ICML 2026 论文列表

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general video understanding, their capacity to interpret involuntary, and spatio-temporally evolving pathologic motor behaviors such as seizure semiology remains largely untested. To address this gap, we introduce Seizure-Semiology-Suite (S³), a clinically grounded dataset and benchmark for fine-grained, structured seizure semiology understanding. The dataset includes 438 seizure videos annotated with over 35,000 dense labels covering 20 ILAE-defined semiological features. Building on this dataset, we propose a seven-task hierarchical benchmark that systematically evaluates MLLMs from low-level visual perception to temporal sequencing, narrative report generation, and seizure diagnosis. To enable clinically meaningful evaluation of generated reports, we further introduce the Report Quality Index for Seizure Semiology (Seizure-RQI). Extensive baselines across 11 open-weight MLLMs reveal systematic weaknesses in laterality reasoning, temporal localization, symptom sequencing, and clinically faithful reporting. We show that seizure-specific fine-tuning substantially improves performance across tasks, and that a two-stage neuro-symbolic framework achieves an F1 score of 0.96 on epileptic versus non-epileptic seizure classification. Seizure-Semiology-Suite establishes a rigorous benchmark for evaluating multimodal models in safety-critical medical video understanding and guides the development of clinically reliable, domain-adaptive multimodal intelligence. Our code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/LinaZhangUCLA/SeizureSemiologySuite}{SeizureSemiologySuite}.

Deep neural networks have recently advanced infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF), but most existing methods rely on sophisticated yet redundant designs, which hinder real-time deployment on mobile devices with limited compute and memory. In this paper, we present MobileFusion, an extremely lightweight and effective convolutional framework that achieves high-quality fusion under strict resource constraints. MobileFusion leverages a novel re-parameterizable multi-branch convolution module to promote cross-modal interactions during training while collapsing into a single-path operator for fast inference. It further incorporates a lightweight attention module to enhance context awareness, together with a re-parameterized feed-forward network to improve feature expressiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MobileFusion delivers a favorable trade-off between fusion quality and computational efficiency, enabling real-time and high-quality IVIF on resource-constrained platforms. The source code is available at https://github.com/sucessfullys/MobileFusion.

Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop OmniSapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample’s contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. OmniSapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

Vision-Text Compression (VTC) offers a scalable path for long-context multimodal modeling by rendering textual data into dense visual tokens. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate high decoding fidelity (OCR) on such inputs, they exhibit a severe reasoning gap: models that reason robustly on native text often fail on visually compressed equivalents, particularly in long-range retrieval and multi-step deduction. We identify a phenomenon of post-training transfer failure, where standard supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on visual prompts yield marginal gains compared to their textual counterparts. To address this, we propose CoRe (Coordinated Reasoning), a training framework that enforces lockstep consistency between the reasoning processes of textual and visual modalities. By treating the text-conditioned policy as a dynamic anchor, CoRe aligns the visual-conditioned policy via step-wise distribution matching, seamlessly integrating into both SFT and RL pipelines. Extensive evaluations across mathematical reasoning, long-context memory, and tabular retrieval benchmarks show that CoRe significantly outperforms standard visual post-training, recovering up to 70% of the performance gap relative to the textual upper bound and effectively activating latent reasoning capabilities in the compressed visual modality.

Repository-level automated program repair (APR) requires long-horizon reasoning over interdependent decisions. However, most LLM-based approaches reconstruct repair reasoning independently for each issue, failing to reuse successful patterns from prior repairs, even though real-world repositories contain many related issues with shared structure or constraints. Existing methods typically rely on forward exploration, which operates under outcome uncertainty, incurs substantial inference-time overhead, and can drift from the final correct patch. We propose Conditional Reasoning Distillation (ConRAD), which leverages in-repository resolved issues by reconstructing repair reasoning backward from verified patches and distilling outcome-consistent, stage-wise repair reasoning plans. Injected at inference time, these plans guide fault localization and patch generation, replacing open-ended exploration with constrained inference without fine-tuning or search. On SWE-Bench Lite, ConRAD improves Pass@1 by 10.4\% (GPT-4o), 8.6\% (DeepSeek-V3), and 10.3\% (GPT-5), demonstrating a scalable inference-time alternative to forward exploration for long-horizon APR.

Pruning is a typical acceleration technique for compute-bound models by removing computation on unimportant values. Recently, it has been applied to accelerate Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model inference. However, existing acceleration methods focus on local information from the current action step and ignore the global context, leading to $>$20\% success rate drop and limited speedup in some scenarios. In this paper, we point out \textbf{spatial-temporal consistency} in VLA tasks: input images in consecutive steps exhibit high similarity, and propose the key insight that token selection should combine local information with global context of the model. Based on this, we propose ***SpecPrune-VLA***, a training-free, two-level pruning method with heuristic control. **(1) Action-level static pruning.** We leverage global history and local attention to statically reduce visual tokens per action. **(2) Layer-level dynamic pruning.** We prune tokens adaptively per layer based on layer-wise importance. **(3) Lightweight action-aware controller:** We classify actions as coarse- or fine-grained by the speed of the end effector and adjust pruning aggressiveness accordingly. Extensive experiments show that SpecPrune-VLA achieves up to 1.57× speedup in LIBERO simulation and 1.70× on real-world tasks, with negligible success rate degradation.

Many organizations lack computational resources to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) on private (unshareable) data for better utility, while fine-tuning tiny language models (TinyLMs) alone performs poorly. To address this bottleneck, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation framework that generates LLM update vectors based on TinyLMs fine-tuned on private data. An update vector is a vector of parameter changes from an initial model to its fine-tuned version on a dataset, capturing the effect of cumulative gradient steps during fine-tuning. The key idea of our framework is a novel **Gradient Transformer** that transforms TinyLM's update vectors into LLM's update vectors. As derived from shadow datasets, $\texttt{Grad-Transformer}$ captures the correlation between TinyLM and LLM update vectors, enabling third-party providers to generate LLM update vectors given the organization's TinyLM update vectors without accessing the organization's private data. The framework supports multi-organization collaboration to jointly update LLMs, improving performance and cost-efficiency. Extensive experiments across language modeling and reasoning tasks show that $\texttt{Grad-Transformer}$ remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge distillation baselines, even under strict differential privacy protection.

Despite the rapid progress of vision-language-action (VLA) models, the prevailing practice of predicting action chunks as discrete waypoints remains structurally misaligned with the intrinsic continuity of physical motion. This discretization arises naturally from fixed-rate robot data collection and the token-by-token prediction paradigm of large language models, but ties actions to rigid sampling rates, does not naturally support analytically consistent higher-order derivatives, and introduces quantization artifacts that hinder precise, compliant interaction. We propose Neural Implicit Action Fields (NIAF), which reformulates chunk-level action representation from discrete waypoints to continuous action functions. Using a vision-language model as a hierarchical spectral modulator over a learnable motion prior, NIAF synthesizes continuous-time action manifolds with arbitrary temporal resolution. This formulation enables analytical differentiation, allowing explicit supervision of velocity and regularization of higher-order derivative signals to promote mathematical consistency, physical plausibility, and control smoothness. Our approach achieves strong results on CALVIN and LIBERO across diverse backbones. Real-world experiments further confirm that NIAF supports stable impedance control, bridging policy-side action generation and execution-side smooth control.

Achieving spatial intelligence requires moving beyond visual plausibility to build world simulators grounded in physical laws. While coding LLMs have advanced static 3D scene generation, extending this paradigm to 4D dynamics remains a critical frontier. This task presents two fundamental challenges: multi-scale context entanglement, where monolithic generation fails to balance local object structures with global environmental layouts; and a semantic-physical execution gap, where open-loop code generation leads to physical hallucinations lacking dynamic fidelity. We introduce Code2Worlds, a framework that formulates 4D generation as language-to-simulation code generation. First, we propose a dual-stream architecture that disentangles retrieval-augmented object generation from hierarchical environmental orchestration. Second, to ensure dynamic fidelity, we establish a physics-aware closed-loop mechanism in which a PostProcess Agent scripts dynamics, coupled with a VLM-Motion Critic that performs self-reflection to iteratively refine simulation code. Evaluations on the Code4D benchmark show Code2Worlds outperforms baselines with a 41% SGS gain and 49% higher Richness, while uniquely generating physics-aware dynamics absent in prior static methods.

Training robust reasoning vision-language models (VLMs) in rare domains (such as geospatial) is fundamentally constrained by supervision scarcity. While raw geospatial imagery is abundant, the amount of task-direct supervision falls far behind that of common domains. In this work, we validate an important conclusion: indirect verifiable rewards, derived from seemingly unrelated metadata, are sufficient to induce sophisticated and generalizable geospatial reasoning across a wide range of downstream tasks (25+). We present Geo-R1 as one empirical instantiation of this paradigm. Rather than relying on limited task-specific annotations (i.e., direct rewards), Geo-R1 utilizes scalable, verifiable indirect proxy rewards based on cross-view alignment with metadata (geolocation information) to drive reinforcement learning at scale. Such indirect rewards successfully motivate the model to discover and internalize zero-shot geospatial reasoning across diverse tasks, achieving extraordinary zero-shot transfer on out-of-distribution benchmarks and even surpassing fully supervised specialists on certain benchmarks. These findings indicate that optimizing for indirect verifiable rewards may provide a scalable pathway to unlock generalized reasoning capabilities in rare domains with massive unlabeled data archives. Our code is available at: https://github.com/miniHuiHui/Geo-R1.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically process visual inputs as a prefix to the language decoder. As the model autoregressively generates text, this initial visual information inevitably undergoes ``dilution'', leading the model to over-rely on language priors and hallucinate objects. Existing interventions attempt to correct this by contrasting logits or iteratively refining outputs, but they incur prohibitive latency costs. We propose **Residual-Update Directed DEcoding Regulation (RUDDER)**, a framework that counters visual dilution by creating a persistent visual anchor. We extract a robust evidence direction (**CARD**) directly from the model's prefill residual updates, and inject it into the decoding process. This injection is modulated by an adaptive gate, the **Beta Gate**, which acts as a trust mechanism and ensures the visual reminder is applied only when necessary. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 (7B/13B), Idefics2, InstructBLIP, and Qwen2.5-VL demonstrate that RUDDER consistently mitigates hallucination (with greedy decoding, RUDDER reduces CHAIR$_S$ by an average of **24.4\%** and CHAIR$_i$ by **23.6\%** relative) and scales effectively across architectures, all while maintaining **>96.0\%** throughput. The code is available at https://github.com/Akko000/RUDDER-Residual-Update-Directed-DEcoding-Regulation-

Relative spatial relations provide a compact representation of spatial structure and are fundamental to relative spatial reasoning in 3D layout generation. Recent works leverage Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to infer such relations, but the inferred relations are often unreliable and are typically handled with post-hoc heuristics. In this paper, we propose R$^3$L, a general framework that improves the reliability and consistency of relative spatial reasoning for 3D layout generation. Our key motivation is that multi-hop reasoning requires repeated reference-frame transformations, which accumulate errors in inferred relations and lead to semantic and metric drift. To mitigate this, we propose invariant spatial decomposition to break coupled relation chains, and consistent spatial imagination to promote self-consistency through an imagine-and-revise loop. We further introduce supportive spatial optimization to ease pose optimization via global-to-local coordinate re-parameterization. Extensive experiments across diverse scene types and instructions demonstrate that R$^3$L produces more physically feasible and semantically consistent layouts. Notably, our analysis shows that resolving frame-induced inconsistencies is crucial for reliable multi-hop relative spatial reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/Neal2020GitHub/R3L.

We present a black-box model-stealing attack that recovers private vision-tokenizer configurations of deployed vision-language models (VLMs), including the visual patch size and input preprocessing pipeline. The key idea is a task-level side channel induced by ViT-style patchification: when a synthetic grid image is aligned with the hidden patch grid, boundary cues are erased at tokenization, causing periodic accuracy drop. By sweeping the grid cell size and measuring these collapses, we infer the patch size; by introducing padding and a consistency-check test, we further identify whether preprocessing is dynamic- or fixed-resolution and recover the target resize resolution. Across open-source Qwen-VL variants and proprietary models including GPT and Claude, we reliably recover tokenizer-related parameters. Finally, we show that such leakage enables preprocessing-aware transfer attacks and model-targeted adversarial manipulation.

Estimating treatment effects from observational text is increasingly practical with Large Language Models (LLMs). However, applying causal representation learning directly to high-dimensional LLM embeddings faces a fundamental barrier: empirical Wasserstein matching suffers from the curse of dimensionality, rendering standard generalization guarantees effectively vacuous. We propose SPIKED-CFR, a framework bridging this gap by assuming a Spiked Structure, where treatment selection bias is assumed to manifest primarily as a low-dimensional treated--control discrepancy in the semantic representation. We develop Wasserstein Projection Pursuit, a minimax objective that adversarially learns an orthogonal projection on the Stiefel manifold to identify and balance only this subspace while preserving prognostic information. Under a spiked structure, we show the projected discrepancy can be estimated at a rate governed by the intrinsic dimension $k \ll D$, and we derive a tighter PEHE generalization bound that depends on $k$ rather than the ambient embedding dimension. Experiments on four semi-synthetic benchmarks and four real-world clinical benchmarks demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over strong baselines.

Current Video-LLM approaches for Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) typically rely on direct timestamp generation from an unstructured visual-token stream, often leading to brittle numerics and inconsistent boundaries. To address this, we propose Foresee-to-Ground (F2G), a framework that reformulates VTG as a verifiable Identify-then-Measure problem. F2G integrates Predictive Temporal Perception with Evidence-Driven Reasoning: it learns boundary-sensitive temporal representations to build a video-wide evidence pool of candidate event segments, and exposes these segments to the LLM as citable evidence units that bind boundary prediction to explicit event hypotheses. By decoupling event identification from precise boundary measurement, F2G stabilizes grounding and makes predictions verifiable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that F2G consistently improves grounding accuracy across diverse benchmarks, transfers robustly across different Video-LLM backbones, and preserves general video understanding capabilities. Our project is available at https://github.com/zelion2003/Foresee-to-Ground.

Traditional whole slide image (WSI) analysis methods typically rely on the multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigm, which extracts patch-level features at high magnification and aggregates them for slide-level prediction. However, such exhaustive patch-level processing is computationally expensive, severely limiting the efficiency and scalability of WSI analysis. To address this challenge, we propose PathCTM (a Pathology-oriented Continuous Thought Model) that enables token-efficient scale-space continuous reasoning for gigapixel WSIs. PathCTM formulates diagnostic inference as a dynamic sequential information pursuit. It progressively transitions from low-magnification global to high-magnification local inspection, and adaptively terminates inference when sufficient evidence is gathered to effectively bound decision uncertainty. Specifically, it uses conditional computation for dynamic scale switching with attention-guided region pruning, coupled with confidence-aware early stopping. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared with standard MIL-based methods, PathCTM reduces the number of required image patches by 95.95\% and shortens inference time by approximately 95.62\%, while maintaining AUC without degradation. Code is available at https://github.com/JSGe-AI/PathCTM.

Red-teaming Vision-Language Models is essential for identifying vulnerabilities where adversarial image-text inputs trigger toxic outputs. Existing approaches treat image generation as a black box, providing only terminal toxicity scores while remaining temporally opaque regarding when and how toxic semantics emerge during multi-step synthesis. We introduce $\textbf{STARE}$, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that treats the denoising trajectory as an exploitable attack surface. By synergizing a high-level prompt editor with low-level T2I fine-tuning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), STARE achieves a 68\% improvement in Attack Success Rate over state-of-the-art baselines including black box and white-box variants. More importantly, we reveal the Optimization-Induced Phase Alignment phenomenon: while vanilla models exhibit diffuse toxicity, adversarial optimization systematically concentrates conceptual harms into early semantic phases and detail-oriented harms into late refinement. This discovery transforms toxicity formation from a chaotic process into a series of predictable vulnerability windows. This temporal alignment transforms red-teaming from a trial-and-error process into a targeted structural analysis. Our work provides both a potent attack engine and a diagnostic foundation for developing next-generation, phase-aware safety mechanisms. Content warning: This paper contains examples of toxic content that may be offensive or disturbing.

Vision–language pre-training (VLP) holds great promise for general-purpose medical AI by leveraging radiology reports as rich textual supervision, yet existing methods struggle with 3D CT imaging due to inefficient visual backbones and coarse semantic alignment. To address these issues, we propose a tailored VLP framework featuring three key components: (1) a CNN–ViT hybrid encoder that replaces ViT’s patch embedding with a 3D CNN backbone to efficiently capture local anatomical details while preserving global attention and compatibility with pre-trained cross-modal priors; (2) a disease-level contrastive learning mechanism using learnable query tokens to dynamically extract disease-specific semantics from full reports and align them with corresponding visual features, thereby disentangling distinct diseases within the same anatomical region; and (3) a diagnosis-aware prompt strategy that employs real clinical phrases and aggregated disease prototypes to bridge the pre-training–inference gap and enhance zero-shot diagnostic reliability. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on CT-RATE (84.4\% AUC, +5.1%) and Rad-ChestCT (75.4\% AUC, +5.4%), with even larger gains (+9.8% AUC) on a challenging 60-disease benchmark, and demonstrates strong transferability to radiology report generation, underscoring the generality and clinical utility of our approach.

Parallel decoding for diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) is difficult because each denoising step provides only token-wise marginal distributions, while unmasking multiple tokens simultaneously requires accounting for inter-token dependencies. We propose **D**ependency-**A**ware **P**arallel **D**ecoding (**DAPD**), a simple, training-free decoding method that uses self-attention to induce a conditional dependency graph over masked tokens. At each iteration, edges in this graph capture strong token interactions, while non-edges indicate weak dependence. Parallel decoding is then reduced to selecting an independent set on the graph and unmasking the selected tokens in parallel. This avoids co-updating strongly coupled tokens without auxiliary models or retraining. Experiments on LLaDA and Dream show that DAPD improves the accuracy–steps trade-off over existing methods and enables more globally distributed parallel updates that better exploit the any-order generation capability of dLLMs. The project is available at \url{https://ai-isl.github.io/dapd}