ICML 2025 论文列表

The multi-agent linear bandit setting is a well-known setting for which designing efficient collaboration between agents remains challenging. This paper studies the impact of data sharing among agents on regret minimization. Unlike most existing approaches, our contribution does not rely on any assumptions on the bandit parameters structure. Our main result formalizes the trade-off between the bias and uncertainty of the bandit parameter estimation for efficient collaboration. This result is the cornerstone of the Bandit Adaptive Sample Sharing (BASS) algorithm, whose efficiency over the current state-of-the-art is validated through both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, when agents' parameters display a cluster structure, our algorithm accurately recovers them.

Recent explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods for time series primarily estimate point-wise attribution magnitudes, while overlooking the directional impact on predictions, leading to suboptimal identification of significant points. Our analysis shows that conventional Integrated Gradients (IG) effectively capture critical points with both positive and negative impacts on predictions. However, current evaluation metrics fail to assess this capability, as they inadvertently cancel out opposing feature contributions. To address this limitation, we propose novel evaluation metrics—Cumulative Prediction Difference (CPD) and Cumulative Prediction Preservation (CPP)—to systematically assess whether attribution methods accurately identify significant positive and negative points in time series XAI. Under these metrics, conventional IG outperforms recent counterparts. However, directly applying IG to time series data may lead to suboptimal outcomes, as generated paths ignore temporal relationships and introduce out-of-distribution samples. To overcome these challenges, we introduce TIMING, which enhances IG by incorporating temporal awareness while maintaining its theoretical properties. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world time series benchmarks demonstrate that TIMING outperforms existing time series XAI baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/drumpt/TIMING.

Large language model training with 8-bit floating point (FP8) formats promises significant efficiency improvements, but reduced numerical precision makes training challenging. It is currently possible to train in FP8 only if one is willing to tune various hyperparameters, reduce model scale, or accept the overhead of computing dynamic scale factors. We demonstrate simple, scalable FP8 training that requires no dynamic scaling factors or special hyperparameters, even at large model sizes. Our method, \textit{µnit Scaling (µS)}, also enables simple hyperparameter transfer across model widths, matched numerics across training and inference, and other desirable properties. µnit Scaling is straightforward to implement, consisting of a set of minimal interventions based on a first-principles analysis of transformer operations. We validate our method by training models with parameters ranging from 1B to 13B, performing all hidden linear layer computations in FP8. We achieve quality equal to higher-precision baselines while also training up to 33% faster.

Neural Processes (NPs) are deep probabilistic models that represent stochastic processes by conditioning their prior distributions on a set of context points. Despite their advantages in uncertainty estimation for complex distributions, NPs enforce parameterization coupling between the conditional prior model and the posterior model. We show that this coupling amounts to prior misspecification and revisit the NP objective to address this issue. More specifically, we propose Rényi Neural Processes (RNP), a method that replaces the standard KL divergence with the Rényi divergence, dampening the effects of the misspecified prior during posterior updates. We validate our approach across multiple benchmarks including regression and image inpainting tasks, and show significant performance improvements of RNPs in real-world problems. Our extensive experiments show consistently better log-likelihoods over state-of-the-art NP models.

Although directed graphs (digraphs) offer strong modeling capabilities for complex topological systems, existing DiGraph Neural Networks (DiGNNs) struggle to fully capture the concealed rich structural information. This data-level limitation results in model-level sub-optimal predictive performance and underscores the necessity of further exploring the potential correlations between the directed edges (topology) and node profiles (features and labels) from a data-centric perspective, thereby empowering model-centric neural networks with stronger encoding capabilities. In this paper, we propose **E**ntropy-driven **D**igraph knowl**E**dge distillatio**N** (EDEN), which can serve as a data-centric digraph learning paradigm or a model-agnostic hot-and-plug data-centric Knowledge Distillation (KD) module. EDEN implements data-centric machine learning by constructing a coarse-grained Hierarchical Knowledge Tree (HKT) using proposed hierarchical encoding theory, and refining HKT through mutual information analysis of node profiles to guide knowledge distillation during training. As a general framework, EDEN naturally extends to undirected graphs and consistently delivers strong performance. Extensive experiments on 14 (di)graph datasets—spanning both homophily and heterophily settings—and across four downstream tasks show that EDEN achieves SOTA results and significantly enhances existing (Di)GNNs.

We consider a distributed learning problem, where agents minimize a global objective function by exchanging information over a network. Our approach has two distinct features: (i) It substantially reduces communication by triggering communication only when necessary, and (ii) it is agnostic to the data-distribution among the different agents. We can therefore guarantee convergence even if the local data-distributions of the agents are arbitrarily distinct. We analyze the convergence rate of the algorithm both in convex and nonconvex settings and derive accelerated convergence rates in a convex setting. We also characterize the effect of communication failures and demonstrate that our algorithm is robust to communication failures. The article concludes by presenting numerical results from distributed learning tasks on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. The experiments underline communication savings of 35\% or more due to the event-based communication strategy, show resilience towards heterogeneous data-distributions, and highlight that our approach outperforms common baselines such as FedAvg, FedProx, SCAFFOLD and FedADMM.

To design reward that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing models using reinforcement learning algorithms. However, existing RLHF methods often misinterpret trajectories as being generated by an optimal policy, causing inaccurate likelihood estimation and suboptimal learning. To address this, we propose Policy-labeled Preference Learning (PPL) within the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) framework, which resolves these likelihood mismatch problems by modeling human preferences with regret, reflecting the efficiency of executed policies. Additionally, we introduce a contrastive KL regularization term derived from regret-based principles to enhance sequential contrastive learning. Experiments in high-dimensional continuous control environments demonstrate PPL's significant improvements in offline RLHF performance and its effectiveness in online settings.

Robustness to outliers is important in machine learning. Many classical problems, including subspace embedding, clustering, and low-rank approximation, lack scalable, outlier-resilient algorithms. This paper considers machine learning problems of the form $\min_{x\in \mathbb{R}^d} F(x)$, where $F(x)=\sum_{i=1}^n F_i(x)$, and their robust counterparts $\min_{x\in\mathbb{R}^d} F^{(m)}(x)$, where $F^{(m)}(x)$ denotes the sum of all but the $m$ largest $F_i(x)$ values. We develop a general framework for constructing $\epsilon$-coresets for such robust problems, where an $\epsilon$-coreset is a weighted subset of functions $\{F_1(x),\dots,F_n(x)\}$ that provides a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation to $F(x)$. Specifically, if the original problem $F$ has total sensitivity $T$ and admits a vanilla $\epsilon$-coreset of size $S$, our algorithm constructs an $\epsilon$-coreset of size $\tilde{O}(\frac{mT}{\epsilon})+S$ for the robust objective $F^{(m)}$. This coreset size can be shown to be near-tight for $\ell_2$ subspace embedding. Our coreset algorithm has scalable running time and leads to new or improved algorithms for the robust optimization problems. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our coresets outperform uniform sampling on real-world data sets.

Flow matching models have emerged as a powerful method for generative modeling on domains like images or videos, and even on irregular or unstructured data like 3D point clouds or even protein structures. These models are commonly trained in two stages: first, a data compressor is trained, and in a subsequent training stage a flow matching generative model is trained in the latent space of the data compressor. This two-stage paradigm sets obstacles for unifying models across data domains, as hand-crafted compressors architectures are used for different data modalities. To this end, we introduce INRFlow, a domain-agnostic approach to learn flow matching transformers directly in ambient space. Drawing inspiration from INRs, we introduce a conditionally independent point-wise training objective that enables INRFlow to make predictions continuously in coordinate space. Our empirical results demonstrate that INRFlow effectively handles different data modalities such as images, 3D point clouds and protein structure data, achieving strong performance in different domains and outperforming comparable approaches. INRFlow is a promising step towards domain-agnostic flow matching generative models that can be trivially adopted in different data domains.

We investigate an emerging setup in which a small, on-device language model (LM) with access to local data collaborates with a frontier, cloud-hosted LM to solve real-world tasks involving financial, medical, and scientific reasoning over long documents. *Can a local-remote collaboration reduce cloud inference costs while preserving quality?* First, we consider a naïve collaboration protocol, coined MINION, where the local and remote models simply chat back and forth. Because only the local model ingests the full context, this protocol reduces cloud costs by 30.4x, but recovers only 87% of the performance of the frontier model. We identify two key limitations of this protocol: the local model struggles to (1) follow the remote model's multi-step instructions and (2) reason over long contexts. Motivated by these observations, we propose MINIONS, a protocol in which the remote model decomposes the task into easier subtasks over shorter chunks of the document, that are executed locally in parallel. MINIONS reduces costs by 5.7× on average while recovering 97.9% of the remote-only performance. Our analysis reveals several key design choices that influence the trade-off between cost and performance in local-remote systems.

Evolutionary model merging enables the creation of high-performing multi-task models but remains computationally prohibitive for consumer hardware. We introduce MERGE$^3$, an efficient framework that makes evolutionary merging of Large Language Models (LLMs) feasible on a single GPU by reducing fitness computation costs 50× while retaining a large fraction of the original performance. MERGE$^3$ achieves this by **E**xtracting a reduced dataset for evaluation, **E**stimating model abilities using Item Response Theory (IRT), and **E**volving optimal merges via IRT-based performance estimators. Our method enables state-of-the-art multilingual and cross-lingual merging, transferring knowledge across languages with significantly lower computational overhead. We provide theoretical guarantees and an open-source library, democratizing high-quality model merging.

Given how large parts of publicly available text are crawled to pretrain large language models (LLMs), data creators increasingly worry about the inclusion of their proprietary data for model training without attribution or licensing. Their concerns are also shared by benchmark curators whose test-sets might be compromised. In this paper, we present STAMP, a framework for detecting dataset membership—i.e., determining the inclusion of a dataset in the pretraining corpora of LLMs. Given an original piece of content, our proposal involves first generating multiple rephrases, each embedding a watermark with a unique secret key. One version is to be released publicly, while others are to be kept private. Subsequently, creators can compare model likelihoods between public and private versions using paired statistical tests to prove membership. We show that our framework can successfully detect contamination across four benchmarks which appear only once in the training data and constitute less than 0.001% of the total tokens, outperforming several contamination detection and dataset inference baselines. We verify that STAMP preserves both the semantic meaning and utility of the original data. We apply STAMP to two real-world scenarios to confirm the inclusion of paper abstracts and blog articles in the pretraining corpora.

Traditional video-to-audio generation techniques primarily focus on perspective video and non-spatial audio, often missing the spatial cues necessary for accurately representing sound sources in 3D environments. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel task, \textbf{360V2SA}, to generate spatial audio from 360-degree videos, specifically producing First-order Ambisonics (FOA) audio - a standard format for representing 3D spatial audio that captures sound directionality and enables realistic 3D audio reproduction. We first create \textbf{Sphere360}, a novel dataset tailored for this task that is curated from real-world data. We also design an efficient semi-automated pipeline for collecting and cleaning paired video-audio data. To generate spatial audio from 360-degree video, we propose a novel framework \textbf{OmniAudio}, which leverages self-supervised pre-training using both spatial audio data (in FOA format) and large-scale non-spatial data. Furthermore, OmniAudio features a dual-branch framework that utilizes both panoramic and perspective video inputs to capture comprehensive local and global information from 360-degree videos. Experimental results demonstrate that OmniAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance across both objective and subjective metrics on Sphere360. Code and datasets are available at~\href{https://github.com/liuhuadai/OmniAudio}{\texttt{github.com/liuhuadai/OmniAudio}}. The project website is available at \href{https://OmniAudio-360V2SA.github.io}{\texttt{OmniAudio-360V2SA.github.io}}.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel in computer vision tasks, especially, few-shot learning (FSL), which is increasingly important for generalizing from limited examples. However, DNNs are computationally expensive with scalability issues in real world. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), with their event-driven nature and low energy consumption, are particularly efficient in processing sparse and dynamic data, though they still encounter difficulties in capturing complex spatiotemporal features and performing accurate cross-class comparisons. To further enhance the performance and efficiency of SNNs in few-shot learning, we propose a few-shot learning framework based on SNNs, which combines a self-feature extractor module and a cross-feature contrastive module to refine feature representation and reduce power consumption. We apply the combination of temporal efficient training loss and InfoNCE loss to optimize the temporal dynamics of spike trains and enhance the discriminative power. Experimental results show that the proposed FSL-SNN significantly improves the classification performance on the neuromorphic dataset N-Omniglot, and also achieves competitive performance to ANNs on static datasets such as CUB and miniImageNet with low power consumption.

Designing experiments for causal effect estimation remains an enduring topic in both machine learning and statistics. While much of the existing statistical literature focuses on using central limit theorems to analyze asymptotic properties of estimators, a parallel line of research has emerged around theoretical tools that provide finite-sample error bounds, offering performance on par with—or superior to—the asymptotic approaches. These finite-sample results are especially relevant in active sampling settings where the sample size is limited (for instance, under privacy or cost constraints). In this paper, we develop a finite-sample estimator with sample complexity analysis and extend its applicability to social networks. Through simulations and real-world experiments, we show that our method achieves higher estimation accuracy with fewer samples than traditional estimators endowed with asymptotic normality and other estimators backed by finite-sample guarantees.

Deep neural networks often develop spurious bias, reliance on correlations between non-essential features and classes for predictions. For example, a model may identify objects based on frequently co-occurring backgrounds rather than intrinsic features, resulting in degraded performance on data lacking these correlations. Existing mitigation approaches typically depend on external annotations of spurious correlations, which may be difficult to obtain and are not relevant to the spurious bias in a model. In this paper, we take a step towards self-guided mitigation of spurious bias by proposing NeuronTune, a post hoc method that directly intervenes in a model's internal decision process. Our method probes in a model's latent embedding space to identify and regulate neurons that lead to spurious prediction behaviors. We theoretically justify our approach and show that it brings the model closer to an unbiased one. Unlike previous methods, NeuronTune operates without requiring spurious correlation annotations, making it a practical and effective tool for improving model robustness. Experiments across different architectures and data modalities demonstrate that our method significantly mitigates spurious bias in a self-guided way.

Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse engineer the computation performed by a neural network in terms of its internal components. Although there is a growing body of research on mechanistic interpretation of neural networks, the notion of a *mechanistic interpretation* itself is often ad-hoc. Inspired by the notion of abstract interpretation from the program analysis literature that aims to develop approximate semantics for programs, we give a set of axioms that formally characterize a mechanistic interpretation as a description that approximately captures the semantics of the neural network under analysis in a compositional manner. We demonstrate the applicability of these axioms for validating mechanistic interpretations on an existing, well-known interpretability study as well as on a new case study involving a Transformer-based model trained to solve the well-known 2-SAT problem.

Understanding generalization of overparametrized models remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning. The literature mostly studies generalization from an interpolation point of view, taking convergence towards a global minimum of the training loss for granted. This interpolation paradigm does not seem valid for complex tasks such as in-context learning or diffusion. It has instead been empirically observed that the trained models go from global minima to spurious local minima of the training loss as the number of training samples becomes larger than some level we call optimization threshold. This paper explores theoretically this phenomenon in the context of two-layer ReLU networks. We demonstrate that, despite overparametrization, networks might converge towards simpler solutions rather than interpolating training data, which leads to a drastic improvement on the test loss. Our analysis relies on the so called early alignment phase, during which neurons align toward specific directions. This directional alignment leads to a simplicity bias, wherein the network approximates the ground truth model without converging to the global minimum of the training loss. Our results suggest this bias, resulting in an optimization threshold from which interpolation is not reached anymore, is beneficial and enhances the generalization of trained models.

Understanding the decision-making processes of large language models is critical given their widespread applications. To achieve this, we aim to connect a formal mathematical framework—zigzag persistence from topological data analysis —with practical and easily applicable algorithms. Zigzag persistence is particularly effective for characterizing data as it dynamically transforms across model layers. Within this framework, we introduce topological descriptors that measure how topological features, $p$-dimensional holes, persist and evolve throughout the layers. Unlike methods that assess each layer individually and then aggregate the results, our approach directly tracks the full evolutionary path of these features. This offers a statistical perspective on how prompts are rearranged and their relative positions changed in the representation space, providing insights into the system’s operation as an integrated whole. To demonstrate the expressivity and applicability of our framework, we highlight how sensitive these descriptors are to different models and a variety of datasets. As a showcase application to a downstream task, we use zigzag persistence to establish a criterion for layer pruning, achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art methods while preserving the system-level perspective.