GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Cite Pretrain: Retrieval-Free Knowledge Attribution for Large Language Models
Authors: Yukun Huang; Sanxing Chen; Jian Pei; Manzil Zaheer; Bhuwan Dhingra
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Trustworthy language models should provide both correct and verifiable answers. However, citations generated directly by standalone LLMs are often unreliable due to hallucinations. As a result, current systems insert citations by querying an external retriever at inference time, introducing latency, infrastructure dependence, and vulnerability to retrieval noise. We explore whether LLMs can be made to reliably attribute to the documents seen during (continual) pretraining, without test‑time retrieval, by revising the training process. To study this, we construct **CitePretrainBench**, a benchmark that mixes real‑world corpora (Wikipedia, Common Crawl, arXiv) with novel, unseen documents and probes both short‑form (single fact) and long‑form (multi‑fact) citation tasks. Our approach follows a two-stage process: (1) Continual-pretraining to index factual knowledge by binding it to persistent document identifiers; (2) Instruction tuning to elicit citation behavior. We introduce **Active Indexing** for the first stage, which creates generalizable, source-anchored bindings by augmenting training with synthetic data that (i) restate each fact in diverse, compositional forms and (ii) enforce bidirectional training (source$\to$fact and fact$\to$source). This equips the model to both generate content from a cited source and attribute its own answers, improving robustness to paraphrase and composition. Experiments with Qwen‑2.5‑7B and 3B show that Active Indexing consistently outperforms a Passive Indexing baseline, which simply appends an identifier to each document, achieving citation precision gains of up to 30.2\% across all tasks and models. Our ablation studies reveal that performance continues to improve as we scale the amount of augmented data, showing a clear upward trend even at 16× the original token count. 
Finally, we show that internal citations complement external ones by making the model more robust to retrieval noise.
ReLaSH: Reconstructing Joint Latent Spaces for Efficient Generation of Synthetic Hypergraphs with Hyperlink Attributes
Authors: Feiyan Ma; Shihao Wu; Gongjun Xu; Ji Zhu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Hypergraph network data, which capture multi-way interactions among entities, have become increasingly prevalent in the big data era, spanning fields such as social science, medical research, and biology. Generating synthetic hyperlinks with attributes from an observed hypergraph has broad applications in data augmentation, simulation, and advancing the understanding of real-world complex systems. This task, however, poses unique challenges due to special properties of hypergraphs, including discreteness, hyperlink sparsity, and the mixed data types of hyperlinks and their attributes, rendering many existing generative models unsuitable. In this paper, we introduce ReLaSH (REconstructing joint LAtent Spaces for Hypergraphs with attributes), a general generative framework for producing realistic synthetic hypergraph data with hyperlink attributes via training a likelihood-based joint embedding model and reconstructing the joint latent space. Given a hypergraph dataset, ReLaSH first embeds the hyperlinks and their attributes into a joint latent space by training a likelihood-based model, and then reconstructs this joint latent space using a distribution-free generator. The generation task is completed by first sampling embeddings from the distribution-free generator and then decoding them into hyperlinks and attributes through the trained likelihood-based model. Compared with existing generative models, ReLaSH explicitly accounts for the unique structure of hypergraphs and jointly models hyperlinks and their attributes. Moreover, the likelihood-based embedding model provides efficiency and interpretability relative to deep black-box architectures, while the distribution-free generator in the joint latent space ensures flexibility. We theoretically demonstrate consistency and generalizability of ReLaSH. Empirical results on a range of real-world datasets from diverse domains demonstrate the strong performance of ReLaSH, underscoring its broad utility and effectiveness in practical applications.
Disentangling the Factors of Convergence between Brains and DINOv3
Authors: Joséphine Raugel; Marc Szafraniec; Huy V. Vo; Camille Couprie; Jérémy Rapin; Stéphane d'Ascoli; Patrick Labatut; Piotr Bojanowski; Valentin Wyart; Jean-Remi King
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Many AI models trained on natural images develop representations that resemble those of the human brain. However, the factors driving this brain-model similarity remain poorly understood. To disentangle how the model, training and data independently lead a neural network to develop brain-like representations, we train a family of self-supervised vision transformers (DINOv3) that systematically vary these factors. We compare their representations of images to those of the human brain recorded through fMRI and MEG, providing high resolution in both spatial and temporal analyses. We assess the brain-model similarity with three complementary metrics focusing on representational similarity, topographical organization, and temporal dynamics. We show that all three factors - model size, training amount, and image type - independently and interactively impact each of these brain similarity metrics. In particular, the largest DINOv3 models trained with the most human-centric images reach the highest brain-similarity. These findings generalize across seven additional models. This emergence of brain-like representations in AI models follows a specific chronology during training: models first align with the early representations of the sensory cortices, and only align with the late and prefrontal representations of the brain with considerably more training. 
Finally, this developmental trajectory is indexed by structural and functional properties of the human cortex: representations acquired last by the models specifically align with cortical areas with the largest developmental expansion, thickness, least myelination and slowest timescales. 
Overall, these findings disentangle the interplay between architecture and experience in shaping how artificial neural networks come to see the world as humans do, thus offering a promising framework to understand how the human brain comes to represent its visual world.
Decision-Theoretic Approaches for Improved Learning-Augmented Algorithms
Authors: Spyros Angelopoulos; Christoph Dürr; Georgii Melidi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We initiate the systematic study of decision-theoretic metrics in the design and analysis of algorithms with machine-learned predictions. We introduce approaches based on both deterministic measures such as distance-based evaluation, that help us quantify how close the algorithm is to an ideal solution, and stochastic measures that balance the trade-off between the algorithm's performance and the risk associated with the imperfect oracle. These approaches allow us to quantify the algorithm's performance across the full spectrum of the prediction error, and thus choose the best algorithm within an entire class of otherwise incomparable ones. We apply our framework to three well-known problems from online decision making, namely ski-rental, one-max search, and contract scheduling.
VoG: Enhancing LLM Reasoning through Stepwise Verification on Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Wenxin Zhao; Jiachuan Wang; Yongqi Zhang; Shuangyin Li; Cheng Deng; Jun Wang; Lei Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at various reasoning tasks but still encounter challenges such as hallucination and factual inconsistency in knowledge-intensive tasks, primarily due to a lack of external knowledge and factual verification. These challenges could be mitigated by leveraging knowledge graphs (KGs) to support more reliable LLM reasoning. However, existing KG-augmented LLM frameworks still rely on static integration mechanisms that cannot adjust reasoning in response to evolving context and retrieved evidence, resulting in error propagation and incomplete reasoning. To alleviate these issues, we propose  **V**erify-**o**n-**G**raph (**VoG**), a scalable and model-agnostic framework to enhance LLM reasoning via iterative retrieval, stepwise verification, and adaptive revision. Besides performing KG retrieval guided by an initially generated reasoning plan, VoG iteratively verifies and revises the reasoning plan, correcting intermediate errors in consideration of the varying contextual conditions. During plan revision, VoG leverages a context-aware multi-armed bandit strategy, guided by reward signals that capture uncertainty and semantic consistency, to enhance the alignment between the reasoning plan and retrieved evidence in a more adaptive and reliable way. Experimental results across three benchmark datasets show that VoG consistently improves both reasoning accuracy and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/WenxinAZhao/VoG.
Monotone Near-Zero-Sum Games: A Generalization of Convex-Concave Minimax
Authors: Ruichen Luo; Sebastian U Stich; Krishnendu Chatterjee
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Zero-sum and non-zero-sum (aka general-sum) games are relevant in a wide range of applications. 
While general non-zero-sum games are computationally hard, researchers focus
on the special class of monotone games for gradient-based algorithms.
However, there is a substantial gap between the gradient complexity of monotone zero-sum and monotone general-sum games. 
Moreover, in many practical scenarios of games the zero-sum assumption needs to be relaxed.
To address these issues, we define a new intermediate class of monotone near-zero-sum games that contains monotone zero-sum games as a special case. Then, we present a novel algorithm that transforms the near-zero-sum games into a sequence of zero-sum subproblems, improving the gradient-based complexity for the class. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of this new
class to model practical scenarios of games motivated from the literature.
Latent Concept Disentanglement in Transformer-based Language Models
Authors: Guan Zhe Hong; Bhavya Vasudeva; Vatsal Sharan; Cyrus Rashtchian; Prabhakar Raghavan; Rina Panigrahy
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: When large language models (LLMs) use in-context learning (ICL) to solve a new task, they must infer latent concepts from demonstration examples. This raises the question of whether and how transformers represent latent structures as part of their computation. Our work experiments with several controlled tasks, studying this question using mechanistic interpretability. First, we show that in transitive reasoning tasks with a latent, discrete concept, the model successfully identifies the latent concept and does step-by-step concept composition. This builds upon prior work that analyzes single-step reasoning. Then, we consider tasks parameterized by a latent numerical concept. We discover low-dimensional subspaces in the model's representation space, where the geometry cleanly reflects the underlying parameterization. Overall, we show that small and large models can indeed disentangle and utilize latent concepts that they learn in-context from a handful of abbreviated demonstrations.
SophiaVL-R1: Reinforcing MLLMs Reasoning with Thinking Reward
Authors: Kaixuan Fan; Kaituo Feng; Haoming Lyu; Dongzhan Zhou; Xiangyu Yue
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advances have shown success in eliciting strong reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome rewards. However, this paradigm typically lacks supervision over the thinking process leading to the final outcome. As a result, the model may learn sub-optimal reasoning strategies, which can hinder its generalization ability. In light of this, we propose SophiaVL-R1, as an attempt to add reward signals for the thinking process in this paradigm. To achieve this, we first train a thinking reward model that evaluates the quality of the entire thinking process. Given that the thinking reward may be unreliable for certain samples due to reward hacking, we propose the Trust-GRPO method, which assigns a trustworthiness weight to the thinking reward during training. This weight is computed based on the thinking reward comparison of responses leading to correct answers versus incorrect answers, helping to mitigate the impact of potentially unreliable thinking rewards. Moreover, we design an annealing training strategy that gradually reduces the thinking reward over time, allowing the model to rely more on the accurate rule-based outcome reward in later training stages. Experiments show that our SophiaVL-R1 surpasses a series of reasoning MLLMs on various benchmarks (\textit{e.g.}, MathVisita, MMMU), demonstrating strong reasoning and generalization capabilities. Notably, our SophiaVL-R1-7B even outperforms LLaVA-OneVision-72B on most benchmarks, despite the latter having 10 $\times$ more parameters. All code, models, and datasets will be made publicly available.
Generating metamers of human scene understanding
Authors: Ritik Raina; Abe Leite; Alexandros Graikos; Seoyoung Ahn; Dimitris Samaras; Greg Zelinsky
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Human vision combines low-resolution “gist” information from the visual periphery with sparse but high-resolution information from fixated locations to construct a coherent understanding of a visual scene. In this paper, we introduce MetamerGen, a tool for generating scenes that are aligned with latent human scene representations. MetamerGen is a latent diffusion model that combines peripherally obtained scene gist information with information obtained from scene-viewing fixations to generate image metamers for what humans understand after viewing a scene. Generating images from both high and low resolution (i.e. “foveated”) inputs constitutes a novel image-to-image synthesis problem, which we tackle by introducing a dual-stream representation of the foveated scenes consisting of DINOv2 tokens that fuse detailed features from fixated areas with peripherally degraded features capturing scene context. To evaluate the perceptual alignment of MetamerGen generated images to latent human scene representations, we conducted a same-different behavioral experiment where participants were asked for a “same” or “different” response between the generated and the original image. With that, we identify scene generations that are indeed metamers for the latent scene representations formed by the viewers. MetamerGen is a powerful tool for understanding scene understanding. Our proof-of-concept analyses uncovered specific features at multiple levels of visual processing that contributed to human judgments. While it can generate metamers even conditioned on random fixations, we find that high-level semantic alignment most strongly predicts metamerism when the generated scenes are conditioned on viewers’ own fixated regions.
Translate Policy to Language: Flow Matching Generated Rewards for LLM Explanations
Authors: Xinyi Yang; Liang Zeng; Heng Dong; Chao Yu; Xiaoran Wu; Huazhong Yang; Yu Wang; Milind Tambe; Tonghan Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: As humans increasingly share environments with diverse agents powered by RL, LLMs, and beyond, the ability to explain agent policies in natural language is vital for reliable coexistence. We introduce a general-purpose framework that trains explanation-generating LLMs via reinforcement learning from AI feedback, with distributional rewards generated by generative continuous normalizing flows (CNFs). CNFs capture the pluralistic and probabilistic nature of human judgments about explanations. Moreover, under mild assumptions, CNFs provably bound deviations from true human reward distributions when trained on noisy proxy rewards from LLMs. We design a specialized CNF architecture that selectively attends to linguistic cues in decision context and explanations when generating rewards. Human and LLM evaluators find that our method delivers explanations that enable more accurate predictions of true agent decisions, exhibit greater logical soundness and actionability, and impose lower cognitive load than explanations trained with proxy LLM rewards or state-of-the-art RLHF and RLAIF baselines.
RestoreVAR: Visual Autoregressive Generation for All-in-One Image Restoration
Authors: Sudarshan Rajagopalan; Kartik Narayan; Vishal M. Patel
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The use of latent diffusion models (LDMs) such as Stable Diffusion has significantly improved the perceptual quality of All-in-One image Restoration (AiOR) methods, while also enhancing their generalization capabilities. However, these LDM-based frameworks suffer from slow inference due to their iterative denoising process, rendering them impractical for time-sensitive applications. Visual autoregressive modeling (VAR), a recently introduced approach for image generation, performs scale-space autoregression and achieves comparable performance to that of state-of-the-art diffusion transformers with drastically reduced computational costs. Moreover, our analysis reveals that coarse scales in VAR primarily capture degradations while finer scales encode scene detail, simplifying the restoration process. Motivated by this, we propose RestoreVAR, a novel VAR-based generative approach for AiOR that significantly outperforms LDM-based models in restoration performance while achieving over $\mathbf{10\times}$ faster inference. To optimally exploit the advantages of VAR for AiOR, we propose architectural modifications and improvements, including intricately designed cross-attention mechanisms and a latent-space refinement module, tailored for the AiOR task. Extensive experiments show that RestoreVAR achieves state-of-the-art performance among generative AiOR methods, while also exhibiting strong generalization capabilities.
AlphaSteer: Learning Refusal Steering with Principled Null-Space Constraint
Authors: Leheng Sheng; Changshuo Shen; Weixiang Zhao; Junfeng Fang; Xiaohao Liu; Zhenkai Liang; Xiang Wang; An Zhang; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their ability to refuse malicious prompts, especially jailbreak attacks, is essential for safe and reliable use. Recently, activation steering has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing LLM safety by adding a refusal direction vector to internal activations of LLMs during inference, which will further induce the refusal behaviors of LLMs. However, indiscriminately applying activation steering fundamentally suffers from the trade-off between safety and utility, since the same steering vector can also lead to over-refusal and degraded performance on benign prompts. Although prior efforts, such as vector calibration and conditional steering, have attempted to mitigate this trade-off, their lack of theoretical grounding limits their robustness and effectiveness. To better address the trade-off between safety and utility, we present a theoretically grounded and empirically effective activation steering method called AlphaSteer. Specifically, it considers activation steering as a learnable process with two principled learning objectives: utility preservation and safety enhancement. For utility preservation, it learns to construct a nearly zero vector for steering benign data, with the null-space constraints. For safety enhancement, it learns to construct a refusal direction vector for steering malicious data, with the help of linear regression. Experiments across multiple jailbreak attacks and utility benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of AlphaSteer, which significantly improves the safety of LLMs without compromising their general capabilities. Our codes are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AlphaSteer-929C/}.
Fly-CL: A Fly-Inspired Framework for Enhancing Efficient Decorrelation and Reduced Training Time in Pre-trained Model-based Continual Representation Learning
Authors: Heming Zou; Yunliang Zang; Wutong Xu; Xiangyang Ji
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Using a nearly-frozen pretrained model, the continual representation learning paradigm reframes parameter updates as a similarity-matching problem to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, directly leveraging pretrained features for downstream tasks often suffers from multicollinearity in the similarity-matching stage, and more advanced methods can be computationally prohibitive for real-time, low-latency applications. Inspired by the fly olfactory circuit, we propose Fly-CL, a bio-inspired framework compatible with a wide range of pretrained backbones. Fly-CL substantially reduces training time while achieving performance comparable to or exceeding that of current state-of-the-art methods. We theoretically show how Fly-CL progressively resolves multicollinearity, enabling more effective similarity matching with low time complexity. Extensive simulation experiments across diverse network architectures and data regimes validate Fly-CL’s effectiveness in addressing this challenge through a biologically inspired design. Code is available at https://github.com/gfyddha/Fly-CL.
Breaking the Total Variance Barrier: Sharp Sample Complexity for Linear Heteroscedastic Bandits with Fixed Action Set
Authors: Heyang Zhao; Tianyuan Jin; Weixin Wang; Vincent Y. F. Tan; Pan Xu; Quanquan Gu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed increasing interests in tackling heteroscedastic noise in bandits and reinforcement learning \citep{zhou2021nearly, zhao2023variance, jia2024does, pacchiano2025second}. In these works, the cumulative variance of the noise $\Lambda = \sum_{t=1}^T \sigma_t^2$, where $\sigma_t^2$ is the variance of the noise at round $t$, has been used to characterize the statistical complexity of the problem, yielding simple regret bounds of order $\tilde{\mathcal O}(d \sqrt{\Lambda / T^2})$ for linear bandits with heteroscedastic noise \citep{zhou2021nearly, zhao2023variance}. 
However, with a closer look, $\Lambda$ remains the same order even if the noise is close to zero at half of the rounds, which indicates that the $\Lambda$-dependence is not optimal.

In this paper, we revisit the linear bandit problem with heteroscedastic noise. We consider the setting where the action set is fixed throughout the learning process. We propose a novel variance-adaptive algorithm VAEE (Variance-Aware Exploration with Elimination) for large action set, which actively explores actions that maximizes the information gain among a candidate set of actions that are not eliminated. With the active-exploration strategy, we show that VAEE achieves a *simple regret* with a nearly *harmonic-mean* dependent rate, i.e. $\tilde{\mathcal O}\Big(d\Big[\sum_{t = 1}^T \frac{1}{\sigma_t^2} - \sum_{i = 1}^{\tilde{O}(d)} \frac{1}{[\sigma^{(i)}]^2} \Big]^{-\frac{1}{2}}\Big)$ where $d$ is the dimension of the feature space and $\sigma^{(i)}$ is the $i$-th smallest variance among $\\{\sigma_t\\}_{t=1}^T$. For finitely many actions, we propose a variance-aware variant of G-optimal design based exploration, which achieves a 
$\tilde {\mathcal O}$ $\bigg(\sqrt{d \log |\mathcal A| }\Big[ \sum\_{t = 1}\^T \frac{1}{\sigma\_t\^2}- \sum\_{i = 1}^{\tilde{O}(d)} \frac{1}{[\sigma^{(i)}]^2} \Big]^{-\frac{1}{2}}\bigg)$  simple regret bound. We also establish a nearly matching lower bound for the fixed action set setting indicating that \emph{harmonic-mean} dependent rate is unavoidable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that breaks the $\sqrt{\Lambda}$ barrier for linear bandits with heteroscedastic noise.