ICLR 2026 论文列表

Real-world Table–Text question answering (QA) tasks require models that can reason across long text and source tables, traversing multiple hops and executing complex operations such as aggregation. Yet existing benchmarks are small, manually curated—and therefore error-prone—and contain shallow questions that seldom demand more than two hops or invoke aggregations, grouping, or other advanced analytical operations expressible in natural-language queries. We present SPARTA, an end-to-end construction framework that automatically generates large-scale Table–Text QA benchmarks with lightweight human validation, requiring only one quarter of the annotation time of HybridQA. The framework first constructs a reference fact database by enriching each source table with grounding tables whose tuples are atomic facts automatically extracted from the accompanying unstructured passages, then synthesizes nested queries whose number of nested predicates matches the desired hop count. To ensure that every SQL statement is executable and that its verbalization yields a fluent, human-sounding question, we propose two novel techniques: provenance-based refinement, which rewrites any syntactically valid query that returns a non-empty result, and realistic-structure enforcement, which confines generation to post-order traversals of the query graph. The resulting pipeline produces thousands of high-fidelity question–answer pairs covering aggregations, grouping, and deep multi-hop reasoning across text and tables. On SPARTA, state-of-the-art models that reach over 70 F1 on HybridQA or over 50 F1 on OTT-QA drop by more than 30 F1 points, exposing fundamental weaknesses in current cross-modal reasoning. We will release the benchmark, construction code, and baseline results to spur progress toward robust, realistic Table–Text QA models.

Text-to-image diffusion models achieve impressive performance, but reconciling multiple spatial conditions usually requires costly retraining or labor intensive weight tuning. We introduce Cross-ControlNet, a training-free framework for text-to-image generation with multiple conditions. It exploits two observations: intermediate features from different ControlNet branches are spatially aligned, and their condition strength can be measured by spatial and channel level variance. Cross-ControlNet contains three modules: PixFusion, which fuses features pixelwise under the guidance of standard deviation maps smoothed by a Gaussian to suppress early-stage noise; ChannelFusion, which applies per channel hybrid fusion via a consistency ratio gate, reducing threshold degradation in high dimensions; and KV-Injection, which injects foreground- and background-specific key/value pairs under text-derived attention masks to disentangle conflicting cues and enforce each condition faithfully. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cross-ControlNet consistently improves controllable generation under both conflicting and complementary conditions, and further generalizes to the DiT-based FLUX model without additional training.

One-step generators distilled from Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) compress multiple sampling steps into a single forward pass, enabling efficient text and image synthesis. However, they suffer two key limitations: they inherit modeling bias from the teacher, and their discrete token outputs block gradient flow, preventing post-distillation refinements such as adversarial training, reward-based fine-tuning, and Test-Time Embedding Optimization (TTEO). In this work, we introduce soft embeddings, a simple relaxation that replaces discrete tokens with the expected embeddings under the generator's output distribution. Soft embeddings preserve representation fidelity for one-step discrete generator while providing a fully differentiable continuous surrogate that is compatible with teacher backbones and tokenizer decoders while cause minimum bias. Integrating soft embeddings into the Di[M]O \citep{zhu2025di} distillation framework (denoted Soft-Di[M]O) makes one-step generators end-to-end trainable and enables straightforward application of GAN-based refinement, differentiable reward fine-tuning, and TTEO. Empirically, across multiple MDM teachers (e.g., MaskBit \citep{weber2024maskbit}, MaskGen \citep{kim2025democratizing}), Soft-Di[M]O achieves state-of-the-art one-step results: improved class-to-image performance, a one-step FID of 1.56 on ImageNet-256 with GAN-based refinement, along with higher than teacher GenEval \citep{ghosh2023geneval} and HPS \citep{wu2023human} scores on text-to-image with reward fine-tuning, and further gains from TTEO.

Unified Multimodal Large Language Models (U-MLLMs) have garnered considerable interest for their ability to seamlessly integrate generation and comprehension tasks. However, existing research lacks a unified evaluation standard, often relying on isolated benchmarks to assess these capabilities. Moreover, current work highlights the potential of ``mixed-modality generation capabilities'' through case studies—such as generating auxiliary lines in images to solve geometric problems, or reasoning through a problem before generating a corresponding image. Despite this, there is no standardized benchmark to assess models on such unified tasks. To address this gap, we introduce MME-Unify, also termed as MME-U, the first open and reproducible benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal comprehension, generation, and mixed-modality generation capabilities. For comprehension and generation tasks, we curate a diverse set of tasks from 12 datasets, aligning their formats and metrics to develop a standardized evaluation framework. For unified tasks, we design five subtasks to rigorously assess how models’ understanding and generation capabilities can mutually enhance each other. Evaluation of 12 U-MLLMs, including Janus-Pro, EMU3, and Gemini2-Flash, reveals significant room for improvement, particularly in areas such as instruction following and image generation quality.

Adapting large-scale flow and diffusion models to downstream tasks through reward optimization is essential for their adoption in real-world applications, including scientific discovery and image generation. While recent fine-tuning methods based on reinforcement learning and stochastic optimal control achieve compelling performance, they face severe scalability challenges due to high memory demands that scale with model complexity. In contrast, methods that disentangle reward adaptation from base model complexity, such as Classifier Guidance (CG), offer flexible control over computational resource requirements. However, CG suffers from limited reward expressivity and a train-test distribution mismatch due to its offline nature. To overcome the limitations of fine-tuning methods and CG, we propose Value Matching (VM), an online algorithm for learning the value function within an optimal control setting. VM provides tunable memory and compute demands through flexible value network complexity, supports optimization of non-differentiable rewards, and operates on-policy, which enables going beyond the data distribution to discover high-reward regions. Experimentally, we evaluate VM across image generation and molecular design tasks. We demonstrate improved stability and sample efficiency over CG and achieve comparable performance to fine-tuning approaches while requiring less than 5% of their memory usage.

Controllable video generation (CVG) has advanced rapidly, yet current systems falter when more than one actor must move, interact, and exchange positions under noisy control signals. We address this gap with DanceTogether, the first end-to-end diffusion framework that turns a single reference image plus independent pose-mask streams into long, photorealistic videos while strictly preserving every identity. A novel MaskPoseAdapter binds “who” and “how” at every denoising step by fusing robust tracking masks with semantically rich but noisy pose heat maps, eliminating the identity drift and appearance bleeding that plague frame-wise pipelines. To train and evaluate at scale, we introduce (i) PairFS-4K, 26 h of dual-skater footage with more than 7 000 distinct IDs, (ii) HumanRob-300, a one-hour humanoid-robot interaction set for rapid cross-domain transfer, and (iii) TogetherVideoBench, a three-track benchmark centred on the DanceTogEval-100 test suite covering dance, boxing, wrestling, yoga, and figure skating. On TogetherVideoBench, DanceTogether outperforms the prior arts by a significant margin. Moreover, we show that a one-hour fine-tune yields convincing human-robot videos, underscoring broad generalisation to embodied-AI and HRI tasks. Extensive ablations confirm that persistent identity-action binding is critical to these gains. Together, our model, datasets, and benchmark lift CVG from single-subject choreography to compositionally controllable, multi-actor interaction, opening new avenues for digital production, simulation, and embodied intelligence.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance across diverse domains. Many practical applications of LLMs, such as code completion and structured data extraction, require adherence to syntactic constraints specified by a formal language. Yet, due to their probabilistic nature, LLM output is not guaranteed to adhere to such formal languages. To address this, prior work has proposed constrained decoding to restrict LLM generation to particular formal languages. However, existing works are not applicable to the emerging paradigm of diffusion LLMs, as this requires supporting token generation in arbitrary order instead of the traditional left-to-right order. In this paper, we address this challenge and present the first constrained decoding method for diffusion models, one that can handle formal languages captured by context-free grammars. We begin by reducing constrained decoding to the more general additive infilling problem, which asks whether a partial output with holes can be completed to a valid word in the target language. This problem also naturally subsumes the previously unaddressed multi-region infilling constrained decoding. We then reduce this problem to the task of deciding whether the intersection of the target language and a regular language is empty and present an efficient algorithm to solve this task for context-free languages. Empirical results on various applications, such as C++ code infilling and structured data extraction in JSON, demonstrate that our method achieves near-perfect syntactic correctness while consistently preserving or improving functional correctness. Importantly, our efficiency optimizations ensure that the computational overhead remains practical.

In the visual generative area, discrete diffusion models are gaining traction for their efficiency and compatibility. However, pioneered attempts still fall behind their continuous counterparts, which we attribute to noise (absorbing state) design and sampling heuristics. In this study, we propose a rehashing noise approach for discrete diffusion transformer (termed **ReDDiT**), with the aim to extend absorbing states and improve expressive capacity of discrete diffusion models. ReDDiT enriches the potential paths that latent variables traverse during training with randomized multi-index corruption. The derived rehash sampler, which reverses the randomized absorbing paths, guarantees high diversity and low discrepancy of the generation process. These reformulations lead to more consistent and competitive generation quality, mitigating the need for heavily tuned randomness. Experiments show that ReDDiT significantly outperforms the baseline model (reducing gFID from 6.18 to **1.61**) and is on par with the continuous counterparts. The code and models will be publicly available.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance on single-image tasks, but their performance declines when multiple images are provided as input. One major reason is the cross-image information leakage, where the model struggles to distinguish information across different images. Existing LVLMs already employ delimiter tokens to mark the start and end of each image, yet our analysis reveals that these tokens fail to effectively block cross-image information leakage. To enhance their effectiveness, we propose a method that scales the hidden states of delimiter tokens. This enhances the model’s ability to preserve image-specific information by reinforcing intra-image interaction and limiting undesired cross-image interactions. Consequently, the model is better able to distinguish between images and reason over them more accurately. Experiments show performance gains on multi-image benchmarks such as Mantis, MuirBench, MIRB and QBench2. We further evaluate our method on text-only tasks that require clear distinction. The method improves performance on multi-document and multi-table understanding benchmarks, including TQABench, MultiNews and WCEP-10. Notably, our method requires no additional training or inference cost.

Any-to-any generation seeks to translate between arbitrary subsets of modalities, enabling flexible cross-modal synthesis. Despite recent success, existing flow-based approaches are challenged by its inefficiency, as they require large-scale datasets often with restrictive pairing constraints, incur high computation cost from modeling joint distribution, and multi-stage training pipeline. We propose \textbf{FlowBind}, an efficient framework for any-to-any generation. Our approach is distinguished by its simplicity: it learns a shared latent space capturing cross-modal information, with modality-specific invertible flows bridging this latent to each modality. Both components are optimized jointly under a single flow-matching objective, and at inference the invertible flows act as encoders and decoders for direct translation across modalities. By factorizing interactions through the shared latent, FlowBind naturally leverages arbitrary subsets of modalities for training, and achieves competitive generation quality while substantially reducing data requirements and computational cost. Experiments on text, image, and audio demonstrate that FlowBind attains comparable quality while requiring up to 6× fewer parameters and training 10× faster than prior methods.

Multi-subject personalized generation presents unique challenges in maintaining identity fidelity and semantic coherence when synthesizing images conditioned on multiple reference subjects. Existing methods often suffer from identity blending and attribute leakage due to inadequate modeling of how different subjects should interact within shared representation spaces. We present MOSAIC, a representation-centric framework that rethinks multi-subject generation through explicit semantic correspondence and orthogonal feature disentanglement. Our key insight is that multi-subject generation requires precise semantic alignment at the representation level—knowing exactly which regions in the generated image should attend to which parts of each reference. To enable this, we introduce SemAlign-MS, a meticulously annotated dataset providing fine-grained semantic correspondences between multiple reference subjects and target images, previously unavailable in this domain. Building on this foundation, we propose the semantic correspondence attention loss to enforce precise point-to-point semantic alignment, ensuring high consistency from each reference to its designated regions. Furthermore, we develop the multi-reference disentanglement loss to push different subjects into orthogonal attention subspaces, preventing feature interference while preserving individual identity characteristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MOSAIC achieves SOTA performance on multiple benchmarks. Notably, while existing methods typically degrade beyond 3 subjects, MOSAIC maintains high fidelity with 4+ reference subjects, opening new possibilities for complex multi-subject synthesis applications.

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) and its variants like DP-Adam ensure data privacy by injecting noise into per-sample gradients. Although effective with large private datasets, their performance degrades significantly when private training data is limited. Recent works leverage public data to learn a gradient subspace and project noisy private sample gradients on to this subspace, achieving improved performance. However, they have overlooked two crucial aspects: the limitation of using a fixed projection subspace throughout training and the importance of choosing where to inject noise. Therefore, we propose Private Evolution aided Stochastic Gradient Descent (***PE-SGD***), a differentially private training framework effective for scenarios with limited private data. ***PE-SGD*** uses an evolutionary strategy to update the gradient projection subspace during training process. We also identify a more effective noise injection point for better alignment between approximate DP-protected gradient and real private gradient. This enables ***PE-SGD*** to outperform DP-SGD and other baselines, particularly in the regime of limited private data and small privacy budget.

Personalized text-to-image generation aims to synthesize images of user-provided concepts in diverse contexts. Despite recent progress in multi-concept personalization, most are limited to object concepts and struggle to customize abstract concepts (e.g., pose, lighting). Some methods have begun exploring multi-concept personalization supporting abstract concepts, but they require test-time fine-tuning for each new concept, which is time-consuming and prone to overfitting on limited training images. In this work, we propose a novel tuning-free method for multi-concept personalization that can effectively customize both object and abstract concepts without test-time fine-tuning. Our method builds upon the modulation mechanism in pre-trained Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) model, leveraging the localized and semantically meaningful properties of the modulation space. Specifically, we propose a novel module, Mod-Adapter, to predict concept-specific modulation direction for the modulation process of concept-related text tokens. It introduces vision-language cross-attention for extracting concept visual features, and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers that adaptively map the concept features into the modulation space. Furthermore, to mitigate the training difficulty caused by the large gap between the concept image space and the modulation space, we introduce a VLM-guided pre-training strategy that leverages the strong image understanding capabilities of vision-language models to provide semantic supervision signals. For a comprehensive comparison, we extend a standard benchmark by incorporating abstract concepts. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-concept personalization, supported by quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluations.

Textual Inversion (TI) is an efficient approach to text‑to‑image personalization but often fails on complex prompts. We trace these failures to embedding norm inflation: learned tokens drift to out‑of‑distribution magnitudes, degrading prompt conditioning in pre‑norm Transformers. Empirically, we show semantics are primarily encoded by direction in CLIP token space, while inflated norms harm contextualization; theoretically, we analyze how large magnitudes attenuate positional information and hinder residual updates in pre‑norm blocks. We propose Directional Textual Inversion (DTI), which fixes the embedding magnitude to an in‑distribution scale and optimizes only direction on the unit hypersphere via Riemannian SGD. We cast direction learning as MAP with a von Mises–Fisher prior, yielding a constant‑direction prior gradient that is simple and efficient to incorporate. Across personalization tasks, DTI improves text fidelity over TI and TI‑variants while maintaining subject similarity. Crucially, DTI’s hyperspherical parameterization enables smooth, semantically coherent interpolation between learned concepts (slerp), a capability that is absent in standard TI. Our findings suggest that direction‑only optimization is a robust and scalable path for prompt‑faithful personalization.

In this paper, we propose UniLIP, a unified framework that adapts CLIP for multimodal understanding, generation and editing. Although CLIP excels at understanding, it lacks reconstruction abilities required to be a unified visual encoder. However, previous CLIP-based unified methods fail to balance understanding and reconstruction, leading to semantic degradation or inconsistent reconstructions. In contrast, we introduce a novel two-stage training scheme with a self-distillation strategy that progressively endows CLIP with high-fidelity reconstruction abilities while preserving its original comprehension performance. For enhanced reasoning and consistency in generation and editing, we further develop a dual-condition architecture built upon the MetaQuery framework. Our architecture jointly utilizes multimodal hidden states for rich contextual details and learnable query embeddings to harness the powerful reasoning abilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Leveraging advanced image representation and architectural design, UniLIP demonstrates superior instruction following and edit fidelity. With only 1B and 3B parameters, UniLIP can outperform larger unified models such as BAGEL (7B) and Uniworld-V1 (12B), achieving state-of-the-art performance of **0.90** on GenEval, **0.63** on WISE, and **3.94** on ImgEdit. These results demonstrate that UniLIP successfully expands the application of CLIP, establishing its continuous features to not only serve as the optimal choice for understanding tasks but also achieve highly competitive performance in generation and editing tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/nnnth/UniLIP.

Synthetic data generation for tabular datasets is shifting toward the use of large, general-purpose foundation models. TabPFN, a state-of-the-art example, uses in-context learning to generate probabilistic predictions conditioned on observed examples in a single forward pass. However, when variables are only weakly associated with others, the model's ability to generate realistic synthetic data deteriorates, as the context examples provide little predictive signal. To address this, we introduce the maximal information auxiliary variable (MIAV) strategy, which increases context information with auxiliary variables constructed by rank-matching random noise variables to real data. We establish theoretical properties of the approach which explain its good performance for weakly associated variables. Additional practical advantages of the MIAV approach include improved computational efficiency and invariance to variable order during the synthetic data generation process. Empirical evaluations, on simulated and real datasets, illustrate how the MIAV strategy improves data generation when compared to direct application of TabPFN, and is competitive against other baselines. To illustrate the generality of the MIAV approach we also present an implementation based on the TabICL model (a more scalable tabular foundation model restricted to classification tasks) for performing synthetic data generation on categorical datasets. Overall, MIAV offers an effective foundation model–based alternative to bespoke synthetic data generators.

Diffusion transformers typically incorporate textual information via (i) attention layers and (ii) a modulation mechanism using a pooled text embedding. Nevertheless, recent approaches discard modulation-based text conditioning and rely exclusively on attention. In this paper, we address whether modulation-based text conditioning is necessary and whether it can provide any performance advantage. Our analysis shows that, in its conventional usage, the pooled embedding contributes little to overall performance, suggesting that attention alone is generally sufficient for faithfully propagating prompt information. However, we reveal that the pooled embedding can provide significant gains when used from a different perspective—serving as guidance and enabling controllable shifts toward more desirable properties. This approach is training-free, simple to implement, incurs negligible runtime overhead, and can be applied to various diffusion models, bringing improvements across diverse tasks, including text-to-image/video generation and image editing.

High-resolution image synthesis remains a core challenge in generative modeling, particularly in balancing computational efficiency with the preservation of fine-grained visual detail. We present $\textit{Latent Wavelet Diffusion (LWD)}$, a lightweight training framework that significantly improves detail and texture fidelity in ultra-high-resolution (2K-4K) image synthesis. LWD introduces a novel, frequency-aware masking strategy derived from wavelet energy maps, which dynamically focuses the training process on detail-rich regions of the latent space. This is complemented by a scale-consistent VAE objective to ensure high spectral fidelity. The primary advantage of our approach is its efficiency: LWD requires no architectural modifications and adds zero additional cost during inference, making it a practical solution for scaling existing models. Across multiple strong baselines, LWD consistently improves perceptual quality and FID scores, demonstrating the power of signal-driven supervision as a principled and efficient path toward high-resolution generative modeling.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has proven effective in enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex tasks by decomposing problems into step-wise solutions. However, extending CoT to multi-modal settings remains challenging, as it requires modeling transitions of visual states alongside textual reasoning. Existing approaches often underperform due to limited capacity to model visual transitions or fragmented architectures. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Uni-CoT, a Unified Chain-of-Thought framework that captures structured visual transitions and seamlessly aligns them with textual logic, enabling coherent multimodal reasoning. To mitigate the computational and training challenges inherent to multi-modal reasoning, Uni-CoT introduces a two-level reasoning paradigm: a macro-level CoT for high-level planning and a micro-level CoT for localized subtask execution. This hierarchical design reduces computational overhead while maintaining coherence. Additionally, Uni-CoT incorporates a structured training paradigm with auxiliary tasks to stabilize optimization and improve generalization. Experiments on reasoning-driven image generation and understanding benchmarks demonstrate that Uni-CoT achieves state-of-the-art performance and remarkable generalization, underscoring its potential for complex multi-modal reasoning.