ICLR 2026 论文列表

We study the neural program synthesis of $\textit{parameterized}$ function families through the lens of meta-learning with hypernetworks. Given a user intent $U$, a meta-learner $M_{\phi}$ produces a full weight set $\hat{\theta}=M_{\phi}(U)$ for a target neural network with fixed architecture $S$, and the instantiated network $m_{S,\hat{\theta}}(X)\to Y$ realizes the behavior intended for $U$. Classical hypernetworks typically $\textit{ignore the target network’s structure}$ and emit a flat list of weights; as a consequence, they fail to account for $\textit{neuron-permutation symmetry}$—many distinct parameterizations of $S$ implement the same function—so equivalent solutions are treated as different targets, fragmenting supervision and hurting out-of-distribution generalization. To address this, we propose $\textit{Meta-GNN}$, a hypernetwork that constructs a $\textit{neural graph}$ from the target architecture $S$ and applies $\textbf{structure-aware}$ message passing with parameter-tied encoders and decoders. This design reduces the search space during learning by collapsing equivalent classes of target networks, without loss of expressivity. Empirically, across modular arithmetic ($\textit{AddMod}$-$p$), array operations ($\textit{SumFirst}$-$n$), and inverse-rule tasks from 1D-ARC, $\textit{Meta-GNN}$ substantially improves learning and $\textbf{out-of-distribution generalization}$ compared to classic hypernetworks and direct $(U,X)\to Y$ baselines. Mechanistic analyses reveal $\textit{what is learned}$: on $\textit{AddMod}$-$p$ the synthesized Transformers recover the canonical clock representation and admit a compact closed-form map $U\mapsto\theta$. These results demonstrate that structure-aware Meta-GNNs enable reliable generalization to $\textit{unseen program parameterizations}$, providing a critical advance for the nascent field of neural program synthesis.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the standard paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, reward-based methods built on the Bradley–Terry assumption struggle to capture the non-transitive and heterogeneous nature of real-world preferences. To address this, recent studies have reframed alignment as a two-player Nash game, giving rise to Nash learning from human feedback (NLHF). While this perspective has inspired algorithms such as INPO, ONPO, and EGPO with strong theoretical and empirical guarantees, they remain fundamentally restricted to two-player interactions, creating a single-opponent bias that fails to capture the full complexity of realistic preference structures. In this work, we introduce Multiplayer Nash Preference Optimization (MNPO), a novel framework that generalizes NLHF to the multiplayer regime. It formulates alignment as an $n$-player game, where each policy competes against a population of opponents while being regularized toward a reference model. Our framework establishes well-defined Nash equilibria in multiplayer settings and extends the concept of duality gap to quantify approximation quality. We demonstrate that MNPO inherits the equilibrium guarantees of two-player methods while enabling richer competitive dynamics and improved coverage of diverse preference structures. Through comprehensive empirical evaluation, we show that MNPO consistently outperforms existing NLHF baselines on instruction-following benchmarks, achieving superior alignment quality under heterogeneous annotator conditions and mixed-policy evaluation scenarios. Together, these results establish MNPO as a principled and scalable framework for aligning LLMs with complex, non-transitive human preferences.

The exponential growth of video content highlights the importance of video summarization, a task that efficiently extracts key information from long videos. However, existing video summarization studies face inherent limitations in understanding complex, multimodal videos. This limitation stems from the fact that most existing architectures employ static or modality-agnostic fusion, which fails to account for the dynamic and frame-dependent variation in modality saliency that naturally occurs within a video. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel architecture, TripleSumm, which adaptively weights and fuses the contributions of the three modalities at the frame level. Furthermore, a significant bottleneck for research into multimodal video summarization has been the lack of comprehensive benchmarks. Addressing this bottleneck, we introduce MoSu (Most Replayed Multimodal Video Summarization), the first large-scale benchmark that provides all three modalities. Our proposed TripleSumm demonstrates its superiority by achieving state-of-the-art performance by a large margin on four video summarization benchmarks, including MoSu.

Test-time entropy minimization helps adapt a model to novel environments and incentivize its reasoning capability, unleashing the model's potential during inference by allowing it to evolve and improve in real-time using its own predictions. However, pure test-time entropy minimization can favor non-generalizable shortcuts, such as inflating the logit norm and driving all predictions to a dominant class to reduce entropy, risking collapsed solutions (e.g., constant one-hot outputs) that trivially minimize the objective without meaningful learning. In this paper, we introduce ZeroSiam, an efficient asymmetric Siamese architecture tailored for test-time entropy minimization. ZeroSiam prevents collapse through asymmetry learning, which is efficiently achieved by a learnable predictor and a stop-gradient operator before the classifier. Beyond the collapse prevention effect, we provide empirical and theoretical evidence that ZeroSiam also absorbs and regularizes biases at testing, enhancing TTA effectiveness even when no collapse occurs. Despite its simplicity, extensive results show that ZeroSiam can avoid collapse and perform more stably over prior methods using negligible overhead, demonstrating efficacy on both vision and language tasks across challenging test scenarios and diverse models, e.g., tiny based models that are particularly collapse-prone.

The Homotopy paradigm, a general principle for solving challenging problems, appears across diverse domains such as robust optimization, global optimization, polynomial root-finding, and sampling. Practical solvers for these problems typically follow a predictor-corrector (PC) structure, but rely on hand-crafted heuristics for step sizes and iteration termination, which are often suboptimal and task-specific. To address this, we unify these problems under a single framework, which enables the design of a general neural solver. Building on this unified view, we propose Neural Predictor-Corrector (NPC), which replaces hand-crafted heuristics with automatically learned policies. NPC formulates policy selection as a sequential decision-making problem and leverages reinforcement learning to automatically discover efficient strategies. To further enhance generalization, we introduce an amortized training mechanism, enabling one-time offline training for a class of problems and efficient online inference on new instances. Experiments on four representative homotopy problems demonstrate that our method generalizes effectively to unseen instances. It consistently outperforms classical and specialized baselines in efficiency while demonstrating superior stability across tasks, highlighting the value of unifying homotopy methods into a single neural framework.

Tackling complex optimization problems often relies on expert-designed heuristics, typically crafted through extensive trial and error. Recent advances demonstrate that large language models (LLMs), when integrated into well-designed evolutionary search frameworks, can autonomously discover high-performing heuristics at a fraction of the traditional cost. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on verbal guidance, i.e., manipulating the prompt generation process, to steer the evolution of heuristics, without adapting the underlying LLM. We propose a hybrid framework that combines verbal and numerical guidance, the latter achieved by fine-tuning the LLM via reinforcement learning (RL) based on the quality of generated heuristics. This joint optimization allows the LLM to co-evolve with the search process. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines across various optimization tasks, running locally on a single 24GB GPU using a 7B model with INT4 quantization. It surpasses methods that rely solely on verbal guidance, even when those use significantly more powerful API-based models.

Learning to simulate complex physical systems from data has emerged as a promising way to overcome the limitations of traditional numerical solvers, which often require prohibitive computational costs for high-fidelity solutions. Recent Graph Neural Simulators (GNSs) accelerate simulations by learning dynamics on graph-structured data, yet often struggle to capture long-range interactions and suffer from error accumulation under autoregressive rollouts. To address these challenges, we propose Information-preserving Graph Neural Simulators (IGNS), a graph-based neural simulator built on the principles of Hamiltonian dynamics. This structure guarantees preservation of information across the graph, while extending to port-Hamiltonian systems allows the model to capture a broader class of dynamics, including non-conservative effects. IGNS further incorporates a warmup phase to initialize global context, geometric encoding to handle irregular meshes, and a multi-step training objective that facilitates PDE matching, where the trajectory produced by integrating the port-Hamiltonian core aligns with the ground-truth trajectory, thereby reducing rollout error. To evaluate these properties systematically, we introduce new benchmarks that target long-range dependencies and challenging external forcing scenarios. Across all tasks, IGNS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GNSs, achieving higher accuracy and stability under challenging and complex dynamical systems. Our project page: https://thobotics.github.io/neural_pde_matching.

While preference optimization is crucial for improving visual generative models, how to effectively scale this paradigm for visual generation remains largely unexplored. Current open-source preference datasets typically contain substantial conflicting preference patterns, where winners excel in some dimensions but underperform in others. Naively optimizing on such noisy datasets fails to learn meaningful preferences, fundamentally hindering effective scaling. To enhance the robustness of preference algorithms against noise, we propose Poly-DPO, which extends the DPO objective with an additional polynomial term that dynamically adjusts model confidence during training based on dataset characteristics, enabling effective learning across diverse data distributions from noisy to trivially simple patterns. Beyond biased patterns, existing datasets suffer from low resolution, limited prompt diversity, and imbalanced distributions. To facilitate large-scale visual preference optimization by tackling key data bottlenecks, we construct ViPO, a massive-scale preference dataset with 1M image pairs (1024px) across five categories and 300K video pairs (720p+) across three categories. Leveraging state-of-the-art generative models and diverse prompts ensures consistent, reliable preference signals with balanced distributions. Remarkably, when applying Poly-DPO to our high-quality dataset, the optimal configuration converges to standard DPO. This convergence validates both our dataset quality and Poly-DPO's adaptive nature: sophisticated optimization becomes unnecessary with sufficient data quality, yet remains valuable for imperfect datasets. We comprehensively validate our approach across various visual generation models. On noisy datasets like Pick-a-Pic V2, Poly-DPO achieves 6.87\% and 2.32\% gains over Diffusion-DPO on GenEval for SD1.5 and SDXL, respectively. For our high-quality VIPO dataset, models achieve performance far exceeding those trained on existing open-source preference datasets. These results confirm that addressing both algorithmic adaptability and data quality is essential for scaling visual preference optimization. All models and datasets will be released.

While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance in multimodal tasks, hallucinations continue to affect their reliability. Among the three categories of hallucinations, which include object, attribute, and relation, relation hallucinations account for the largest proportion but have received the least attention. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{ChainMPQ} (\textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{P}erspective \textbf{Q}uestions guided Interleaved Text-image Reasoning \textbf{Chain}), a training-free method that improves relational inference in LVLMs by utilizing accumulated textual and visual memories. ChainMPQ first extracts subject and object keywords from the question to enhance the corresponding image regions. It then constructs multi-perspective questions that focus on the three core components of a relationship: the subject, the object, and the relation that links them. These questions are sequentially input to the model, with textual and visual memories from earlier steps providing supporting context for subsequent ones, thereby forming an interleaved chain of image and text that guides progressive relational reasoning. Experiments on multiple LVLMs and benchmarks show that ChainMPQ substantially reduces relation hallucinations, while ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of its three core modules.

Scaling laws for language model training traditionally characterize how performance scales with model size and dataset volume. Prior work has explored architecture variants and data treatments such as dataset filtering and noise injection in language model pretraining; however, these studies have not formalized data quality within a principled scaling law. We introduce a dimensionless data-quality parameter Q, and propose a quality-aware scaling law extending the Chinchilla framework to predict loss as a joint function of model size, data volume, and data quality. The law is motivated by an effective-sample-size and information-theoretic view of noisy or redundant corpora, and it admits two practical estimators for Q: (i) a corruption rate proxy and (ii) a deficiency measure. Through synthetic experiments in neural machine translation and autoregressive modeling--where we systematically control data quality via multiple levels of noise injection--we show that loss scales predictably with data quality and that higher-quality data can substantially reduce model size and hence compute requirements. Our results demonstrate a sublinear decay of effective data with quality and robustness to moderate data corruption; out-of-sample evaluations further validate the predictive form of the law. Unlike prior empirical analyses, our work establishes an explicit, generalizable law for data quality, offering concrete guidance for balancing data curation effort and model scale in large-scale pretraining.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and web agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-hop deep search tasks, yet current practice suffers from two major limitations. First, most benchmarks leak the reasoning path in the question text, allowing models to follow surface cues rather than discover reasoning chains autonomously. Second, evaluation is typically reduced to a single pass rate, which collapses diverse behaviors into one score and obscures whether failures stem from inadequate search, poor knowledge use, or inappropriate refusal. To address these issues, we present WebDetective, a benchmark of hint-free multi-hop questions paired with a controlled Wikipedia sandbox that ensures full traceability of model actions, and a holistic evaluation framework that separates search sufficiency, knowledge utilization, and refusal behavior. Our evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art models reveals systematic weaknesses across all architectures: models struggle with knowledge utilization despite having sufficient evidence and demonstrate near-absent appropriate refusal when evidence is lacking. These patterns expose a fundamental gap—today's systems excel at executing given reasoning paths but fail when required to discover them. We develop an agentic workflow EvidenceLoop that explicitly targets the challenges our benchmark identifies, incorporating verification loops and systematic evidence tracking that improve both search and synthesis capabilities. This baseline demonstrates that WebDetective's diagnostic framework can guide concrete architectural improvements, establishing our benchmark as a critical tool for developing genuinely autonomous reasoning systems rather than pattern-following agents.

Understanding human behavior traits is central to applications in human-computer interaction, computational social science, and personalized AI systems. Such understanding often requires integrating multiple modalities to capture nuanced patterns and relationships. However, existing resources rarely provide datasets that combine behavioral descriptors with complementary modalities such as facial attributes and biographical information. To address this gap, we present PersonaX, a curated collection of multimodal datasets designed to enable comprehensive analysis of public traits across modalities. PersonaX consists of (1) CelebPersona, featuring 9444 public figures from diverse occupations, and (2) AthlePersona, covering 4181 professional athletes across 7 major sports leagues. Each dataset includes behavioral trait assessments inferred by three high-performing large language models, alongside facial imagery and structured biographical features. We analyze PersonaX at two complementary levels. First, we abstract high-level trait scores from text descriptions and apply five statistical independence tests to examine their relationships with other modalities. Second, we introduce a novel causal representation learning (CRL) framework tailored to multimodal and multi-measurement data, providing theoretical identifiability guarantees. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. By unifying structured and unstructured analysis, PersonaX establishes a foundation for studying LLM-inferred behavioral traits in conjunction with visual and biographical attributes, advancing multimodal trait analysis and causal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/lokali/PersonaX.

We present SIGMA-GEN, a unified framework for multi-identity preserving image generation. Unlike prior approaches, SIGMA-GEN is the first to enable single-pass multi-subject identity-preserved generation guided by both structural and spatial constraints. A key strength of our method is its ability to support user guidance at various levels of precision — from coarse 2D or 3D boxes to pixel-level segmentations and depth — with a single model. To enable this, we introduce SIGMA-SET27K, a novel synthetic dataset that provides identity, structure, and spatial information for over 100k unique subjects across 27k images. Through extensive evaluation we demonstrate that SIGMA-GEN achieves state-of-the-art performance in identity preservation, image generation quality, and speed.

Recent advances in diffusion-based video restoration (VR) demonstrate significant improvement in visual quality, yet yield a prohibitive computational cost during inference. While several distillation-based approaches have exhibited the potential of one-step image restoration, extending existing approaches to VR remains challenging and underexplored, particularly when dealing with high-resolution video in real-world settings. In this work, we propose a one-step diffusion-based VR model, termed as SeedVR2, which performs adversarial VR training against real data. To handle the challenging high-resolution VR within a single step, we introduce several enhancements to both model architecture and training procedures. Specifically, an adaptive window attention mechanism is proposed, where the window size is dynamically adjusted to fit the output resolutions, avoiding window inconsistency observed under high-resolution VR using window attention with a predefined window size. To stabilize and improve the adversarial post-training towards VR, we further verify the effectiveness of a series of losses, including a proposed feature matching loss without significantly sacrificing training efficiency. Extensive experiments show that SeedVR2 can achieve comparable or even better performance compared with existing VR approaches in a single step.

Motivated by the prevalence and success of machine learning, a line of recent work has studied learning-augmented algorithms in the streaming model. These results have shown that for natural and practical oracles implemented with machine learning models, we can obtain streaming algorithms with improved space efficiency that are otherwise provably impossible. On the other hand, our understanding is much more limited for the sliding window model, which captures applications where either recent data leads to better or older data must be expunged from the dataset, e.g., by privacy regulation laws. In this paper, we utilize an oracle for the heavy-hitters of datasets to give learning-augmented algorithms for a number of fundamental problems in the sliding window model, such as norm/moment estimation, frequency estimation, cascaded norms, and rectangular moment estimation. We complement our theoretical results with a number of empirical evaluations that demonstrate the practical efficiency of our algorithms on real and synthetic datasets.

When there exists an unlearnable source of randomness (noisy-TV) in the environment, a naively intrinsic reward driven exploring agent gets stuck at that source of randomness and fails at exploration. Intrinsic reward based on uncertainty estimation or distribution similarity, while eventually escapes noisy-TVs as time unfolds, suffers from poor sample efficiency and high computational cost. Inspired by recent findings from neuroscience that humans monitor their improvements during exploration, we propose a novel method for intrinsically-motivated exploration, named Learning Progress Monitoring (LPM). During exploration, LPM rewards model improvements instead of prediction error or novelty, effectively rewards the agent for observing learnable transitions rather than the unlearnable transitions. We introduce a dual-network design that uses an error model to predict the expected prediction error of the dynamics model in its previous iteration, and use the difference between the model errors of the current iteration and previous iteration to guide exploration. We theoretically show that the intrinsic reward of LPM is zero-equivariant and a monotone indicator of Information Gain (IG), and that the error model is necessary to achieve monotonicity correspondence with IG. We empirically compared LPM against state-of-the-art baselines in noisy environments based on MNIST, 3D maze with 160x120 RGB inputs, and Atari. Results show that LPM's intrinsic reward converges faster, explores more states in the maze experiment, and achieves higher extrinsic reward in Atari. This conceptually simple approach marks a shift-of-paradigm of noise-robust exploration.

Protecting the copyright of user-generated AI images is an emerging challenge as AIGC becomes pervasive in creative workflows. Existing watermarking methods (1) remain vulnerable to real-world adversarial threats, often forced to trade off between defenses against spoofing and removal attacks; and (2) cannot support semantic-level tamper localization. We introduce PAI, a training-free inherent watermarking framework for AIGC copyright protection, plug-and-play with diffusion-based AIGC services. PAI simultaneously provides three key functionalities: robust ownership verification, attack detection, and semantic-level tampering localization. Unlike existing inherent watermark methods that only embed watermarks at noise initialization of diffusion models, we design a novel key-conditioned deflection mechanism that subtly steers the denoising trajectory according to the user key. Such trajectory-level coupling further strengthens the semantic entanglement of identity and content, thereby further enhancing robustness against real-world threats. Moreover, we also provide a theoretical analysis proving that only the valid key can pass verification. Experiments across 12 attack methods show that PAI achieves 98.43\% verification accuracy, improving over SOTA methods by 37.25\% on average, and retains strong tampering localization performance even against advanced AIGC edits. Our code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PAI-423D}.

Humans invent new words when there is a rising demand for a new useful concept (e.g., doomscrolling). We explore and validate a similar idea in our communication with LLMs: introducing new words to better understand and control the models, expanding on the recently introduced neologism learning. This method introduces a new word by adding a new word embedding and training with examples that exhibit the concept with no other changes in model parameters. We show that adding a new word allows for control of concepts such as flattery, incorrect answers, text length, as well as more complex concepts in AxBench. We discover that neologisms can also further our understanding of the model via self-verbalization: models can describe what each new word means to them in natural language, like explaining that a word that represents a concept of incorrect answers means “a lack of complete, coherent, or meaningful answers. . . ” To validate self-verbalizations, we introduce plug-in evaluation: we insert the verbalization into the context of a model and measure whether it controls the target concept. In some self-verbalizations, we find machine-only synonyms: words that seem unrelated to humans but cause similar behavior in machines. Finally, we show how neologism learning can jointly learn multiple concepts in multiple words.

Multi-modal distribution in robotic manipulation action sequences poses critical challenges for imitation learning. To this end, existing approaches often model the action space as either a discrete set of tokens or a continuous, latent-variable distribution. However, both approaches present trade-offs: some methods discretize actions into tokens and therefore lose fine-grained action variations, while others generate continuous actions in a single stage tend to produce unstable mode transitions. To address these limitations, we propose Primary-Fine Decoupling for Action Generation (PF-DAG), a two-stage framework that decouples coarse action consistency from fine-grained variations. First, we compress action chunks into a small set of discrete modes, enabling a lightweight policy to select consistent coarse modes and avoid mode bouncing. Second, a mode conditioned MeanFlow policy is learned to generate high-fidelity continuous actions. Theoretically, we prove PF-DAG’s two-stage design achieves a strictly lower MSE bound than single-stage generative policies. Empirically, PF-DAG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across 56 tasks from Adroit, DexArt, and MetaWorld benchmarks. It further generalizes to real-world tactile dexterous manipulation tasks. Our work demonstrates that explicit mode-level decoupling enables both robust multi-modal modeling and reactive closed-loop control for robotic manipulation.