managing epistemic uncertainty, which arises from limited data coverage (sample-level) and the ambiguity in identifying transition dynamics from finite data (model-level). To provide a unified quantification of these uncertainties, Bayesian RL has been proposed by treating the dynamics model as a random variable and maintaining a corresponding belief. Despite its theoretical appeal, policy optimization in Bayesian RL remains computationally challenging as it requires solving composite objectives with expectations. Prior methods either employ search-based techniques with poor computational scalability or impose restrictive posterior assumptions that sacrifice the adaptability of Bayesian RL. To address these limitations, we propose Posterior Hybrid Bayesian Belief (PhyB), which reformulates the expectation as a convex combination over a subset of dynamics models. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the objective discrepancy induced by this approximation remains bounded. Based on PhyB, we develop an iterative regularized policy optimization algorithm that provides metric-agnostic guarantees for monotonic improvement until convergence. Empirical results demonstrate that PhyB achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks.

Audio large language models (Audio LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on speech understanding tasks, yet their ability to understand paralinguistic information remains limited. To systematically quantify this issue, we introduce **VoxParadox**, an adversarial benchmark with 2,000 verified examples, spanning 10 paralinguistic tasks, created with controlled speech synthesis to intentionally mismatch transcript claims and speaking style, enabling direct measurement of speech paralinguistic understanding. Evaluation of a diverse set of Audio LLMs reveals consistently low accuracy on acoustic ground truth and a strong tendency to follow language-implied (incorrect) answers. To understand the cause of this gap, we perform layer-wise probing and find that (i) paralinguistic cues can degrade in deeper encoder layers and at the encoder--LLM interface, and (ii) even when such cues are available in audio tokens, the language model frequently ignores them. To address these problems, we propose **Prompt-Conditioned Layer Mixer (PCLM)**, which adaptively combines information from multiple audio layers based on the input prompt, and pair it with **Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)** to explicitly prefer acoustically supported options over language-implied alternatives. These methods substantially improve Audio LLM paralinguistic understanding, improving Audio Flamingo 3 from **17.40%** to **65.20%** on VoxParadox, and from **37.74%** to **54.78%** on MMSU paralinguistic subset. Our project page is available at https://voxparadox.github.io/.

Many optimization problems in machine learning and data science—from deep neural networks to Bayesian inference and beyond—fall outside the standard Lipschitz smoothness framework that underpins the convergence theory of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Motivated by this theory-practice disconnect, we examine the almost sure convergence of the trajectories of SGD in non-convex landscapes under a generalized $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness condition which allows for gradients with superlinear growth (even exponential). We begin by proposing a taming scheme for SGD that achieves almost sure convergence under a generalized ABC-type condition on the gradient noise. Subsequently, to relax this requirement, we introduce a more flexible, dissipative taming scheme which converges almost surely under less restrictive moment bound conditions for the stochastic gradients entering the process. For both taming schemes, we show that the generated trajectories avoid strict saddle points (and/or manifolds thereof) with probability 1 so, generically, both methods only converge to local minimizers.

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is compute-intensive because each prompt requires generating multiple responses, or rollouts. To make the best use of GPU resources, the key question is how to allocate rollout-generation jobs across prompts. Existing methods typically use uniform allocation, assigning every prompt the same rollout budget. This is inefficient and ineffective: easy prompts are oversampled after they are already solved, while hard prompts receive too little exploration. In policy optimization methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), both cases often yield near-zero gradients and limited learning progress. We address this problem by formulating rollout allocation as a computeconstrained resource allocation task, where each prompt-budget choice has an expected learning value and rollout cost. Based on this view, we propose Knapsack RL, a practical framework that uses knapsack optimization to assign heterogeneous, task-specific rollout budgets. It directs exploration toward prompts that benefit most from additional sampling. Applied to GRPO, Knapsack RL increases the effective-gradient ratio by up to 40%, enables larger budgets for challenging prompts, and improves mathematical reasoning by 2–4 points on average, with peak gains of up to 9 points. Achieving similar performance with uniform allocation requires about 2× more compute, demonstrating a simple and practical path toward scaling RL fine-tuning for LLMs.

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is fundamental for precise localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments, aiming to match ground or UAV imagery with satellite views. Existing approaches often rely on global feature alignment, but they suffer from substantial domain shifts induced by varying regional textures and weather conditions. This issue becomes even more pronounced in UAV-based scenarios, where the broader perspective inevitably introduces dense, fine-grained objects, creating significant visual clutter. To address this, we draw inspiration from Object-Centric Learning (OCL) and propose InfoGeo, an information-theoretic framework designed to enhance robustness and generalization. InfoGeo reformulates the optimization as an information bottleneck process with two core objectives: (i) maximizing view-invariant information by aligning the object-centric structural relations across views, and (ii) minimizing view-specific noisy signals through cross-view knowledge constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and challenging scenarios demonstrate that InfoGeo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Multimodal Large Language Models have made substantial progress on visual understanding tasks, yet they still perform poorly on high-resolution images. Prior work often attributes this limitation to perceptual constraints, arguing that MLLMs fail to recognize small objects and therefore rely on ''zoom-in" strategies to recover fine details. In contrast, our analysis shows that the dominant failure mode is background interference rather than object size. We study the "zoom-in" operation through a **hierarchical decoupling analysis** and propose the **Hierarchical Decoupling Framework**, a training-free method that turns implicit attention into explicit region selection. HiDe first performs Token-wise Attention Decoupling to disentangle question semantics and identify the most informative tokens, then uses their attention patterns to pinpoint the corresponding visual regions. It subsequently applies Layout-Preserving Decoupling to extract these regions from cluttered backgrounds and construct a compact representation that retains key spatial structure while filtering out irrelevant context. HiDe achieves state-of-the-art results on high-resolution benchmarks like Vstar Bench. It boosts Qwen2.5-VL 7B and InternVL3 8B to state of the art performance, reaching 92.1\% and 91.6\% on Vstar Bench, and even surpasses reinforcement learning based methods. After optimization, HiDe reduces memory usage by 75\% compared with the previous training-free approach. Code will be available at https://tennine2077.github.io/HiDe.github.io/.

We introduce Spectral Guidance, a framework for controlling diffusion models by leveraging the intrinsic geometry of the generative process. As data is progressively corrupted by noise, only a small number of features remain informative for control. We characterize them as the singular functions of a conditional expectation operator and show that they can be learned via a self-supervised objective. Once recovered, this basis enables the projection of arbitrary guidance signals, such as labels, CLIP embeddings, or masks, directly onto the sampling trajectory. This approach allows for stable, high-fidelity control without retraining or denoiser backpropagation during sampling. Empirically, we improve conditional accuracy on CIFAR-10 by 37 percentage points over the strongest training-free baseline while offering $4\times$ faster sampling. Moreover, the same representations that support label and CLIP guidance also enable spatial control, such as mask-based guidance, without auxiliary models. Finally, our framework reveals a phase transition in the generative process, pinpointing the optimal time window for effective guidance.

Given a question, a language model (LM) implicitly encodes a distribution over possible answers. In practice, post-training procedures for LMs often collapse this distribution onto a single dominant mode. While this is generally not a problem for benchmark-style evaluations that assume one correct answer, many real-world tasks inherently involve multiple valid answers or irreducible uncertainty. Examples include medical diagnosis, ambiguous question answering, and settings with incomplete information. In these cases, we would like LMs to generate multiple plausible hypotheses, ideally with confidence estimates for each one, and without computationally intensive repeated sampling to generate non-modal answers. This paper describes a multi-answer reinforcement learning approach for training LMs to perform distributional reasoning over multiple answers during inference. We modify the RL objective to enable models to explicitly generate multiple candidate answers in a single forward pass, internalizing aspects of inference-time search into the model's generative process. Across question-answering, medical diagnostic, and coding benchmarks, we observe improved diversity, coverage, and set-level calibration scores compared to single answer trained baselines. Models trained with our approach require fewer tokens to generate multiple answers than competing approaches. On coding tasks, they are also substantially more accurate. These results position multi-answer RL as a principled and compute-efficient alternative to inference-time scaling procedures such as best-of-k.

Histopathology whole-slide images (WSIs) are routinely acquired in clinical practice and contain rich tissue morphology but lack direct molecular architecture and functional programs defining pathological states, whereas RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) provides genome-wide transcriptional profiles at substantial cost, thereby motivating WSI-based genome-wide transcriptomic prediction. Existing approaches for predicting gene expression from WSIs predominantly rely on deterministic regression with one-to-one mapping, limiting their ability to capture biological heterogeneity and predictive uncertainty. We propose RNA-FM, a flow-matching generative framework for genome-wide bulk RNA-seq prediction from WSIs. RNA-FM formulates transcriptomic prediction as a continuous-time conditional transport problem, learning a velocity field that maps a simple prior to the target gene expression distribution conditioned on morphologies. By integrating pathway-level structure, RNA-FM enables scalable and biologically interpretable genome-wide gene expression imputation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RNA-FM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while maintaining biological meaningfulness. Code is available at https://github.com/YXSong000/RNA-FM.

Genomic foundation models increasingly adopt large language model architectures, yet almost universally rely on fixed tokenization schemes such as $k$-mers, BPE, or single nucleotides, which impose arbitrary sequence boundaries that may obscure biologically relevant structure. We present LDARNet, a 120M-parameter hierarchical genomic foundation model that adapts H-Net-style dynamic chunking from autoregressive generation to masked language modeling, combining BiMamba-2 state-space layers with local attention, bidirectional routing, and a ratio-based regularizer to induce adaptive token boundaries without supervision. Fine-tuned on 27 tasks from the Nucleotide Transformer and Genomic Benchmarks suites, LDARNet achieves 11/18 wins among compact models ($<$300M parameters) and state-of-the-art results on 5 histone modification tasks, outperforming models up to 20$\times$ larger. A FLOPs-matched controlled experiment isolates learned routing as the source of these gains: learned boundaries beat fixed-grid boundaries by up to 14 percentage points on histone tasks at identical compute. Nucleotide-resolution analysis further shows that the learned boundaries align with canonical promoter motifs and splice junctions without supervision, providing a biological interpretation for adaptive tokenization in genomic foundation models.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is a powerful method for enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models, but its full potential is limited by a lack of exploration in two key areas: \textbf{Depth} (the difficulty of problems) and \textbf{Breadth} (the number of training instances). Our analysis of the popular GRPO algorithm reveals a bias that down-weights difficult, low-accuracy problems, which are crucial for improving reasoning skills. To address this, we introduce Difficulty Adaptive Rollout Sampling (DARS), a method that re-weights difficult problems by using targeted, multi-stage rollouts. This approach increases the number of rollout outcomes for these harder problems according to our proposed re-balancing schedules and leads to consistent gains in \textit{Pass@K}. We also found that simply enlarging the rollout size isn't effective and can even harm performance. We also investigated the role of breadth by scaling the batch size and using full-batch updates. This significantly improved \textit{Pass@1} performance by maintaining high token-level entropy, which indicates continued exploration and reduced gradient noise. Finally, we present DARS-Breadth, a combined approach that uses DARS with a large breadth of training data. This method demonstrates simultaneous gains in both \textit{Pass@K} and \textit{Pass@1}, confirming that depth (adaptive exploration) and breadth (scaling the training data) are orthogonal and essential dimensions for unlocking the full reasoning power of RLVR.

Identifiable virtual face (IVF) generation aims to transform a user's original face into a virtual face for high utility privacy protection. The IVF is visually and statistically different from the original face, which can still be used for recognizing the user's identity. Despite this advantage, these schemes are unable to verify the trustworthiness of the IVF, the quality and controllability of which is often limited. To address these issues, we propose TIVDiff, a diffusion-based framework for trustworthy and identifiable virtual face generation. TIVDiff learns a virtual identity (VID) space via Virtual Identity Projection (VIP) and synthesizes high-quality virtual faces conditioned on VID and 3D facial geometry for pose and expression preservation. To enable the trustworthiness of IVF, we further propose an Identity-Guarded Generative Watermarking (IGGW) scheme to bind the diffusion initial noise with VID through a reversible mapping mechanism. This enables the embedding of an imperceptible cue into IVF for legitimacy verification. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of our TIVDiff over the state-of-the-art IVF generation schemes in terms of image quality, identifiability and trustworthiness.

Graph collaborative filtering (GCF) is a dominant paradigm in recommender systems, where contrastive learning (CL) objectives such as the Sampled Softmax (SSM) loss are widely used for optimization. However, it remains unclear how CL interacts with the prediction mechanism of GCF. By unfolding the prediction mechanism of GCF, we show that the user-item prediction score is computed by aggregating learnable weights over a large number of neighbor pairs formed by the multi-hop neighbors of the user and the item. This analysis suggests that effective optimization critically depends on which neighbor pairs are upweighted during training. Empirically, we find that effective recommendation is achievable by selectively upweighting only a small subset of neighbor pairs whose constituent neighbors are structurally similar to the target user and item, and that the effect of such selective upweighting varies across different neighbor pair types. Based on these findings, we analyze SSM and identify key limitations in its neighbor pair weight update dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose NT-SSM, an effective and principled CL objective that induces type-aware neighbor pair weight update dynamics. Experiments demonstrate consistent performance improvements over SSM across multiple datasets and GCF models.

In this paper, we reveal a significant shortcoming in class unlearning evaluations: overlooking the underlying class geometry can cause information leakage about the forgotten class. We further propose a simple unlearning strategy to mitigate this issue. We introduce Class Membership Inference Attack (CMIA) that uses the probabilities the model assigns to neighboring classes to detect unlearned samples. We find that existing unlearning methods are vulnerable to CMIA across multiple datasets. We then propose a new fine-tuning objective that mitigates this privacy leakage by approximating, for forget-class inputs, the distribution over the remaining classes that a retrained-from-scratch model would produce. To construct this approximation, we estimate inter-class similarity and tilt the target model’s distribution accordingly. The resulting Tilted REWeighting (TREW) distribution serves as the desired distribution during fine-tuning. We also show that across multiple benchmarks, TREW matches or surpasses existing unlearning methods on prior unlearning metrics. More specifically, on CIFAR-10, it reduces the gap with retrained models by $19\%$ and $46\%$ for U-LiRA and CMIA scores, accordingly, compared to the SOTA method for each category.