ICML 2026 论文列表

Inferring the structure of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data is a central challenge in causal discovery, particularly in modern high-dimensional settings where large-scale interventional data are increasingly available. While interventional data can improve identifiability, existing methods remain limited by soft acyclicity constraints, leading to optimization over invalid cyclic graphs, numerical instability, and reduced scalability. We introduce PACER (Perturbation-driven Acyclic Causal Edge Recovery), a scalable framework for causal discovery that guarantees acyclicity by construction. PACER parameterizes a distribution over DAGs through a joint model of variable permutations and edge probabilities, enabling direct optimization over valid causal structures without surrogate penalties. The framework supports a unified likelihood-based treatment of observational and interventional data, flexible conditional density models, and the incorporation of structural prior knowledge. For linear-Gaussian mechanisms, we derive closed-form expressions for the expected interventional log-likelihood and its gradients, yielding substantial computational gains. Empirically, PACER matches or exceeds state-of-the-art methods on protein signaling and large-scale genetic perturbation benchmarks, while scaling efficiently to networks with thousands of variables and achieving up to two orders of magnitude speedups over penalty-based differentiable approaches. These results demonstrate that exact and scalable causal discovery from high-dimensional perturbation data is achievable through principled search space design.

Joint planning through language-based interactions is a key area of human-AI teaming. Planning problems in the open world often involve various aspects of incomplete information and unknowns, e.g., objects involved, human goals/intents -- thus leading to knowledge gaps in joint planning. We consider the problem of discovering optimal interaction strategies for AI agents to actively elicit human inputs in object-driven planning. To this end, we propose Minimal Information Neuro-Symbolic Tree (MINT) to reason about the impact of knowledge gaps and leverage self-play with MINT to optimize the AI agent’s elicitation strategies and queries. More precisely, MINT builds a symbolic tree by making propositions of possible human-AI interactions and by consulting a neural planning policy to estimate the uncertainty in planning outcomes caused by remaining knowledge gaps. Finally, we leverage LLM to search and summarize MINT’s reasoning process and curate a set of queries to optimally elicit human inputs for best planning performance. By considering a family of extended Markov decision processes with knowledge gaps, we analyze the return guarantee for a given MINT with active human elicitation. Our evaluation on three benchmarks involving unseen/unknown objects of increasing realism shows that MINT-based planning attains near-expert returns by issuing a limited number of questions per task while achieving significantly improved rewards and success rates.

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is crucial for real-world applications, as it enables effective modeling of both rich node semantics and complex graph structure. Nevertheless, this task is intrinsically challenging due to structural–semantic mismatch stemming from divergent modality distributions, as well as dual-source noise inherent in node textual content and graph structure. Existing approaches often enforce a rigid fusion of distinct modalities while overlooking their inherent noise, which inevitably results in persistent distribution gaps and amplifies mixed interference during information propagation. To address these issues, we propose UDPD, an Uncertainty-modulated Dual-Path Diffusion model for robust text-attributed graph learning. Specifically, we first employ a dual-perspective node encoding strategy to separately learn semantic and structural embeddings. We then introduce a cooperative diffusion paradigm with parallel semantic and structural branches, where mutual guidance enables progressive alignment of different distributions while effectively suppressing modality inherent noise. Crucially, the reverse process is guided by node uncertainty, which is used to adaptively modulate cross-branch interaction strength, ensuring robust coupling and maximizing denoising effectiveness. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our UDPD over state-of-the-art baselines.

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (EFMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of downstream EEG tasks via pretraining and fine-tuning. Through empirical analysis, we observe that (i) no single EFM consistently dominates all tasks, yet identifying the task-specific optimal model by fine-tuning all EFMs introduces substantial computational overhead; and (ii) models with inferior task-level performance still exhibit strengths at the sample level as distinct architectures induce diverse inductive biases. These observations motivate EmBrace, a representation-centric framework for sample-aware knowledge fusion that avoids the constraints of parameter-level or output-level alignment. EmBrace synchronizes discriminative intermediate representations into a unified manifold and adaptively weights multiple EFMs at the sample level while selecting the most compatible model as the carrier. Extensive experiments across multiple EEG benchmarks demonstrate that EmBrace consistently improves over SOTA EFMs and generalizes effectively under cross-task settings.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) alters brain electrophysiology and disrupts multichannel EEG dynamics, making accurate and clinically useful EEG-based diagnosis increasingly important for screening and disease monitoring. However, many existing approaches rely on black-box classifiers and do not explicitly model the latent event timing and cross-channel coordination behind their decisions. To address these limitations, we propose LERD, an end-to-end Bayesian latent event--relational dynamical system that infers latent neural events and their relational structure directly from multichannel EEG without event or interaction annotations. LERD combines a continuous-time event inference module with a stochastic event-generation process to capture flexible temporal patterns, while incorporating an electrophysiology-inspired dynamical prior to guide learning in a principled way. We further provide theoretical analysis that yields a tractable IVP-based KL regularizer and stability guarantees for the inferred relational dynamics. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and two real-world AD EEG cohorts demonstrate that LERD consistently outperforms strong baselines and yields physiology-aligned rate, timing, and graph summaries that help characterize group-level dynamical differences.

Despite the success of knowledge distillation (KD) in Large Language Models (LLMs), the underlying mechanism behind its efficacy remains unclear. In this paper, we propose a unified approach to explore the common mechanism of various KD methods using interactions. Specifically, we decompose the output score of the LLM into the sum of numerous interactions. Each interaction represents a nonlinear relationship involving a set of input variables (e.g., words). Based on the decomposed interactions, we discover that the common mechanism underlying various KD methods is the sparsification of interactions, i.e., student models retain fewer interactions for inference while suppressing other interactions to zero effects. Furthermore, we discover that the performance variance across different KD methods arises from their capabilities in handling complex interactions. A KD method typically yields better performance if it enables the student model to achieve higher sparsity of complex interactions. Motivated by these insights, we propose a plug-and-play loss function called Complex Interaction Penalty (CIP) to explicitly enforce the sparsity of complex interactions during the distillation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating CIP consistently improves the performance of diverse KD methods on both in-domain and out-of-distribution benchmarks.

Continual learning for visual question answering (VQA) is typically implemented by training one expert per task and routing each query using task-ID supervision. Yet continual VQA tasks overlap substantially: on the VQA-v2 task stream, a non-native expert outperforms the task’s own expert on $49.9\%$ of queries, so hard routing both wastes transferable knowledge and can be confidently wrong when mismatched. We propose a calibrated Bayesian mixture-of-experts that trains parameter-efficient per-task adapters, learns routing by directly maximizing expected VQA utility, and marginalizes expert identity at inference via Bayesian aggregation in a unified answer space; an entropy penalty prevents the utility objective from collapsing to one-hot routing, enabling evidence pooling across plausible experts. We reach $64.16$ accuracy with $0.63$ forgetting on VQA-v2 CL-LS ($+5.74\%$ accuracy, $-2.99$ forgetting vs. the strongest prior method), $78.81$ with $0.40$ forgetting on TDIUC CL-LS ($+3.10$, $-1.74$), and $83.41$ with $3.21$ forgetting on TDIUC CL-VS ($+1.58$, $-0.82$). Calibration also improves on VQA-v2, reducing ECE from $0.15$ to $0.07$.

Generalizing pretrained models to unseen datasets without retraining is a central challenge toward foundation models. Achieving fully inductive inference on numerical data is particularly difficult due to large variations in feature dimensionality and semantics across datasets. We observe that, in the presence of graph structure, numerical data admits a distinct structure-induced representational axis beyond the feature space, which we formalize as the *view space*. This view space enables a unified representation of graphs with heterogeneous features and motivates *Graph View Transformation* (GVT), a class of parametric mappings that can be shared across arbitrary graphs. We instantiate this framework with Recurrent GVT, an architecture for fully inductive node representation learning in node classification. Pretrained on OGBN-Arxiv and evaluated on 27 benchmarks, Recurrent GVT outperforms GraphAny, the prior fully inductive graph model, by +8.93%, and surpasses 12 individually tuned GNNs by at least +3.30%. These results establish the view space as a principled and practical foundation for learning across graphs with heterogeneous feature spaces. Code and checkpoints are available in https://github.com/dooho00/graph-view-space.

Supervised Graph Outlier Detection has long been constrained by severe class imbalance, and although recent diffusion-based augmentation methods have improved sample quality, their practical utility is hindered by the high computational costs of multi-step iterative sampling and the stochasticity of the generation process. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose Graph Outlier Synthesis via Origin Consistency Model (GOCM), a single-step graph outlier synthesis framework based on a consistency model. Theoretically, we pioneer the Origin Consistency (OC) mechanism by employing an ``Interval-based Origin Inference'' strategy, which mathematically derives a direct mapping from the noise trajectory to the data origin, achieving robust and efficient single-step sample generation. Architecturally, to address the complexity of heterogeneous graphs containing multiple relations, we design the Multi-input Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (MiVGAE), which decouples intricate structures via relation-level message passing and cross-relation fusion, mapping them into a unified latent space, from which GOCM synthesizes high-quality outlier nodes. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that GOCM achieves superior detection performance with significantly improved generation efficiency. The source code is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RFS-2026-EB63/.

Designing high-performance neural networks for new tasks requires balancing optimization quality with search efficiency. Current methods fail to achieve this balance: neural architectural search is computationally expensive, while model retrieval often yields suboptimal static checkpoints. To resolve this dilemma, we model the performance gains induced by fine-grained architectural modifications as edit-effect evidence and build evidence graphs from prior tasks. By constructing a retrieval-augmented model refinement framework, our proposed M-DESIGN dynamically weaves historical evidence to discover near-optimal modification paths. M-DESIGN features an adaptive retrieval mechanism that quickly calibrates the evolving transferability of edit-effect evidence from different sources. To handle out-of-distribution shifts, we introduce predictive task planners that extrapolate gains from multi-hop evidence, thereby reducing reliance on an exhaustive repository. Based on our model knowledge base of 67,760 graph neural networks across 22 datasets, extensive experiments demonstrate that M-DESIGN consistently outperforms baselines, achieving the search-space best performance in 26 out of 33 cases under a strict budget.

Reasoning hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) often appear as fluent yet unsupported conclusions that violate either the given context or underlying factual knowledge. Although such failures are widely observed, the mechanisms by which decoder-only Transformers produce them remain poorly understood. We model next-token prediction as a graph search process over an underlying graph, where entities correspond to nodes and learned transitions form edges. From this perspective, contextual reasoning is a constrained search over a sampled subgraph (intrinsic reasoning), while context-free queries rely on memorized structures in the underlying graph (extrinsic reasoning). We show that reasoning hallucinations arise from two fundamental mechanisms: path reuse, where memorized knowledge overrides contextual constraints during early training, and path compression, where frequently traversed multi-step paths collapse into shortcut edges in later training. Together, these mechanisms provide a unified explanation for reasoning hallucinations in LLMs and connected to well-known behaviors observed in downstream applications.

Because of the pervasive use of deep neural networks (DNNs), especially in high-stakes domains, the interpretability of DNNs has received increased attention. The general idea of rationale extraction (RE) is to provide an interpretable-by-design framework for DNNs via a select-predict architecture where two neural networks learn jointly to perform feature selection and prediction, respectively. Given only the remote supervision from the final task prediction, the process of learning to select subsets of features (or *rationales*) requires searching in the space of all possible feature combinations, which is computationally challenging and even harder when the base neural networks are not sufficiently capable. To improve the predictive performance of RE models that are based on less capable or smaller neural networks (i.e., the students), we propose **REKD** (**R**ationale **E**xtraction with **K**nowledge **D**istillation) where a student RE model learns from the rationales and predictions of a teacher (i.e., a *rationalist*) in addition to the student's own RE optimization. This structural adjustment to RE aligns well with how humans could learn effectively from interpretable and verifiable knowledge. Because of the neural-model agnostic nature of the method, any black-box neural network could be integrated as a backbone model. To demonstrate the viability of REKD, we conduct experiments with multiple variants of BERT and vision transformer (ViT) models. Our experiments across language and vision classification datasets (i.e., IMDB movie reviews, CIFAR 10 and CIFAR 100) show that REKD significantly improves the predictive performance of the student RE models. The code is publicly available: https://github.com/JiayiDai/REKD.

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly large reasoning models (LRMs), are rapidly advancing. This raises concerns about whether LRMs can maintain their safety awareness throughout long-form reasoning. Frustratingly, we identify a prevalent safety issue across LLMs and LRMs, where LRMs can reveal dangerous thoughts, leading to harmful knowledge elicitation when confronting sensitive yet benign topics. For example, when explaining the chemical context of Lewisite, a biological weapon, LRMs analyze its synthesis in their reasoning without recognizing the associated risks. We refer to this issue as the *unintended elicitation* issue. Experiments on our benchmark show that it is a common issue across current LRMs due to their strong multi-step reasoning capabilities. To address this issue, we propose placing LLMs in our synthesized open-ended environments, allowing them to self-search for a safety reasoning pattern to respond responsibly and helpfully. We first design a scalable data synthesis pipeline to generate data that triggers the *unintended elicitation* issue. We further propose a safety-first reward model design, which prioritizes safety while also evaluating the helpfulness of responses and the faithfulness of reasoning. Experiments show that our method improves safety, reduces over-refusal, and maintains strong helpfulness, paving the way for safer deployment in high-stakes domains. Code is available at https://github.com/XinhaoS0101/Safety-CoT.

AI assistants in human-AI collaboration often correct suboptimal human actions through behavioral feedback (e.g., alerts or steering-wheel nudges in assistive driving). Such interventions can mitigate immediate errors, but long-term improvement requires addressing the underlying misconceptions that cause repeated mistakes. We introduce SENSEI, a framework that infers user misconceptions from interaction behavior and provides targeted, minimal yet sufficient suggestions to correct them. Our approach departs from action- or trajectory-level interventions by operating over a structured knowledge representation to localize and correct the sources of erroneous behavior. Across three long-horizon tasks with diverse misconceptions and corresponding behaviors, SENSEI demonstrates zero-shot compositional generalization, disentangling multiple overlapping misconceptions despite training only on single-misconception cases. A user study further shows that our method identifies real human misconceptions and provides effective guidance that improves long-horizon task performance, successfully correcting 90% of student misconceptions.

Vertex-level clustering for directed graphs (digraphs) remains challenging as edge directionality breaks the key assumptions underlying popular spectral methods, which also incur the overhead of eigen-decomposition. This paper proposes *Parametrized Power Iteration Clustering* (ParPIC), a random-walk-based clustering method for weakly connected digraphs. This builds over the Power-Iteration Clustering paradigm, which uses the rows of the iterated diffusion operator as a data embedding. ParPIC has three important features: the use of parametrized reversible random walk operators, the automatic tuning of the diffusion time, and the efficient truncation of the final embedding, which produces low-dimensional data representations and reduces complexity. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world graphs demonstrate that ParPIC achieves competitive clustering accuracy with improved scalability relative to spectral and teleportation-based methods.

Text-attributed Graphs (TAGs) incorporate textual node attributes with graph structures to describe rich relational semantics. Recent efforts to integrate Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for learning on TAGs, yet achieving well-aligned representations remains challenging. Prior studies largely rely on heuristics that perform coarse-grained matching. They lack sufficient constraints and ignore distributional alignment, leading to representation drift and limited generalization. Building on Energy-based Models (EBMs), we propose an **E**nergy-based **R**epresentation **Align**ment (ERAlign) framework that projects GNN-encoded graph structure and LLM-derived text embeddings in a shared latent space to achieve distribution consistency. Concretely, layer-wise alignment is quantified by a distance metric and optimized via an EBM objective. By decreasing energy values, our framework yields well-aligned representations for downstream tasks. During training, we introduce Energy Discrepancy (ED) to avoid high sampling costs associated with intractable normalization. ED also carries theoretical guarantees of higher training efficiency and reduced energy landscape distortion. Empirical evaluations on eight TAG datasets demonstrate that ERAlign obtains state-of-the-art performance across varying levels of supervision and cross-task transfer scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess broad conceptual knowledge acquired through large-scale text pretraining, yet their potential to supervise models in other modalities remains underexplored. In this work, we propose LaViD—Language-to-Visual Knowledge Distillation—a simple and effective framework for transferring high-level semantic knowledge from a language-only teacher to a vision-only student model. Instead of relying on paired multimodal data, LaViD elicits conceptual signals from an LLM by prompting it to generate multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that probe semantic distinctions between visual classes. Each class is mapped to a soft label distribution over these MCQs, forming a rich conceptual signature that guides the student through an auxiliary distillation loss. Notably, despite using a language-only teacher without access to image data, LaViD consistently outperforms recent methods like MaKD that distill from vision-language models across multiple fine-grained benchmarks. It also achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art visual distillation methods such as DKD and MLKD, with further gains when combined with logit standardization. On the Waterbirds dataset, LaViD substantially improves worst-group accuracy, demonstrating enhanced robustness to spurious correlations with distillation. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/lliangthomas/lavid}.

GraphRAG is increasingly adopted for converting unstructured corpora into graph structures to enable multi-hop reasoning. However, standard graph algorithms rely heavily on static connectivity and explicit edges, often failing in real-world scenarios where Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are noisy, sparse, or incomplete. To address this limitation, we introduce INSES (Intelligent Navigation and Similarity Enhanced Search), a dynamic framework designed to reason beyond explicit edges. INSES couples LLM-guided navigation, which prunes noise and steers exploration, with embedding-based similarity expansion to recover hidden links and bridge semantic gaps. Recognizing the computational cost of graph reasoning, we complement INSES with a lightweight router that delegates simple queries to Naïve RAG and escalates complex cases to INSES, balancing efficiency with reasoning depth. Experimental results show that INSES performs favorably compared to established RAG and GraphRAG baselines on multiple benchmarks. In particular, on the MINE benchmark, it exhibits notable robustness and adaptability across KGs constructed by varying methods. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/hanggao-gh/INSES.

While large language models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive amounts of data, their knowledge coverage remains incomplete in specialized, data-scarce domains, motivating extensive efforts to study synthetic data generation for knowledge injection. We propose $\textbf{SPA}$ ($\textbf{S}$caling $\textbf{P}$rompt-engineered $\textbf{A}$ugmentation), a simple but tough-to-beat baseline that uses a small set of carefully designed prompts to generate large-scale synthetic data for knowledge injection. Through systematic comparisons, we find that $\textbf{SPA}$ outperforms several strong baselines. Furthermore, we identify two key limitations of prior approaches: (1) while RL-based methods may improve the token efficiency of LLM-based data augmentation at small scale, they suffer from diversity collapse as data scales, leading to diminishing returns; and (2) while multi-stage prompting may outperform simple augmentation methods, their advantages can disappear after careful prompt tuning. Our results suggest that, for knowledge injection, careful prompt design combined with straightforward large-scale augmentation can be surprisingly effective, and we hope SPA can serve as a strong baseline for future studies in this area. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tangkexian/SPA.