ICML 2026 论文列表

International Conference on Machine Learning

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6,341篇论文

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LORD-GoF: A Robust Online Detection Approach for LLM Watermarks in Sparse and Mixed Streams

Jiade Xu, Zhouping Li

展开摘要

Watermarking is crucial for identifying AI-generated text, however, existing detection methods often focus on offline settings and fail to control the online False Discovery Rate (oFDR) when applied to real-world streams where machine-generated content is sparse and mixed with human writing. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose LORD-GoF, a novel online detection framework that combines a Goodness-of-Fit (GoF) statistic with the Levels based On Recent Discovery (LORD) procedure. We prove that LORD-GoF approach can rigorously control the oFDR below a user-specified level by dynamically adjusting detection thresholds. Extensive experiments on watermarked text from Qwen-2.5-3B, Sheared-LLaMA-2.7B, and OPT-1.3B using both the Gumbel-Max and Inverse Transform watermarking schemes show that our method maintains statistical power comparable to offline benchmarks while successfully controlling the oFDR under complex, mixed streaming scenarios.

Poster
MORE: A Multilingual Document Parsing Benchmark and Evaluation

Long Xu, Binghong Wu, TingHao YU, Hao Feng, Zhenyu Huang, Haoqing Jiang, YUNHAO WANG, Shuo Huang, Feng Zhang

展开摘要

Multilingual documents encapsulate rich regional cultures, scientific discoveries, and historical records. Parsing this content into structured, machine-readable formats is critical for unlocking global knowledge. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on high-resource languages like English and Chinese, creating an $\textit{evaluation blind spot}$ concerning model performance on other languages. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) claim support for hundreds of languages, the lack of ground truth makes it impossible to empirically verify these capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce $\textbf{MORE}$, a large-scale benchmark designed for multilingual document parsing evaluation. MORE distinguishes itself through three key dimensions: (1) $\textbf{Unprecedented Scale}$: It covers $\textbf{149 languages}$, making it the most linguistically diverse benchmark to date; (2) $\textbf{Structural Complexity}$: Unlike previous works, it extends evaluation beyond plain text to include structural elements such as code blocks, tables, and catalogs; and (3) $\textbf{Data Authenticity}$: All samples are curated from real-world documents via a model-assisted, human-refined annotation pipeline. We evaluate state-of-the-art models using MORE, establishing new performance baselines for long-tail languages and validating the benchmark's effectiveness in diagnosing model capabilities in realistic, diverse scenarios. The MORE dataset will be available at https://github.com/zimoqingfeng/MORE.

Poster
TabSwift: An Efficient Tabular Foundation Model with Row-Wise Attention

Si-Yang Liu, Han-Jia Ye

展开摘要

Tabular foundation models, exemplified by TabPFN, perform prediction via in-context learning, inferring test labels directly from labeled training examples. They have demonstrated competitive performance, particularly on small-to-medium datasets. However, recent tabular foundation models often improve accuracy with increasingly complex architectures, incurring higher inference cost and limiting practical deployment. In this work, we revisit the original TabPFN design and show that a lightweight row-wise attention–only backbone can remain highly competitive with two simple enhancements: a gated attention stabilization mechanism and a small set of learnable register tokens that provide global context and improve pretraining quality. The resulting model, TabSwift, supports both classification and regression, and is competitive with stronger tabular foundation models (e.g., TabPFN v2 and TabICL) while being more efficient at inference. For latency-sensitive serving, we further introduce an adaptive layer-wise early-exit mechanism that dynamically adjusts inference depth per sample. Overall, TabSwift enables efficient and anytime tabular in-context learning for practical deployments.

Spotlight
Every Step Counts: Decoding Trajectories as Authorship Fingerprints of dLLMs

Qi Li, Runpeng Yu, Haiquan Lu, Xinchao Wang

展开摘要

Discrete Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising non-autoregressive paradigm, offering faster inference while achieving strong performance in code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks. In this work, we show that dLLMs’ decoding mechanism not only improves utility but also enables effective model attribution: by analyzing a response’s decoding trajectory, we can identify its source model and help mitigate risks from model misuse. A key challenge is the diversity of attribution scenarios, ranging from distinguishing different models to identifying different checkpoints or backups of the same model. To ensure broad applicability, we focus on two core questions: what information to extract from the decoding trajectory, and how to use it effectively. We first observe that per-step model confidence is ineffective, as the bidirectional nature of dLLMs causes mutual influence among decoded tokens, leading to highly redundant confidence signals that obscure structural information about decoding order and dependencies. To overcome this, we propose a novel information extraction scheme called the \textit{Directed Decoding Map (DDM)}, which captures structural relationships between decoding steps and reveals model-specific behaviors. Furthermore, to fully leverage the extracted structure, we propose \textit{Gaussian-Trajectory Attribution (GTA)}, which fits a cell-wise Gaussian distribution at each decoding position for each model and uses log-likelihood differences between trajectories as the attribution score. Extensive experiments across diverse models, datasets and different model access assumptions validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Poster
How (Not) to Hybridize Neural and Mechanistic Models for Epidemiological Forecasting

Yiqi Su, Ray Lee, Jiaming Cui, Naren Ramakrishnan

展开摘要

Epidemiological forecasting from surveillance data is a hard problem and hybridizing mechanistic compartmental models with neural models is a natural direction. The mechanistic structure helps keep trajectories epidemiologically plausible, while neural components can capture non-stationary, data-adaptive effects. In practice, however, many seemingly straightforward couplings fail under partial observability and continually shifting transmission dynamics driven by behavior, waning immunity, seasonality, and interventions. We catalog these failure modes and show that robust performance requires making non-stationarity explicit: we extract multi-scale structure from the observed infection series and use it as an interpretable control signal for a controlled neural ODE coupled to an epidemiological model. Concretely, we decompose infections into trend, seasonal, and residual components and use these signals to drive continuous-time latent dynamics while jointly forecasting and inferring time-varying transmission, recovery, and immunity-loss rates. Across early outbreak and multi-wave regimes, our approach attains the lowest RMSE on all five datasets (up to 57% reduction over the strongest baseline), predicts the peak within one time step on four of five, and recovers time-varying epidemiological rates within ground-truth ranges, without relying on auxiliary covariates.

Poster
On the Intrinsic Limits of Transformer Image Embeddings in Non-Solvable Spatial Reasoning

Siyi Lyu, Quan Liu, Feng Yan

展开摘要

Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel in semantic recognition but exhibit systematic failures in spatial reasoning tasks such as mental rotation. While often attributed to data scale, this work argues that the limitation arises from the intrinsic circuit complexity of the architecture. By formalizing spatial understanding as a **Group Homomorphism Problem**—where latent embeddings preserve the algebraic structure of physical transformations acting on images—we identify a fundamental computational bottleneck. Specifically, for non-solvable groups (e.g., $\mathrm{SO}(3)$), maintaining such structure-preserving embeddings is lower-bounded by the Word Problem, which is $\mathsf{NC^1}$-complete. In contrast, constant-depth ViTs with polynomial precision are strictly bounded by the complexity class $\mathsf{TC^0}$. Under the standard conjecture $\mathsf{TC^0} \subsetneq \mathsf{NC^1}$, a **complexity boundary** emerges: constant-depth architectures lack the logical depth required to capture non-solvable spatial structures in a single forward pass. To empirically validate this theoretical gap, we propose the **Latent Space Algebra (LSA)** benchmark, which reveals a significant degradation in ViT representations as the compositional depth of non-solvable tasks increases.

Poster
FusionCell: Cross-Attentive Fusion of Layout Geometry and Netlist Topology for Standard-Cell Performance Prediction

Haoyi Zhang, Kairong Guo, Bojie Zhang, Yibo Lin, Runsheng Wang

展开摘要

Standard cells form the building blocks of digital circuits, so their delay and power critically influence chip-level performance; yet characterization (can be understood as evaluation of cell delay and power) still relies on slow simulation sweeps, and many fast predictors ignore layout geometry, missing coupling and layout-dependent effects. The challenge is to jointly represent layout geometry and netlist topology so models capture fine-grained spatial details together with structural connectivity for accurate performance prediction. We introduce \textbf{FusionCell}, a dual-modality predictor that treats routed layout geometry and netlist topology as inputs and fuses them explicitly in a unified model. A DeiT encoder processes three-layer routed layouts, while a graph transformer models heterogeneous device/net graphs. The modalities are integrated through a \textbf{topology-guided} mechanism, where the netlist acts as a structural ``map'' to actively query relevant physical regions in the layout for joint geometric and topological reasoning. We build a 7nm dataset based on the ASAP7 PDK with over 19.5k cells spanning 149 types using automatic tools, targeting six metrics: signal rise/fall delay, transition, and power. Experimental results demonstrate that \textbf{FusionCell} reduces regression error (average MAPE 0.92\%) and improves Spearman/Kendall ranking over baselines, while accelerating the characterization process by orders of magnitude compared to circuit simulation.

Poster
Decomposing Out-of-Distribution Error in Conditional Flow Matching via Wasserstein Geometry

Long HC Pham

展开摘要

Conditional flow matching has emerged as a powerful generative modeling framework that learns a vector field to transport an initial distribution toward a target data distribution. However, theoretical understanding of its out-of-distribution (OOD) performance under unseen conditions remains limited. In this work, we establish a rigorous geometric formulation to decompose the source of generalization error. We treat the conditional task as a map from the condition space to the Wasserstein space and derive a generalization bound under a coarse embedding assumption. The resulting decomposition separates OOD error into three tractable components: *Interpolation Sparsity*, *Geometric Distortion*, and *In-Distribution Fit*. Our empirical evaluation confirms that this framework demonstrates three key functions: (1) it acts as a diagnostic tool that tracks the dynamics of generalization during training; (2) it identifies dataset-specific failure modes (e.g., topological gaps, geometric instability); and (3) it enables mathematically motivated interventions that yield predictable gains by minimizing specific terms.

Poster
Distributional Alignment Games for Answer-Level Fine-Tuning

Mehryar Mohri, Jon Schneider, Yifan Wu

展开摘要

We focus on the problem of \emph{Answer-Level Fine-Tuning} (ALFT), where the goal is to optimize a language model based on the correctness or properties of its final answers, rather than the specific reasoning traces used to produce them. Directly optimizing answer-level objectives is computationally intractable due to the need to marginalize over the vast space of latent reasoning paths. To overcome this, we propose a general game-theoretical framework that lifts the problem to a *Distributional Alignment Game*. We formulate ALFT as a two-player game between a Policy (the generator) and a Target (an auxiliary distribution). We prove that the Nash Equilibrium of this game corresponds exactly to the solution of the original answer-level optimization problem. This variational perspective transforms the intractable marginalization problem into a tractable projection problem. We demonstrate that this framework unifies recent approaches to diversity and self-improvement (coherence) and provide efficient algorithms compatible with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), such as *Coherence-GRPO*, yielding significant complexity gains in mathematical reasoning tasks.

Poster
Attribution-Guided and Coverage-Maximized Pruning for Structural MoE Compression

Yifu Ding, Jiacheng Wang, Ge Yang, Yongcheng Jing, Jinyang Guo, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao

展开摘要

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale compute efficiently, yet they remain expensive to deploy due to substantial memory footprint and inference overhead. Prior methods mainly operate at the expert level, either removing whole experts or ranking experts by importance. However, such expert-wise decisions are too coarse to identify redundancy, and often misallocate pruning budgets and limits compression. This issue worsens in large MoEs with dynamic routing and heterogeneous experts. To alleviate this dilemma, we for the first time observe that information in MoE experts is highly concentrated in a few channels, leaving substantial redundancy even in "high importance" experts. Accordingly, we propose a structural pruning framework tailored for MoEs, reforming the prune-ratio objective to maximizing channel-score coverage via an efficient attribution-based approximation. Experiments on DeepSeek and Qwen MoEs retain accuracy under 50\% or 25\% pruning joinly with 4-bit quantization, reducing the memory footprint of Qwen3-30B-A3B by 5.27$\times$, and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines under diverse benchmarks.

Spotlight
Sharp Empirical Bernstein Inequalities for the Variance of Bounded Random Variables

Diego Martinez-Taboada, Aaditya Ramdas

展开摘要

We develop novel "empirical Bernstein" inequalities for the variance of bounded random variables. Our inequalities hold under constant conditional variance and mean, without further assumptions like independence or identical distribution of the random variables, making them suitable for sequential decision making contexts. The results are instantiated for both the batch setting (where the sample size is fixed) and the sequential setting (where the sample size is a stopping time). Our bounds are asymptotically "sharp": when the data are iid, our CI adapts optimally to both unknown mean $\mu$ and unknown $\mathbb{V}[(X-\mu)^2]$, meaning that the first order term of our CI exactly matches that of the oracle Bernstein inequality which knows those quantities. We compare our results to a widely used (non-sharp) concentration inequality for the variance based on self-bounding random variables, showing both the theoretical gains and improved empirical performance of our approach. We finally extend our methods to work in any separable Hilbert space.

Poster
STORM: Segment, Track, and Object Re-Localization from a Single Image

Yu Deng, Teng Cao, Hikaru Shindo, Quentin Delfosse, Jiahong Xue, Kristian Kersting

展开摘要

Accurate 6D pose estimation and tracking are core capabilities for physical AI systems, yet real-world deployment remains brittle and labor-intensive. Many pipelines rely on CAD models, manual masking, or per-object adaptation, and still fail under occlusion or fast motion without a principled way to recognize failure. We propose STORM, a unified framework for reference-conditioned 6D tracking that can operate from a single reference image, with minimal manual input and improved robustness. STORM combines: (i) Hierarchical Spatial Fusion Attention (HSFA), a task-driven reference-query fusion architecture that supports both single-reference and multi-reference conditioning and can optionally use vision-language semantic conditioning to resolve instance ambiguities; and (ii) a BCE-trained tracking verifier whose continuous compatibility logit is used as an energy-like score to detect drift and trigger automatic re-initialization. Experiments on LM-O and YCB-Video show that STORM improves annotation-free pose tracking accuracy over strong baselines and recovers reliably from severe occlusions and rapid viewpoint changes with minimal overhead.

Poster
Clustering in Deep Stochastic Transformers

Lev Fedorov, Michael Eli Sander, Romuald Elie, Pierre Marion, Mathieu Lauriere

展开摘要

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning across various domains but understanding the precise token dynamics remains a theoretical challenge. Existing theories of deep Transformers with layer normalization typically predict that tokens cluster to a single point; however, these results rely on deterministic weight assumptions, which fail to capture the standard initialization scheme in Transformers. In this work, we show that accounting for the intrinsic stochasticity of random initialization alters this picture. More precisely, we analyze deep Transformers where noise arises from the random initialization of value matrices. Under diffusion scaling and token-wise RMS normalization, we prove that, as the number of Transformer layers goes to infinity, the discrete token dynamics converge to an interacting-particle system on the sphere where tokens are driven by a *common* matrix-valued Brownian noise. In this limit, we show that initialization noise prevents the collapse to a single cluster predicted by deterministic models. For two tokens, we prove a phase transition governed by the interaction strength and the token dimension: unlike deterministic attention flows, antipodal configurations become attracting with positive probability. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted transition, reveal that antipodal formations persist for more than two tokens, and demonstrate that suppressing the intrinsic noise degrades accuracy.

Spotlight
Think Less, Act Early: Reinforced Latent Reasoning with Early Exit in Vision-Language-Action Models

Dianqiao Lei, Lianlei Shan

展开摘要

Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to bridge perception and action. While effective, this paradigm suffers from high computational costs and error propagation in multi-step tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Variable Alignment VLA (AVA-VLA), a novel Latent Reasoning VLA framework that models reasoning as a sequence of unobservable latent variables, bypassing the need for explicit text generation. However, latent trajectories are inherently susceptible to noise interference and misalignment with downstream objectives. To address this, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning-based Denoising mechanism that treats latent state generation as a sequential decision process, optimizing reasoning trajectories via task-level rewards. Furthermore, we incorporate an Early-Exit Strategy that adaptively terminates reasoning based on state confidence, enabling a dynamic trade-off between depth and efficiency. Extensive experiments on embodied decision benchmarks demonstrate that AVA-VLA significantly reduces inference latency while achieving superior stability and success rates compared to full-reasoning baselines.

Poster
LRAgent: Efficient KV Cache Sharing for Multi-LoRA LLM Agents

Hyesung Jeon, Hyeongju Ha, Jae-Joon Kim

展开摘要

Role specialization in multi-LLM agent systems is often realized via multi-LoRA, where agents share a pretrained backbone and differ only through lightweight adapters. Despite sharing base model weights, each agent independently builds and stores its own KV cache for the same long, tool-augmented trajectories, incurring substantial memory and compute overhead. Existing KV cache sharing methods largely overlook this multi-LoRA setting. We observe that, across agents, cache differences are dominated by adapter outputs, while activations from the shared pretrained backbone remain highly similar. Based on this observation, we propose LRAgent, a KV cache sharing framework for multi-LoRA agents that decomposes the cache into a shared base component from the pretrained weights and an adapter-dependent component from LoRA weights. LRAgent reduces memory overhead by sharing the base component and storing the adapter component in its inherent low-rank form, and further reduces compute overhead, enabled by shared-$A$ multi-LoRA architectures, by also sharing the low-rank cache and avoiding redundant computations for contexts already processed by other agents. To efficiently reconstruct adapter contributions at runtime, we introduce Flash-LoRA-Attention, a kernel that reorders attention computation to avoid materializing the low-rank cache to full dimension. LRAgent achieves throughput and time-to-first-token latency close to fully shared caching, while preserving accuracy near the non-shared caching baseline across agentic question-answering benchmarks.

Poster
Recursive Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Benjamin Howard, Keith Frankston

展开摘要

We introduce a recursive AlphaZero style Monte--Carlo tree search algorithm, "RMCTS". It first generates the search tree using prior policies, and then recursively re-estimates action values by using the regularized optimal posterior policies from ``Monte--Carlo tree search as regularized policy optimization'' (Grill et al., 2020) at each node of the search tree, starting from the leaves and working back up to the root. We find that RMCTS matches or exceeds the quality of AlphaZero's MCTS-UCB in a tiny fraction of the time.

Poster
Beyond Independent Genes: Learning Module-Inductive Representations for Single-Cell Gene Perturbation Prediction

Jiafa Ruan, Ruijie Quan, Xu Liyang, Zongxin Yang, Yi Yang

展开摘要

Predicting transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in functional genomics. In practice, perturbation responses are rarely gene-independent but instead manifest as coordinated, program-level transcriptional changes among functionally related genes. However, most existing methods do not explicitly model such coordination, due to gene-wise modeling paradigms and reliance on static biological priors that cannot capture dynamic program reorganization. To address these limitations, we propose scBIG, a module-inductive perturbation prediction framework that explicitly models coordinated gene programs. scBIG induces coherent gene programs from data via Gene-Relation Clustering, captures inter-program interactions through a Gene-Cluster-Aware Encoder, and preserves modular coordination using structure-aware alignment objectives. These structured representations are then modeled using conditional flow matching to enable flexible and generalizable perturbation prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple single-cell perturbation benchmarks show that scBIG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly on unseen and combinatorial perturbation settings, achieving an average improvement of 6.7% over the strongest baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ttruan2426-dot/scBIG.

Poster
Set-Coupled Guidance: Set-Level Coordination in Diffusion-Based Dataset Distillation

Ziang Gan, Qi Zhu, Libao Zhang

展开摘要

Diffusion models serve as generative priors for dataset distillation, yet existing pipelines rely on per-sample update rules that evolve each synthetic image independently, limiting their ability to optimize collective set-level objectives. We propose Set-Coupled Guidance (SCG), a plug-and-play auxiliary controller that shifts from per-image to group (IPC-at-once) sampling by injecting set-symmetric feedback at each diffusion step. SCG combines spectral set-point regulation, which aligns set-level statistics to real data via empirical characteristic function matching, with cooperative kernel coupling that stabilizes joint trajectories under noisy feedback. All computations operate on lightweight descriptors extracted from predicted clean latents, adding low overhead to the base method. We provide theoretical analysis including Lyapunov descent and input-to-state stability for distributional tracking. Experiments on ImageNette, ImageWoof, ImageNet-100 and ImageNet-1K show consistent accuracy gains across multiple diffusion-based baselines; code is available at \url{https://github.com/tade1s/SCG}.

Poster
A proximal ADMM for multiblock problems with block anti-upper triangular constraints

Zhanwang Deng, Yuqiu Su, Wen Huang

展开摘要

In this paper, we present the convergence analysis of the proximal Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) for problems with block anti-upper triangular constraints. While the linear constraints can be treated separately, most analyses of ADMM and its variants predominantly regard the linear constraints as one. Hence, it relies on assumptions related to the entire constraint matrix, such as the full column rank. However, some problems with block anti-upper triangular constraints that can be solved by ADMM do not satisfy these assumptions. To fill this gap, a new assumption is proposed and used to guarantee the global convergence of the proximal ADMM for nonconvex problems. In the strongly convex setting, we also prove the global convergence of the proximal ADMM and establish the linear convergence under four different scenarios. This work extends the theoretical understanding of the multi-block ADMM to more general cases with block anti-upper triangular constraints.

Poster
Bridging the Gap Between Average and Discounted TD Learning

HAOXING TIAN, Zaiwei Chen, Ioannis Paschalidis, Alex Olshevsky

展开摘要

The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of stochastic updates that are effective in discounted settings. Although a considerable body of literature addresses these challenges, existing theoretical approaches come with limitations. We introduce a novel algorithm designed explicitly for policy evaluation in the average-reward setting, utilizing sampling from two Markovian trajectories. Our proposed method overcomes previous limitations by guaranteeing convergence to the unique solution of a properly defined projected Bellman equation. Notably, and in contrast to earlier work, our convergence analysis is uniformly applicable to both linear function approximation and tabular settings and does not involve explicit dimension-dependent terms in its convergence bounds. These results align with what is known to hold in the discounted setting. Furthermore, our algorithm achieves improved dependence on the problem's condition number, reducing the sample complexity from quartic, as in prior literature, to quadratic scaling, and thus matching the efficiency seen in the discounted setting.

Poster