ICLR 2026 论文列表

Large language models are often used to answer queries grounded in large text corpora (e.g. codebases, legal documents, or chat histories) by placing the entire corpus in the context window and leveraging in-context learning (ICL). Although current models support contexts of 100K-10M tokens, this setup is costly to serve because the memory consumption of the KV cache scales with input length. We explore an alternative: training a smaller KV cache offline on each corpus. At inference time, we load this trained KV cache, which we call a Cartridge, and decode a response. Critically, the cost of training a Cartridge can be amortized across all the queries referencing the same corpus. However, we find that the naive approach of training the Cartridge with next-token prediction on the corpus is not competitive with ICL. Instead, we propose self-study, a training recipe in which we generate synthetic conversations about the corpus and train the Cartridge with a context-distillation objective. We find that Cartridges trained with self-study replicate the functionality of ICL, while being significantly cheaper to serve. On challenging long-context benchmarks, Cartridges trained with self-study match ICL performance while using 38.6x less memory and enabling 26.4x higher throughput. Self-study also extends the model's effective context length (e.g. from 128k to 484k tokens on MTOB) and surprisingly, leads to Cartridges that can be composed at inference time without retraining.

The pursuit of computational efficiency has driven the adoption of low-precision formats for training transformer models. However, this progress is often hindered by notorious training instabilities. This paper provides the first mechanistic explanation for a long-standing and unresolved failure case where training with flash attention in low-precision settings leads to catastrophic loss explosions. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the failure is not a random artifact but caused by two intertwined phenomena: the emergence of similar low-rank representations within the attention mechanism and the compounding effect of biased rounding errors inherent in low-precision arithmetic. We demonstrate how these factors create a vicious cycle of error accumulation that corrupts weight updates, ultimately derailing the training dynamics. To validate our findings, we introduce a minimal modification to the flash attention that mitigates the bias in rounding errors. This simple change stabilizes the training process, confirming our analysis and offering a practical solution to this persistent problem. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/why-low-precision-training-fails.

Protein folding models have achieved groundbreaking results typically via a combination of integrating domain knowledge into the architectural blocks and training pipelines. Nonetheless, given the success of generative models across different but related problems, it is natural to question whether these architectural designs are a necessary condition to build performant models. In this paper, we introduce SimpleFold, the first flow-matching based protein folding model that solely uses general purpose transformer blocks}. Protein folding models typically employ computationally expensive modules involving triangular updates, explicit pair representations or multiple training objectives curated for this specific domain. Instead, SimpleFold employs standard transformer blocks with adaptive layers and is trained via a generative flow-matching objective with an additional structural term. We scale SimpleFold to 3B parameters and train it on approximately 9M distilled protein structures together with experimental PDB data. On standard folding benchmarks, SimpleFold-3B achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, in addition SimpleFold demonstrates strong performance in ensemble prediction which is typically difficult for models trained via deterministic reconstruction objectives. SimpleFold challenges the reliance on complex domain-specific architectures designs in protein folding, opening up an alternative design space for future progress.

Ultrasound imaging is widely used due to its safety, affordability, and real-time capabilities, but its 2D interpretation is highly operator-dependent, leading to variability and increased cognitive demand. We present $\textbf{UltraGauss}$: an ultrasound-specific Gaussian Splatting framework that serves as an efficient approximation to acoustic image formation. Unlike projection-based splatting, UltraGauss renders by $\textit{probe-plane intersection}$ with in-plane aggregation, aligning with plane-based echo sampling while remaining fast and memory-efficient. A stable parameterisation and compute-aware GPU rasterisation make this method practical at scale. On clinical datasets, UltraGauss delivers state-of-the-art 2D-to-3D reconstructions in minutes on a single GPU (reaching 0.99 SSIM within $\sim$20 minutes), and a clinical expert survey rates its reconstructions the most realistic among competing methods. To our knowledge, this is the first Gaussian Splatting approach tailored to ultrasound 2D-to-3D reconstruction. Code will be released upon publication.

The rapid advancement of AI-generated content (AIGC) has enabled the synthesis of visually convincing images; however, many such outputs exhibit subtle \textbf{semantic anomalies}, including unrealistic object configurations, violations of physical laws, or commonsense inconsistencies, which compromise the overall plausibility of the generated scenes. Detecting these semantic-level anomalies is essential for assessing the trustworthiness of AIGC media, especially in AIGC image analysis, explainable deepfake detection and semantic authenticity assessment.In this paper, we formalize \textbf{semantic anomaly detection and reasoning} for AIGC images and introduce \textbf{AnomReason}, a large-scale benchmark with structured annotations as quadruples \emph{(Name, Phenomenon, Reasoning, Severity)}. Annotations are produced by a modular multi-agent pipeline (\textbf{AnomAgent}) with lightweight human-in-the-loop verification, enabling scale while preserving quality. At construction time, AnomAgent processed approximately 4.17\,B GPT-4o tokens, providing scale evidence for the resulting structured annotations. We further show that models fine-tuned on AnomReason achieve consistent gains over strong vision-language baselines under our proposed semantic matching metric (\textit{SemAP} and \textit{SemF1}). Applications to {explainable deepfake detection} and {semantic reasonableness assessment of image generators} demonstrate practical utility. In summary, AnomReason and AnomAgent serve as a foundation for measuring and improving the semantic plausibility of AI-generated images. We will release code, metrics, data, and task-aligned models to support reproducible research on semantic authenticity and interpretable AIGC forensics.

Long video generation with Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is bottlenecked by the quadratic scaling of full attention with sequence length. Since attention is highly redundant, outputs are dominated by a small subset of query–key pairs. Existing sparse methods rely on blockwise coarse estimation, whose accuracy–efficiency trade-offs are constrained by block size. This paper introduces Mixture-of-Groups Attention (MoGA), an efficient sparse attention that uses a lightweight, learnable token router to precisely match tokens without blockwise estimation. Through semantic-aware routing, MoGA enables effective long-range interactions. As a kernel-free method, MoGA integrates seamlessly with modern attention stacks, including FlashAttention and sequence parallelism. Building on MoGA, we develop an efficient long video generation model that end-to-end produces minute-level, multi-shot, 480p videos at 24 fps, with a context length of approximately 580k. Comprehensive experiments on various video generation tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach. We provide an anonymous link \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MoGA} to showcase the generated videos.

Dataset distillation (DD) has emerged as a promising approach to compress datasets and speed up model training. However, the underlying connections among various DD methods remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce UniDD, a spectral filtering framework that unifies diverse DD objectives. UniDD interprets each DD objective as a specific filter function applied to the eigenvalues of the feature-feature correlation (FFC) matrix to extract certain frequency information of the feature-label correlation (FLC) matrix. In this way, UniDD reveals that the essence of DD fundamentally lies in matching frequency-specific features. Moreover, we characterize the roles of different filters. For example, low-pass filters, \eg, DM and DC, capture blurred patches, while high-pass filters, \eg, MTT and FrePo, prefer to synthesize fine-grained textures and have better diversity. However, existing methods can only learn the sole frequency information as they rely on fixed filter functions throughout distillation. To address this limitation, we further propose Curriculum Frequency Matching (CFM), which gradually adjusts the filter parameter to cover both low- and high-frequency information of the FFC and FLC matrices. Extensive experiments on small-scale datasets, such as CIFAR-10/100, and large-scale ImageNet-1K, demonstrate the superior performance of CFM over existing baselines and validate the practicality of UniDD.

As one of the most fundamental models, meta learning aims to effectively address few-shot learning challenges. However, it still faces significant issues related to the training data, such as training inefficiencies due to numerous low-contribution tasks in large datasets and substantial noise from incorrect labels. Thus, training data attribution methods are needed for meta learning. However, the dual-layer structure of meta learning complicates the modeling of training data contributions because of the interdependent influence between meta parameters and task-specific parameters, making existing data influence evaluation tools inapplicable or inaccurate. To address these challenges, based on the influence function, we propose a general data attribution evaluation framework for meta learning within the bilevel optimization framework. Our approach introduces task influence functions (task-IF) and instance influence functions (instance-IF) to accurately assess the impact of specific tasks and individual data points in closed forms. This framework comprehensively models data contributions across both the inner and outer training processes, capturing the direct effects of data points on meta parameters as well as their indirect influence through task-specific parameters. We also provide several strategies to enhance computational efficiency and scalability. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in training data evaluation via several downstream tasks.

As AI becomes more personal, e.g., Agentic AI, there is an increasing need for personalizing models for various use cases. Personalized federated learning (PFL) enables each client to collaboratively leverage other clients' knowledge for better adaptation to the task of interest, without privacy risks. Despite its potential, existing PFL methods remain confined to rather simplified scenarios where data and models are the same across clients. To move towards realistic scenarios, we propose FedMosaic, a method that jointly addresses data and model heterogeneity with a task-relevance-aware model aggregation strategy to reduce parameter interference, and a dimension-invariant module that enables knowledge sharing across heterogeneous architectures without huge computational cost. To mimic the real-world task diversity, we propose a multi-modal PFL benchmark spanning 40 distinct tasks with distribution shifts over time. The empirical study shows that FedMosaic outperforms the state-of-the-art PFL methods, excelling in both personalization and generalization capabilities under challenging, realistic scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong but shallow alignment: they directly refuse harmful queries when a refusal is expected at the very start of an assistant turn, yet this protection collapses once a harmful continuation is underway (either through the adversarial attacks or via harmful assistant-prefill attacks). This raises a fundamental question: _Can the innate shallow alignment in LLMs be unlocked to ensure safety at arbitrary generation depths?_ To achieve this goal, we propose Any-Depth Alignment (ADA) an effective inference-time defense with negligible overhead. ADA is built based on our observation that alignment is concentrated in the _assistant header tokens_ through repeated use in shallow-refusal training, and these tokens possess the model’s strong alignment priors. By reintroducing these tokens mid-stream, ADA induces the model to reassess harmfulness and recover refusals at _any point in generation_. Across diverse open-source model families (Llama, Gemma, Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek, and gpt-oss), ADA achieves robust safety performance _without requiring any changes to the base model's parameters_. It secures a near-100% refusal rate against challenging adversarial prefill attacks ranging from dozens to thousands of tokens. Furthermore, ADA reduces the average success rate of prominent adversarial prompt attacks (such as GCG, AutoDAN, PAIR, and TAP) to below 3%. This is all accomplished while preserving benign utility with minimal over-refusal and maintaining resilience even after the base model undergoes subsequent instruction tuning.

In recent years, 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant strides in image-text understanding tasks. However, their performance in 3D spatial comprehension, which is critical for embodied intelligence, remains limited. Recent advances have leveraged 3D point clouds and multi-view images as inputs, yielding promising results. However, we propose exploring a purely vision-based solution inspired by human perception, which merely relies on visual cues for 3D spatial understanding. This paper empirically investigates the limitations of VLMs in 3D spatial knowledge, revealing that their primary shortcoming lies in the lack of global-local correspondence between the scene and individual frames. To address this, we introduce GPT4Scene, a novel visual prompting paradigm in VLM training and inference that helps build the global-local relationship, significantly improving the 3D spatial understanding of indoor scenes. Specifically, GPT4Scene constructs a Bird's Eye View (BEV) image from the video and marks consistent object IDs across both frames and the BEV image. The model then inputs the concatenated BEV image and video frames with markers. In zero-shot evaluations, GPT4Scene improves performance over closed-source VLMs like GPT-4o. Additionally, we prepare a processed video dataset consisting of 165K text annotation to fine-tune open-source VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on all 3D understanding tasks. Surprisingly, after training with the GPT4Scene paradigm, VLMs consistently improve during inference, even without object marker prompting and BEV image as explicit correspondence. It demonstrates that the proposed paradigm helps VLMs develop an intrinsic ability to understand 3D scenes, which paves the way for a seamless approach to extending VLMs for 3D scene understanding.

Large-language-models (LLMs) demonstrate enormous utility in long-context tasks which require processing prompts that consist of tens to hundreds of thousands of tokens. However, existing LLM training libraries do not provide easy to use abstractions to optimize for long-context training, instead focusing on optimizations for models with large parameter counts through ZeRO-3/FSDP, Tensor and Pipeline parallelism. This forces users to rewrite LLM training libraries to incorporate compositions of various complex long-context optimizations, such as sequence-parallelism, to training pipelines; a process that requires in-depth expertise, reducing developer productivity. To tackle these challenges, we introduce AutSP: the first automated solution to automatically optimize LLM training for longer-contexts. AutoSP compiles models and applies a targeted set of optimizations: automated sequence parallelism, and long-context aware activation-checkpointing, to drastically enhance LLM trainability at negligible cost to throughput. Our evaluation demonstrates AutoSP's capability on both NVIDIA and AMD hardware, increasing training contexts by upto 2.7$\times$ and 2.5$\times$ respectively at negligible cost to runtime performance over competitive hand-written baselines.

Determining an appropriate size for an artificial neural network under computational constraints is a fundamental challenge. This paper introduces a practical metric, derived from Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), for estimating the minimum necessary network width with respect to test loss -- prior to training. We provide both theoretical and empirical evidence that the smallest eigenvalue of the NTK strongly influences test loss in wide but finite-width neural networks. Based on this observation, we define an NTK-based metric computed at initialization to identify what we call cardinal width, i.e., the width of a network at which generalization performance saturates. Our experiments across multiple datasets and architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of this metric in estimating the cardinal width.

This paper investigates the global convergence of stepsized Newton methods for convex functions with Hölder continuous Hessians or third derivatives. We propose several simple stepsize schedules with fast global convergence guarantees, up to $\mathcal {O}(1/k^3)$ . For cases with multiple plausible smoothness parameterizations or an unknown smoothness constant, we introduce a stepsize linesearch and a backtracking procedure with provable convergence as if the optimal smoothness parameters were known in advance. Additionally, we present strong convergence guarantees for the practically popular Newton method with exact linesearch.

Aligning Large Language Models with human preferences typically requires computationally intensive training or complex reward architectures. We introduce PALC (Preference Alignment via Logit Calibration), a parameter-efficient framework that achieves test-time alignment through a novel intervention strategy: direct calibration in vocabulary space. Unlike existing methods that manipulate entangled hidden representations or rely on external reward models, PALC operates at the logit layer where each dimension corresponds to a distinct token, providing interpretable and efficient control. Our approach employs a bottleneck architecture that learns to compress the base model's hidden states and generate position-dependent calibration vectors, requiring only a fraction of the base model's parameters. Through this design, PALC sidesteps the superposition problem inherent in representation engineering while eliminating the computational overhead of guided decoding methods. A single scaling factor enables runtime adjustment of alignment strength without retraining, allowing practitioners to balance between preserving model capabilities and enforcing preferences. Experiments demonstrate that PALC outperforms most test-time alignment methods while maintaining near-baseline inference speed. Our ablations reveal that human preferences concentrate on surprisingly low-dimensional manifolds, validating our architectural choices. By establishing vocabulary-space intervention as an effective alignment paradigm, PALC makes preference alignment accessible for resource-constrained deployments where traditional methods are infeasible, opening new avenues for scalable and adaptive AI alignment.

Navigation foundation models trained on massive web-scale data enable agents to generalize across diverse environments and embodiments. However, these models, which are trained solely on offline data, often lack the capacity to reason about the consequences of their actions or adapt through counterfactual understanding. They thus face significant limitations in the real-world urban navigation where interactive and safe behaviors, such as avoiding obstacles and moving pedestrians, are critical. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Seeing-to-Experiencing (S2E) learning framework to scale the capability of navigation foundation models with reinforcement learning. S2E combines the strengths of pre-training on offline videos and post-training through reinforcement learning. It maintains the model's generalizability acquired from large-scale real-world videos while enhancing its interactivity through reinforcement learning in simulation environments. Specifically, we introduce two innovations: 1) an Anchor-Guided Distribution Matching strategy for offline pretraining, which stabilizes learning and models diverse motion patterns through anchor-based supervision; and 2) a Residual-Attention Module for reinforcement learning, which obtains reactive behaviors from simulation environments without erasing the model’s pretrained knowledge. Moreover, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation benchmark, NavBench-GS, built on photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of real-world scenes that incorporate physical interactions. It can systematically assess the generalizability and safety of navigation foundation models.

Point cloud-based motion capture leverages rich spatial geometry and privacy-preserving sensing, but learning robust representations from noisy, unstructured point clouds remains challenging. Existing approaches face a struggle trade-off between point-based methods (geometrically detailed but noisy) and skeleton-based ones (robust but oversimplified). We address the fundamental challenge: how to construct an effective representation for human motion capture that can balance expressiveness and robustness. In this paper, we propose Sparkle, a structured representation unifying skeletal joints and surface anchors with explicit kinematic-geometric factorization. Our framework, SparkleMotion, learns this representation through hierarchical modules embedding geometric continuity and kinematic constraints. By explicitly disentangling internal kinematic structure from external surface geometry, SparkleMotion achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in accuracy but crucially in robustness and generalization under severe domain shifts, noise, and occlusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superiority across diverse sensor types and challenging real-world scenarios.

We introduce Representation Tokenizer (RepTok), a generative modeling framework that represents an image using a single continuous latent token obtained from self-supervised vision transformers. Building on a pre-trained SSL encoder, we fine-tune only the semantic token embedding and pair it with a generative decoder trained end-to-end using a standard flow matching objective. This adaptation enriches the token with low-level, reconstruction-relevant details, enabling faithful image reconstruction. To preserve the favorable geometry of the original SSL space, we add a cosine-similarity loss that regularizes the adapted token, ensuring it remains smooth and suitable for generation.Our single-token formulation resolves the spatial redundancies of the 2D latent space, simplifies architectures, and significantly reduces training costs. Despite its simplicity and efficiency, RepTok achieves competitive results on class-conditional ImageNet generation and extends naturally to text-to-image synthesis, reaching competitive zero-shot performance on MS-COCO under extremely limited training budgets. Our findings highlight the potential of fine-tuned SSL representations as compact and effective latent spaces for efficient generative modeling. We will release our model to facilitate further research.

Chain-of-thought prompting has popularized step-by-step reasoning in large language models, yet model performance still degrades as problem complexity and context length grow. By decomposing difficult tasks with long contexts into shorter, manageable ones, recent multi-agent paradigms offer a promising near-term solution to this problem. However, the fundamental capacities of such systems are poorly understood. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze the expressivity of multi-agent systems. We apply our framework to three algorithmic families: state tracking, recall, and $k$-hop reasoning. We derive bounds on (i) the number of agents required to solve the task exactly, (ii) the quantity and structure of inter-agent communication, and (iii) the achievable speedups as problem size and context scale. Our results identify regimes where communication is provably beneficial, delineate tradeoffs between agent count and bandwidth, and expose intrinsic limitations when either resource is constrained. We complement our theoretical analysis with a set of experiments on pretrained LLMs using controlled synthetic benchmarks. Empirical outcomes confirm the tradeoffs between key quantities predicted by our theory. Collectively, our analysis offers principled guidance for designing scalable multi-agent reasoning systems.