GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
WFR-FM: Simulation-Free Dynamic Unbalanced Optimal Transport
Authors: Qiangwei Peng; Zihan Wang; Junda Ying; Yuhao Sun; Qing Nie; Lei Zhang; Tiejun Li; Peijie Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The Wasserstein–Fisher–Rao (WFR) metric extends dynamic optimal transport (OT) by coupling displacement with change of mass, providing a principled geometry for modeling unbalanced snapshot dynamics. Existing WFR solvers, however, are often unstable, computationally expensive, and difficult to scale. Here we introduce \textbf{WFR Flow Matching (WFR-FM)}, a simulation-free training algorithm that unifies flow matching with dynamic unbalanced OT. Unlike classical flow matching which regresses only a transport vector field, WFR-FM simultaneously regresses a vector field for displacement and a scalar growth rate function for birth–death dynamics, yielding continuous flows under the WFR geometry. Theoretically, we show that minimizing the WFR-FM loss exactly recovers WFR geodesics. Empirically, WFR-FM yields more accurate and robust trajectory inference in single-cell biology, reconstructing consistent dynamics with proliferation and apoptosis, estimating time-varying growth fields, and  applying to generative dynamics under imbalanced data. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in efficiency, stability, and reconstruction accuracy. Overall, WFR-FM establishes a unified and efficient paradigm for learning dynamical systems from unbalanced snapshots, where not only states but also mass evolve over time. The Python code is available at <https://github.com/QiangweiPeng/WFR-FM>.
Geometry Forcing: Marrying Video Diffusion and 3D Representation for Consistent World Modeling
Authors: Haoyu Wu; Diankun Wu; Tianyu He; Junliang Guo; Yang Ye; Yueqi Duan; Jiang Bian
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Videos inherently represent 2D projections of a dynamic 3D world. However, our analysis suggests that video diffusion models trained solely on raw video data often fail to capture meaningful geometric-aware structure in their learned representations. To bridge this gap between video diffusion models and the underlying 3D nature of the physical world, we propose Geometry Forcing, a simple yet effective method that encourages video diffusion models to internalize latent 3D representations. Our key insight is to guide the model’s intermediate representations toward geometry-aware structure by aligning them with features from a pretrained geometric foundation model. To this end, we introduce two complementary alignment objectives: Angular Alignment, which enforces directional consistency via cosine similarity, and Scale Alignment, which preserves scale-related information by regressing unnormalized geometric features from normalized diffusion representation. We evaluate Geometry Forcing on both camera view–conditioned and action-conditioned video generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves visual quality and 3D consistency over the baseline methods.
SemHiTok: A Unified Image Tokenizer via Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Codebook for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Authors: Zisheng Chen; Chunwei Wang; Runhui Huang; Hongbin Xu; Xiuwei Chen; Jun Zhou; Jianhua Han; Hang Xu; Xiaodan Liang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce SemHiTok, a unified image Tokenizer via Semantic Guided Hierarchical codebook that provides consistent discrete representations for multimodal understanding and generation. Recently, unified image tokenizers have sparked exploration within the research community, which is designed to capture high-level semantic features for understanding and retaining low-level pixel features for generation. Previous works attempt to train a unified image tokenizer by combining loss for semantic distillation and pixel reconstruction. However, due to the differing levels of features prioritized by multimodal understanding and generation, joint training methods face significant challenges in achieving a good trade-off. SemHiTok addresses this challenge through a novel semantic-guided
hierarchical codebook, which builds pixel sub-codebooks on a pretrained semantic codebook. This design decouples the semantic and pixel in terms of structure and training strategy, enabling the tokenizer to capture pixel features while retaining its ability to comprehend high-level semantic information. Our experiments demonstrate that SemHiTok achieves leading performance in image reconstruction and multimodal understanding under the LLaVA-v1.5 setting. Further, we develop a unified MLLM with SemHiTok, which exhibits superior performance across multimodal understanding and generation tasks. Extensive experiments confirm our analysis, showing that our unified image tokenizer architecture achieves a better trade-off.
Adversarial Attacks Already Tell the Answer: Directional Bias-Guided Test-time Defense for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Liangsheng Liu; Si Chen; Jiamin Wu; Weiwei Feng; Zhixin Cheng; Xiaotian Yin; Wenfei Yang; Tianzhu Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have shown strong zero-shot generalization but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, posing serious risks in real-world applications. Test-time defenses for VLMs have recently emerged as a promising and efficient approach to defend against adversarial attacks without requiring costly large-scale retraining. In this work, we uncover a surprising phenomenon: under diverse input transformations, adversarial images in CLIP’s feature space consistently shift along a dominant direction, in contrast to the dispersed patterns of clean images. We hypothesize that this dominant shift, termed the Defense Direction, opposes the adversarial shift, pointing features back toward their correct class centers. Building on this insight, we propose Directional Bias-guided Defense (DBD), a test-time framework that estimates the Defense Direction and employs a DB-score–based two-stream reconstruction strategy to recover robust representations. Experiments on 15 datasets demonstrate that DBD not only achieves SOTA adversarial robustness while preserving clean accuracy, but also reveals the counterintuitive result that adversarial accuracy can even surpass clean accuracy. This demonstrates that adversarial perturbations inherently encode directional priors about the true decision boundary.
ProtoTS: Learning Hierarchical Prototypes for Explainable Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Ziheng Peng; Shijie Ren; Xinyue Gu; Linxiao Yang; Xiting Wang; Liang Sun
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: While deep learning has achieved impressive performance in time series forecasting, it becomes increasingly crucial to understand its decision-making process for building trust in high-stakes scenarios. Existing interpretable models often provide only local and partial explanations, lacking the capability to reveal how heterogeneous and interacting input variables jointly shape the overall temporal patterns in the forecast curve. We propose ProtoTS, a novel interpretable forecasting framework that achieves both high accuracy and transparent decision-making through modeling prototypical temporal patterns. ProtoTS computes instance-prototype similarity based on a denoised representation that preserves abundant heterogeneous information. The prototypes are organized hierarchically to capture global temporal patterns with coarse prototypes while capturing finer-grained local variations with detailed prototypes, enabling expert steering and multi-level interpretability. Experiments on multiple realistic benchmarks, including a newly released LOF dataset, show that ProtoTS not only exceeds existing methods in forecast accuracy but also delivers expert-steerable interpretations for better model understanding and decision support. The source code is available at https://github.com/SKURA502/ProtoTS.
Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Authors: YiFan Zhang; Xingyu Lu; Shukang Yin; Chaoyou Fu; Wei Chen; Xiao Hu; Bin Wen; Kaiyu Jiang; Changyi Liu; Tianke Zhang; Haonan fan; Kaibing Chen; Jiankang Chen; Haojie Ding; Kaiyu Tang; Zhang Zhang; Liang Wang; Fan Yang; Tingting Gao; Guorui Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Following OpenAI's introduction of the ``thinking with images'' concept, recent efforts have explored stimulating the use of visual information in the reasoning process to enhance model performance in perception and reasoning tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, no open-source work currently offers a feature set as rich as proprietary models (OpenAI O3), which can perform diverse image manipulations and simultaneously enhance logical reasoning capabilities through code.

In this paper, we make a preliminary attempt in this direction by introducing \textbf{Thyme} (\textbf{Th}ink Be\textbf{y}ond I\textbf{m}ag\textbf{e}s), a novel paradigm for enabling multimodal large language models to transcend existing ``think with images'' approaches by autonomously generating and executing diverse image processing and computational operations via executable code (Figure 2). This approach not only facilitates a rich, on-the-fly set of image manipulations (e.g., cropping, rotation, contrast enhancement), but also allows for mathematical computations, all while maintaining high autonomy in deciding when and how to apply these operations. We activate this capability through a two-stage training strategy: an initial Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a curated dataset of 500K samples to teach code generation, followed by a Reinforcement Learning (RL) phase to refine decision-making. For the RL stage, we manually collect and design high-resolution question-answer pairs to increase the learning difficulty, and we propose \textbf{GRPO-ATS} (Group Relative Policy Optimization with Adaptive Temperature Sampling), an algorithm that applies distinct temperatures to text and code generation to balance reasoning exploration with code execution precision. We conduct extensive experimental analysis and ablation studies. As shown in Figure 1, comprehensive evaluations on nearly 20 benchmarks show that Thyme yields significant and consistent performance gains, particularly in challenging high-resolution perception and complex reasoning tasks.
BaseReward: A Strong Baseline for Multimodal Reward Model
Authors: YiFan Zhang; Haihua Yang; Huanyu Zhang; Yang Shi; Zezhou Chen; Haochen Tian; Chaoyou Fu; Kai WU; Bo Cui; Xu Wang; Jianfei Pan; Haotian Wang; Zhang Zhang; Liang Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has made aligning them with human preferences a critical challenge. Reward Models (RMs) are a core technology for achieving this goal, but a systematic guide for building state-of-the-art Multimodal Reward Models (MRMs) is currently lacking in both academia and industry. Through exhaustive experimental analysis, this paper aims to provide a clear “recipe” for constructing high-performance MRMs. We systematically investigate every crucial component in the MRM development pipeline, including reward modeling paradigms (e.g., Naive-RM, Critic-based RM, and Generative RM), reward head architecture, training strategies, data curation (covering over ten multimodal and text-only preference datasets), backbone model and model scale, and ensemble methods.

Based on these experimental insights, we introduce BaseReward, a powerful and efficient baseline for multimodal reward modeling. BaseReward adopts a simple yet effective architecture, built upon a Qwen2.5-VL backbone, featuring an optimized two-layer reward head, and is trained on a carefully curated mixture of high-quality multimodal and text-only preference data. Our results show that BaseReward establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on major benchmarks such as MM-RLHF-Reward Bench, VL-Reward Bench, and Multimodal Reward Bench, outperforming previous open-source and proprietary models. Furthermore, to validate its practical utility beyond static benchmarks, we integrate BaseReward into a real-world reinforcement learning pipeline, successfully enhancing an MLLM’s performance across various perception, reasoning, and conversational tasks. This work not only delivers a top-tier MRM but, more importantly, provides the community with a clear, empirically backed guide for developing robust reward models for the next generation of MLLMs.
SinkTrack: Attention Sink based Context Anchoring for Large Language Models
Authors: Xu Liu; Guikun Chen; Wenguan Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucination and context forgetting. Prior studies suggest that attention drift is a primary cause of these problems, where LLMs' focus shifts towards newly generated tokens and away from the initial input context. To address this, we make use of a related, intrinsic characteristic of LLMs: attention sink – the tendency to consistently allocate high attention to the very first token (i.e., ⟨BOS⟩) of a sequence. Concretely, we propose an advanced context anchoring method, SINKTRACK, which treats ⟨BOS⟩ as an information anchor and injects key contextual features (such as those derived from the input image or instruction) into its representation. As such, LLM remains anchored to the initial input context throughout the entire generation process. SINKTRACK is training-free, plug-and-play, and introduces negligible inference overhead. Experiments demonstrate that SINKTRACK mitigates hallucination and context forgetting across both textual (e.g., +18.9% on QuAC with Llama3.1-8B-Instruct) and multi-modal (e.g., +23.0% on M3CoT with Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct) tasks. Its consistent gains across different architectures and scales underscore the robustness and generalizability. We also analyze its underlying working mechanism from the perspective of information delivery. Our source code is available at anonymous GitHub.
Riemannian High-Order Pooling for Brain Foundation Models
Authors: Chen Hu; Ziheng Chen; Rui Wang; Yefeng Zheng; Nicu Sebe
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is a noninvasive technique for measuring brain electrical activity that supports a wide range of brain-computer interaction applications. Motivated by the breakthroughs of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent efforts have begun to explore Large EEG foundation Models trained on broad unlabeled corpora. However, most advances focus on improving the backbone while neglecting the classification head. Existing models often rely on a single class token, underutilizing the spatiotemporal structure and second-order statistics that are crucial for EEG decoding. We propose Riemannian High Order Pooling (RHOP), a plug-and-play module that injects principled Riemannian statistics into the classifier. RHOP maps each token to a quotient Gaussian jointly encoding mean and second-order information, yielding scale-invariant descriptors. Tokens are then aggregated by estimating a Riemannian Gaussian on the SPD manifold, where the Fréchet mean and covariance are embedded into an SPD descriptor. The resulting normalized vector is fused with the class token for prediction. RHOP is backbone-agnostic and integrates with modern EEG foundation models, \textit{e.g.}, BIOT and LaBraM. Across diverse EEG benchmarks, it improves accuracy and efficiency under full fine-tuning, linear probing, and from-scratch training settings. The code is publicly available at github.com/ChenHu-ML/RHOP.
Mastering Sparse CUDA Generation through Pretrained Models and Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yaoyu Wang; Hankun Dai; Zhidong Yang; Junmin Xiao; Guangming Tan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Code generation is a crucial research area in the field of artificial intelligence, holding the potential to revolutionize software development and streamline programming processes. However, generating the high-performance code, which need to be executed in a shorter time for the low-latency scenario, remains a formidable challenge. Existing methods often struggle to account for the irregularity of input sparse data in sparse programs and the need for domain-specific architectural knowledge, leading to sub-optimal performance. To tackle these issues, we propose the SparseRL framework. SparseRL leverages deep reinforcement learning, treating a pre-trained language model as a stochastic policy. It takes the row and column indices of non-zero elements in the sparse matrix as input and generates CUDA code as output for sparse matrix operations. We also introduce a domain-specific code generation mechanism for the dynamic input, a sinusoidal embedding technique tailored for sparse matrices, and a hierarchical reward function that considers both code correctness and execution efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate SparseRL achieves state-of-the-art performance. In sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) tasks, it improves the compilation rate by 20% compared to existing methods, and the generated code runs 30% faster on average. For sparse matrix-dense matrix multiplication (SpMM) tasks, SparseRL also shows significant performance gains. These results highlight the effectiveness of SparseRL in generating high-performance CUDA code for sparse matrix operations.
STAR-Bench: Probing Deep Spatio-Temporal Reasoning as Audio 4D Intelligence
Authors: Zihan Liu; Zhikang Niu; Qiuyang Xiao; Zhisheng Zheng; Ruoqi Yuan; Yuhang Zang; Yuhang Cao; Xiaoyi Dong; Jianze Liang; Xie Chen; Leilei Sun; Dahua Lin; Jiaqi Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Despite rapid progress in Multi-modal Large Language Models and Large Audio-Language Models, existing audio benchmarks largely test semantics that can be recovered from text captions, masking deficits in fine-grained perceptual reasoning.
We formalize audio 4D intelligence that is defined as reasoning over sound dynamics in time and 3D space, and introduce STAR-Bench to measure it. STAR-Bench combines a Foundational Acoustic Perception setting (six attributes under absolute and relative  regimes) with a Holistic Spatio-Temporal Reasoning setting that includes segment reordering for continuous and discrete processes and spatial tasks spanning static localization, multi-source relations, and dynamic trajectories. Our data curation pipeline uses two methods to ensure high-quality samples. For foundational tasks, we use procedurally synthesized and physics-simulated audio. For holistic data, we follow a four-stage process that includes human annotation and final selection based on human performance. Unlike prior benchmarks where caption-only answering reduces accuracy slightly, STAR-Bench induces far larger drops (-31.5\% temporal, -35.2\% spatial), evidencing its focus on linguistically hard-to-describe cues. Evaluating 19 models reveals substantial gaps compared with humans and a capability hierarchy: closed-source models are bottlenecked by fine-grained perception, while open-source models lag across perception, knowledge, and reasoning. Our STAR-Bench provides critical insights and a clear path forward for developing future models with a more robust understanding of the physical world.
scDFM: Distributional Flow Matching Model for Robust Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction
Authors: Chenglei Yu; Chuanrui Wang; Bangyan Liao; Tailin Wu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: A central goal in systems biology and drug discovery is to predict the transcriptional response of cells to perturbations. This task is challenging due to the noisy, sparse nature of single-cell measurements and the fact that perturbations often induce population-level shifts rather than changes in individual cells. Existing deep learning methods typically assume cell-level correspondences, limiting their ability to capture such global effects.
We present **scDFM**, a generative framework based on conditional flow matching that models the full distribution of perturbed cells conditioned on control states.
By incorporating an MMD objective, our method aligns perturbed and control populations beyond cell-level correspondences. 
To further improve robustness to sparsity and noise, we propose the Perturbation-Aware Differential Transformer architecture (PAD-Transformer), a backbone that leverages gene interaction graphs and differential attention to capture context-specific expression changes.
**scDFM** outperforms prior methods across multiple genetic and drug perturbation benchmarks, excelling in both unseen and combinatorial settings. In the combinatorial setting, it reduces MSE by 19.6\% over the strongest baseline.
These results highlight the importance of distribution-level generative modeling for robust $\textit{in silico}$ perturbation prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/scDFM.
Neural Predictor-Corrector: Solving Homotopy Problems with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jiayao Mai; Bangyan Liao; Zhenjun Zhao; Yingping Zeng; Haoang Li; Javier Civera; Tailin Wu; Yi Zhou; Peidong Liu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The Homotopy paradigm, a general principle for solving challenging problems, appears across diverse domains such as robust optimization, global optimization, polynomial root-finding, and sampling. Practical solvers for these problems typically follow a predictor-corrector (PC) structure, but rely on hand-crafted heuristics for step sizes and iteration termination, which are often suboptimal and task-specific. To address this, we unify these problems under a single framework, which enables the design of a general neural solver. Building on this unified view, we propose Neural Predictor-Corrector (NPC), which replaces hand-crafted heuristics with automatically learned policies. NPC formulates policy selection as a sequential decision-making problem and leverages reinforcement learning to automatically discover efficient strategies. To further enhance generalization, we introduce an amortized training mechanism, enabling one-time offline training for a class of problems and efficient online inference on new instances. Experiments on four representative homotopy problems demonstrate that our method generalizes effectively to unseen instances. It consistently outperforms classical and specialized baselines in efficiency while demonstrating superior stability across tasks, highlighting the value of unifying homotopy methods into a single neural framework.
Uncertainty-driven Embedding Convolution
Authors: Sungjun Lim; Kangjun Noh; Youngjun Choi; Heeyoung Lee; Kyungwoo Song
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Text embeddings are essential components in modern NLP pipelines. Although numerous embedding models have been proposed, no single model consistently dominates across domains and tasks. This variability motivates the use of ensemble techniques to combine complementary strengths. However, most existing ensemble methods operate on deterministic embeddings and fail to account for model-specific uncertainty, limiting their robustness and reliability in downstream applications. To address these limitations, we propose Uncertainty-driven Embedding Convolution (UEC). UEC first transforms deterministic embeddings into probabilistic ones in a post-hoc manner. It then computes adaptive ensemble coefficients based on embedding uncertainty, derived from a principled surrogate-loss formulation. Additionally, UEC employs an uncertainty-aware similarity function that directly incorporates uncertainty into the similarity scoring, providing a theoretically grounded and efficient surrogate to distributional distances. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that UEC consistently improves both performance and robustness by leveraging principled uncertainty modeling.