ICML 2026 论文列表

3D hierarchical semantic segmentation (3DHS) is crucial for embodied intelligence that demands the coarse-to-fine grained and multi-hierarchy understanding of 3D scenes. 3DHS tasks can be addressed by multi-label learning, but facing two issues: I) learning multiple labels for each point with a shared model can lead to multi-hierarchy conflicts in cross-hierarchy optimization, and II) the class imbalance issue is inevitable across multiple hierarchies of 3D scenes, making the model easily be dominated by major classes. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-label learning with contrastive cluster self-supervision framework for 3DHS. Specifically, we propose a late-decoupled multi-label learning 3DHS network which employs decoupled decoders with the coarse-to-fine hierarchical consistency guidance. This late-decoupled model architecture can mitigate the underfitting and overfitting conflicts among multiple hierarchies and also constrain the class imbalance problem within each individual hierarchy. Moreover, we introduce a 3DHS-oriented contrastive cluster self-supervision learning method, which learns cluster-wise point cloud features with contrastive loss and produces self-supervised information to enhance the class-imbalance segmentation. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and backbones demonstrate that our approach promotes the multi-hierarchy balance and mitigates the class imbalance issue in 3DHS tasks.

While humans perceive the world through diverse modalities that operate synergistically to support a holistic understanding of their surroundings, existing omnivideo models still face substantial challenges on audio-visual understanding tasks. In this paper, we propose OmniVideo-R1, a novel reinforced framework that improves mixed-modality reasoning. OmniVideo-R1 empowers models to "think with omnimodal cues" by two key strategies: (1) query‑intensive grounding based on self‑supervised learning paradigms; and (2) modality‑attentive fusion built upon contrastive learning paradigms. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that OmniVideo-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and robust generalization capabilities.

Identifying molecular structures from spectral data is essential for early-stage chemical analysis, yet it remains a difficult task due to severe functional group imbalance and complex inter-group dependencies, which often cause existing methods to overfit frequent groups while underperforming on rare ones. To address these issues, we present **SymSpectra**, a **Sym**metric Conditional Information Bottleneck (SCIB) framework designed to seamlessly integrate multi-modal **Spectra** features. Our model employs the SCIB framework to fuse multi-modal spectroscopic data into a unified representation, effectively preserving discriminative signals while mitigating redundancy. To enhance robustness against data imbalance, we incorporate conditional mutual information into the training objective, increasing the model’s sensitivity to rare functional groups and challenging molecular cases. Additionally, a specialized module captures the dependencies among functional groups, improving both prediction accuracy and chemically meaningful interpretability. Experiments on multimodal spectral datasets show that SymSpectra outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an F1-score of 0.970 in substructure classification and demonstrating strong robustness under various imbalance settings.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose neural network activations into interpretable features, but many learned features never activate, a problem called feature death that wastes dictionary capacity and can reintroduce superposition. Death rates vary dramatically between models: near-zero on GPT-2, over 70\% on AlphaFold3 with identical configurations. We find that dimension-level activation outliers (dimensions whose mean magnitude is large relative to per-token variation) cause this by shifting pre-activations at initialization based on each feature's alignment with the activation mean. Features anti-aligned with the mean receive permanently negative pre-activations and never fire. We formalize outlier severity as $\gamma = \|\boldsymbol{\mu}\|/\|\boldsymbol{\sigma}\|$; it predicts initial death rates (Spearman $\rho = 0.89$ for dead-by-TopK, $0.82$ for dead-by-ReLU) across 454 model-layer combinations spanning language, vision, protein, and genomic models. Dead features can revive during training, but recovery requires the SAE bias to learn the activation mean, a process that is prohibitively slow at high $\gamma$. Mean-centering (subtracting the activation mean) sidesteps this and eliminates outlier-induced death across all tested models, confirming the mechanism and providing a principled basis for when and why this preprocessing step is necessary.

Neural architecture design lacks first principles: innovations are discovered empirically and justified post-hoc, with no systematic way to diagnose *why* an architecture fails or derive *what* repair will succeed. We introduce the *Axiomatic Atlas*, encoding requirements as composable axioms over graph connectivity, operator contracts, numerical stability, and information preservation. Given an operator library and wiring conventions, the Atlas constructs certificates lower-bounding output variation via min-cut analysis and diagnoses failures by locating axiom violations. Crucially, the framework is prescriptive: each violation implies a targeted repair, reducing architecture design to constraint satisfaction. We prove variation bounds under exact and finite-precision arithmetic, enabling modular verification across transformers, MoEs, SSMs, and GNNs. Four Atlas-derived interventions validate the approach: +46 percentage points on GNN bottlenecks, $3\times$ robustness to MoE quantization, 83\% gap closure with adaptive expert budgets, and 0\%$\to$100\% retrieval via orthogonal keys---each against matched negative controls.

We present SorryDB, a dynamically-updating benchmark of open Lean tasks drawn from 78 real world formalization projects on GitHub. Unlike existing static benchmarks, often composed of competition problems, hillclimbing the SorryDB benchmark will yield tools that are aligned to the community needs, more usable by mathematicians, and more capable of understanding complex dependencies. Moreover, by providing a continuously updated stream of tasks, SorryDB mitigates test-set contamination and offers a robust metric for an agent's ability to contribute to novel formal mathematics projects. We evaluate a collection of approaches, including generalist large language models, agentic approaches, and specialized symbolic provers, over a selected snapshot of 1000 tasks from SorryDB. We show that current approaches are complementary: even though an agentic approach based on Gemini Flash is the most performant, it is not strictly better than other off-the-shelf large-language models, specialized provers, or even a curated list of tactics.

Proteins are shaped by gradual evolution under biophysical and functional constraints. Protein language models learn rich evolutionary constraints from large-scale sequences, and discrete diffusion-based protein language models (e.g., DPLMs) are promising for both understanding and generation. However, existing DPLMs typically rely on masked diffusion that contradicts a simple biological intuition: proteins evolve through accumulated edits, not by emerging from masks. Consequently, these frameworks lack explicit pretraining objectives for substitution and insertion/deletion (indel) operations, limiting both optimization-style post-editing and flexible guided generation. To address these limitations, we present DPLM-Evo, an evolutionary discrete diffusion framework that explicitly predicts substitution, insertion, and deletion operations during denoising. DPLM-Evo decouples an upsampled-length latent alignment space from the variable-length observed sequence space, which makes indel-aware generation tractable. To better align substitutions with real evolution, we further introduce a contextualized evolutionary noising kernel that produces biologically informed, context-dependent mutation patterns. Across tasks, DPLM-Evo improves sequence understanding and achieves state-of-the-art mutation effect prediction performance on ProteinGym in the single-sequence setting. It also enables variable-length simulated evolution, and post-editing/optimization of existing proteins via explicit edit trajectories.

The increasing prevalence of large-scale hypergraphs poses significant computational challenges for hypergraph neural network (HNN) training. To address this, hypergraph condensation (HGC) distills large real hypergraphs into compact yet informative synthetic ones, beyond graph condensation (GC) methods limited to pairwise relations. However, existing HGC methods rely on decoupled training architectures, where structure generators are pre-trained on the original hypergraph but not jointly optimized with condensed features during refinement, resulting in misaligned structures that degrade downstream utility. Moreover, trajectory-based optimization incurs substantial computational overhead in refinement, limiting condensation efficiency. To tackle these issues, we propose \textbf{A}nchor-guided \textbf{H}yper\textbf{G}raph \textbf{C}ondensation with \textbf{D}ual-level \textbf{D}iscrimination (\textbf{AHGCDD}), which consists of three key components: (1) a node initialization module based on Heat Kernel PageRank (HKPR) to encode structural knowledge into feature semantics; (2) an anchor-guided hyperedge synthesis strategy for joint optimization of condensed features and structure; (3) a theoretically grounded dual-level discrimination objective for utility-preserving condensation without redundant HNN training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of AHGCDD.

We propose UniDFlow, a unified discrete flow-matching framework for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing. It decouples understanding and generation via task-specific low-rank adapters, avoiding objective interference and representation entanglement, while a novel reference-based multimodal preference alignment optimizes relative outcomes under identical conditioning, improving faithfulness and controllability without large-scale retraining. UniDFlow achieves SOTA performance across eight benchmarks and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to tasks including inpainting, in-context image generation, reference-based editing, and compositional generation, despite no explicit task-specific training.

While LiDAR NeRFs excel in static environments, synthesizing dynamic scenes remains challenging as moving objects break multi-view consistency, causing conflicting supervision and ghosting artifacts across frames. Existing methods typically suffer from optimization difficulty from the start, struggling to disentangle valid geometry from motion noise when initial motion priors are unreliable. To address this, we propose MAC-NeRF, a novel LiDAR NeRF framework enhanced by motion-aware curriculum learning for high-fidelity dynamic scene synthesis. First, we propose Rectified Temporal Consistency to resolve motion-induced supervision conflicts. By filtering out erroneous supervision via forward-backward geometric verification, it creates a curriculum that prioritizes trustworthy temporal correspondences before handling challenging motions. Second, we propose Confidence-Modulated Frequency Regularization (CMFR) to eliminate geometric ambiguity. It adaptively modulates the frequency regularization bandwidth, progressively transitioning from strict low-frequency constraints for artifact suppression to full-spectrum modeling for fine-grained detail preservation. Extensive experiments on KITTI-360 and nuScenes demonstrate that MAC-NeRF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in rendering quality.

Research on differentially private synthetic tabular data has largely focused on independent and identically distributed rows where each record corresponds to a unique individual. This perspective neglects the temporal complexity in longitudinal datasets, such as electronic health records, where a user contributes an entire (sub) table of sequential events. While practitioners might attempt to model such data by flattening user histories into high-dimensional vectors for use with standard marginal-based mechanisms, we demonstrate that this strategy is insufficient. Flattening fails to preserve temporal coherence even when it maintains valid marginal distributions. We introduce PATH, a novel generative framework that treats the full table as the unit of synthesis and leverages the autoregressive capabilities of privately fine-tuned large language models. Extensive evaluations show that PATH effectively captures long-range dependencies that traditional methods miss. Empirically, our method reduces the distributional distance to real trajectories by over 60% and reduces state transition errors by nearly 50% compared to leading marginal mechanisms while achieving similar marginal fidelity.

The scarcity of high-quality imaging data for coronary angiography (CAG) stenosis limits the clinical translation of automated stenosis detection. Synthetic stenosis data provides a practical avenue to augment training sets, improving data quality, diversity, and distributional coverage, and enhancing detection precision and generalization. However, diffusion-based editing commonly relies on soft guidance in a noise-initialized reverse process, offering limited pixel-level precision and structure preservation. We propose the **OT-Bridge Editor**, which reframes localized editing as a constrained entropic optimal transport (OT) problem and leverages geometric information to steer the generation path, enabling stronger geometric control. Extensive experiments show that our synthesized angiograms consistently improve downstream stenosis detection, yielding substantial relative gains of 27.8% on the public ARCADE benchmark and 23.0% on our multi-center dataset, supported by consistent qualitative results.

Current neural architectures lack a principled way to handle interchangeable tokens, i.e., symbols that are semantically equivalent yet distinguishable, such as bound variables. As a result, models trained on fixed vocabularies often struggle to generalize to unseen symbols, even when the underlying semantics remain unchanged. We propose a novel Transformer-based mechanism that is provably invariant to the renaming of interchangeable tokens. Our approach employs parallel embedding streams to isolate the contribution of each interchangeable token in the input, combined with an aggregated attention mechanism that enables structured information sharing across streams. Experimental results confirm the theoretical guarantees of our method and demonstrate substantial performance gains on open-vocabulary tasks that require generalization to novel symbols. Project page: https://bu-depend-lab.github.io/Symbol-Invariant-Transformer/

Video motion transfer aims to synthesize novel content videos that strictly follow the motion trajectories of a reference video. However, existing methods typically operate in Euclidean space, treating motion as unconstrained pixel displacements or linear phase shifts. This simplification frequently causes severe shearing artifacts and perspective collapse under complex camera and object motions. In this work, we present LieWarper, a geometry-aware motion transfer framework that reconceptualizes motion as coordinate evolution on a manifold rather than mere pixel displacement. Specifically, we derive an analytic solver on the $\text{Sim}(2)$ manifold to extract global evolution parameters from noisy optical flow. We then introduce a flow-guided phase modulation mechanism, enabling non-rigid dynamics to undergo coordinate transformation along the evolution path. This approach achieves accurate trajectory transfer while maintaining global geometric integrity. Extensive experiments show that LieWarper significantly outperforms state-of-the-art training-free baselines in both motion fidelity and geometric stability, while maintaining high generation quality.

In DRL, an agent is trained from a stream of experience. In a continual learning setting, such agents can suffer from \emph{plasticity loss}: their ability to learn new skills from new experiences diminishes over training. Recently, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks have been reported to enable scaling laws and facilitate the learning of diverse skills. However, in continual reinforcement learning settings, their performance can degenerate as learning proceeds, indicating a loss of plasticity. To address this, building on Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory, we formalize the plasticity loss in MoE policies as a loss of \emph{spectral plasticity}. We then derive a tractable proxy for spectral plasticity, one expressible in terms of individual expert feature matrices. Leveraging this proxy, we introduce \emph{SPHERE}, a practical Parseval penalty tailored for MoE-based policies that alleviates the loss of spectral plasticity. On MetaWorld and HumanoidBench, SPHERE improves average success under continual RL by 133\% and 50\% over an unregularized MoE baseline, while maintaining higher spectral plasticity throughout training.

In many multi-agent systems, agents interact repeatedly and are expected to settle into stable, rational behavior over time. Yet in practice, behavior often drifts, and detecting such deviations in real time remains an open challenge. We introduce a sequential testing framework that monitors whether observed play is consistent with a benchmark of strategic behavior, without assuming a fixed sample size. Our approach builds on the e-value framework for safe anytime-valid inference: by "betting" against the benchmark, we construct a test supermartingale that accumulates evidence whenever observed payoffs systematically violate the expected conditions. For repeated normal-form games, we take equilibrium as the benchmark, yielding a statistically sound, interpretable measure of departure from equilibrium that can be monitored online; our framework unifies the treatment of Nash, correlated, and coarse correlated equilibria, offering finite-time guarantees and a detailed analysis of detection times. We also leverage Benjamini-Hochberg-type procedures to increase detection power in large games while rigorously controlling the false discovery rate. Finally, we extend our method to stochastic games, verifying online whether observed trajectories adhere to a specified target policy, such as a computed equilibrium, broadening the framework's applicability to dynamic, state-dependent settings.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate executable outputs, JSON objects, and API calls, where a single syntax error can make the output unusable. Constrained decoding enforces validity token-by-token via masking and renormalization, but it can distort generation when the model assigns low probability mass to valid continuations, pushing decoding toward locally valid yet semantically incorrect trajectories. We propose \emph{Draft-Conditioned Constrained Decoding (DCCD)}, a simple two-step, training-free inference procedure that decouples semantic planning from structural enforcement: an unconstrained draft is generated first, and constrained decoding is then applied, conditioned on this draft, to guarantee validity. We analyze DCCD through a KL-projection view, showing that draft conditioning increases feasible mass and reduces the cumulative “projection tax” induced by hard constraints, with an optional best-of-$K$ draft selection. Across structured reasoning benchmarks, DCCD improves strict structured accuracy by up to +24 percentage points over standard constrained decoding (e.g., 15.2\% to 39.0\% on GSM8K with a 1B model), and enables smaller model pairs to match or exceed much larger constrained baselines, yielding substantial gains in parameter efficiency.

For tool-augmented language models, comparing natural-language reasoning with code-execution pipelines is difficult because the comparison changes both the intermediate representation and the execution mechanism. We separate these factors with an intermediate intervention: the model expresses its reasoning as executable code, and the language model simulates that code in context to produce an answer. On a 40-task verifiable algorithmic benchmark, deterministic code execution outperforms natural-language reasoning by +31.6pp. We observe that the intermediate intervention is not meaningfully different from natural-language reasoning (+0.15pp). These results suggest that, in our evaluated setting, changing the intermediate representation alone does not explain the tool-use advantage, providing evidence for the performance gains requiring reliable external execution. We formalize this intuition with a simple statistical decision-theoretic model that characterizes when execution dominates end-to-end risk in our disentangled trace-generation/execution regime. We validate our theory using a reconstruction intervention that leverages a proxy language model to infer natural-language reasoning traces from code representations, recovering performance comparable to the original natural-language reasoning pipeline. All experiments are at https://github.com/TerryTong-Git/ToolProj.

Iterative self-improvement fine-tunes an autoregressive large language model (LLM) on reward-verified outputs generated by the LLM itself. In contrast to the empirical success of self-improvement, the theoretical foundation of this generative, iterative procedure in a practical, finite-sample setting remains limited. We make progress toward this goal by modeling each round of self-improvement as maximum-likelihood fine-tuning on a reward-filtered distribution and deriving finite-sample guarantees for the expected reward. Our analysis reveals an explicit feedback loop where better models accept more data per iteration, supporting sustained self-improvement while explaining eventual saturation of such improvement. Adopting a task-centric view by considering reasoning tasks with multiple difficulty levels, we further prove quantifiable conditions on model initialization, task difficulty, and sample budget where easy-to-hard curricula provably achieve better guarantees than training on fixed mixtures of tasks. Our analyses are validated through Monte-Carlo simulations and experiments spanning a synthetic graph-based reasoning task and multiple standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks.