GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
On the $O(1/T)$ Convergence of Alternating Gradient Descent–Ascent in Bilinear Games
Authors: Tianlong Nan; Shuvomoy Das Gupta; Garud Iyengar; Christian Kroer
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We study the alternating gradient descent-ascent (AltGDA) algorithm in two-player zero-sum games. 
    Alternating methods, where players take turns to update their strategies, have long been recognized as simple and practical approaches for learning in games, exhibiting much better numerical performance than their simultaneous counterparts.
    However, our theoretical understanding of alternating algorithms remains limited, and results are mostly restricted to the unconstrained setting. 
    We show that for two-player zero-sum games that admit an interior Nash equilibrium, AltGDA converges at an $O(1/T)$ ergodic convergence rate when employing a small constant stepsize. This is the first result showing that alternation improves over the simultaneous counterpart of GDA in the constrained setting.
    For games without an interior equilibrium, we show an $O(1/T)$ local convergence rate with a constant stepsize that is independent of any game-specific constants. 
    In a more general setting, we develop a performance estimation programming (PEP) framework to jointly optimize the AltGDA stepsize along with its worst-case convergence rate. 
    The PEP results indicate that AltGDA may achieve an $O(1/T)$ convergence rate for a finite horizon $T$, whereas its simultaneous counterpart appears limited to an $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate.
CrossPL: Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Models for Cross Programming Language Interoperating Code Generation
Authors: zhanhang xiong; Dongxia Wang; Yuekang Li; Xinyuan An; Wenhai Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in single-language code generation, but how well they produce cross-programming-language (CPL) interoperating code, which is widely used in cross-platform and complex software systems, remains underexplored. Therefore, a benchmark for evaluating CPL interaction code generation is essential. However, Constructing such a benchmark is challenging owing to sparse interoperating code in real-world multi-programming-language projects, diverse Inter-process Communication (IPC) mechanisms, vast Foreign Function Interface (FFI) language pairs, and the difficulty of evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce CrossPL, the first benchmark for systematically assessing LLM performance of CPL code generation across two primary interoperation modes and 2534 tasks, specifically 1,982 IPC tasks spanning six languages and 522 Python–C FFI tasks. Its construction involved a review of CPL documentation, 156 finite state machines, and analysis of 19,169 multi-language GitHub repositories. Two LLM-based workflows are designed for automating the benchmark construction and evaluation, and assess 20 state-of-the-art LLMs. Results reveal clear limitations: the best model achieves only 19.5\% Pass@1 and 26.46\% Pass@5 on the FFI subset, in sharp contrast to the strong performance of these models on single-language benchmarks. These findings underscore the urgent need for improving LLMs regarding CPL interoperating code generation. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/newxzh/crosspl.
PERSONA: Dynamic and Compositional Inference-Time Personality Control via Activation Vector Algebra
Authors: Xiachong Feng; Liang Zhao; Weihong Zhong; Yichong Huang; Yuxuan Gu; Lingpeng Kong; Xiaocheng Feng; Bing Qin
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Current methods for personality control in Large Language Models rely on static prompting or expensive fine-tuning, failing to capture the dynamic and compositional nature of human traits. We introduce PERSONA, a training-free framework that achieves fine-tuning level performance through direct manipulation of personality vectors in activation space. Our key insight is that personality traits appear as extractable, approximately orthogonal directions in the model's representation space that support algebraic operations. The framework operates through three stages: Persona-Base extracts orthogonal trait vectors via contrastive activation analysis; Persona-Algebra enables precise control through vector arithmetic (scalar multiplication for intensity, addition for composition, subtraction for suppression); and Persona-Flow achieves context-aware adaptation by dynamically composing these vectors during inference. On PersonalityBench, our approach achieves a mean score of 9.60, nearly matching the supervised fine-tuning upper bound of 9.61 without any gradient updates. On our proposed Persona-Evolve benchmark for dynamic personality adaptation, we achieve up to 91% win rates across diverse model families. These results provide evidence that aspects of LLM personality are mathematically tractable, opening new directions for interpretable and efficient behavioral control.
Are LLMs Really Not Knowledgeable? Mining the Submerged Knowledge in LLMs' Memory
Authors: Xingjian Tao; Yiwei Wang; Yujun Cai; Zhicheng Yang; Jing Tang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as parametric knowledge bases, but often underperform on question answering (QA) tasks due to hallucinations and uncertainty. While prior work attributes these failures to knowledge gaps in the model’s parameters, we uncover a complementary phenomenon: LLMs frequently retain correct knowledge even when generating incorrect or \``unsure'' answers.
By analyzing the token-level output distributions, we find that correct answers often appear among high-probability candidates, despite not being selected. Motivated by this, we propose Hits@k, a novel metric to evaluate latent knowledge retention independent of answer surface form. Our experiments reveal that LLMs possess significantly more factual knowledge than is reflected by standard QA accuracy.
Building on these insights, we further examine the prevailing few-shot QA paradigm. We find that prompting strategies which allow ``unsure'' outputs can inadvertently suppress correct answers by discouraging low-confidence generation. We design a set of quantitative experiments to measure this suppression effect, offering practical guidance for future prompt and decoding design in knowledge-intensive tasks.
MaRS: Memory-Adaptive Routing for Reliable Capacity Expansion and Knowledge Retention
Authors: Gang Yan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large pre-trained models (LPMs) serve as universal backbones for vision and language tasks, but continual learning (CL) with frozen LPMs remains challenging, since shallow adaptation modules face the stability–plasticity dilemma and are prone to catastrophic forgetting. To address this problem, we propose MaRS (Memory-adaptive Router with Statistical control), a modular framework that decouples stable representation from adaptive capacity through three components: a frozen encoder, a slot-based memory router, and a lightweight classifier. On this basis, we design two mechanisms: (i) Statistically-Grounded Slot Expansion (SGSE) formulates expansion as a statistical decision problem, ensuring controlled growth with guarantees on false alarms and detection delay; (ii) Dual-Stage Contrastive–Distillation Adaptation (DCDA) integrates new slots through supervised contrastive learning and knowledge distillation, preserving prior knowledge without raw replay. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show that MaRS achieves state-of-the-art performance in continual learning with frozen LPMs, combining adaptability, efficiency, and retention.
BLADE: Block-Sparse Attention Meets Step Distillation for Efficient Video Generation
Authors: Youping Gu; XIAOLONG LI; Yuhao Hu; Chen Minqi; Bohan Zhuang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Diffusion transformers currently lead the field in high-quality video generation, but their slow iterative denoising process and prohibitive quadratic attention costs for long sequences create significant inference bottlenecks. While both step distillation and sparse attention mechanisms have shown promise as independent acceleration strategies, effectively combining these approaches presents critical challenges---training-free integration yields suboptimal results, while separately training sparse attention after step distillation requires prohibitively expensive high-quality video data. To overcome these limitations, we propose $\textit{BLADE}$, an innovative data-free joint training framework that introduces: (1) an Adaptive Block-Sparse Attention (ASA) mechanism for dynamically generating content-aware sparsity masks to focus computation on salient spatiotemporal features, and (2) a sparsity-aware step distillation paradigm, built upon Trajectory Distribution Matching (TDM), directly incorporates sparsity into the distillation process rather than treating it as a separate compression step and features fast convergence. We validate BLADE on text-to-video models like CogVideoX-5B and Wan2.1-1.3B, and our framework demonstrates remarkable efficiency gains across different scales. On Wan2.1-1.3B, BLADE achieves a 14.10$\times$ end-to-end inference acceleration over a 50-step baseline. Moreover, on models such as CogVideoX-5B with short video sequence lengths, our framework delivers a robust 8.89$\times$ speedup. Crucially, the acceleration is accompanied by a consistent quality improvement. On the VBench-2.0 benchmark, BLADE boosts the score of CogVideoX-5B to 0.569 (from 0.534) and Wan2.1-1.3B to 0.570 (from 0.563), results that are further corroborated by superior ratings in human evaluations.
ExGRPO: Learning to Reason from Experience
Authors: Runzhe Zhan; Yafu Li; Zhi Wang; Xiaoye Qu; Dongrui Liu; Jing Shao; Derek F. Wong; Yu Cheng
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is an emerging paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, standard on-policy training discards rollout experiences after a single update, leading to computational inefficiency and instability. While prior work on RL has highlighted the benefits of reusing past experience, the role of experience characteristics in shaping learning dynamics of large reasoning models remains underexplored. In this paper, we are the first to investigate what makes a reasoning experience valuable and identify rollout correctness and entropy as effective indicators of experience value. Based on these insights, we propose  ExGRPO (Experiential Group Relative Policy Optimization), a framework that organizes and prioritizes valuable experiences, and employs a mixed-policy objective to balance exploration with experience exploitation. Experiments on five backbone models (1.5B-8B parameters) show that ExGRPO consistently improves reasoning performance on mathematical/general benchmarks, with an average gain of +3.5/7.6 points over on-policy RLVR. Moreover, ExGRPO stabilizes training on both stronger and weaker models where on-policy methods fail. These results highlight principled experience management as a key ingredient for efficient and scalable RLVR.
A$^2$Search: Ambiguity-Aware Question Answering with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Fengji Zhang; Xinyao Niu; Chengyang Ying; Guancheng Lin; Zhongkai Hao; Zhou Fan; Chengen Huang; Jacky Keung; Bei Chen; Junyang Lin
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have led to strong performance in open-domain question answering (QA). However, existing models still struggle with questions that admit multiple valid answers. Standard QA benchmarks, which typically assume a single gold answer, overlook this reality and thus produce inappropriate training signals. Existing attempts to handle ambiguity often rely on costly manual annotation, which is difficult to scale to multi-hop datasets such as HotpotQA and MuSiQue.
In this paper, we present A$^2$Search, an annotation-free, end-to-end training framework to recognize and handle ambiguity. At its core is an automated pipeline that detects ambiguous questions and gathers alternative answers via trajectory sampling and evidence verification. The model is then optimized with RL using a carefully designed $\mathrm{AnsF1}$ reward, which naturally accommodates multiple answers.
Experiments on eight open-domain QA benchmarks demonstrate that A$^2$Search achieves new state-of-the-art performance. With only a single rollout, A$^2$Search-7B yields an average $\mathrm{AnsF1}@1$ score of $48.4$% across four multi-hop benchmarks, outperforming all strong baselines, including the substantially larger ReSearch-32B ($46.2$%). Extensive analyses further show that A$^2$Search resolves ambiguity and generalizes across benchmarks, highlighting that embracing ambiguity is essential for building more reliable QA systems. Our code, data, and model weights can be found at https://github.com/zfj1998/A2Search.
Just Do It!? Computer-Use Agents Exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness
Authors: Erfan Shayegani; Keegan Hines; Yue Dong; Nael Abu-Ghazaleh; Roman Lutz; Spencer Whitehead; Vidhisha Balachandran; Besmira Nushi; Vibhav Vineet
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are an increasingly deployed class of agents that take actions on GUIs to accomplish user goals. 
In this paper, we show that CUAs consistently exhibit *Blind Goal-Directedness* (BGD): a bias to pursue goals regardless of feasibility, safety, reliability, or context. We characterize three prevalent patterns of BGD: (i) lack of contextual reasoning, (ii) assumptions and decisions under ambiguity, and (iii) contradictory or infeasible goals. We develop BLIND-ACT, a benchmark of 90 tasks capturing these three patterns. Built on OSWorld, BLIND-ACT provides realistic environments and employs LLM-based judges to evaluate agent behavior, achieving 93.75% agreement with human annotations. We use BLIND-ACT to evaluate nine frontier models, including Claude Sonnet and Opus 4, Computer-Use-Preview, and GPT-5, observing high average BGD rates (80.8%) across them. We show that BGD exposes subtle risks that arise even when inputs are not directly harmful. While prompting-based interventions lower BGD levels, substantial risk persists, highlighting the need for stronger training- or inference-time interventions. Qualitative analysis reveals observed failure modes: execution-first bias (focusing on *how* to act over *whether* to act), thought–action disconnect (execution diverging from reasoning), and request-primacy (justifying actions due to user request). Identifying BGD and introducing BLIND-ACT establishes a foundation for future research on studying and mitigating this fundamental risk and ensuring safe CUA deployment.
Transitive RL: Value Learning via Divide and Conquer
Authors: Seohong Park; Aditya Oberai; Pranav Atreya; Sergey Levine
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: In this work, we present Transitive Reinforcement Learning (TRL), a new value learning algorithm based on a divide-and-conquer paradigm. TRL is designed for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) problems, where the aim is to find a policy that can reach any state from any other state in the smallest number of steps. TRL converts a triangle inequality structure present in GCRL into a practical divide-and-conquer value update rule. This has several advantages compared to alternative value learning paradigms. Compared to temporal difference (TD) methods, TRL suffers less from bias accumulation, as in principle it only requires $O(\log T)$ recursions (as opposed to $O(T)$ in TD learning) to handle a length-T trajectory. Unlike Monte Carlo methods, TRL suffers less from high variance as it performs dynamic programming. Experimentally, we show that TRL achieves the best performance in highly challenging, long-horizon benchmark tasks compared to previous offline GCRL algorithms.
Testing Most Influential Sets
Authors: Lucas Darius Konrad; Nikolas Kuschnig
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Small influential data subsets can dramatically impact model conclusions, with a few data points overturning key findings. While recent work identifies these most influential sets, there is no formal way to tell when maximum influence is excessive rather than expected under natural random sampling variation. We address this gap by developing a principled framework for most influential sets. Focusing on linear least-squares, we derive a convenient exact influence formula and identify the extreme value distributions of maximal influence – the heavy-tailed Fréchet for constant-size sets and heavy-tailed data, and the well-behaved Gumbel for growing sets or light tails. This allows us to conduct rigorous hypothesis tests for excessive influence. We demonstrate through applications across economics, biology, and machine learning benchmarks, resolving contested findings and replacing ad-hoc heuristics with rigorous inference.
MOSS: Efficient and Accurate FP8 LLM Training with Microscaling and Automatic Scaling
Authors: Yu Zhang; Hui-Ling Zhen; Mingxuan Yuan; Bei Yu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Training large language models with FP8 formats offers significant efficiency gains. However, the reduced numerical precision of FP8 poses challenges for stable and accurate training. Current frameworks preserve training performance using mixed-granularity quantization, i.e., applying per-group quantization for activations and per-tensor/block quantization for weights. While effective, per-group quantization requires scaling along the inner dimension of matrix multiplication, introducing additional dequantization overhead. Moreover, these frameworks often rely on just-in-time scaling to dynamically adjust scaling factors based on the current data distribution. However, this online quantization is inefficient for FP8 training, as it involves multiple memory reads and writes that negate the performance benefits of FP8. To overcome these limitations, we propose MOSS, a novel FP8 training framework that ensures both efficiency and numerical stability. MOSS introduces two key innovations: (1) a two-level microscaling strategy for quantizing sensitive activations, which balances precision and dequantization cost by combining a high-precision global scale with compact, power-of-two local scales; and (2) automatic scaling for weights in linear layers, which eliminates the need for costly max-reduction operations by predicting and adjusting scaling factors during training. Leveraging these techniques, MOSS enables efficient FP8 training of a 7B parameter model, achieving performance comparable to the BF16 baseline while achieving up to 34\% higher training throughput.
GOOD: Geometry-guided Out-of-Distribution Modeling for Open-set Test-time Adaptation in Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Tianpei Zou; Guo Yu; Ya Wu; Fan Lu; Zhongcong Xu; Zhang Bo; Ziqiao Wang; Sanqing Qu; Guang Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Open-set Test-time Adaptation (OSTTA) has been introduced to address the challenges of both online model optimization and open-set recognition. Despite the demonstrated success of OSTTA methodologies in 2D image recognition, their application to 3D point cloud semantic segmentation is still hindered by the complexities of point cloud data, particularly the imbalance between known (in-distribution, ID) and unknown (out-of-distribution, OOD) data, where known samples dominate and unknown instances are often sparse or even absent. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective strategy, termed Geometry-guided Out-of-Distribution Modeling (GOOD), specifically designed to address OSTTA for 3D point cloud semantic segmentation. Technically, we first leverage geometric priors to cluster the point cloud into superpoints, thereby mitigating the numerical disparity between individual points and providing a more structured data representation. Then, we introduce a novel confidence metric to effectively distinguish between known and unknown superpoints. Additionally, prototype-based representations are integrated to enhance the discrimination between ID and OOD regions, facilitating robust segmentation. We validate the efficacy of GOOD across four benchmark datasets. Remarkably, on the Synth4D to SemanticKITTI task, GOOD outperforms HGL by 1.93%, 8.99%, and 7.91% in mIoU, AUROC, and FPR95, respectively.
Action Chunking and Data Augmentation Yield Exponential Improvements in Behavior Cloning for Continuous Spaces
Authors: Thomas TCK Zhang; Daniel Pfrommer; Chaoyi Pan; Nikolai Matni; Max Simchowitz
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: This paper presents a theoretical analysis of two of the most impactful interventions in modern learning from demonstration in robotics and continuous control: the practice of *action-chunking* (predicting sequences of actions in open-loop) and *exploratory augmentation* of expert demonstrations. Though recent results show that learning from demonstration, also known as imitation learning (IL), can suffer errors that compound *exponentially* with task horizon in continuous settings, we demonstrate that action chunking and exploratory data collection circumvent exponential compounding errors in different regimes. Our results identify control-theoretic stability as the key mechanism underlying the benefits of these interventions. On the empirical side, we validate our predictions and the role of control-theoretic stability through experimentation on popular robot learning benchmarks. On the theoretical side, we demonstrate that the control-theoretic lens provides fine-grained insights into how compounding error arises, leading to tighter statistical guarantees on imitation learning error when these interventions are applied than previous techniques based on information-theoretic considerations alone.
OneTwoVLA: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model with Adaptive Reasoning
Authors: Fanqi Lin; Ruiqian Nai; Yingdong Hu; Jiacheng You; Junming Zhao; Yang Gao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: General-purpose robots capable of performing diverse tasks require synergistic reasoning and acting capabilities.
However, recent dual-system approaches, which separate high-level reasoning from low-level acting, often suffer from challenges such as limited mutual understanding of capabilities between systems and latency issues. 
This paper introduces OneTwoVLA, a single unified vision-language-action model that can perform both acting (System One) and reasoning (System Two). Crucially, OneTwoVLA adaptively switches between two modes: explicitly reasoning at critical moments during task execution, and generating actions based on the most recent reasoning at other times.
To further unlock OneTwoVLA's reasoning and generalization capabilities, we design a scalable pipeline for synthesizing embodied reasoning-centric vision-language data, used for co-training with robot data. We validate OneTwoVLA's effectiveness through extensive experiments, highlighting its superior performance across four key capabilities: long-horizon task planning, error detection and recovery, natural human-robot interaction, and generalizable visual grounding, enabling the model to perform long-horizon, highly dexterous manipulation tasks such as making hotpot or mixing cocktails.