ICML 2025 论文列表

In large multimodal models (LMMs), the perception of non-language modalities (e.g., visual representations) is usually not on par with the large language models (LLMs)' powerful reasoning capabilities, deterring LMMs' performance on challenging downstream tasks. This weakness has been recently mitigated by replacing the vision encoder with a mixture-of-experts (MoE), which provides rich, multi-granularity, and diverse representations required by different downstream tasks. The performance of multimodal MoE largely depends on its router, which reweights and mixes the representations of different experts for each input. However, we find that the end-to-end trained router does not always produce the optimal routing weights for every test sample. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel and efficient method ''**R**e-**R**outing in **T**est-**T**ime (R2-T2)'' that locally optimizes the vector of routing weights in test-time by moving it toward those vectors of the correctly predicted samples in a neighborhood of the test sample. We propose three R2-T2 strategies with different optimization objectives and neighbor-search spaces. R2-T2 consistently and significantly improves state-of-the-art LMMs' performance on challenging multimodal benchmarks of diverse tasks, without training any parameters in the base model. Our code can be accessed here.

Tree-search-based reasoning methods have significantly enhanced the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) by facilitating the exploration of multiple intermediate reasoning steps, i.e., thoughts. However, these methods suffer from substantial inference latency, as they have to generate numerous reasoning thoughts, severely limiting LLM applicability. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Speculative Search (SpecSearch) framework that significantly accelerates LLM reasoning by optimizing thought generation. Specifically, SpecSearch utilizes a small model to strategically collaborate with a large model at both thought and token levels, efficiently generating high-quality reasoning thoughts. The major pillar of SpecSearch is a novel quality-preserving rejection mechanism, which effectively filters out thoughts whose quality falls below that of the large model's outputs. Moreover, we show that SpecSearch preserves comparable reasoning quality to the large model. Experiments on both the Qwen and Llama models demonstrate that SpecSearch significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 2.12$\times$ speedup with comparable reasoning quality.

Little is known about the training dynamics of equivariant neural networks, in particular how it compares to data augmented training of their non-equivariant counterparts. Recently, neural tangent kernels (NTKs) have emerged as a powerful tool to analytically study the training dynamics of wide neural networks. In this work, we take an important step towards a theoretical understanding of training dynamics of equivariant models by deriving neural tangent kernels for a broad class of equivariant architectures based on group convolutions. As a demonstration of the capabilities of our framework, we show an interesting relationship between data augmentation and group convolutional networks. Specifically, we prove that they share the same expected prediction over initializations at all training times and even off the data manifold. In this sense, they have the same training dynamics. We demonstrate in numerical experiments that this still holds approximately for finite-width ensembles. By implementing equivariant NTKs for roto-translations in the plane ($G=C_{n}\ltimes\mathbb{R}^{2}$) and 3d rotations ($G=\mathrm{SO}(3)$), we show that equivariant NTKs outperform their non-equivariant counterparts as kernel predictors for histological image classification and quantum mechanical property prediction.

Label distribution learning (LDL) is an effective method to predict the relative label description degree (a.k.a. label distribution) of a sample. However, the label distribution is not a complete representation of an instance because it overlooks the absolute intensity of each label. Specifically, it's impossible to obtain the total description degree of hidden labels that not in the label space, which leads to the loss of information and confusion in instances. To solve the above problem, we come up with a new concept named background concentration to serve as the absolute description degree term of the label distribution and introduce it into the LDL process, forming the improved paradigm of concentration distribution learning. Moreover, we propose a novel model by probabilistic methods and neural networks to learn label distributions and background concentrations from existing LDL datasets. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed approach is able to extract background concentrations from label distributions while producing more accurate prediction results than the state-of-the-art LDL methods. The code is available in https://github.com/seutjw/CDL-LD.

Developing generative models to create or conditionally create symbolic music presents unique challenges due to the combination of limited data availability and the need for high precision in note pitch. To address these challenges, we introduce an efficient Fine-Grained Guidance (FGG) approach within diffusion models. FGG guides the diffusion models to generate music that aligns more closely with the control and intent of expert composers, which is critical to improve the accuracy, listenability, and quality of generated music. This approach empowers diffusion models to excel in advanced applications such as improvisation, and interactive music creation. We derive theoretical characterizations for both the challenges in symbolic music generation and the effects of the FGG approach. We provide numerical experiments and subjective evaluation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We have published a demo page to showcase performances, which enables real-time interactive generation.

Video generation models have made significant progress in simulating future states, showcasing their potential as world simulators in embodied scenarios. However, existing models often lack robust understanding, limiting their ability to perform multi-step predictions or handle Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose the Reflection of Generation (RoG), a set of intermediate reasoning strategies designed to enhance video prediction. It leverages the complementary strengths of pre-trained vision-language and video generation models, enabling them to function as a world model in embodied scenarios. To support RoG, we introduce Embodied Video Anticipation Benchmark(EVA-Bench), a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates embodied world models across diverse tasks and scenarios, utilizing both in-domain and OOD datasets. Building on this foundation, we devise a world model, Embodied Video Anticipator (EVA), that follows a multistage training paradigm to generate high-fidelity video frames and apply an autoregressive strategy to enable adaptive generalization for longer video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of EVA in various downstream tasks like video generation and robotics, thereby paving the way for large-scale pre-trained models in real-world video prediction applications. The video demos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/icml-eva.

The proliferation of open-sourced Large Language Models (LLMs) and diverse downstream tasks necessitates efficient model selection, given the impracticality of fine-tuning all candidates due to computational constraints. Despite the recent advances in LLM selection, a fundamental research question largely remains nascent: *how can we model the dynamic behaviors of LLMs during fine-tuning, thereby enhancing our understanding of their generalization performance across diverse downstream tasks?* In this work, we propose a novel theoretical framework that provides a proper lens to assess the generalization capabilities of LLMs, thereby enabling accurate and efficient LLM selection for downstream applications. In particular, we first derive a *PAC-Bayesian Generalization Bound* that unveils fine-tuning dynamics of LLMs and then introduce *LensLLM*, a Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK)-based Rectified Scaling Model that enables accurate performance predictions across diverse tasks while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive empirical results on 3 large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves up to 91.1% accuracy and reduces up to 88.5% computational cost in LLM selection, outperforming 5 state-of-the-art methods. We open-source our proposed *LensLLM* model and corresponding results at [LensLLM.io](https://github.com/Susan571/LENSLLM.git).

The improved semantic understanding of vision-language pretrained (VLP) models has made it increasingly difficult to protect publicly posted images from being exploited by search engines and other similar tools. In this context, this paper seeks to protect users' privacy by implementing defenses at the image compression stage to prevent exploitation. Specifically, we propose a flexible coding method, termed Privacy-Shielded Image Compression (PSIC), that can produce bitstreams with multiple decoding options. By default, the bitstream is decoded to preserve satisfactory perceptual quality while preventing interpretation by VLP models. Our method also retains the original image compression functionality. With a customizable input condition, the proposed scheme can reconstruct the image that preserves its full semantic information. A Conditional Latent Trigger Generation (CLTG) module is proposed to produce bias information based on customizable conditions to guide the decoding process into different reconstructed versions, and an Uncertainty-Aware Encryption-Oriented (UAEO) optimization function is designed to leverage the soft labels inferred from the target VLP model's uncertainty on the training data. This paper further incorporates an adaptive multi-objective optimization strategy to obtain improved encrypting performance and perceptual quality simultaneously within a unified training process. The proposed scheme is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated into most existing Learned Image Compression (LIC) models. Extensive experiments across multiple downstream tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our design.

Although Multi-Vector Retrieval (MVR) has achieved the state of the art on many information retrieval (IR) tasks, its performance highly depends on how to decompose queries into smaller pieces, say phrases or tokens. However, optimizing query decomposition for MVR performance is not end-to-end differentiable. Even worse, jointly solving this problem and training the downstream retrieval-based systems, say RAG systems could be highly inefficient. To overcome these challenges, we propose Performance-Oriented Query Decomposer (POQD), a novel query decomposition framework for MVR. POQD leverages one LLM for query decomposition and searches the optimal prompt with an LLM-based optimizer. We further propose an end-to-end training algorithm to alternatively optimize the prompt for query decomposition and the downstream models. This algorithm can achieve superior MVR performance at a reasonable training cost as our theoretical analysis suggests. POQD can be integrated seamlessly into arbitrary retrieval-based systems such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Extensive empirical studies on representative RAG-based QA tasks show that POQD outperforms existing query decomposition strategies in both retrieval performance and end-to-end QA accuracy. POQD is available at https://github.com/PKU-SDS-lab/POQD-ICML25.

Diffusion models have demonstrated significant potential in speech synthesis tasks, including text-to-speech (TTS) and voice cloning. However, their iterative denoising processes are computationally intensive, and previous distillation attempts have shown consistent quality degradation. Moreover, existing TTS approaches are limited by non-differentiable components or iterative sampling that prevent true end-to-end optimization with perceptual metrics. We introduce DMOSpeech, a distilled diffusion-based TTS model that uniquely achieves both faster inference and superior performance compared to its teacher model. By enabling direct gradient pathways to all model components, we demonstrate the first successful end-to-end optimization of differentiable metrics in TTS, incorporating Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss and Speaker Verification (SV) loss. Our comprehensive experiments, validated through extensive human evaluation, show significant improvements in naturalness, intelligibility, and speaker similarity while reducing inference time by orders of magnitude. This work establishes a new framework for aligning speech synthesis with human auditory preferences through direct metric optimization. The audio samples are available at https://dmospeech.github.io/demo

In many classification applications, the prediction of a deep neural network (DNN) based classifier needs to be accompanied by some confidence indication. Two popular approaches for that aim are: 1) *Calibration*: modifies the classifier's softmax values such that the maximal value better estimates the correctness probability; and 2) *Conformal Prediction* (CP): produces a prediction set of candidate labels that contains the true label with a user-specified probability, guaranteeing marginal coverage but not, e.g., per class coverage. In practice, both types of indications are desirable, yet, so far the interplay between them has not been investigated. Focusing on the ubiquitous *Temperature Scaling* (TS) calibration, we start this paper with an extensive empirical study of its effect on prominent CP methods. We show that while TS calibration improves the class-conditional coverage of adaptive CP methods, surprisingly, it negatively affects their prediction set sizes. Motivated by this behavior, we explore the effect of TS on CP *beyond its calibration application* and reveal an intriguing trend under which it allows to trade prediction set size and conditional coverage of adaptive CP methods. Then, we establish a mathematical theory that explains the entire non-monotonic trend. Finally, based on our experiments and theory, we offer guidelines for practitioners to effectively combine adaptive CP with calibration, aligned with user-defined goals.

Large language models (LLMs) are regularly evaluated using benchmark datasets. But what justifies making inferences about an LLM's capabilities based on its answers to a curated set of questions? This paper first introduces a formal framework to address this question. The key is to note that the benchmarks used to test LLMs---such as AP exams---are also those used to test people. However, this raises an implication: such benchmarks are only valid tests if LLMs misunderstand concepts in ways that mirror human misunderstandings. Otherwise, success on benchmarks only demonstrates **potemkin understanding:** the illusion of understanding driven by answers irreconcilable with how any human would interpret a concept. We present two procedures for quantifying the existence of potemkins: one using a specially designed benchmark in three domains, the other using a general procedure that provides a lower-bound on their prevalence. We find that potemkins are ubiquitous across models, tasks, and domains. We also find that these failures reflect not just incorrect understanding, but deeper internal incoherence in concept representations.

Bilevel optimization is a powerful tool for many machine learning problems, such as hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. Estimating hypergradients (also known as implicit gradients) is crucial for developing gradient-based methods for bilevel optimization. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient technique for incorporating curvature information into the approximation of hypergradients and present a novel algorithmic framework based on the resulting enhanced hypergradient computation. We provide convergence rate guarantees for the proposed framework in both deterministic and stochastic scenarios, particularly showing improved computational complexity over popular gradient-based methods in the deterministic setting. This improvement in complexity arises from a careful exploitation of the hypergradient structure and the inexact Newton method. In addition to the theoretical speedup, numerical experiments demonstrate the significant practical performance benefits of incorporating curvature information.

Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) enable high-quality 3D scene reconstruction from RGB images. Many studies extend this paradigm for language-driven open-vocabulary scene understanding. However, most of them simply project 2D semantic features onto 3D Gaussians and overlook a fundamental gap between 2D and 3D understanding: a 3D object may exhibit various semantics from different viewpoints—a phenomenon we term **view-dependent semantics**. To address this challenge, we propose **LaGa** (**La**nguage **Ga**ussians), which establishes cross-view semantic connections by decomposing the 3D scene into objects. Then, it constructs view-aggregated semantic representations by clustering semantic descriptors and reweighting them based on multi-view semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaGa effectively captures key information from view-dependent semantics, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of 3D scenes. Notably, under the same settings, LaGa achieves a significant improvement of **+18.7\% mIoU** over the previous SOTA on the LERF-OVS dataset. Our code is available at: https://github.com/https://github.com/SJTU-DeepVisionLab/LaGa.

With the widespread deployment of long-context large language models (LLMs), there has been a growing demand for efficient support of high-throughput inference. However, as the key-value (KV) cache expands with the sequence length, the increasing memory footprint and the need to access it for decoding both result in low throughput when serving long-context LLMs. While various dynamic sparse attention methods have been proposed to accelerate inference while maintaining generation quality, they either fail to sufficiently reduce GPU memory usage or introduce significant decoding latency by offloading the KV cache to the CPU. We present ShadowKV, a high-throughput long-context LLM inference system that stores the low-rank key cache and offloads the value cache to reduce the memory footprint for larger batch sizes and longer sequences. To minimize decoding latency, ShadowKV employs an accurate KV selection strategy that reconstructs minimal sparse KV pairs on-the-fly. By evaluating ShadowKV on benchmarks like RULER, LongBench, and models such as Llama-3.1-8B and GLM-4-9B-1M, we demonstrate that it achieves up to 6$\times$ larger batch sizes and 3.04$\times$ higher throughput on an A100 GPU without sacrificing accuracy, even surpassing the performance achievable with infinite batch size under the assumption of infinite GPU memory.

Recent advances have highlighted the benefits of scaling language models to enhance performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. However, these approaches still face limitations in effectiveness and efficiency when applied to domain-specific tasks, particularly for small edge-side models. We propose the LoRA-Gen framework, which utilizes a large cloud-side model to generate LoRA parameters for edge-side models based on task descriptions. By employing the reparameterization technique, we merge the LoRA parameters into the edge-side model to achieve flexible specialization. Our method facilitates knowledge transfer between models while significantly improving the inference efficiency of the specialized model by reducing the input context length. Without specialized training, LoRA-Gen outperforms conventional LoRA fine-tuning, which achieves competitive accuracy and a 2.1x speedup with TinyLLaMA-1.1B in reasoning tasks. Besides, our method delivers a compress ratio of 10.1x with Gemma-2B on intelligent agent tasks.

Recent advances in vision backbones have yielded powerful and diverse visual and video encoders. Yet, current Video Large Language Models encode visual inputs using an encoder from a single backbone family, limiting the amount and type of visual information they can process. We propose MERV, a Multi-Encoder Video Representation, which utilizes multiple encoders for a comprehensive video representation. To optimize heterogeneous features from a broad spectrum of encoders and ensure efficient and coherent feature integration, MERV first aligns encoder features spatio-temporally, then projects them into a unified structure, and finally fuses them through cross-attention. Under fair comparison, MERV achieves up to 4.62% higher accuracy than its base model, while introducing minimal extra parameters and training faster than equivalent single-encoder methods after parallelizing visual processing. Qualitative analysis shows MERV successfully captures and integrates domain knowledge from each encoder, opening new possibilities for scaling enhanced video understanding.

Anomaly detection is essential for the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. Current methods often focus on detection accuracy but neglect response time, which is critical in time-sensitive driving scenarios. In this paper, we introduce real-time anomaly detection for autonomous driving, prioritizing both minimal response time and high accuracy. We propose a novel multimodal asynchronous hybrid network that combines event streams from event cameras with image data from RGB cameras. Our network utilizes the high temporal resolution of event cameras through an asynchronous Graph Neural Network and integrates it with spatial features extracted by a CNN from RGB images. This combination effectively captures both the temporal dynamics and spatial details of the driving environment, enabling swift and precise anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our approach outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and response time, achieving millisecond-level real-time performance.

Estimating optimal transport maps between two distributions from respective samples is an important element for many machine learning methods. To do so, rather than extending discrete transport maps, it has been shown that estimating the Brenier potential of the transport problem and obtaining a transport map through its gradient is near minimax optimal for smooth problems. In this paper, we investigate the private estimation of such potentials and transport maps with respect to the distribution samples. We propose a differentially private transport map estimator with $L^2$ error at most $n^{-1} \vee n^{-\frac{2 \alpha}{2 \alpha - 2 + d}} \vee (n\epsilon)^{-\frac{2 \alpha}{2 \alpha + d}} $ up do polylog terms where $n$ is the sample size, $\epsilon$ is the desired level of privacy, $\alpha$ is the smoothness of the true transport map, and $d$ is the dimension of the feature space. We also provide a lower bound for the problem.