ICLR 2026 论文列表

Reasoning has emerged as a key capability of large language models. In linguistic tasks, this capability can be enhanced by self-improving techniques that refine reasoning paths for subsequent fine-tuning. However, extending these language-based self-improving approaches to vision language models (VLMs) presents a unique challenge: visual hallucinations in reasoning paths cannot be effectively verified or rectified. Our solution starts with a key observation about visual contrast: when presented with a contrastive VQA pair, i.e., two visually similar images with synonymous questions, VLMs identify relevant visual cues more precisely compared with when given a single VQA sample. Motivated by this observation, we propose Visual Contrastive Self-Taught Reasoner (VC-STaR), a novel self-improving framework that leverages visual contrast to mitigate hallucinations in model-generated rationales. We collect a diverse suite of VQA datasets, curate contrastive pairs according to multi-modal similarity, and generate rationales using VC-STaR. Consequently, we obtain a new visual reasoning dataset, VisCoR-$55$K, which is then used to boost the reasoning capability of various VLMs through supervised finetuning. Extensive experiments show that VC-STaR not only outperforms existing self-improving approaches but also surpasses models finetuned on the SoTA visual reasoning datasets, demonstrating that the inherent contrastive ability of VLMs can bootstrap their own visual reasoning. The code, dataset and trained models will be released upon acceptance.

Maximizing conditional mutual information (CMI) has recently been shown to enhance the effectiveness of teacher networks in knowledge distillation (KD). Prior work achieves this by fine-tuning a pretrained teacher to maximize a proxy of its CMI. However, fine-tuning large-scale teachers is often impractical, and proxy-based optimization introduces inaccuracies. To overcome these limitations, we propose Differentiable JPEG-based Input Perturbation (DJIP), a plug-and-play framework that improves teacher–student knowledge transfer without modifying the teacher. DJIP employs a trainable differentiable JPEG layer inserted before the teacher to perturb teacher inputs in a way that directly increases CMI. We further introduce a novel alternating optimization algorithm to efficiently learn the coding parameters of the JPEG layer to maximize the perturbed CMI. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, across diverse distillers and architectures, demonstrate that DJIP consistently improves student accuracy-achieving up to 4.11% gains-while remaining computationally lightweight and fully compatible with standard KD pipelines.

Graph outlier detection is a critical task for identifying rare, deviant patterns in graph-structured data. However, prevalent methods based on graph convolution are fundamentally challenged by the ''Homophily Trap'': the aggregation of features from neighboring nodes inadvertently contaminates the representations of normal nodes near anomalies, blurring their distinctions. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Clustering-guided Edge Reweighting framework for Graph Outlier Detection (CER-GOD), which jointly optimizes a self-discriminative masking spoiler with an adaptive clustering-based outlier detector. The masking spoiler learns to selectively weaken the influence of heterogeneous neighbors, preserving the discriminative power of node embeddings. This process is guided by the clustering detector, which generates pseudo-labels in an unsupervised manner, thereby eliminating the need for predefined anomaly thresholds. To ensure robust optimization and prevent class collapse—a failure mode exacerbated by the homophily trap—we introduce a diversity loss that stabilizes the clustering process. Our end-to-end framework demonstrates superior performance on multiple benchmark datasets, establishing a new state-of-the-art by effectively dismantling the homophily trap.

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) combines the efficiency of bi-encoders with the transparency of lexical matching, but existing approaches struggle to scale beyond English. We introduce MILCO, an LSR architecture that maps queries and documents from different languages into a shared English lexical space via a multilingual connector. MILCO is trained with a specialized two-stage regime that combines Sparse Alignment Pretraining with contrastive training to provide representation transparency and effectiveness while mitigating semantic collapse. Motivated by the observation that uncommon entities are often lost when projected into English, we propose a new LexEcho head, which enhances robustness by augmenting the English lexical representation with a source-language view obtained through a special [ECHO] token. MILCO achieves state-of-the-art multilingual and cross-lingual LSR performance, outperforming leading dense, sparse, and multi-vector baselines such as BGE-M3 and Qwen3-Embed on standard multilingual benchmarks, while supporting dynamic efficiency through post-hoc pruning. Notably, when using mass-based pruning to reduce document representations to only 30 active dimensions on average, MILCO 560M outperforms the similarly-sized Qwen3-Embed 0.6B with 1024 dimensions, , while achieving 3$\times$ lower retrieval latency and 10$\times$ smaller index size.

Reliable uncertainty estimation is a key missing piece for on-device monitoring in TinyML: microcontrollers must detect failures, distribution shift, or accuracy drops under strict flash/latency budgets, yet common uncertainty approaches (deep ensembles, MC dropout, early exits, temporal buffering) typically require multiple passes, extra branches, or state that is impractical on milliwatt hardware. This paper proposes a novel and practical method, SNAP-UQ, for single-pass, label-free uncertainty estimation based on depth-wise next-activation prediction. SNAP-UQ taps a small set of backbone layers and uses tiny int8 heads to predict the mean and scale of the next activation from a low-rank projection of the previous one; the resulting standardized prediction error forms a depth-wise surprisal signal that is aggregated and mapped through a lightweight monotone calibrator into an actionable uncertainty score. The design introduces no temporal buffers or auxiliary exits and preserves state-free inference, while increasing deployment footprint by only a few tens of kilobytes. Across vision and audio backbones, SNAP-UQ reduces flash and latency relative to early-exit and deep-ensemble baselines (typically $\sim$40--60% smaller and $\sim$25--35% faster), with several competing methods at similar accuracy often exceeding MCU memory limits. On corrupted streams, it improves accuracy-drop event detection by multiple AUPRC points and maintains strong failure detection (AUROC $\approx 0.9$) in a single forward pass. By grounding uncertainty in layer-to-layer dynamics rather than solely in output confidence, SNAP-UQ offers a novel, resource-efficient basis for robust TinyML monitoring. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ism-ail11/SNAP-UQ

Protein design stands as one of biology’s most important frontiers, with the potential to transform medicine, advance human health, and drive sustainability. Protein generation, a central task in protein design, has been greatly accelerated by AI-driven models—such as FoldFlow, MultiFlow, and AlphaFlow that build on residue-wise rigidity–based modeling pioneered by AlphaFold2. Residue-wise rigid-body representations reduce structural dimensionality while enforcing chemical constraints, enabling more efficient and physically consistent protein structure generation than all-atom modeling. Despite these advances, existing models often underutilize the vast structural information available in large-scale protein datasets. This highlights the importance of pretraining, which can provide richer representations and improve generalization across diverse protein design tasks. More importantly, the challenge lies in how to fully exploit abundant, low-cost unlabeled protein datasets using unsupervised pretraining. We introduce RigidSSL, a rigidity-based pretraining framework for proteins. RigidSSL canonicalizes structures into an inertial frame, employs a two-phase workflow combining large-scale perturbations and molecular dynamics views, and applies a rigid-body flow matching objective with Invariant Point Attention to capture global geometry. This enables learning stable, geometry-aware representations that improve downstream protein generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of RigidSSL, we conduct quantitative experiments on the protein generation task. Empirically, RigidSSL outperforms previous state-of-the-art geometric pretraining algorithms, leading to improvements in unconditional generation across all metrics, including designability, novelty, and diversity, for length up to 800 residues.

We introduce AnyUp, a method for feature upsampling that can be applied to any vision feature at any resolution, without encoder-specific training. Existing learning-based upsamplers for features like DINO or CLIP need to be re-trained for every feature extractor and thus do not generalize to different feature types at inference time. In this work, we propose an *inference-time* feature-agnostic upsampling architecture to alleviate this limitation and improve upsampling quality. In our experiments, AnyUp sets a new state of the art for upsampled features, generalizes to different feature types, and preserves feature semantics while being efficient and easy to apply to a wide range of downstream tasks.

Steering a large language model's attention towards user-specified highlighted text is a critical capability. Existing prompt highlighting methods are incompatible with modern efficient attention mechanisms like Flash Attention due to their reliance on post-hoc matrix editing. We introduce Spectral Editing Key Amplification (SEKA), a training-free steering method that tackles this by directly editing key embeddings before attention computation. SEKA learns universal relevance subspaces offline via spectral decomposition. We extend this to Adaptive SEKA (AdaSEKA), a query-adaptive variant that uses a training-free routing mechanism to dynamically combine multiple expert subspaces based on the prompt's semantic intent. Our experiments show both methods significantly outperform strong baselines on standard steering benchmarks while adding much lower latency and memory overhead, ensuring full compatibility with optimised attention.

High-quality visual representation is a long-standing pursuit in computer vision. In the context of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), feeding higher-resolution images can produce more fine-grained visual tokens. However, it introduces additional computational and design complexity, due to multiple forward passes and post-processing of increased tokens. Before simply adopting a higher resolution, have we truly unlocked the model's full perception capability at a standard resolution? Therefore, we study an interesting problem: how to achieve fine visual perception under lower cost without larger images. We present SigLIP-HD in this work. The core is a highly simple fine-to-coarse supervision design. We enforce the coarse feature of a mid-resolution image to mimic the fine-grained feature of its high-resolution version. We build this framework on the advanced SigLIP 2 model. Our final model produces better visual tokens at exactly the same inference budget. It is validated on extensive MLLM benchmarks and consistently delivers stronger results than our baseline model, especially on OCR-related tasks.

Contrastive learning has achieved remarkable success in self-supervised representation learning, often guided by information-theoretic objectives such as mutual information maximization. Motivated by the limitations of static augmentations and rigid invariance constraints, we propose IE-CL (Incremental-Entropy Contrastive Learning), a framework that explicitly optimizes the entropy gain between augmented views while preserving semantic consistency. Our theoretical framework reframes the challenge by identifying the encoder as an information bottleneck and proposes a joint optimization of two components: a learnable transformation for entropy generation and an encoder regularizer for its preservation. Experiments on CIFAR-10/100, STL-10, and ImageNet demonstrate that IE-CL consistently improves performance under small-batch settings. Moreover, our core modules can be seamlessly integrated into existing frameworks. This work bridges theoretical principles and practice, offering a new perspective in contrastive learning.

Neural networks necessitate nonlinearities to achieve universal approximability. Traditional activation functions introduce nonlinearities through rigid feature rectifications. Recent self-gated variants improve traditional methods in fitting flexibility by incorporating learnable content-aware factors and non-local dependencies, enabling dynamic adjustments to activation curves via adaptive translation and scaling. While SOTA approaches achieve notable gains in conventional CNN layers, they struggle to enhance Transformer layers, where fine-grained context is inherently modeled, severely reducing the effectiveness of non-local dependencies leveraged in activation processes. We refer to this critical yet unexplored challenge as the **non-local tension** of activation. Drawing on a decision-making perspective, we systematically analyze the origins of the non-local tension problem and explore the initial solution to foster a more discriminative and generalizable neural activation methodology. This is achieved by rethinking how non-local cues are encoded and transformed into adaptive scaling coefficients, which in turn recalibrate the contributions of features to filter updates through neural activation. Grounded in these insights, we present **FleS**, a novel self-gated activation model for discriminative pattern recognition. Extensive experiments on various popular benchmarks validate our interpretable methodology for improving neural activation modeling.

Self-supervised models exhibit a surprising stability in their internal representations. Whereas most prior work treats this stability as a single property, we formalize it as two distinct concepts: **statistical identifiability** (consistency of representations across runs) and **structural identifiability** (alignment of representations with some unobserved ground truth). Recognizing that perfect pointwise identifiability is generally unrealistic for modern representation learning models, we propose new model-agnostic definitions of statistical and structural near-identifiability of representations up to some error tolerance $\epsilon$. Leveraging these definitions, we prove a statistical $\epsilon$-**near-identifiability** result for the representations of models with nonlinear decoders, generalizing existing identifiability theory beyond last-layer representations in e.g. generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) to near-identifiability of the intermediate representations of a broad class of models including (masked) autoencoders (MAEs) and supervised learners. Although these weaker assumptions confer weaker identifiability, we show that independent components analysis (ICA) can resolve much of the remaining linear ambiguity for this class of models, and validate and measure our near-identifiability claims empirically. With additional assumptions on the data-generating process, statistical identifiability extends to structural identifiability, yielding a simple and practical recipe for disentanglement: ICA post-processing of latent representations. On synthetic benchmarks, this approach achieves state-of-the-art disentanglement using a vanilla autoencoder. With a foundation model-scale MAE for cell microscopy, it disentangles biological variation from technical batch effects, substantially improving downstream generalization.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful pretraining strategy to learn transferable representations from unlabeled data. Yet, it remains unclear how long SSL models should be pretrained for such representations to emerge. Contrary to the prevailing heuristic that longer pretraining translates to better downstream performance, we identify a transferability trade-off: across diverse SSL settings, intermediate checkpoints often yield stronger out-of-domain (OOD) generalization, whereas additional pretraining primarily benefits in-domain (ID) accuracy. From this observation, we hypothesize that SSL progresses through learning phases that can be characterized through the lens of critical periods (CP). Prior work on CP has shown that supervised learning models exhibit early phases of high plasticity, followed by a consolidation phase where adaptability declines but task-specific performance keeps increasing. Since traditional CP analysis depends on supervised labels, for SSL we rethink CP in two ways. First, we inject deficits to perturb the pretraining data and measure the quality of learned representations via downstream tasks. Second, to estimate network plasticity during pretraining we compute the Fisher Information matrix on pretext objectives, quantifying the sensitivity of model parameters to the supervisory signal defined by the pretext tasks. We conduct several experiments to demonstrate that SSL models do exhibit their own CP, with CP closure marking a sweet spot where representations are neither underdeveloped nor overfitted to the pretext task. Leveraging these insights, we propose CP-guided checkpoint selection as a mechanism for identifying intermediate checkpoints during SSL that improve OOD transferability. Finally, to balance the transferability trade-off, we propose CP-guided self-distillation, which selectively distills layer representations from the sweet spot (CP closure) checkpoint into their overspecialized counterparts in the final pretrained model.

The explosive growth of large language models (LLMs) has created a vast but opaque landscape: millions of models exist, yet their evolutionary relationships through fine-tuning, distillation, or adaptation are often undocumented or unclear, complicating LLM management. Existing methods are limited by task specificity, fixed model sets, or strict assumptions about tokenizers or architectures. Inspired by biological DNA, we address these limitations by mathematically defining *LLM DNA* as a low-dimensional, bi-Lipschitz representation of functional behavior. We prove that LLM DNA satisfies *inheritance* and *genetic determinism* and establish its existence. Building on this theory, we derive a general, scalable, training-free pipeline for DNA extraction. In experiments across 305 LLMs, DNA aligns with prior studies on limited subsets and achieves superior or competitive performance on various tasks. Beyond these tasks, DNA comparisons uncover previously undocumented relationships among LLMs. We further construct the evolutionary tree of LLMs using phylogenetic algorithms, which align with shifts from encoder-decoder to decoder-only architectures, reflect temporal progression, and reveal distinct evolutionary speeds across LLM families.

A central principle in self-supervised learning (SSL) is to learn data representations that are invariant to semantic-preserving transformations \eg, image representations should remain unchanged under augmentations like cropping or color jitter. While effective for classification, such invariance can suppress transformation-relevant information that is valuable for other tasks. To address this, recent works explore equivariant representation learning, which encourages representations to retain information about the applied transformations. \textcolor{blue}{However, how to effectively incorporate equivariance as an explicit regularizer on top of strong invariance‑based SSL backbones at ImageNet scale remains underexplored.} We conjecture that enforcing invariance and equivariance to the same layer is inherently difficult and, if handled naively, may even hinder learning. To overcome this, we propose soft equivariance regularization (SER), a simple yet scalable method that decouples the two objectives: learning invariant representations via standard SSL, while softly regularizing intermediate features with an equivariance loss. Our approach necessitates neither a transformation label nor its predictive objectives, but operates directly with group actions applied to the intermediate feature maps. We show that this soft equivariance regularization significantly improves the generalization performance of ImageNet-1k pre-training of vision transformers (ViT), leading to stronger downstream classification accuracy in ImageNet and in its variants, including both natural distributions and broad types of common corruptions and perturbations ImageNet-C and ImageNet-P. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/erl-B5CE

Spectral imaging offers promising applications across diverse domains, including medicine and urban scene understanding, and is already established as a critical modality in remote sensing. However, variability in channel dimensionality and captured wavelengths among spectral cameras impede the development of AI-driven methodologies, leading to camera-specific models with limited generalizability and inadequate cross-camera applicability. To address this bottleneck, we introduce CARL, a model for Camera-Agnostic Representation Learning across RGB, multispectral, and hyperspectral imaging modalities. To enable the conversion of a spectral image with any channel dimensionality to a camera-agnostic representation, we introduce a novel spectral encoder, featuring a self-attention-cross-attention mechanism, to distill salient spectral information into learned spectral representations. Spatio-spectral pre-training is achieved with a novel feature-based self-supervision strategy tailored to CARL. Large-scale experiments across the domains of medical imaging, autonomous driving, and satellite imaging demonstrate our model's unique robustness to spectral heterogeneity, outperforming on datasets with simulated and real-world cross-camera spectral variations. The scalability and versatility of the proposed approach position our model as a backbone for future spectral foundation models. Code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/IMSY-DKFZ/CARL.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable and steadily improving performance across a wide range of tasks. However, LLM performance may be highly sensitive to prompt variations especially in scenarios with limited openness or strict output formatting requirements, indicating insufficient robustness. In real-world applications, user prompts provided to LLMs often contain imperfections, which may undermine the quality of the model's responses. To address this issue, previous work has primarily focused on preprocessing prompts, employing external tools or even LLMs to refine prompt formulations in advance. However, these approaches overlook the intrinsic robustness of LLMs, and their reliance on external components introduces additional computational overhead and uncertainty. In this work, we propose a Contrastive Learning-based Inverse Direct Preference Optimization (CoIPO) method that minimizes the discrepancy between the label-aligned logits produced by the model under a clean prompt and its noisy counterpart, and conduct a detailed analysis using mutual information theory. We augment the FLAN dataset by constructing paired prompts, each consisting of a clean prompt and its corresponding noisy version for training. Additionally, to evaluate the effectiveness, we develop NoisyPromptBench, a benchmark enhanced and derived from the existing PromptBench. Experimental results conducted on NoisyPromptBench demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a significant improvement in average accuracy over the current state-of-the-art approaches. The source code of CoIPO, pair-wise FLAN datasets, and NoisyPromptBench have already been released on https://github.com/vegetable-yx/CoIPO.

We propose BioTamperNet, a novel framework for detecting duplicated regions in tampered biomedical images, leveraging affinity-guided attention inspired by State Space Model (SSM) approximations. Existing forensic models, primarily trained on natural images, often underperform on biomedical data where subtle manipulations can compromise experimental validity. To address this, BioTamperNet introduces an affinity-guided self-attention module to capture intra-image similarities and an affinity-guided cross-attention module to model cross-image correspondences. Our design integrates lightweight SSM-inspired linear attention mechanisms to enable efficient, fine-grained localization. Trained end-to-end, BioTamperNet simultaneously identifies tampered regions and their source counterparts. Extensive experiments on the benchmark bio-forensic datasets demonstrate significant improvements over competitive baselines in accurately detecting duplicated regions. All source code and dataset will be publicly available.

Recent studies operationalize self-improvement through coding agents that edit their own codebases, grow a tree of self-modifications through expansion strategies that favor higher software engineering benchmark performance, considering that this implies more promising subsequent self-modifications. However, we identify a mismatch between the agent’s self-improvement potential (metaproductivity) and its coding benchmark performance, namely the \emph{Metaproductivity-Performance~Mismatch}. Inspired by Huxley’s concept of clade, we propose a metric ($\mathrm{CMP}$) that aggregates the benchmark performances of the \emph{descendants} of an agent as an indicator of its potential for self-improvement. We show that the G\"odel Machine, the optimal self-improving machine, is achieved with access to true $\mathrm{CMP}$. We introduce the Huxley-G\"odel Machine (HGM), which, by estimating $\mathrm{CMP}$ and using it as guidance, searches the tree of self-modifications. On SWE-bench Verified and Polyglot, HGM outperforms prior self-improving coding agent search methods while using less wall-clock time. Moreover, the agent optimized by HGM on SWE-bench Verified outperforms SWE-agent, a leading human-engineered open source coding agent on SWE-bench Lite, where SWE-agent ranks the best on the official leaderboard, when both use the GPT-5-mini backbone, demonstrating that HGM self-improvement indeed enhances genuine coding capability.