ICML 2026 论文列表

Multi-view clustering (MVC) is a fundamental task in heterogeneous data analysis, where anchor-based graph methods are widely adopted for their computational efficiency. However, existing approaches typically utilize static, single-layer anchors, failing to capture the multi-granularity nature of complex data. Drawing inspiration from hierarchical human cognition, we propose a hierarchical anchor graph learning method, termed HAG-MVC, a novel framework that organizes multi-view data as a multi-level pyramid. Unlike conventional one-shot anchor generation methods, HAG-MVC introduces a multi-level co-evolution mechanism, where anchors and graph structures are iteratively refined together to capture semantics from fine-to-coarse granularities. Moreover, HAG-MVC offers a transparent abstraction architecture as an alternative to black-box deep clustering: by maintaining all anchors within the original feature space, it enables explicit inspection of the abstraction process, ensuring inherent interpretability. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HAG-MVC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Beyond MVC, this work provides a scalable and trustworthy paradigm for hierarchical knowledge representation in broad machine learning tasks.

A central goal of large language model (LLM) research is to build agentic systems that can plan, act, and adapt through sustained interaction with dynamic environments. While recent LLM-based agents exhibit impressive contextual reasoning, their long-horizon decision-making remains fragile, often suffering from $\textit{objective drift}$, where goals and plans drift over extended interactions. We introduce $\texttt{Multi}^2$, a hierarchical multi-agent decision-making framework that explicitly decomposes agent behavior into complementary roles. A high-level agent ($\texttt{System 1}$) focuses on context-aware sub-goal generation using supervised fine-tuning (SFT), while a low-level agent ($\texttt{System 2}$) executes atomic actions through offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) in interactive environments. This separation enables stable long-horizon control, mitigates objective drift, and allows efficient adaptation. Across diverse interactive environments, $\texttt{Multi}^2$ consistently outperforms strong agentic baselines, demonstrating improved robustness and coordination in multi-turn interaction. Beyond performance, we introduce and release three hierarchical benchmark datasets, filling a long-standing gap in training and evaluating hierarchical decision-making for LLM-based agents.

Segmentation based on language has been a popular topic in computer vision. While recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have endowed segmentation systems with reasoning capabilities, these efforts remain confined by the frozen internal knowledge of MLLMs, which limits their potential for real-world scenarios that involve up-to-date information or domain-specific concepts. In this work, we propose \textbf{Seg-ReSearch}, a novel segmentation paradigm that overcomes the knowledge bottleneck of existing approaches. By enabling interleaved reasoning and external search, Seg-ReSearch empowers segmentation systems to handle dynamic, open-world queries that extend beyond the frozen knowledge of MLLMs. To effectively train this capability, we introduce a hierarchical reward design that harmonizes initial guidance with progressive incentives, mitigating the dilemma between sparse outcome signals and rigid step-wise supervision. For evaluation, we construct OK-VOS, a challenging benchmark that explicitly requires outside knowledge for video object segmentation. Experiments on OK-VOS and two existing reasoning segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our Seg-ReSearch improves state-of-the-art approaches by a substantial margin. Code and data is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/Seg-ReSearch.

This paper focuses on a key challenge in Neural Architecture Search (NAS): integrating established architectural knowledge while exploring new designs under expensive evaluations. Large language models (LLMs) are a promising assistant for NAS because they can translate rich architectural and coding priors into executable code edits. However, in practice, seemingly local revisions often propagate into non-local behavioral and performance shifts because a single edit can inadvertently couple multiple interacting functional factors, a phenomenon we refer to as functional entanglement. To make LLM knowledge usable under such entanglement, we propose Structured Progressive Knowledge Activation (SPARK), which activates relevant priors by explicitly selecting the functional factor to modify and conditioning the edit on that factor. This factor-conditioned editing reduces entangled side effects and yields more targeted, reliable architecture modifications. On CLRS-DFS, SPARK achieves a 28.1x sample-efficient architecture evolution speedup and yields a 22.9% relative improvement in OOD accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIM-ResearchLab/SPARK.

Diffusion Posterior Sampling (DPS) provides a principled Bayesian approach to inverse problems by sampling from $p(x_0 \mid y)$. While posterior sampling is valuable for capturing uncertainty and multi-modality, many classical and practical inverse problem settings ultimately prioritize accurate point estimation—most notably the MAP estimator, which has long served as a standard reconstruction objective in imaging and scientific applications. We introduce Local MAP Sampling (LMAPS), a new inference framework that iteratively solving local MAP subproblems along the diffusion trajectory. This perspective clarifies their connection to global MAP and DPS, offering a unified probabilistic interpretation for optimization-based methods. Building on this foundation, we develop practical algorithms with a covariance approximation motivated by Gaussian prior assumption, a reformulated objective for stability and interpretability. Across a broad set of image restoration and scientific tasks, LMAPS achieves state-of-the-art performance.

The ability to use tools is fundamental for large language model (LLM) agents. Given a task, existing systems use LLMs to plan and generate tool calls, which are executed by real-world tools to complete the task. However, tool calls are prone to errors because they are generated primarily from the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs. Moreover, while it is useful to let LLMs iteratively refine the tool-call sequence using execution results from real tools, this process can be expensive and may cause unsafe side effects. To improve LLM tool calls and address issues caused by using real tools for refinement, we introduce Gecko, a stateful simulation environment that provides informative feedback for refining LLM tool calls before real execution. Specifically, Gecko combines rules and LLMs to check the validity of tool names and arguments, synthesize schema-conforming and state-consistent responses, and judge task completion against the user objective. These three types of feedback allow LLMs to refine their tool calls in simulation, forming a simple yet effective test-time scaling method named GATS. On BFCLv3 and $\tau^2$-bench, GATS consistently improves the performance of various LLMs, including GPT-4o, GPT-5, and Gemini-3.0-pro.

Despite recent progress in calibration-free monocular SLAM via 3D vision foundation models, scale drift remains severe on long sequences. Motion-agnostic partitioning breaks contextual coherence and causes zero-motion drift, while conventional geometric alignment is computationally expensive. To address these issues, we propose VGGT-Motion, a calibration-free SLAM system for efficient and robust global consistency over kilometer-scale trajectories. Specifically, we first propose a motion-aware submap construction mechanism that uses optical flow to guide adaptive partitioning, prune static redundancy, and encapsulate turns for stable local geometry. We then design an anchor-driven direct Sim(3) registration strategy. By exploiting context-balanced anchors, it achieves search-free, pixel-wise dense alignment and efficient loop closure without costly feature matching. Finally, a lightweight submap-level pose graph optimization enforces global consistency with linear complexity, enabling scalable long-range operation. Experiments show that VGGT-Motion markedly improves trajectory accuracy and efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot, long-range calibration-free monocular SLAM.

Multimodal LLMs struggle to systematically model the temporal evolution of visual scenes in videos or multi-image sequences. Such inputs require models to predict or simulate multiple levels of dynamic constituents, such as actions taken in the visual sequence, and the associated changes to the visual environment that result. To address this challenge, we propose a dynamic schema-guided world model, DynaVieW, optimized for visual dynamic prediction and simulation. DynaVieW achieves an in-depth understanding of visual dynamics by learning interleaved state-transition sequences, where states cover broad visual scenes from video keyframes, and transitions capture comprehensive dynamic constituents within a hierarchical schema. DynaVieW jointly models transition prediction and state simulation under a mixture-of-experts architecture, with a cross-expert selective attention and a schema token re-weighted loss, to ensure effective and robust learning. DynaVieW's superior visual dynamic understanding boosts its downstream performances on both visual narrative creation and world simulation, showing improved consistency and controllability of visual generation and better instruction-following ability.

Ultrafast online learning is essential for high-frequency systems, such as controls for quantum computing and nuclear fusion, where adaptation must occur on sub-microsecond timescales. Meeting these requirements demands low-latency, fixed-precision computation under strict memory constraints, a regime in which conventional Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are both inefficient and numerically unstable. We identify key properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) that align with these constraints. Specifically, we show that: (i) KAN updates exploiting B-spline locality are sparse, enabling superior on-chip resource scaling, and (ii) KANs are inherently robust to fixed-point quantization. By implementing fixed-point online training on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a representative platform for on-chip computation, we demonstrate that KAN-based online learners are significantly more efficient and expressive than MLPs across a range of low-latency and resource-constrained tasks. To our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate model-free online learning at sub-microsecond latencies.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a predominant approach for aligning large language models with human preferences. Recent work has used perplexity differentials to identify unreliable preference labels, but these methods apply uniform calibration strategies across all samples. We observe that the reliability of perplexity signals varies substantially across task types: perplexity differentials strongly correlate with preference quality for factual tasks but provide weak signals for creative tasks where novelty is valued. Based on this observation, we propose Task-Aware Preference Calibration (TAPC), which learns task-conditioned calibration functions that adapt to the characteristics of different prompt types. TAPC employs a task encoder to extract prompt representations and learns task-specific slope and bias parameters for mapping perplexity signals to confidence targets. Through meta-learning on a small reference dataset, TAPC discovers how to weight perplexity signals appropriately for each task category. Experiments on Llama-3-8B and Qwen2-7B demonstrate that TAPC outperforms existing methods across multiple benchmarks, with particularly large improvements on creative and open-ended tasks where uniform calibration strategies fail.

Analogy is a central faculty of human intelligence, enabling abstract patterns discovered in one domain to be applied to another. However, the mechanisms underlying analogical reasoning in Transformers remain poorly understood. In this work, inspired by the notion of functors in category theory, we formalize analogical reasoning as the inference of correspondences between entities across categories. Based on this formulation, we introduce synthetic tasks that evaluate the emergence of analogical reasoning under controlled settings. We find that the emergence of analogical reasoning is highly sensitive to data characteristics, optimization choices, and model scale. Through mechanistic analysis, we show that analogical reasoning in Transformers decomposes into two key components: (1) geometric alignment of relational structure in the embedding space, and (2) the application of a functor within the Transformer. These mechanisms enable models to transfer relational structure from one category to another, realizing analogy. Finally, we quantify these effects and find that the same trends are observed in pretrained LLMs. In doing so, we move analogy from an abstract cognitive notion to a concrete, mechanistically grounded phenomenon in modern neural networks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex logical reasoning. Existing approaches typically rely on either purely neural reasoning in natural language or offloading to formal solvers via symbolic representations. However, both paradigms face significant limitations: while LLMs exhibit strong semantic intuition they are prone to hallucinations, whereas symbolic solvers offer rigorous derivation but remain highly sensitive to minor syntactic errors. To combine the strengths of these two paradigms while mitigating their respective limitations, we introduce **LogicSAGE** (**L**ogic-informed **S**ocratic **A**gent for **G**uided **E**nhancement), a dual-process framework that integrates a robust neural reasoner (System 1) with a rigorous symbolic validator (System 2). Specifically, our framework employs a Socratic Error Correction mechanism that treats solver feedback not as terminal failures but as pedagogical signals, engaging in a dialectic loop to iteratively refine logic programs and resolve semantic ambiguities. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that LogicSAGE (8B) achieves a state-of-the-art 92.36% average accuracy, significantly outperforming GPT-4 baselines, which establishes that architectural innovation can supersede model scale in faithful reasoning.

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions in high-dimensional spaces, the efficiency of importance sampling critically depends on the choice of the proposal distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive scheme for the construction of efficient proposal distributions. Our algorithm promotes efficient exploration of the target distribution by combining global sampling mechanisms with a delayed weighting procedure. The proposed weighting mechanism plays a key role by enabling rapid resampling in regions where the proposal distribution is poorly adapted to the target. Our sampling algorithm is shown to be geometrically convergent under mild assumptions and is illustrated through various numerical experiments.

Quantum hardware suffers from intrinsic device heterogeneity and environmental drift, forcing practitioners to choose between suboptimal non-adaptive controllers or costly per-device recalibration. We derive a scaling law lower bound for meta-learning showing that the adaptation gain (expected fidelity improvement from task-specific gradient steps) saturates exponentially with gradient steps and scales linearly with task variance, providing a quantitative criterion for when adaptation justifies its overhead. Validation on quantum gate calibration shows negligible benefits for low-variance tasks but > 40% fidelity gains on two-qubit gates under extreme out-of-distribution conditions (10× the training noise), with implications for reducing per-device calibration time on cloud quantum processors. Further validation on classical linear-quadratic control confirms these laws emerge from general optimization geometry rather than quantum-specific physics. We further introduce a few-shot pre-adaptation protocol that estimates the optimal adaptation budget from $N =3–5$ probe steps within 3–19% relative error across out-of-distribution regimes.

Compared with individual agents, large language model based multi-agent systems have shown great capabilities consistently across diverse tasks, including code generation, mathematical reasoning, and planning, etc. Despite their impressive performance, the effectiveness and robustness of these systems heavily rely on their communication topology, which is often fixed or generated in a single step. This restricts fine-grained structural exploration and flexible composition, resulting in excessive token utilization on simple tasks while limiting capability on complicated tasks. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce RADAR, a redundancy-aware and query-adaptive generative framework that actively reduce communication overhead. Motivated by recent progress in conditional discrete graph diffusion models, we formulate communication topology design as a step-by-step generation process, guided by the effective size of the graph. Comprehensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that RADAR consistently outperforms recent baselines, achieving higher accuracy, lower token consumption, and greater robustness across diverse scenarios. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/cszhangzhen/RADAR.

The deployment of quantized neural networks on edge devices, combined with privacy regulations like GDPR, creates an urgent need for machine unlearning in quantized models. However, existing methods face critical challenges: they induce forgetting by training models to memorize incorrect labels, conflating forgetting with misremembering, and employ scalar gradient reweighting that cannot resolve directional conflicts between gradients. We propose $\textbf{OEU}$, a novel Orthogonal Entropy Unlearning framework with two key innovations: 1) Entropy-guided unlearning provides an unbiased forgetting direction by maximizing prediction uncertainty on forgotten data, avoiding confident misprediction toward any specific class, and 2) Gradient orthogonal projection eliminates interference by projecting forgetting gradients onto the orthogonal complement of retain gradients, providing theoretical guarantees for utility preservation under first-order approximation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OEU outperforms existing methods in both forgetting effectiveness and retain accuracy.

The remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are often undermined by their instability. Even subtle and semantically irrelevant changes in prompts can cause dramatic fluctuations in performance, a phenomenon known as prompt sensitivity. Previous studies typically evaluate prompt sensitivity by comparing the LLM's final outputs when prompts change. However, such coarse-grained metrics fail to explain the internal reasons for prompt sensitivity. In this paper, we introduce interactions as a fine-grained tool to analyze prompt sensitivity of LLMs. Specifically, we decompose the output score of the LLM into a set of interactions. Each interaction represents a nonlinear relationship involving a set of input variables. We discover that subtle changes to prompts can trigger severe instability in interactions, even when the outputs of the LLM remain the same. To this end, we propose an Interaction-based Prompt Sensitivity (IPS) metric by quantifying changes in interactions when we introduce subtle changes to prompts. We apply the IPS metric to 50 open-source LLMs and uncover four factors that reduce the prompt sensitivity of LLMs, including supervised fine-tuning, increased model scales, dense architectures, and few-shot learning. More crucially, we discover a common mechanism by which these four factors reduce prompt sensitivity: all four factors tend to reduce the prompt sensitivity of low-order interactions (i.e., interactions involving few input variables).

Adopting pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising avenue for mitigating data scarcity and heterogeneity. However, existing solutions suffer from high computational complexity or ineffective knowledge aggregation. To address these problems, we propose FedSPA (Federated Adaptation via Semantic-Visual Prototype Alignment). On the client side, FedSPA restricts local optimization to visual prototypes, enabling lightweight personalization. On the server side, we introduce a semantic alignment module that leverages client-uploaded prototypes to minimize a contrastive objective, aligning global semantic prototypes with heterogeneous visual distributions and thereby shifting the paradigm from traditional "learning-to-describe" (optimizing static prompts) to "learning-to-align". Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedSPA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both personalized and global benchmarks, while substantially reducing computational overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/eejiarong/FedSPA-main.

Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) predicts an image’s overall aesthetic score, yet aesthetic is influenced by multiple attributes whose relative importance varies with image content and usage scenarios. Under end-to-end training with only overall-score supervision, attribute signals are blended, which can cause gradient conflict across samples dominated by different attributes, resulting in gradient cancellation and persistent systematic bias. To address these issues, we propose AGREE (Attribute-guided Gradient Routing for Establishing Agreement), which learns attribute-specific subspaces and performs gradient routing based on sample-wise attribute sensitivity estimated via perturbation analysis. AGREE further reduces feature coupling across attributes with semantic anchors and improves robustness via error-aware reweighting. Experiments on AVA, LAPIS, AADB, TAD66K, and PARA show consistent improvements over diverse IAA baseline models, and AGREE is plug-and-play for existing end-to-end IAA methods without modifying their original architectures. To our knowledge, this work is among the early efforts in IAA to systematically study gradient conflict and provide an effective solution. The code is available at https://dahat364.github.io/AGREE/.