ICML 2026 论文列表

Existing Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) methods focus on how to search when controlling optimizers, but largely overlook where to search. We propose MetaSG-SAEA, a bi-level MetaBBO framework for expensive constrained multi-objective optimization problems (ECMOPs), in which a meta-policy provides search guidance to the low-level Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Algorithm (SAEA). To achieve this, we introduce Max–Min Constraint-Calibrated Inequality (MM-CCI), a compact, problem-agnostic region abstraction that maps heterogeneous constraint evaluations to an ordered scalar level; we further provide a theoretical analysis of its fundamental properties. Building on this region abstraction, we adopt diffusion-based population initialization to translate the meta-policy’s region-level guidance into solution-level priors for the SAEA. To make MetaSG-SAEA scalable, we construct an attention-based state representation across varying problem dimensions, population sizes, and numbers of objectives and constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that MetaSG-SAEA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse benchmarks and exhibits the ability to generalize across problem distributions.

Even for the gradient descent (GD) method applied to neural network training, understanding its optimization dynamics, including convergence rate, iterate trajectories, function value oscillations, and especially its implicit acceleration, remains a challenging problem. We analyze nonlinear models with the logistic loss and show that the steps of GD reduce to those of generalized perceptron algorithms (Rosenblatt, 1958), providing a new perspective on the dynamics. This reduction yields significantly simpler algorithmic steps, which we analyze using classical linear algebra tools. Using these tools, we demonstrate on a minimalistic example that the nonlinearity in a two-layer model can provably yield a faster iteration complexity $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{d})$ compared to $\Omega(d)$ achieved by linear models, where $d$ is the number of features. This helps explain the optimization dynamics and the implicit acceleration phenomenon observed in neural networks. The theoretical results are supported by extensive numerical experiments. We believe that this alternative view will further advance research on the optimization of neural networks.

Federated Prompt Learning (FPL) adapts Vision-Language Models to privacy-sensitive medical imaging, typically via a textual tuning paradigm that assumes the frozen visual encoder provides a discriminative feature geometry. We argue this assumption breaks down in medical settings, leading to two geometric pathologies: (1) Intra-client: Medical Manifold Collapse, where high morphological similarity reduces the effective rank of visual features; and (2) Inter-client: Medical Topological Misalignment, where heterogeneous acquisition protocols induce inconsistent geometry across clients. To address these, we propose FedMAP, which shifts the paradigm to Visual Manifold Anchoring. FedMAP utilizes an LLM-derived codebook as a client-invariant synchronization signal to restructure the visual space, via Manifold Semantic Anchoring (MSA) and Topology Structural Alignment (TSA) to enforce consistent inter-class relations. Experiments on FedISIC, FedCamelyon17, and a private ultrasound dataset show that FedMAP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in high-noise regimes where manifold collapse is most severe.

Deep protein structure predictors such as AlphaFold provide confidence estimates (e.g., pLDDT) that are not calibrated and degrade under distribution shifts across experimental modalities, temporal changes, and disordered regions. We introduce \textbf{CalPro}, a prior-aware evidential conformal framework for shift-robust uncertainty quantification. CalPro combines three components: (i) a geometric evidential head outputting Normal Inverse Gamma distributions via graph neural networks; (ii) a differentiable calibration surrogate that shapes representations during training, followed by split-conformal calibration for finite-sample coverage; and (iii) domain priors (disorder, flexibility) encoded as soft constraints on predicted uncertainty. Theoretically, we derive structure-aware \emph{sensitivity bounds} for coverage degradation under distribution shift using PAC-Bayesian control over ambiguity sets, quantifying how miscoverage increases with model complexity and shift magnitude. Empirically, CalPro achieves at most 5 percentage points coverage degradation across modalities compared to 15 to 25 points for baselines, reduces calibration error by 30\% to 50\%, and improves downstream docking success from 52\% to 75\% when filtering by uncertainty. The framework extends beyond proteins to structured regression tasks where priors encode local reliability.

LLMs have traditionally scaled along dense dimensions, where performance is coupled with near-linear increases in computational cost. While MoE decouples capacity from compute, it introduces large memory overhead and hardware efficiency challenges. To overcome these, we propose token-indexed parameters as a novel, orthogonal scaling axis that decouple model capacity from FLOPs. Specifically, we introduce ReToken and MoRT, which augment Transformer layers with modulation vectors retrieved from auxiliary embedding tables. These vectors modulate the backbone via lightweight, element-wise operations, incurring negligible FLOPs overhead. Extensive experiments on both dense and MoE backbones, spanning from 190M to 9.8B parameters, demonstrate that our approach consistently reduces validation loss and significantly improves downstream task performance (e.g., +7.3 on ARC-C, +6.3 on GSM8K). Rigorous isoFLOPs analysis further confirms that MoRT fundamentally shifts the quality–compute Pareto frontier, achieving comparable model quality with 35\% less compute relative to vanilla MoE architectures, and we validate that token-indexed parameters exhibit a predictable power-law scaling behavior. Moreover, our efficient implementation ensures that the overhead introduced by ReToken and MoRT remains marginal.

Many fields collect large-scale temporal data through repeated measurements (`trials’), where each trial is labeled with a set of metadata variables spanning several categories. For example, a trial in a neuroscience study may be linked to a value from category (a): task difficulty, and category (b): animal choice. A critical challenge in time-series analysis is to understand how these labels are encoded within the multi-trial observations, and disentangle the distinct effect of each label entry across categories. Here, we present MILCCI, a novel data-driven method that i) identifies the interpretable components underlying the data, ii) captures cross-trial variability, and iii) integrates label information to understand each category's representation within the data. MILCCI extends a sparse per-trial decomposition that leverages label similarities within each category to enable subtle, label-driven cross-trial adjustments in component compositions and to distinguish the contribution of each category. MILCCI also learns each component’s corresponding temporal trace, which evolves over time within each trial and varies flexibly across trials. We demonstrate MILCCI’s performance through both synthetic and real-world examples, including voting patterns, online page view trends, and neuronal recordings.

We present a constructive lower bound of $\Omega(1/\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ for Frank-Wolfe (FW) when both the objective and the constraint set are smooth and strongly convex, showing that the known uniform $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ guarantees in this regime are tight. It is known that under additional assumptions on the position of the optimizer, FW can converge linearly. However, it remained unclear whether strong convexity of the set can yield rates \emph{uniformly} faster than $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{\varepsilon})$, i.e., irrespective of the position of the optimizer. To investigate this question, we focus on a simple yet representative problem class: minimizing a strongly convex quadratic over the Euclidean unit ball, with the optimizer on the boundary. We analyze the dynamics of FW for this problem in detail and develop a novel computational approach to construct worst-case FW trajectories, which is of independent interest. Guided by these constructions, we develop an analytical proof establishing the lower bound.

Symbolic expressions can effectively characterize and predict circuit behavior, but deriving them directly from circuit schematics is challenging. This process requires accurate visual-to-symbolic construction of circuit structure from images and correct multi-step symbolic derivation, both of which impose strict correctness requirements. This work proposes AutoVSR, an automated framework for visual-to-symbolic generation of circuit expressions using Vision Language Models (VLMs). By reconstructing circuit diagrams into an executable intermediate representation (Executable IR) and leveraging a symbolic solver for reasoning, AutoVSR significantly improves the accuracy of symbolic expression generation. AutoVSR introduces two key innovations: an IR construction method guided by component rule retrieval and verification-based feedback, and a symbolic solver implemented as a planning agent equipped with a symbolic tool library for reliable multi-step derivation. Compared with end-to-end VLM approaches and specialized methods on the main symbolic expression generation task, AutoVSR achieves accuracy improvements of 30.01--59.45% and 41.96--51.84%, respectively. Moreover, AutoVSR surpasses closed-source state-of-the-art VLMs in inference cost and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/LongfeiLi1/AutoVSR.

Empirically, option-based hierarchical reinforcement (HRL) learning often produces longer and more diverse options when a deliberation cost is charged at option boundaries. However, when options are executed for many steps under an approximate dynamics model, small model errors compound along the option, degrading the quality of the resulting plan. In this work, we introduce the commitment loss to formalize the tradeoff between deliberation cost and model error as a function of option duration. We characterize how optimal termination probabilities vary with this tradeoff under two model-error mechanisms. First, the model is learned from finite data via maximum-likelihood estimation, producing statistical error that interacts with option duration. Second, we consider an input-driven setting where an exogenous input is only observed at option boundaries and evolves unobserved between them, creating a drift-induced mismatch between planned and realized dynamics. In both cases, we solve for the optimal termination behavior as a function of deliberation cost and the error scale, clarifying the behavior of some popular HRL algorithms that approach the deliberation cost as a heuristic.

In modern applications such as ECG monitoring, neuroimaging, wearable sensing, and industrial equipment diagnostics, complex and continuously structured data are ubiquitous, presenting both challenges and opportunities for functional data analysis. However, existing methods face a critical trade-off: conventional functional models are limited by linearity, whereas deep learning approaches lack interpretable region selection for sparse effects. To bridge these gaps, we propose a sparse Bayesian functional deep neural network (sBayFDNN). It learns adaptive functional embeddings through a deep Bayesian architecture to capture complex nonlinear relationships, while a structured prior enables interpretable, region-wise selection of influential domains with quantified uncertainty. Theoretically, we establish rigorous approximation error bounds, posterior consistency, and region selection consistency. These results provide the first theoretical guarantees for a Bayesian deep functional model, ensuring its reliability and statistical rigor. Empirically, comprehensive simulations and real‑world studies confirm the effectiveness and superiority of sBayFDNN. Crucially, sBayFDNN excels in recognizing intricate dependencies for accurate predictions and more precisely identifies functionally meaningful regions, capabilities fundamentally beyond existing approaches.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models with external knowledge, and tree-based RAG organizes documents into hierarchical indexes to support queries at multiple granularities. However, existing Tree-RAG methods designed for single-document retrieval face critical challenges in scaling to cross-document multi-hop questions: *(1) poor distribution adaptability*, where $k$-means clustering introduces noise due to rigid distribution assumptions; *(2) structural isolation*, as tree indexes lack explicit cross-document connections; and *(3) coarse abstraction*, which obscures fine-grained details. To address these limitations, we propose **$\Psi$-RAG**, a tree-RAG framework with two key components. *First*, a hierarchical abstract tree index built through an iterative "merging and collapse" process that adapts to data distributions without a priori assumption. *Second*, a multi-granular retrieval agent that intelligently interacts with the knowledge base with reorganized queries and an agent-powered hybrid retriever. $\Psi$-RAG supports diverse tasks from token-level question answering to document-level summarization. On cross-document multi-hop QA benchmarks, it outperforms RAPTOR by 25.9\% and HippoRAG 2 by 7.4\% in average F1 score.

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train graph neural networks while strictly preserving data privacy. However, existing FGL methods implicitly assume the reliability of local graph structures and lack elastic awareness of parameter importance during model aggregation, leading to representation degradation under topological noise and catastrophic forgetting caused by model drift. To address these challenges, we propose GraphP-FL, a general personalized FGL framework. (1) Specifically, we design a self-supervised dynamic topology reconstruction mechanism on the client side. This mechanism mines implicit dependencies to adaptively rectify noisy topologies, effectively suppressing topological noise propagation and capturing precise structural relationships for high-quality representations. (2) Additionally, we introduce a Fisher-based Elastic Parameter Alignment (FRPA) algorithm. FRPA imposes anisotropic regularization constraints in the parameter space to precisely quantify parameter importance, enabling the model to strictly preserve critical local knowledge while flexibly aligning with the global model, thus effectively overcoming catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks (including biochemical molecules, social networks, and large-scale encrypted traffic) demonstrate that GraphP-FL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving accuracy by up to 8.6% while exhibiting superior generalization and robustness.

With the rapid development of deep learning, the issue of data scarcity has become increasingly prominent, inspiring emerging interests towards research on data augmentation techniques over recent years. However, our literature survey indicates that existing efforts often suffer from two issues of semantic infidelity, including: (i) visual semantics infidelity, such as visual artifacts, manifold intrusion, and unnatural blending boundaries etc, and (ii) label semantic infidelity, where augmented images do not match the original labels, creating extra label noises. To address these issues, we propose a Semantics Calibrated and Diffusion-Enhanced Augmentation (SCalDA) scheme to achieve accurate semantics calibration across image, label and feature domains. Compared with the existing approaches, our proposed features in precise guidance in label domain, semantics driven synthesis across three domains (image, label and feature), and semantics-aware metric learning. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that SCalDA yields consistent and significant performance improvements for both fine-grained and general classification tasks, validating the effectiveness and broad applicability of the proposed.

Multi-adapter serving systems route entire sequences to a single adapter, forcing a choice when requests span multiple domains. This assumption fails in two important settings: (1) multimodal generation, where text and image tokens require different adapters within the same sequence, and (2) mixed-capability requests like ``write code to solve this equation,'' which need expertise from multiple specialized adapters. We introduce \emph{per-token routing}, which routes individual tokens to adapters based on either vocabulary structure (for multimodal models) or learned gating (for semantic specialization). Per-token routing is provably optimal for mixed-adapter requests: $N$ work for $N$ tokens, versus $K \cdot N$ for per-sequence systems that must replay one adapter per pass. Our key contribution is MoLoRA (Mixture of LoRA), which enables \emph{composable specialization}: load multiple domain-specific adapters and let a learned router select the appropriate adapter per-token. We demonstrate that specialization dramatically beats scale: MoLoRA enables Qwen3-1.7B to exceed Qwen3-8B across four reasoning benchmarks while being 4.7$\times$ smaller. This enables modular expertise at inference time: train focused LoRAs independently, combine them without retraining, and add new capabilities by simply loading new adapters.

We present adversarial flow models, a class of generative models that belongs to both the adversarial and flow families. Our method supports native one-step and multi-step generation and is trained with an adversarial objective. Unlike traditional GANs, in which the generator learns an arbitrary transport map between the noise and data distributions, our generator is encouraged to learn a deterministic noise-to-data mapping. This significantly stabilizes adversarial training. Unlike consistency-based methods, our model directly learns one-step or few-step generation without having to learn the intermediate timesteps of the probability flow for propagation. This preserves model capacity and avoids error accumulation. Under the same 1NFE setting on ImageNet-256px, our B/2 model approaches the performance of consistency-based XL/2 models, while our XL/2 model achieves a new best FID of 2.38. We additionally demonstrate end-to-end training of 56-layer and 112-layer models without any intermediate supervision, achieving FIDs of 2.08 and 1.94 with a single forward pass and surpassing the corresponding 28-layer 2NFE and 4NFE counterparts with equal compute and parameters.

We introduce TFRBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of forecasting systems. Traditionally, time-series forecasting has been evaluated solely on numerical accuracy, treating foundation models as "black boxes." Unlike existing benchmarks, TFRBench provides a protocol for evaluating the reasoning generated by forecasting systems--specifically their analysis of cross-channel dependencies, trends, and external events. To enable this, we propose a systematic multi-agent framework that utilizes an iterative verification loop to synthesize numerically grounded reasoning traces. Spanning ten datasets across five domains, our evaluation confirms that this reasoning is causally effective; useful for evaluation; and prompting LLMs with our generated traces significantly improves forecasting accuracy compared to direct numerical prediction (e.g., avg. $\sim40.2$% $\rightarrow$ $\sim56.6$%), validating the quality of our reasoning. Conversely, benchmarking experiments reveal that off-the-shelf LLMs consistently struggle with both reasoning (lower LLM-as-a-Judge scores) and numerical forecasting, frequently failing to capture domain-specific dynamics. TFRBench thus establishes a new standard for interpretable, reasoning-based evaluation in time-series forecasting. Our benchmark is available at: https://tfrbench.github.io

State Space Models (SSMs) provide linear-time alternatives to attention for vision, but require serializing 2D images into 1D sequences using a predefined scan order. We identify scan order as a previously underexplored inductive bias that fundamentally shapes spatial dependency modeling in Vision SSMs. Fixed scan paths distort local adjacency, fragment object structure, and induce anisotropic representations that are brittle under geometric transformations such as rotation. We propose Partial RIng Scan Mamba (PRIS-Mamba), a rotation-robust traversal that decomposes images into concentric rings, performs permutation-invariant aggregation within each ring, and models cross-ring dependencies via short radial SSMs. This design induces a structured factorization of spatial dependencies that preserves isotropy while maintaining linear complexity. To improve efficiency without sacrificing expressivity, we introduce partial channel filtering, selectively applying recurrent modeling to informative channels while routing others through a residual pathway. Empirically, PRIS-Mamba improves accuracy, efficiency, and rotation robustness over prior Vision SSMs on ImageNet-1K. Our results position scan-order design as a core representational choice in Vision SSMs, with implications for robustness and generalization beyond architectural scaling. The code will be released upon paper acceptance.

We propose a system for marking sensitive or copyrighted texts to detect their use in fine-tuning large language models under black-box access with statistical guarantees. Our method builds digital “marks” using invisible Unicode characters organized into (“cue”, “reply”) pairs. During an audit, prompts containing only “cue” fragments are issued to trigger regurgitation of the corresponding “reply”, indicating document usage. To control false positives, we compare against held-out counterfactual marks and apply a ranking test, yielding a verifiable bound on the false positive rate. Empirically, we obtain a true positive rate of 96.7\% at 0\% false positive rate and reply regurgitation rates exceeding 28\% per document with only 40 (4\%) watermarked documents. The approach is minimally invasive, scalable across many sources, robust to standard processing pipelines, and achieves high detection power even when marked data is a small fraction of the fine-tuning corpus.

Relational prediction tasks are fundamental in many real-world applications, where data are naturally stored in relational databases (RDBs). Relational Deep Learning (RDL) addresses this problem by modeling RDBs as graphs and applying graph neural networks (GNNs) for end-to-end learning. However, the full-resolution property is commonly adopted as a design principle in graph construction for RDBs to preserve relational semantics, which leads most existing methods to rely on fixed graph structures. In this paper, we propose **FROG**, a *F*ull-*R*esolution and *O*ptimizable *G*raph Structure Learning framework for RDL that formulates relational structure learning as a learnable table role modeling problem, allowing tables to contribute as nodes and edges in message passing. We further design role-driven message passing mechanisms to capture relational semantics, enabling joint optimization of graph structure and GNN representations. To ensure semantic consistency, we introduce functional dependency constraints that regularize representations across table and entity levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches and reveal how table roles impact downstream tasks, offering new insights into graph construction for RDL.