ICML 2026 论文列表

In long-video understanding, conventional uniform frame sampling often fails to capture key visual evidence, leading to degraded performance and increased hallucinations. To address this, recent agentic thinking-with-videos paradigms have emerged, adopting a localize–clip–answer pipeline in which the model actively identifies relevant video segments, performs dense sampling within those clips, and then produces answers. However, existing methods remain inefficient, suffer from weak localization, and adhere to rigid workflows. To solve these issues, we propose VideoTemp-o3, a unified agentic thinking-with-videos framework that jointly models video grounding and question answering. VideoTemp-o3 exhibits strong localization capability, supports on-demand clipping, and can refine inaccurate localizations. Specifically, in the supervised fine-tuning stage, we design a unified masking mechanism that encourages exploration while preventing noise. For reinforcement learning, we introduce dedicated rewards to mitigate reward hacking. Besides, from the data perspective, we develop an effective pipeline to construct high-quality long video grounded QA data, along with a corresponding benchmark for systematic evaluation across various video durations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance on both long video understanding and grounding.

Fine-grained vision-language understanding requires precise alignment between visual content and linguistic descriptions, a capability that remains limited in current models, particularly in non-English settings. While models like CLIP perform well on global alignment, they often struggle to capture fine-grained details in object attributes, spatial relations, and linguistic expressions, with limited support for bilingual comprehension. To address these challenges, we introduce FG-CLIP 2, a bilingual vision-language model designed to advance fine-grained alignment for both English and Chinese. Our approach leverages rich fine-grained supervision, including region-text matching and long-caption modeling, alongside multiple discriminative objectives. We further introduce the Textual Intra-modal Contrastive (TIC) loss to better distinguish semantically similar captions. Trained on a carefully curated mixture of large-scale English and Chinese data, including a newly released 12M Chinese region-text dataset, FG-CLIP 2 achieves powerful bilingual performance. To enable rigorous evaluation, we present a new benchmark for Chinese multimodal understanding, featuring long-caption retrieval and bounding box classification. Extensive experiments on 29 datasets across 8 tasks show that FG-CLIP 2 outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in both languages. We release the model, code, and benchmark to facilitate future research on bilingual fine-grained vision-language alignment.

Traditional text-based person retrieval approaches typically rely on single-shot textual queries, which are generally incomplete or vague in real-world scenarios. Recently, chat-based person retrieval methods enable iterative query refinement via question-answering interactions between the system and users. However, these methods fall short of direct user interaction with retrieved candidates during conversation, making it challenging to effectively refine the retrieval results. To address these limitations, we propose multimodal interactive person retrieval (MInterPR), a new retrieval paradigm that allows users to iteratively refine retrieved candidates by providing feedback on visual differences from the target person. To support this task, we establish MInterPEDES, a multimodal conversational dataset constructed by augmenting existing question-answering dialogues with synthesized visual feedbacks. Furthermore, to tackle the challenge of accurate and efficient semantics understanding in multimodal dialogues, we propose a multimodal conversational memory-enhanced framework MNEMO, which incorporates an atomic turn encoding (ATE) module to model each dialogue turn independently, and a dialogue memory aggregation (DMA) module to capture the fine-grained information and cross-turn dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MNEMO achieves substantial improvements in both retrieval accuracy and generalization ability, highlighting its promising potential in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Flame-Chasers/MNEMO.

We study a setting where the goal is to learn a target function f(x) with respect to a target distribution D(x), but training is done on i.i.d. samples from a different training distribution D’(x), labeled by the true target f(x). Such a distribution shift (here in the form of covariate shift) is usually viewed negatively, as hurting or making learning harder, and the traditional distribution shift literature is mostly concerned with limiting or avoiding this negative effect. In contrast, we argue that with a well-chosen D'(x), the shift can be positive and make learning easier -- a perspective called Positive Distribution Shift (PDS). Such a perspective is central to contemporary machine learning, where much of the innovation is in finding good training distributions D’(x), rather than changing the training algorithm. We further argue that the benefit is often computational rather than statistical, and that PDS allows computationally hard problems to become tractable even using standard gradient-based training. We formalize different variants of PDS, show how certain hard classes are easily learnable under PDS, and make connections with membership query learning.

Understanding and decoding brain activity into visual representations is a fundamental challenge at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. While electroencephalogram (EEG) visual decoding has shown promise due to its non-invasive and low-cost nature, existing methods suffer from {Hierarchical Neural Encoding Neglect (HNEN)}, a critical limitation in which flat neural representations fail to model the brain’s hierarchical visual processing. Inspired by the hierarchical organization of visual cortex, we propose ViEEG, a neuro-inspired framework that addresses HNEN. ViEEG decomposes each visual stimulus into three biologically aligned components, namely contour, foreground object, and contextual scene, which serve as anchors for a three-stream EEG encoder. These EEG features are progressively integrated via cross-attention routing, simulating cortical information flow from low-level to high-level vision. We further adopt hierarchical contrastive learning for EEG-CLIP representation alignment, enabling zero-shot object recognition. Extensive experiments on THINGS-EEG dataset demonstrate that ViEEG significantly outperforms previous methods by a large margin in both subject-dependent and subject-independent settings. Results on THINGS-MEG dataset further confirm ViEEG's generalization to different neural modalities. ViEEG not only advances the performance frontier but also sets a new paradigm for EEG brain visual decoding. Our code is available at https://github.com/LauMason/ViEEG.

Dynamic relational data arise in many machine learning applications, yet their evolving structure poses challenges for learning representations that remain consistent and interpretable over time. A common approach is to learn time varying node embeddings, whose usefulness depends on well defined stability properties across nodes and across time. We introduce Unfolded Laplacian Spectral Embedding (ULSE), a principled extension of unfolded adjacency spectral embedding to normalized Laplacian operators, a setting where stability guarantees have remained out of reach. We prove that ULSE satisfies both cross-sectional and longitudinal stability under a dynamic stochastic block model. Moreover, the Laplacian formulation yields a dynamic Cheeger-type inequality linking the spectrum of the unfolded normalized Laplacian to worst case conductance over time, providing structural insight into the embeddings. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world dynamic networks validate the theory.

Representation Engineering analyses often characterize refusal using static directions extracted from terminal or pooled representations. We ask whether this view misses how refusal is constructed across layer-token positions. Using causal tracing, we identify a Refusal Trajectory: a sparse upstream activation pattern that often persists even when attacks such as GCG suppress terminal refusal signals. Based on this observation, we propose SALO (Sparse Activation Localization Operator), a lightweight white-box detector that operates on raw hidden-state volumes from a selected layer window. Across Qwen, Llama, and Mistral models, SALO improves jailbreak detection on several attack families under a fixed XSTest-calibrated operating point. We further analyze static RepE-style baselines, ROI sensitivity, adaptive GCG attacks, and encoded-input boundary cases, clarifying both the promise and limitations of refusal-trajectory monitoring.

Preference-based reward modeling is a core component of RLHF and DPO pipelines. In practice, the humans providing preference feedback are rarely an i.i.d. sample: recruitment and exposure often follow social, institutional, or spatial structure, inducing non-uniform inclusion probabilities that correlate with graph centrality. We formalize preference learning with *network-sampled* annotators and show that identity-agnostic scalar reward modeling implicitly represents an inclusion-weighted welfare, over-representing structurally central communities when the inclusion distribution $q$ differs from a designer-chosen target weighting $\pi$. We propose Graph-Preference Learning, which combines (i) a graph-personalized reward model that shares statistical strength across neighboring annotators and (ii) graph-balanced aggregation that computes stabilized importance weights to target $\pi$. Our analysis characterizes the induced welfare represented by the learned aggregate reward and bounds its deviation from the target in terms of weight mismatch, reward-model approximation, and finite-sample effects. Experiments on synthetic graphs and a *semi-synthetic* case study on the LMArena preference dataset, where biased inclusion is *induced* via graph-based sampling, demonstrate up to 62% reduction in target-welfare recovery error and 17% reduction in cross-language performance gaps under biased inclusion.

Predictive memory has recently emerged as a powerful mechanism for online video models, enabling temporal reasoning beyond static memory banks. However, we observe a paradoxical phenomenon in which predictive memory often exacerbates drift under occlusion or rapid motion, as inaccurate predictions contaminate the internal state and lead to irreversible identity loss. We identify this failure as a reliability mismatch: predictive dynamics are applied uniformly despite high uncertainty and weak observations. To address this issue, we reinterpret video memory as a dynamic latent process rather than a static buffer. Building on this insight, we introduce Reliability-Guided Predictive Memory (RPM), a framework that explicitly regulates when and how predictive dynamics should influence online video perception. RPM integrates a latent world model based on state-space dynamics to generate predictive priors, while employing a reliability-aware fusion policy that suppresses unreliable predictions during occlusion. We instantiate RPM on a SAM2-based model and evaluate it on visual object tracking benchmarks. Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces drift after occlusion, consistently outperforming strong baselines that rely on either static memory or unconditional predictive modeling. We further show that this reliability-guided mechanism transfers to video object segmentation across multiple standard benchmarks. These findings establish that predictive memory is beneficial only when its reliability is explicitly modeled, and define a general principle for robust online video perception. The code is available at https://github.com/minwookim01/memory-as-dynamics.

AI-generated text increasingly blends with human writing, raising practical risks such as misinformation, academic misuse, and corpora contamination. While statistical detectors are appealing for efficiency and generalization, they suffer from two key limitations. (i) Boilerplate dominance, boilerplate tokens shared across human and LLM writing can overwhelm discriminative signals. (ii) Brittle point estimates, relying on a single probability score yields unstable decisions under adversarial manipulations. To address these issues, we propose $\textbf{Uncertainty}$, a multiscale uncertainty estimator that focuses on informative low-probability tokens, which more clearly expose distributional discrepancies. Locally, it alleviates boilerplate dominance by averaging the log-probabilities of low-probability tokens; globally, it reduces brittleness by capturing the distributional shape of this low-probability region via Rényi entropy. We further extend the detector to $\textbf{Uncertainty++}$ via conditional independent sampling, yielding a more stable uncertainty estimation. Experiments across seven datasets and sixteen LLMs demonstrate high effectiveness, generalization, and robustness. Our code is available at github.com/guoyikai2000/Uncertainty-AIGT.

Entropic optimal transport (EOT) in continuous spaces with quadratic cost is a classical tool for solving the domain translation problem. In practice, recent approaches optimize a weak dual EOT objective depending on a single potential, but doing so is computationally not efficient due to the intractable log-partition term. Existing methods typically resolve this obstacle in one of two ways: by significantly restricting the transport family to obtain closed-form normalization (via Gaussian-mixture parameterizations), or by using general neural parameterizations that require simulation-based training procedures. We propose Variational Entropic Optimal Transport (VarEOT), based on an exact variational reformulation of the log-partition $\log \mathbb{E}[\exp(\cdot)]$ as a tractable minimization over an auxiliary positive normalizer. This yields a differentiable learning objective optimized with stochastic gradients and avoids the necessity of MCMC simulations during the training. We provide theoretical guarantees, including finite-sample generalization bounds and approximation results under universal function approximation. Experiments on synthetic data and unpaired image-to-image translation demonstrate competitive or improved translation quality, while comparisons within the solvers that use the same weak dual EOT objective support the benefit of the proposed optimization principle.

We study generalized linear bandits with memory, an endogenous non-stationary setting in which rewards depend on past actions through a finite memory matrix. Building on prior work for linear models Clerici et al.,(2024), we show that the previously known $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{3/4})$ regret bound stems from a loose analysis, and we provide a sharpened analysis that recovers a $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret rate in the linear case. We then extend this improvement to generalized linear models and propose a block-wise algorithm based on shrunken confidence bounds. Our algorithm achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(\sqrt{mT} + d\sqrt{T} + \sqrt{\kappa}d^{2} m^{1/4} T^{1/4} + \kappa d^{2} \right)$, where $d$ denotes the feature dimension, $m$ the memory length, and $\kappa$ a curvature parameter of the link function. This attains a $\sqrt{T}$-type rate despite nonlinear rewards and memory effects. To the best of our knowledge, this analysis provides a unified treatment of memory-induced non-stationarity and nonlinear link functions, while ensuring that the leading regret term is independent of the curvature of the link function. We conduct numerical experiments that are consistent with our theoretical findings.

Flow Matching enables simulation-free training of generative models on Riemannian manifolds, yet sampling typically still relies on numerically integrating a probability-flow ODE. We propose Riemannian MeanFlow (RMF), extending MeanFlow to manifold-valued generation where velocities lie in location-dependent tangent spaces. RMF defines an average-velocity field via parallel transport and derives a Riemannian MeanFlow identity that links average and instantaneous velocities for intrinsic supervision. We make this identity practical in a log-map tangent representation, avoiding trajectory simulation and heavy geometric computations. For stable optimization, we decompose the RMF objective into two terms and apply conflict-aware multi-task learning to mitigate gradient interference. RMF also supports conditional generation via classifier-free guidance. Experiments on spheres, tori, SO(3), and SE(3) demonstrate competitive one-step sampling with improved quality–efficiency trade-offs and substantially reduced sampling cost.

Inverse design aims to find design parameters $x$ achieving target performance $y^*$. Generative approaches learn bidirectional mappings between designs and labels, enabling diverse solution sampling. However, standard conditional flow matching (CFM), when adapted to inverse problems by pairing labels with design parameters, exhibits strong sensitivity to their arbitrary ordering and scaling, leading to unstable training. We introduce Diagonal Flow Matching (Diag--CFM), which resolves this through a zero-anchoring strategy that pairs design coordinates with noise and labels with zero, making the learning problem provably invariant to coordinate permutations. This yields substantially lower round-trip error than CFM and invertible neural network baselines across design dimensions up to $P{=}784$, including order-of-magnitude gains on several benchmarks. We develop two architecture-intrinsic uncertainty metrics, Zero-Deviation and Self-Consistency, that enable three practical capabilities: selecting the best candidate among multiple generations, abstaining from unreliable predictions, and detecting out-of-distribution targets; consistently outperforming ensemble and general-purpose alternatives across all tasks. We validate on airfoil, gas turbine combustor, scalable analytical benchmarks, a photonics inverse-design task, and an image-statistics benchmark.

Reinforcement learning algorithms are commonly analyzed (and designed) under the Markov assumption. This is unrealistic, as most environments encountered in practice are either partially observable, or require function approximation that restricts the agent to access non-Markovian state features. We consider the problem of learning an optimal reactive policy in a finite environment with deterministic observations (or equivalently, hard state aggregation). We introduce a new algorithm, _Committed Q-learning_, and prove almost-sure convergence to the optimal reactive policy under an intuitive assumption we call _rewire-robustness_. This assumption is strictly weaker than the $q_\star$-realizability condition used in prior work. Our algorithm is a variant of classical Q-learning in which the behavior policy commits to a single action upon entering a feature, and only resamples actions when the observed feature changes. A crucial part of our analysis is the introduction of _quasi-Markov_ environments.

Common deep learning approaches for antibody engineering focus on modeling the marginal distribution of sequences. By treating sequences as independent samples, however, these methods overlook affinity maturation as a rich and largely untapped source of information about the evolutionary process by which antibodies explore the underlying fitness landscape. In contrast, classical phylogenetic models explicitly represent evolutionary dynamics but lack the expressivity to capture complex epistatic interactions. We bridge this gap with **CoSiNE**, a continuous-time Markov chain parameterized by a deep neural network. Mathematically, we prove that CoSiNE provides a first-order approximation to the intractable sequential point mutation process, capturing epistatic effects with an error bound that is quadratic in branch length. Empirically, CoSiNE outperforms state-of-the-art language models in zero-shot variant effect prediction by explicitly disentangling selection from context-dependent somatic hypermutation. Finally, we introduce *Guided Gillespie*, a classifier-guided sampling scheme that steers CoSiNE at inference time, enabling efficient optimization of antibody binding affinity toward specific antigens.

Block-wise decoding effectively improves the inference speed and quality in diffusion language models (DLMs) by combining inter-block sequential denoising and intra-block parallel unmasking. However, existing block-wise decoding methods typically partition blocks in a rigid and fixed manner, which inevitably fragments complete semantic or syntactic constituents, leading to suboptimal performance. Inspired by the entropy reduction hypothesis (ERH), we recognize that constituent boundaries offer greater opportunities for uncertainty reduction, which motivates us to employ entropy analysis for identifying constituent boundaries. Therefore, we propose Swordsman, an entropy-driven adaptive block-wise decoding framework for DLMs. Swordsman adaptively partitions blocks by identifying entropy shifts between adjacent tokens to better align with semantic or syntactic constituent boundaries. In addition, Swordsman dynamically adjusts unmasking thresholds conditioned on the real-time unmasking status within a block, further improving both efficiency and stability. As a training-free framework, supported by KV Cache, Swordsman demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across extensive evaluations. Our code is now available.

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) promise fast, non-autoregressive text generation, yet existing samplers, which pick tokens to unmask based on model confidence, ignore interactions when unmasking multiple positions in parallel and effectively reduce to slow, autoregressive behavior. We propose the Dilated Unmasking Scheduler (DUS), an inference-only, planner-model-free method that partitions sequence positions into non-adjacent dilated groups and unmasks them in parallel so as to minimize an upper bound on joint entropy gain at each denoising step. By explicitly trading off the number of network calls against generation quality, DUS recovers most of the performance lost under traditional parallel unmasking strategies. Across math (GSM8K, MATH500), code (HumanEval, MBPP), general-knowledge (BBH, MMLU-Pro), and instruction following (IFEval) benchmarks, DUS outperforms confidence-based planners and turns the diffusion-specific quality-speed trade-off into a deterministic, predictable speedup set by the block size $B$, yielding up to $5.8\times$ wall-clock speedup over token-by-token MDLM decoding without modifying the underlying denoiser. Applied as a drop-in post-filter, dilated spacing also improves adaptive samplers. Code is available at https://github.com/omerlux/DUS.

Self-play bootstraps LLM reasoning through an iterative Challenger--Solver loop: the Challenger is trained to generate questions that target the Solver's capabilities, and the Solver is optimized on the generated data to expand its reasoning skills. However, existing frameworks like R-Zero often exhibit non-sustained improvement, where early gains degrade as self-play continues. We identify a key failure mode, **Diversity Illusion**, where the Solver's training signals appear diverse yet collapse into recurring underlying patterns. It manifests as (1) *Local Diversity Illusion*, where diversity is enforced only within-batch, inducing cross-iteration mode cycling; and (2) *Surface Diversity Illusion*, where questions vary superficially but require near-identical reasoning skills. To mitigate them, we propose R-Diverse with two aligned innovations: **Memory-Augmented Penalty (MAP)**, which uses a persistent memory bank to discourage recycling across iterations, and **Skill-Aware Measurement (SAM)**, which evaluates diversity by the reasoning skills exercised rather than surface variation of questions. Across 10 math and general reasoning benchmarks, R-Diverse sustains gains over more iterations and consistently outperforms prior self-play methods.