ICML 2025 论文列表

Pre-trained **V**ision-**L**anguage **M**odels (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot classification abilities, demonstrating great potential for generating weakly supervised labels. Unfortunately, existing weakly supervised learning methods are short of ability in generating accurate labels via VLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised labeling setting, namely **T**rue-**F**alse **L**abels (TFLs) which can achieve high accuracy when generated by VLMs. The TFL indicates whether an instance belongs to the label, which is randomly and uniformly sampled from the candidate label set. Specifically, we theoretically derive a risk-consistent estimator to explore and utilize the conditional probability distribution information of TFLs. Besides, we propose a convolutional-based **M**ulti-modal **P**rompt **R**etrieving (MRP) method to bridge the gap between the knowledge of VLMs and target learning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TFL setting and MRP learning method. The code to reproduce the experiments is at https://github.com/Tranquilxu/TMP.

The Metric Nearness Problem involves restoring a non-metric matrix to its closest metric-compliant form, addressing issues such as noise, missing values, and data inconsistencies. Ensuring metric properties, particularly the $O(N^3)$ triangle inequality constraints, presents significant computational challenges, especially in large-scale scenarios where traditional methods suffer from high time and space complexity. We propose a novel solution based on the tropical inner product (max-plus operation), which we prove satisfies the triangle inequality for non-negative real matrices. By transforming the problem into a continuous optimization task, our method directly minimizes the distance to the target matrix. This approach not only restores metric properties but also generates metric-preserving embeddings, enabling real-time updates and reducing computational and storage overhead for downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves up to 60× speed improvements over state-of-the-art approaches, and efficiently scales from $1e4 \times 1e4$ to $1e5 \times 1e5$ matrices with significantly lower memory usage.

Label completion serves as a preprocessing approach to handling the sparse crowdsourced label matrix problem, significantly boosting the effectiveness of the downstream label aggregation. In recent advances, worker modeling has been proved to be a powerful strategy to further improve the performance of label completion. However, in real-world scenarios, workers typically annotate only a few instances, leading to insufficient worker modeling and thus limiting the improvement of label completion. To address this issue, we propose a novel transfer learning-based label completion (TLLC) method. Specifically, we first identify all high-confidence instances from the whole crowdsourced data as a source domain and use it to pretrain a Siamese network. The abundant annotated instances in the source domain provide essential knowledge for worker modeling. Then, we transfer the pretrained network to the target domain with the instances annotated by each worker separately, ensuring worker modeling captures unique characteristics of each worker. Finally, we leverage the new embeddings learned by the transferred network to complete each worker’s missing labels. Extensive experiments on several widely used real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TLLC. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/jiangliangxiao/TLLC.

Quantum machine learning models incorporating data re-uploading circuits have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional expressivity and trainability. However, their ability to generate accurate predictions on unseen data, referred to as the predictive performance, remains insufficiently investigated. This study reveals a fundamental limitation in predictive performance when deep encoding layers are employed within the data re-uploading model. Concretely, we theoretically demonstrate that when processing high-dimensional data with limited-qubit data re-uploading models, their predictive performance progressively degenerates to near random-guessing levels as the number of encoding layers increases. In this context, the repeated data uploading cannot mitigate the performance degradation. These findings are validated through experiments on both synthetic linearly separable datasets and real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate that when processing high-dimensional data, the quantum data re-uploading models should be designed with wider circuit architectures rather than deeper and narrower ones.

Data imbalance is a common factor hindering classifier performance. Data-level approaches for imbalanced learning, such as resampling, often lead to information loss or generative errors. Building on theoretical studies of imbalance ratio in binary classification, it is found that adding suitable label noise can adjust biased decision boundaries and improve classifier performance. This paper proposes the Label-Noise-based Re-balancing (LNR) approach to solve imbalanced learning by employing a novel design of an asymmetric label noise model. In contrast to other data-level methods, LNR alleviates the issues of informative loss and generative errors and can be integrated seamlessly with any classifier or algorithm-level method. We validated the superiority of LNR on synthetic and real-world datasets. Our work opens a new avenue for imbalanced learning, highlighting the potential of beneficial label noise.

Many systems contain latent variables that make their dynamics partially unidentifiable or cause distribution shifts in the observed statistics between offline and online data. However, existing control techniques often assume access to complete dynamics or perfect simulators with fully observable states, which are necessary to verify whether the system remains within a safe set (forward invariance) or safe actions are consistently feasible at all times. To address this limitation, we propose a technique for designing probabilistic safety certificates for systems with latent variables. A key technical enabler is the formulation of invariance conditions in probability space, which can be constructed using observed statistics in the presence of distribution shifts due to latent variables. We use this invariance condition to construct a safety certificate that can be implemented efficiently in real-time control. The proposed safety certificate can continuously find feasible actions that control long-term risk to stay within tolerance. Stochastic safe control and (causal) reinforcement learning have been studied in isolation until now. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed work is the first to use causal reinforcement learning to quantify long-term risk for the design of safety certificates. This integration enables safety certificates to efficiently ensure long-term safety in the presence of latent variables. The effectiveness of the proposed safety certificate is demonstrated in numerical simulations.

Diffusion models, widely recognized for their success in generative tasks, have not yet been applied to clustering. We introduce Clustering via Diffusion (CLUDI), a self-supervised framework that combines the generative power of diffusion models with pre-trained Vision Transformer features to achieve robust and accurate clustering. CLUDI is trained via a teacher–student paradigm: the teacher uses stochastic diffusion-based sampling to produce diverse cluster assignments, which the student refines into stable predictions. This stochasticity acts as a novel data augmentation strategy, enabling CLUDI to uncover intricate structures in high-dimensional data. Extensive evaluations on challenging datasets demonstrate that CLUDI achieves state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised classification, setting new benchmarks in clustering robustness and adaptability to complex data distributions.

Recent advances in deep learning rely heavily on massive datasets, leading to substantial storage and training costs. Dataset pruning aims to alleviate this demand by discarding redundant examples. However, many existing methods require training a model with a full dataset over a large number of epochs before being able to prune the dataset, which ironically makes the pruning process more expensive than just training the model on the entire dataset. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the **Difficulty and Uncertainty-Aware Lightweight (DUAL)** score, which aims to identify important samples from the early training stage by considering both example difficulty and prediction uncertainty. To address a catastrophic accuracy drop at an extreme pruning ratio, we further propose a pruning ratio-adaptive sampling using Beta distribution. Experiments on various datasets and learning scenarios such as image classification with label noise and image corruption, and model architecture generalization demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. Specifically, on ImageNet-1k, our method reduces the time cost for pruning to 66\% compared to previous methods while achieving a SOTA 60\% test accuracy at a 90\% pruning ratio. On CIFAR datasets, the time cost is reduced to just 15\% while maintaining SOTA performance.

Symbolic regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering symbolic expressions that characterize nonlinear relationships in data, gaining increasing attention for its interpretability, compactness, and robustness. However, existing SR methods do not scale to datasets with a large number of input variables (referred to as extreme-scale SR), which is common in modern scientific applications. This "large $p$'' setting, often accompanied by measurement error, leads to slow performance of SR methods and overly complex expressions that are difficult to interpret. To address this scalability challenge, we propose a method called PAN+SR, which combines a key idea of ab initio nonparametric variable selection with SR to efficiently pre-screen large input spaces and reduce search complexity while maintaining accuracy. The use of nonparametric methods eliminates model misspecification, supporting a strategy called parametric-assisted nonparametric (PAN). We also extend SRBench, an open-source benchmarking platform, by incorporating high-dimensional regression problems with various signal-to-noise ratios. Our results demonstrate that PAN+SR consistently enhances the performance of 19 contemporary SR methods, enabling several to achieve state-of-the-art performance on these challenging datasets.

Multi-Label Online Continual Learning (MOCL) requires models to learn continuously from endless multi-label data streams, facing complex challenges including persistent catastrophic forgetting, potential missing labels, and uncontrollable imbalanced class distributions. While existing MOCL methods attempt to address these challenges through various techniques, \textit{they all overlook label-specific region identifying and feature learning} - a fundamental solution rooted in multi-label learning but challenging to achieve in the online setting with incremental and partial supervision. To this end, we first leverage the inherent structural information of input data to evaluate and verify the innate localization capability of different pre-trained models. Then, we propose CUTER (CUT-out-and-Experience-Replay), a simple yet versatile strategy that provides fine-grained supervision signals by further identifying, strengthening and cutting out label-specific regions for efficient experience replay. It not only enables models to simultaneously address catastrophic forgetting, missing labels, and class imbalance challenges, but also serves as an orthogonal solution that seamlessly integrates with existing approaches. Extensive experiments on multiple multi-label image benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/wxr99/Cut-Replay}{https://github.com/wxr99/Cut-Replay}

Tree ensembles (e.g., gradient boosting decision trees) are often used in practice because they offer excellent predictive performance while still being easy and efficient to learn. In some contexts, it is important to additionally optimize their size: this is specifically the case when models need to have verifiable properties (verification of fairness, robustness, etc. is often exponential in the ensemble's size), or when models run on battery-powered devices (smaller ensembles consume less energy, increasing battery autonomy). For this reason, compression of tree ensembles is worth studying. This paper presents LOP, a method for compressing a given tree ensemble by pruning or entirely removing trees in it, while updating leaf predictions in such a way that predictive accuracy is mostly unaffected. Empirically, LOP achieves compression factors that are often 10 to 100 times better than that of competing methods.

As Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are increasingly adopted for diverse downstream tasks and integrated into large vision-language models (VLMs), their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations has emerged as a critical concern. In this work, we introduce **X-Transfer**, a novel attack method that exposes a universal adversarial vulnerability in CLIP. X-Transfer generates a Universal Adversarial Perturbation (UAP) capable of deceiving various CLIP encoders and downstream VLMs across different samples, tasks, and domains. We refer to this property as **super transferability**—a single perturbation achieving cross-data, cross-domain, cross-model, and cross-task adversarial transferability simultaneously. This is achieved through **surrogate scaling**, a key innovation of our approach. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed surrogate models, which are computationally intensive to scale, X-Transfer employs an efficient surrogate scaling strategy that dynamically selects a small subset of suitable surrogates from a large search space. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that X-Transfer significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art UAP methods, establishing a new benchmark for adversarial transferability across CLIP models.

In real-world crowdsourcing scenarios, most workers often annotate a few instances only, which results in a significantly sparse crowdsourced label matrix and subsequently harms the performance of label integration algorithms. Recent work called worker similarity-based label completion (WSLC) has been proven to be an effective algorithm to addressing this issue. However, WSLC considers solely the correlation of the labels annotated by different workers on per individual instance while totally ignoring the correlation of the labels annotated by different workers among similar instances. To fill this gap, we propose a novel label distribution propagation-based label completion (LDPLC) algorithm. At first, we use worker similarity weighted majority voting to initialize a label distribution for each missing label. Then, we design a label distribution propagation algorithm to enable each missing label of each instance to iteratively absorb its neighbors’ label distributions. Finally, we complete each missing label based on its converged label distribution. Experimental results on both real-world and simulated crowdsourced datasets show that LDPLC significantly outperforms WSLC in enhancing the performance of label integration algorithms. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/jiangliangxiao/LDPLC.

Training a precise binary classifier with limited supervision in weakly supervised learning scenarios holds considerable research significance in practical settings. Leveraging pairwise unlabeled data with confidence differences has been demonstrated to outperform learning from pointwise unlabeled data. We theoretically analyze the various supervisory signals reflected by confidence differences in confidence difference (ConfDiff) classification and identify challenges arising from noisy signals when confidence differences are small. To address this, we partition the dataset into two subsets with distinct supervisory signals and propose a consistency regularization-based risk estimator to encourage similar outputs for similar instances, mitigating the impact of noisy supervision. We further derive and analyze its estimation error bounds theoretically. Extensive experiments on benchmark and UCI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Additionally, to effectively capture the influence of real-world noise on the confidence difference, we artificially perturb the confidence difference distribution and demonstrate the robustness of our method under noisy conditions through comprehensive experiments.

Autoregressive surrogate models (or *emulators*) of spatiotemporal systems provide an avenue for fast, approximate predictions, with broad applications across science and engineering. At inference time however, these models are generally unable to provide predictions over long time rollouts due to accumulation of errors leading to diverging trajectories. In essence, emulators operate out of distribution, and controlling the online distribution quickly becomes intractable in large-scale settings. To address this fundamental issue, and focusing on time-stationary systems admitting an invariant measure, we leverage diffusion models to obtain an implicit estimator of the score of this invariant measure. We show that this model of the score function can be used to stabilize autoregressive emulator rollouts by applying on-the-fly denoising during inference, a process we call *thermalization*. Thermalizing an emulator rollout is shown to extend the time horizon of stable predictions by two orders of magnitude in complex systems exhibiting turbulent and chaotic behavior, opening up a novel application of diffusion models in the context of neural emulation.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) on graph-structured data has attracted considerable attention recently. Masked graph autoencoder, as one promising generative graph SSL approach that aims to recover masked parts of the input graph data, has shown great success in various downstream graph tasks. However, existing masked graph autoencoders fail to consider the degree of difficulty of recovering the masked edges that often have different impacts on the model performance, resulting in suboptimal node representations. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel curriculum based self-supervised masked graph autoencoder that is able to capture and leverage the underlying degree of difficulty of data dependencies hidden in edges, and design better mask-reconstruction pretext tasks for learning informative node representations. Specifically, we first design a difficulty measurer to identify the underlying structural degree of difficulty of edges during the masking step. Then, we adopt a self-paced scheduler to determine the order of masking edges, which encourages the graph encoder to learn from easy to difficult parts. Finally, the masked edges are gradually incorporated into the reconstruction pretext task, leading to high-quality node representations. Experiments on several real-world node classification and link prediction datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art graph self-supervised learning baselines. This work is the first study of curriculum strategy for masked graph autoencoders, to the best of our knowledge.

Label distribution learning (LDL) is a powerful learning paradigm that emulates label polysemy by assigning label distributions over the label space. However, existing LDL evaluation metrics struggle to capture meaningful performance differences due to their insensitivity to subtle distributional changes, and existing LDL learning objectives often exhibit biases by disproportionately emphasizing a small subset of samples with extreme predictions. As a result, the LDL metrics lose their discriminability, and the LDL objectives are also at risk of overfitting. In this paper, we propose DeltaLDL, a percentage of predictions that are approximately correct within the context of LDL, as a solution to the above problems. DeltaLDL can serve as a novel evaluation metric, which is parameter-free and reflects more on real performance improvements. DeltaLDL can also serve as a novel learning objective, which is differentiable and encourages most samples to be predicted as approximately correct, thereby mitigating overfitting. Our theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Many federated learning scenarios encounter label noises in the client-side datasets. The resulting degradation in global model performance raises the urgent need to address label noise. This paper proposes FedClean -- a novel general robust label noise correction for federated learning. FedClean first uses the local centralized noisy label learning to select clean samples to train a global model. Then, it employs a two-stage correction scheme to correct the noisy labels from two distinct perspectives of local noisy label learning and the global model. FedClean also proposes a novel model aggregation method, further reducing the impact of label noises. FedClean neither assumes the existence of clean clients nor the specific noise distributions, showing the maximum versatility. Extensive experimental results show that FedClean effectively identifies and rectifies label noises even if all clients exhibit label noises, which outperforms the state-of-the-art noise-label learning methods for federated learning.