ICML 2026 论文列表

Visual Contrastive Decoding (VCD) mitigates hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by penalizing the output shift from noise-perturbed images, assuming this shift captures the hallucination direction. We prove this assumption flawed: noise-induced drift in Language-Image Pretrained (LIP) encoders is a \emph{coupled vector} entangling (i) structural degradation from corrupted visual information with (ii) hallucination induction from linguistic prior activation. VCD's indiscriminate penalty inevitably suppresses valid visual semantics. Our key insight is that Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) encoders exhibit \emph{only} structural degradation under noise—geometrically orthogonal to hallucination paths—enabling principled disentanglement via LIP--SSL differential response. We propose \textbf{Disentangled Visual Rectification (DVR)}, a training-free dual-stream framework performing visual-layer rectification and decoding-layer contrast on purified representations. DVR achieves approximately $5\times$ theoretical error reduction over VCD and establishes SOTA performance on POPE, MME, LLaVA-Bench and CHAIR benchmarks.

We study two recurring phenomena in Transformer language models: massive activations, in which a small number of tokens exhibit extreme outliers in a few channels, and attention sinks, in which certain tokens attract disproportionate attention mass regardless of semantic relevance. Prior work observes that these phenomena frequently co-occur and often involve the same tokens, but their functional roles and causal relationships remain unclear. Through systematic experiments, we show that the co-occurrence is largely an architectural artifact of modern Transformer design, and that the two phenomena serve related but distinct functions. Massive activations operate globally: they induce near-constant hidden representations that persist across layers, effectively functioning as implicit parameters of the model. Attention sinks operate locally: they modulate attention outputs across heads and bias individual heads toward short-range dependencies. We identify the pre-norm configuration as the key choice that enables the co-occurrence and show that ablating it causes the two phenomena to decouple.

Neural operators provide a powerful framework for learning discretization invariant mappings between function spaces, but standard deterministic models do not capture predictive uncertainty. We introduce *diffusion last layer* (DLL), a modular probabilistic output head for neural operator backbones. DLL represents target fields through an input dependent low rank expansion inspired by the Karhunen--Lo\`eve expansion and learns a conditional diffusion model over the corresponding coefficient space. This design enables efficient distributional modeling while preserving the structural advantages of operator learning. On stochastic PDE benchmarks with random forcing, DLL achieves strong distributional fidelity and performs competitively with pixel space and conventional latent diffusion baselines. In deterministic long horizon rollout tasks, DLL improves rollout stability over the underlying backbone and provides useful estimates of predictive uncertainty under compounding autoregressive errors. These results suggest that diffusion modeling in learned coefficient spaces offers a practical route to uncertainty aware neural operators. Code is available at https://github.com/sungwpark/dll-no

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based multimodal learning integrates brain signals with complementary modalities to improve mental state assessment, providing great clinical potential. The effectiveness of such paradigms largely depends on the representation learning on heterogeneous modalities. For EEG-based paradigms, one promising approach is to leverage their hierarchical structures, as recent studies have shown that both EEG and associated modalities (e.g., facial expressions) exhibit hierarchical structures reflecting complex cognitive processes. However, Euclidean embeddings struggle to represent these hierarchical structures due to their flat geometry, while hyperbolic spaces, with their exponential growth property, are naturally suited for them. In this work, we propose EEG-MoCE, a novel hyperbolic mixture-of-curvature experts framework designed for multimodal neurotechnology. EEG-MoCE assigns each modality to an expert in a learnable-curvature hyperbolic space, enabling adaptive modeling of its intrinsic geometry. A curvature-aware fusion strategy then dynamically weights experts, emphasizing modalities with richer hierarchical information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that EEG-MoCE achieves state-of-the-art performance, including emotion recognition, sleep staging, and cognitive assessment. Code is available at https://github.com/zhourunhe/EEG-MoCE.

LLM-augmented database analytics face a major bottleneck in the costly prefill phase. Although relational tables inherently contain repeated attribute values, standard row-by-row processing produces fragmented prompt layouts that obscure shared prefixes, thereby minimizing opportunities for prefix KV cache reuse and constraining system efficiency. Existing solutions typically employ heuristic or exhaustive search methods to reorder prompt layouts, but these approaches can be inefficient and may not leverage the structural properties of relational tables. We address this challenge by formulating prefix-cache-aware prompt layout optimization as a problem rooted in the isomorphism between prefix-cache reuse and the radix tree topology induced by the relational data distribution. Building on this perspective, we introduce a practical greedy tree-shaping algorithm that efficiently selects row and column orderings to maximize prefix overlap. Our approach, SOLO, improves prefill throughput by up to 90.3\% under fixed prefix-cache budget. Moreover, it reduces planning overhead by up to 242$\times$ compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

The construction of the brain functional network often follows the hand-crafted Correlation Coefficients without any learnable components. Meanwhile, most efforts are made to the models, such as graph neural networks, that make predictions with the constructed brain network as input. Unfortunately, the fixed brain network may lose critical information during construction and lead to difficulty in performance improvement, even with deliberately designed graph models. From this perspective, the current situation is similar to the machine learning community, i.e., hand-crafted features and learnable predictors, before the advent of representation learning. In fact, the brain network can be regarded as a graph-structured learnable representation of the brain. By drawing on representation learning, this paper presents the Brain Representation (BRep) learning problem. To this end, the widely used linear and nonlinear correlations are enhanced to be high-order, parametric, and learnable. The expressive brain representation shifts the heavy computational burden away from downstream architectures, enabling a simple yet accurate predictor. Theoretical analysis guarantees the model's universal approximation to any U/V-statistics. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that BRep possesses superior performance, high efficiency, and interpretability. The code is available at https://github.com/Kevin-916/BRep-demo/.

The Densest $k$-Subgraph (D$k$S) is a fundamental combinatorial problem known for its theoretical hardness and breadth of applications. Recently, Lu et al. (AAAI 2025) introduced a penalty-based non-convex relaxation that achieves promising empirical performance; however, a rigorous theoretical understanding of its success remains unclear. In this work, we bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive theoretical analysis. We first establish the tightness of the relaxation, ensuring that the global maximum values of the original combinatorial problem and the relaxed problem coincide. Then we reveal the benign geometry of the optimization landscape by proving a strict dichotomy of stationary points: all integral stationary points are local maximizers, whereas all non-integral stationary points are strict saddles with explicit positive curvature. We propose a saddle-escaping Frank--Wolfe algorithm and prove that it achieves exact convergence to an integral local maximizer in a finite number of steps.

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as efficient annotators for tasks such as generation and classification. While these models offer significant cost and speed advantages over human annotation, a critical challenge remains: existing self-evaluation methods, such as LLM-as-judge, often lack reliable reference-based calibration for error detection. We address this limitation by introducing **SAGE** (**S**emantic-**A**nchored Jud**G**m**E**nt), a method that leverages semantically similar samples retrieved via $k$-nearest-neighbor as references for annotation verification. We provide a theoretical framework that derives a closed-form expression for the error detection AUROC, which can be decomposed into three factors: intrinsic separability, reference-induced mean shift, and noise reduction through averaging. This decomposition reveals *when* semantic neighbors help (when references are both semantically matched and correct) and *why* (by providing reference-based calibration that raises scores for correct annotations and lowers scores for incorrect ones). Experiments on LLM generation, VLM captioning, and classification tasks validate our theoretical framework: SAGE improves error detection when semantic neighbors provide reliable reference-based calibration, and our decomposition offers insights into when direct scoring or alternative strategies may be preferred. Our code is available at https://github.com/dina-1205/SAGE.

Video quality assessment (VQA) plays a critical role in optimizing video delivery systems. While numerous objective metrics have been proposed to approximate human perception, the perceived quality strongly depends on viewing conditions and display characteristics. Factors such as ambient lighting, display brightness, and resolution significantly influence the visibility of distortions. In this work, we address the question of the multi-screen quality assessment on mobile devices, as this area still tends to be under-covered. We introduce a first large-scale subjective dataset collected across more than different 300 Android devices, accompanied by metadata on viewing conditions and display properties. We propose a strategy for aggregated score extraction and adaptation of VQA models to device-specific quality estimation. Our results demonstrate that incorporating device and context information enables more accurate and flexible quality prediction, offering new opportunities for fine-grained optimization in streaming services. Ultimately, this work advances the development of perceptual quality models that bridge the gap between laboratory evaluations and the diverse conditions of real-world media consumption. We made the dataset and the code available at https://videoprocessing.github.io/device-viewing-conditions.

The problem of domain generalization concerns learning predictive models that are robust to distribution shifts when deployed in new, previously unseen environments. Existing methods typically require labeled data from multiple training environments, limiting their applicability when labeled data are scarce. In this work, we study domain generalization in an anti-causal setting, where the outcome causes the observed covariates. Under this structure, environment perturbations that affect the covariates do not propagate to the outcome, which motivates regularizing the model's sensitivity to these perturbations. Crucially, estimating these perturbation directions does not require labels, enabling us to leverage unlabeled data from multiple environments. We propose two methods that penalize the model's sensitivity to variations in the mean and covariance of the covariates across environments, respectively, and prove that these methods have worst-case optimality guarantees under certain classes of environments. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of our approach on a controlled physical system and a physiological signal dataset.

Existing image inpainting frameworks rely on strictly supervised training paradigms, often suffering from an over-reliance on ground-truth reconstruction, which leads to conservative outputs with misaligned creativity and limited diversity. To this end, we propose the first framework to explore Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for text-guided image inpainting, formulating an efficient online reinforcement learning pipeline that enables flexible, human-aligned aesthetic control via a preference scoring model. Crucially, by decoupling the rigid one-to-one correspondence between text prompts and masked images, our method enables the model to explore diverse, controllable, and high-quality solutions beyond a single target. Furthermore, to balance semantic consistency with physical naturalness at mask boundaries, we introduce a scale-aware dynamic reward mechanism that adaptively emphasizes boundary gradient coherence for small occlusions while prioritizing visual aesthetics in large-scale generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently produces higher-quality results across different backbone architectures such as Stable Diffusion and FLUX, significantly enhancing the generative capacity of base models.

Supervised classification has a theoretical optimum, Neural Collapse (NC), yet neither of its two dominant paradigms reaches it in practice. Cross entropy (CE) leaves radial degrees of freedom unconstrained and converges to a degenerate geometry, while supervised contrastive learning (SCL) drives features toward NC during pretraining but discards this structure in a post hoc linear probing phase. We show that both paradigms are different appearances of the same method that contrasts prototypes on the unit hypersphere, and that closing the gap requires fixing each at its point of failure. From the CE side, we propose NTCE and NONL, two normalized losses that import contrastive optimization's missing ingredients into classifier learning: a large effective negative set and decoupled alignment and uniformity terms. From the SCL side, we prove that SCL's objective already optimizes throughout training for a principled classifier whose weights are the class mean embeddings, making linear probing both redundant and harmful. Empirically, on four benchmarks including ImageNet-1K, NTCE and NONL surpass CE accuracy, closely approximate NC ($\geq 95\%$), and match CE's converged NC on 4/5 metrics in under $7.5\%$ of its iterations, while SCL with fixed prototypes matches linear probing without the hours-long classifier training phase. The learned geometry yields $+5.5\%$ mean relative improvement in transfer learning, up to $+8.7\%$ under severe class imbalance, and improved robustness to corruptions on ImageNet-C. Our work recasts supervised learning as prototype learning on the hypersphere, with NC reached *by design*.

The transition from single-turn models to Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) promises enhanced problem-solving capabilities, yet the centralized orchestration topology remains a critical point of fragility. To analyze this, we propose a Mean-Field Entropy Dynamics framework, modeling the orchestration process as a system governed by the competing forces of task resolution and cumulative context loading. To facilitate high-resolution validation, we introduce Inverse Workflow Generation (IWG), a multi-agent pipeline that synthesizes process-verifiable, high-complexity benchmarks with dense intermediate checkpoints. We demonstrate that our entropy dynamics model fits empirical trajectories, providing physically interpretable parameters that quantify system stability and performance collapse. Crucially, our analysis uncovers a ``Reasoning Trap": while reasoning-heavy models excel in isolated tasks, they frequently fail as orchestrators due to context squeezing. By elucidating the physical mechanisms underlying the Orchestrator and quantifying systemic uncertainty, our findings offer insights for the architectural design development of Multi-Agent Systems in prospective research.

World models require robust relational understanding to support prediction, reasoning, and control. While object-centric representations provide a useful abstraction, they are not sufficient to capture interaction-dependent dynamics. We therefore propose C-JEPA, a simple and flexible object-centric world model that extends masked joint embedding prediction from image patches to object-centric representations. By masking object-level latents and requiring each masked object state to be inferred from the surrounding context, C-JEPA imposes structured partial observability during training, creating counterfactual-like prediction queries that discourage shortcut solutions and make interaction-dependent prediction necessary under the learning objective. Empirically, C-JEPA leads to consistent gains in visual question answering, with an absolute improvement of about 20\% in counterfactual reasoning over the same architecture without object-level masking. On agent control tasks, C-JEPA enables substantially more efficient planning by using only 1\% of the total latent input features required by patch-based world models, while achieving comparable performance. Finally, we provide a formal analysis demonstrating that object-level masking induces useful inductive bias by controlling observability. Our code is available at https://github.com/galilai-group/cjepa.

Model distillation enables efficient emulation of frontier large language models (LLMs), creating a need for robust mechanisms to detect when a third-party student model has trained on a teacher model's outputs. However, existing fingerprinting techniques that could be used to detect such distillation rely on heuristic perturbations that impose a steep trade-off between generation quality and fingerprinting strength, often requiring significant degradation of utility to ensure the fingerprint is effectively internalized by the student. We introduce ***antidistillation fingerprinting*** (ADFP), a principled approach that aligns the fingerprinting objective with the student's learning dynamics. Building upon the gradient-based framework of *antidistillation sampling*, ADFP utilizes a proxy model to identify and sample tokens that directly maximize the expected detectability of the fingerprint in the student after fine-tuning, rather than relying on the incidental absorption of the un-targeted biases of a more naive watermark. Experiments on GSM8K, OASST1, and MBPP demonstrate that ADFP achieves a significant Pareto improvement over state-of-the-art baselines, yielding stronger detection confidence with minimal impact on utility across mathematical reasoning, dialogue, and code generation, even when the student model's architecture is unknown.

Literature reviews are essential to scientific progress, but rigorously evaluating automatically generated reviews remains difficult because many aspects of research utility depend on expert judgment rather than reference-overlap metrics. We introduce \textbf{LitReview Arena}, a battle-style evaluation platform with a structured protocol tailored to literature review quality: domain experts with AI paper-writing experience compare anonymized drafts, are matched to topics within their expertise, and provide dimension-wise outcomes over five literature-review-specific criteria. From this protocol, we collect 3k expert judgments, each containing five dimension-wise outcomes, and show that even the strongest current systems win only 23.0\% of decisive matches against human drafts on overall utility, while agentic LLMs such as Sonar Deep Research substantially outperform base language models by over 60\%. We further find that existing LLM-as-a-judge methods are substantially misaligned with human experts (Spearman's $\rho \approx 0.467$), especially on synthesis-heavy criteria such as paper structure and research suggestions. Using the collected preference data, we provide an expert-calibrated evaluator, LitJudge, which improves alignment to $\rho \approx 0.78$, comparable to inter-expert consistency; code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/VanellopeAsher/LitReview-Arena.

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret large language models by decomposing activations into sparse, human-understandable features, but scaling to large dictionaries exposes fundamental challenges. Systematic studies reveal pervasive feature splitting that fragments coherent concepts into non-atomic latents and widespread feature absorption that creates arbitrary exceptions in general features, severely compromising latent reliability. These issues stem from inconsistent latent assignment across samples: without cross-sample constraints, per-sample optimization often allows a single underlying concept to be inconsistently distributed across multiple redundant or interfering latents. To address this, we introduce C$^2$R (\underline{\textbf{C}}ross-sample \underline{\textbf{C}}onsistency \underline{\textbf{R}}egularization). C$^2$R explicitly encourages that each semantic feature is consistently represented by a unified latent across the batch by penalizing the co-activation of directionally similar latents. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that C$^2$R effectively mitigates both splitting and absorption while, crucially, preserving reconstruction fidelity, providing a principled solution that enhances latent interpretability without degrading model performance. Source code is available\footnote{\url{https://github.com/hr-jin/Cross-sample-Consistency-Regularization}}.

Recent text-to-image models built on large-scale Transformer backbones and flow-based objectives deliver strong text–image alignment and high visual quality, yet often produce overly similar samples under a fixed prompt. Existing diversity-enhancement methods alleviate this, but typically require expensive sampling or auxiliary optimization, incurring non-trivial overhead. To investigate the root cause of this homogeneity, we examine intermediate Transformer features and observe that the zero-frequency spatial average (DC) component rapidly converges across seeds early in generation, causing early trajectory lock-in that limits downstream variation. Building on this, we propose DC Attenuation for diVersity Enhancement (\textbf{DAVE}), a training-free representation-level intervention that selectively attenuates this component in the early regime. DAVE preserves the sampling pipeline with negligible overhead, improving prompt-consistent diversity while maintaining competitive image quality.

Continual learning enables neural networks to learn tasks sequentially without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. However, neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where learning new tasks degrades performance on earlier ones. We address this problem with **Shapley Neuron Valuation (SNV)**, a principled framework that quantifies Neuron importance in continual learning, grounded in cooperative game theory. SNV selectively freezes important Neurons while keeping others plastic, enabling **buffer-free** continual learning without expanding architecture. Experiments on ImageNet-1k show that SNV consistently outperforms existing buffer-free methods. In particular, SNV improves accuracy by **+2.88\%** in the class incremental learning and **+6.46\%** in the task incremental learning scenarios compared to the second baseline.