ICLR 2026 论文列表

Large language models leverage internet-scale text data, yet embodied AI remains constrained by the prohibitive costs of physical trajectory collection. Desktop environments---particularly gaming---offer a compelling alternative: they provide rich sensorimotor interactions at scale while maintaining the structured observation-action coupling essential for embodied learning. We present D2E (Desktop to Embodied AI), a framework that demonstrates desktop interactions can serve as an effective pretraining substrate for robotics embodied AI tasks. Unlike prior work that remained domain-specific (e.g., VPT for Minecraft) or kept data proprietary (e.g., SIMA), D2E establishes a complete pipeline from scalable desktop data collection to verified transfer in embodied domains. Our framework comprises three components: (1) the OWA Toolkit that unifies diverse desktop interactions into a standardized format with 152× compression, (2) the Generalist-IDM that achieves strong zero-shot generalization across unseen games through timestamp-based event prediction, enabling internet-scale pseudo-labeling, and (3) VAPT that transfers desktop-pretrained representations to physical manipulation and navigation. Using 1.3K+ hours of data (259 hours of human demonstrations, and 1K+ hours of pseudo-labeled gameplay), we achieve a total of 96.6\% success rate on LIBERO manipulation and 83.3\% on CANVAS navigation benchmarks. This validates that sensorimotor primitives in digital interactions exhibit sufficient invariance to transfer meaningfully to physical embodied tasks, establishing desktop pretraining as a practical paradigm for robotics. We will make all our work public, including the OWA toolkit, datasets of human-collected and pseudo-labeled, and VAPT-trained models. (Demo available at [link](https://www.notion.so/D2E-Scaling-Vision-Action-Pretraining-on-Desktop-Data-for-Transfer-to-Embodied-AI-279e81a6e92380b4a672d19c924494eb?source=copy_link))

While diffusion models excel at image generation, their growing adoption raises critical concerns about copyright issues and model transparency. Existing attribution methods identify training examples influencing an entire image, but fall short in isolating contributions to specific elements, such as styles or objects, that are of primary concern to stakeholders. To address this gap, we introduce _concept-level attribution_ through a novel method called _Concept-TRAK_, which extends influence functions with a key innovation: specialized training and utility loss functions designed to isolate concept-specific influences rather than overall reconstruction quality. We evaluate Concept-TRAK on novel concept attribution benchmarks using Synthetic and CelebA-HQ datasets, as well as the established AbC benchmark, showing substantial improvements over prior methods in concept-level attribution scenarios.

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) often leverages pretrained vision or vision-language models, but many existing methods use prompt learning or complex modeling to fit the data distribution, resulting in high training or inference cost and limited cross-domain stability. To address these limitations, we propose Memory-Retrieval Anomaly Detection method (MRAD), a unified framework that replaces parametric fitting with a direct memory retrieval. The train-free base model, MRAD-TF, freezes the CLIP image encoder and constructs a two-level memory bank (image-level and pixel-level) from auxiliary data, where feature-label pairs are explicitly stored as keys and values. During inference, anomaly scores are obtained directly by similarity retrieval over the memory bank. Based on the MRAD-TF, we further propose two lightweight variants as enhancements: (i) MRAD-FT fine-tunes the retrieval metric with two linear layers to enhance the discriminability between normal and anomaly; (ii) MRAD-CLIP injects the normal and anomalous region priors from the MRAD-FT as dynamic biases into CLIP's learnable text prompts, strengthening generalization to unseen categories. Across 16 industrial and medical datasets, the MRAD framework consistently demonstrates superior performance in anomaly classification and segmentation, under both train-free and training-based settings. Our work shows that fully leveraging the empirical distribution of raw data, rather than relying only on model fitting, can achieve stronger anomaly detection performance. The code has been publicly released at https://github.com/CROVO1026/MRAD.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation. Despite substantial progress enabled by large-scale pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these models face two fundamental challenges: (i) the scarcity and high cost of large-scale robotic trajectories required for SFT scaling, and (ii) limited generalization to tasks under distribution shift. To overcome these limitations, we explore reinforcement learning (RL) as a pathway to scaling VLA training beyond limited datasets. Inspired by LLM breakthroughs where RL with outcome rewards enhances step-by-step reasoning, we ask: Can outcome-driven RL improve long-horizon step-by-step action planning of VLA? In this work, we introduce SimpleVLA-RL, an efficient RL framework tailored for VLA models. Building upon veRL, we introduce VLA-specific trajectory sampling, scalable parallelization, multi-environment rendering, and optimized loss computation. Applied to OpenVLA-OFT, SimpleVLA-RL achieves 99\% of SoTA performance on LIBERO and 80\% relative improvement on RoboTwin 1.0\&2.0, outperforming $\pi_0$ with our proposed exploration-enhancing strategies. SimpleVLA-RL reduces dependence on large-scale data, enables robust generalization, and remarkably surpasses SFT in real-world tasks. Moreover, we identify a novel phenomenon "pushcut'' during RL training, wherein the policy discovers unseen patterns beyond those seen in previous training process.

Discovering scaling laws for predicting model performance at scale is a fundamental and open-ended challenge, mostly reliant on slow, case specific human experimentation. To investigate the potential for LLMs to automate this process, we collect over 5,000 experiments from existing literature and curate seven diverse scaling law discovery tasks. While existing agents struggle to produce accurate law formulas, this paper introduces SLDAgent, an evolution-based agent that co-optimize the scaling law model and the parameters, enabling it to autonomously explore complex relationships between variables. For the first time, we demonstrates that SLDAgent can automatically discover laws that exhibit consistently more accurate extrapolation than their established, human-derived counterparts across all tasks. Through comprehensive analysis, we elucidate why these discovered laws are superior and verify their practical utility in both pretraining and finetuning applications. This work establishes a new paradigm for agentic scientific discovery, showing that AI systems can understand their own scaling behavior, and can contribute novel and practical knowledge back to the research community.

We study the prophet inequality, a fundamental problem in online decision-making and optimal stopping, in a practical setting where rewards are observed only through noisy realizations and reward distributions are unknown. At each stage, the decision-maker receives a noisy reward whose true value follows a linear model with an unknown latent parameter, and observes a feature vector drawn from a distribution. To address this challenge, we propose algorithms that integrate learning and decision-making via lower-confidence-bound (LCB) thresholding. In the i.i.d. setting, we establish that both an Explore-then-Decide strategy and an $\varepsilon$-Greedy variant achieve the sharp competitive ratio of $1 - 1/e$. For non-identical distributions, we show that a competitive ratio of $1/2$ can be guaranteed against a relaxed benchmark. Moreover, with window access to past rewards, the optimal ratio of $1/2$ against the optimal benchmark is achieved. Experiments on synthetic datasets confirm our theoretical results and demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms.

We introduce **LudoBench**, a multimodal reasoning benchmark that evaluates whether vision-enabled large language models (LMs) can acquire, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous game knowledge in mainstream analog tabletop games. Unlike prior works that emphasize deep strategic mastery, LudoBench targets an initial reasoning challenge uninitiated gamers face: *correctly comprehending a new tabletop strategy game for the first time*. We examine whether, given a visual depiction of a tabletop scene and a corresponding ruleset, a model can correctly answer grounded questions about the pictured scenario. Concretely, LudoBench tests three cumulative situated game-comprehension capabilities: (1) *Environment Perception*, (2) *Heterogeneous Rules Integration*, and (3) *Short-horizon Optimization*, to progressively stress-test the foundational reasoning required for real-world game comprehension. Evaluating frontier LMs on three diverse strategy games, we find that even the strongest models achieve only ~68% accuracy on simple environment perception tasks and fall below 10% on situated multi-step comprehension puzzles that hobbyist gamers can routinely solve. Our extensive failure analysis and knowledge-ablation experiments reveal that *models largely fail to comprehend rich cross-modal reference knowledge* and are subsequently unable to apply this knowledge to messy and unfamiliar situated environments. Our findings highlight the many steps remaining for current methods to succeed on complex multimodal reasoning in the real world.

We propose UnLoc, an efficient data-driven solution for sequential camera localization within floorplans. Floorplan data is readily available, long-term persistent, and robust to changes in visual appearance. We address key limitations of recent methods, such as the lack of uncertainty modeling in depth predictions and the necessity for custom depth networks trained for each environment. We introduce a novel probabilistic model that incorporates uncertainty estimation, modeling depth predictions as explicit probability distributions. By leveraging off-the-shelf pre-trained monocular depth models, we eliminate the need to rely on per-environment-trained depth networks, enhancing generalization to unseen spaces. We evaluate UnLoc on large-scale synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Notably, we achieve $2.7$ times higher localization recall on long sequences (100 frames) and $42.2$ times higher on short ones (15 frames) than the state of the art on the challenging LaMAR HGE dataset.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for reliable deployment of machine learning systems in vision, robotics, and reinforcement learning. We introduce Score–Curvature Out-of-distribution Proximity Evaluator for Diffusion (SCOPED), a fast and general-purpose OOD detection method for diffusion models that reduces the number of forward passes on the trained model by an order of magnitude compared to prior methods, outperforming most diffusion-based baselines and approaching the accuracy of the strongest ones. SCOPED is computed from a single diffusion model trained once on a diverse dataset and combines the Jacobian trace and squared norm of the model’s score function into a single test statistic. Rather than thresholding on a fixed value, we estimate the in-distribution density of SCOPED scores using kernel density estimation, enabling a flexible, unsupervised test that, in the simplest case, only requires a single forward pass and one Jacobian–vector product (JVP), made efficient by Hutchinson’s trace estimator. On four vision benchmarks, SCOPED achieves competitive or state-of-the-art precision-recall scores despite its low computational cost. The same method generalizes to robotic control tasks with shared state and action spaces, identifying distribution shifts across reward functions and training regimes. These results position SCOPED as a practical foundation for fast and reliable OOD detection in real-world domains, including perceptual artifacts in vision, outlier detection in autoregressive models, exploration in reinforcement learning, and dataset curation for unsupervised training.

Recent advances align diffusion models with human preferences to increase aesthetic appeal and mitigate artifacts and biases. Such methods aim to maximize a conditional output distribution aligned with higher rewards whilst not drifting far from a pretrained prior. This is commonly enforced by KL (Kullback–Leibler) regularization. As such, a central issue still remains: how does one choose the right regularization strength? Too high of a strength leads to limited alignment and too low of a strength leads to "reward hacking". This renders the task of choosing the correct regularization strength highly non-trivial. Existing approaches sweep over this hyperparameter by aligning a pretrained model at multiple regularization strengths and then choose the best strength. Unfortunately, this is prohibitively expensive. We introduce _DeRaDiff_, a _denoising-time realignment_ procedure that, after aligning a pretrained model once, modulates the regularization strength _during sampling_ to emulate models trained at other regularization strengths—_without any additional training or fine-tuning_. Extending decoding-time realignment from language to diffusion models, DeRaDiff operates over iterative predictions of continuous latents by replacing the reverse-step reference distribution by a geometric mixture of an aligned and reference posterior, thus giving rise to a closed-form update under common schedulers and a single tunable parameter, $\lambda$, for on-the-fly control. Our experiments show that across multiple text–image alignment and image-quality metrics, our method consistently provides a strong approximation for models aligned entirely from scratch at different regularization strengths. Thus, by enabling very precise inference-time control of the regularization strength, our method yields an efficient way to search for the optimal strength, eliminating the need for expensive alignment sweeps and thereby substantially reducing computational costs. The official implementation is available at https://github.com/itsShahain/DeRaDiff.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have become a popular medium for decoding visual information due to their cost-effectiveness and high temporal resolution. However, current approaches face significant challenges in bridging the modality gap between EEG and image data. These methods typically rely on complex adaptation processes involving multiple stages, making it hard to maintain consistency and manage compounding errors. Furthermore, the computational overhead imposed by large-scale diffusion models limit their practicality in real-world brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. In this work, we present AVDE, a lightweight and efficient framework for visual decoding from EEG signals. First, we leverage LaBraM, a pre-trained EEG model, and fine-tune it via contrastive learning to align EEG and image representations. Second, we adopt an autoregressive generative framework based on a "next-scale prediction" strategy: images are encoded into multi-scale token maps using a pre-trained VQ-VAE, and a transformer is trained to autoregressively predict finer-scale tokens starting from EEG embeddings as the coarsest representation. This design enables coherent generation while preserving a direct connection between the input EEG signals and the reconstructed images. Experiments on two datasets show that AVDE outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both image retrieval and reconstruction tasks, while using only 10% of the parameters. In addition, visualization of intermediate outputs shows that the generative process of AVDE reflects the hierarchical nature of human visual perception. These results highlight the potential of autoregressive models as efficient and interpretable tools for practical BCI applications.

``Read the room,'' or the ability to infer others' mental states from subtle social cues, is a hallmark of human social intelligence but remains a major challenge for current AI systems. Existing social reasoning datasets are limited in complexity, scale, and coverage of mental states, falling short of the rich causal dynamics found in real-life interactions. In this work, we introduce $R^3$-Bench-an evaluation benchmark with fine-grained annotations of belief, intent, desire, emotion, and their causal chains in complex scenarios; and $R^3$-FDT, a large-scale training set generated through a novel automated pipeline with the same structure. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) large vision-language models (LVLMs) on $R^3$-Bench, revealing substantial gaps in consistent multi-step social reasoning. We also fine-tune a 7B model using group relative policy optimization (GRPO) on $R^3$-FDT, achieving notable improvements across multiple social reasoning benchmarks. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) a novel benchmark with richly annotated, multi-step causal reasoning data; (ii) systematic evidence that SOTA LVLMs fall far short of human-level reasoning; (iii) a scalable training dataset that significantly enhances social reasoning performance. We will release our dataset, code and models upon acceptance.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge. However, conflicts between parametric knowledge and retrieved context pose challenges, particularly when retrieved information is unreliable or the model's internal knowledge is outdated. In such cases, LLMs struggle to determine whether to rely more on their own parameters or the conflicted context. To address this, we propose CK-PLUG, a plug-and-play method for controlling LLMs' reliance on parametric and contextual knowledge. We introduce a novel knowledge consistency metric, Confidence Gain, which detects knowledge conflicts by measuring entropy shifts in token probability distributions after context insertion. CK-PLUG then enables fine-grained control over knowledge preference by adjusting the probability distribution of tokens with negative confidence gain through a single tuning parameter. Experiments demonstrate CK-PLUG's ability to significantly regulate knowledge reliance in counterfactual RAG scenarios while maintaining generation fluency and knowledge accuracy. For instance, on LLaMA3-8B, memory recall (MR) of RAG response can be adjusted within a broad range (9.9%-71.9%), compared to the baseline of 42.1%. Moreover, CK-PLUG supports adaptive control based on the model's confidence in both internal and external knowledge, achieving consistent performance improvements across various general RAG tasks. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CK-PLUG-Ano-8E62

Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress, but they still struggle with complex reasoning tasks such as logical deduction and planning. This is partly because they rely primarily on token-level probability relationships, which limits their ability to reason effectively. In this paper, inspired by cognitive science and neurosymbolic AI, we introduce Structured Reasoning, which aimes at enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs from the step level. To this end, we first collect high‑frequency, domain‑agnostic reasoning step tags and construct a structured reasoning dataset with those tags. Then, we treat a reasoning process as a directed acyclic graph, where the vertices represent steps and the edges indicate the direction of reasoning. In this context, an efficient reasoning process corresponds to, or can be characterized by, a sparse reasoning graph. To construct reasoning graphs, we introduce structured tags for reliable step extraction from LLM outputs. For single-graph optimization, we propose the MaxFlow reward, which rewards graphs with balanced node contributions and fewer redundant steps. The quality of a sparse reasoning graph can be reflected by the total flow from all steps to the final answer. For multi-graph comparison, we propose the LCS reward, which selects reliable reasoning paths by identifying optimal common subsequences (consecutive steps) shared across multiple generated responses (sequences). Experiments with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B and 7B models show that our method consistently outperforms GRPO and other carefully tuned baselines across various context lengths (0.5k–8k). Structured Reasoning shows particular strength in efficiency (better performance with fewer steps) and stability (consistently generating high-quality outputs across a temperature range of 0.1 to 1.0).

Materials discovery requires navigating vast chemical and structural spaces while satisfying multiple, often conflicting, objectives. We present LLM-guided Evolution for Materials design (**LLEMA**), a unified framework that couples the scientific knowledge embedded in large language models with chemistry-informed evolutionary rules and memory-based refinement. At each iteration, an LLM proposes crystallographically specified candidates under explicit property constraints; a surrogate-augmented oracle estimates physicochemical properties; and a multi-objective scorer updates success and failure memories to guide subsequent generations. Evaluated on **14 realistic tasks** spanning electronics, energy, coatings, optics, and aerospace, AlgName discovers candidates that are chemically plausible, thermodynamically stable, and property-aligned, achieving higher hit rates and stronger Pareto fronts than generative and LLM-only baselines. Ablation studies confirm the importance of rule-guided generation, memory-based refinement, and surrogate prediction. By enforcing synthesizability and multi-objective trade-offs, AlgName provides a principled approach to accelerating practical materials discovery. Project website: https://scientific-discovery.github.io/llema-project/

Most existing offline RL methods presume the availability of action labels within the dataset, but in many practical scenarios, actions may be missing due to privacy, storage, or sensor limitations. We formalise the setting of action-free offline-to-online RL, where agents must learn from datasets consisting solely of $(s,r,s')$ tuples and later leverage this knowledge during online interaction. To address this challenge, we propose learning state policies that recommend desirable next-state transitions rather than actions. Our contributions are twofold. First, we introduce a simple yet novel state discretisation transformation and propose Offline State-Only DecQN (OSO-DecQN), a value-based algorithm designed to pre-train state policies from action-free data. OSO-DecQN integrates the transformation to scale efficiently to high-dimensional problems while avoiding instability and overfitting associated with continuous state prediction. Second, we propose a novel mechanism for guided online learning that leverages these pre-trained state policies to accelerate the learning of online agents. Together, these components establish a scalable and practical framework for leveraging action-free datasets to accelerate online RL. Empirical results across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach improves convergence speed and asymptotic performance, while analyses reveal that discretisation and regularisation are critical to its effectiveness.

Large language models demonstrate the intriguing ability to perform unseen tasks via in-context learning. However, it remains unclear what mechanisms inside the model drive such task-level generalization. In this work, we approach this question through the lens of off-by-one addition (i.e., 1+1=3, 2+2=5, 3+3=?), a two-step, counterfactual task with an unexpected +1 function as a second step. Leveraging circuit-style interpretability techniques such as path patching, we analyze the models' internal computations behind their performance and present three key findings. First, we uncover a function induction mechanism that explains the model's generalization from standard addition to off-by-one addition. This mechanism resembles the structure of the induction head mechanism found in prior work and elevates it to a higher level of abstraction. Second, we show that the induction of the +1 function is governed by multiple attention heads in parallel, each of which emits a distinct piece of the +1 function. Finally, we find that this function induction mechanism is reused in a broader range of tasks, including synthetic tasks such as shifted multiple-choice QA and algorithmic tasks such as base-8 addition. Overall, our findings offer deeper insights into how reusable and composable structures within language models enable task-level generalization.

The automation of analog integrated circuit (IC) design remains a longstanding challenge, primarily due to the intricate interdependencies among physical layout, parasitic effects, and circuit-level performance. These interactions impose complex constraints that are difficult to accurately capture and optimize using conventional design methodologies. Although recent advances in machine learning (ML) have shown promise in automating specific stages of the analog design flow, the development of holistic, end-to-end frameworks that integrate these stages and iteratively refine layouts using post-layout, parasitic-aware performance feedback is still in its early stages. Furthermore, progress in this direction is hindered by the limited availability of open, high-quality datasets tailored to the analog domain, restricting both the benchmarking and the generalizability of ML-based techniques. To address these limitations, we present OSIRIS, a scalable dataset generation pipeline for analog IC design. OSIRIS systematically explores the design space of analog circuits while producing comprehensive performance metrics and metadata, thereby enabling ML-driven research in electronic design automation (EDA). In addition, we release a dataset consisting of 87,100 circuit variations generated with OSIRIS, accompanied by a reinforcement learning (RL)–based baseline method that exploits OSIRIS for analog design optimization.

Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires models to answer questions about an image by integrating external knowledge, posing significant challenges due to noisy retrieval and the structured, encyclopedic nature of the knowledge base. These characteristics create a distributional gap from pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs), making effective reasoning and domain adaptation difficult in the post-training stage. In this work, we propose \textit{Wiki-R1}, a data-generation-based curriculum reinforcement learning framework that systematically incentivizes reasoning in MLLMs for KB-VQA. Wiki-R1 constructs a sequence of training distributions aligned with the model’s evolving capability, bridging the gap from pretraining to the KB-VQA target distribution. We introduce \textit{controllable curriculum data generation}, which manipulates the retriever to produce samples at desired difficulty levels, and a \textit{curriculum sampling strategy} that selects informative samples likely to yield non-zero advantages during RL updates. Sample difficulty is estimated using observed rewards and propagated to unobserved samples to guide learning. Experiments on two KB-VQA benchmarks, Encyclopedic VQA and InfoSeek, demonstrate that Wiki-R1 achieves new state-of-the-art results, improving accuracy from 35.5\% to 37.1\% on Encyclopedic VQA and from 40.1\% to 44.1\% on InfoSeek.