GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Watch Out Your Album! On the Inadvertent Privacy Memorization in Multi-Modal Large Language Models
Authors: Tianjie Ju; Yi Hua; Hao Fei; Zhenyu Shao; Yubin Zheng; Haodong Zhao; Mong-Li Lee; Wynne Hsu; Zhuosheng Zhang; Gongshen Liu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on various vision-language tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). Despite accumulating evidence of privacy concerns associated with task-relevant content, it remains unclear whether MLLMs inadvertently memorize private content that is entirely irrelevant to the training tasks. In this paper, we investigate how randomly generated task-irrelevant private content can become spuriously correlated with downstream objectives due to partial mini-batch training dynamics, thus causing inadvertent memorization. Concretely, we randomly generate task-irrelevant watermarks into VQA fine-tuning images at varying probabilities and propose a novel probing framework to determine whether MLLMs have inadvertently encoded such content. Our experiments reveal that MLLMs exhibit notably different training behaviors in partial mini-batch settings with task-irrelevant watermarks embedded. Furthermore, through layer-wise probing, we demonstrate that MLLMs trigger distinct representational patterns when encountering previously seen task-irrelevant knowledge, even if this knowledge does not influence their output during prompting. Our code is available at https://github.com/illusionhi/ProbingPrivacy.
EARL-BO: Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Lookahead, High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Mujin Cheon; Jay H Lee; Dong-Yeun Koh; Calvin Tsay
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: To avoid myopic behavior, multi-step lookahead Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithms consider the sequential nature of BO and have demonstrated promising results in recent years. However, owing to the curse of dimensionality, most of these methods make significant approximations or suffer scalability issues. This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for multi-step lookahead BO in high-dimensional black-box optimization problems. The proposed method enhances the scalability and decision-making quality of multi-step lookahead BO by efficiently solving the sequential dynamic program of the BO process in a near-optimal manner using RL. We first introduce an Attention-DeepSets encoder to represent the state of knowledge to the RL agent and subsequently propose a multi-task, fine-tuning procedure based on end-to-end (encoder-RL) on-policy learning. We evaluate the proposed method, EARL-BO (Encoder Augmented RL for BO), on synthetic benchmark functions and hyperparameter tuning problems, finding significantly improved performance compared to existing multi-step lookahead and high-dimensional BO methods.
Pareto-frontier Entropy Search with Variational Lower Bound Maximization
Authors: Masanori Ishikura; Masayuki Karasuyama
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: This study considers multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) through the information gain of the Pareto-frontier. To calculate the information gain, a predictive distribution conditioned on the Pareto-frontier plays a key role, which is defined as a distribution truncated by the Pareto-frontier. However, it is usually impossible to obtain the entire Pareto-frontier in a continuous domain, and therefore, the complete truncation cannot be known. We consider an approximation of the truncated distribution by using a mixture distribution consisting of two possible approximate truncations obtainable from a subset of the Pareto-frontier, which we call over- and under-truncation. Since the optimal balance of the mixture is unknown beforehand, we propose optimizing the balancing coefficient through the variational lower bound maximization framework, by which the approximation error of the information gain can be minimized. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method particularly when the number of objective functions is large.
DISCO: learning to DISCover an evolution Operator for multi-physics-agnostic prediction
Authors: Rudy Morel; Jiequn Han; Edouard Oyallon
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We address the problem of predicting the next states of a dynamical system governed by *unknown* temporal partial differential equations (PDEs) using only a short trajectory. While standard transformers provide a natural black-box solution to this task, the presence of a well-structured evolution operator in the data  suggests a more tailored and efficient approach. Specifically, when the PDE is fully known, classical numerical solvers can evolve the state accurately with only a few parameters. Building on this observation, we introduce DISCO, a model that uses a large hypernetwork to process a short trajectory and generate the parameters of a much smaller operator network, which then predicts the next states through time integration. Our framework decouples dynamics estimation -- i.e., DISCovering an evolution Operator from a short trajectory -- from state prediction -- i.e., evolving this operator. Experiments show that pretraining our model on diverse physics datasets achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring significantly fewer epochs. Moreover, it generalizes well to unseen initial conditions and remains competitive when fine-tuned on downstream tasks.
Deep Unsupervised Hashing via External Guidance
Authors: Qihong Song; XitingLiu; Hongyuan Zhu; Joey Tianyi Zhou; Xi Peng; Peng Hu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recently, deep unsupervised hashing has gained considerable attention in image retrieval due to its advantages in cost-free data labeling, computational efficiency, and storage savings. Although existing methods achieve promising performance by leveraging inherent visual structures within the data, they primarily focus on learning discriminative features from unlabeled images through limited internal knowledge, resulting in an intrinsic upper bound on their performance. To break through this intrinsic limitation, we propose a novel method, called Deep Unsupervised Hashing with External Guidance (DUH-EG), which incorporates external textual knowledge as semantic guidance to enhance discrete representation learning. Specifically, our DUH-EG: i) selects representative semantic nouns from an external textual database by minimizing their redundancy, then matches images with them to extract more discriminative external features; and ii) presents a novel bidirectional contrastive learning mechanism to maximize agreement between hash codes in internal and external spaces, thereby capturing discrimination from both external and intrinsic structures in Hamming space. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DUH-EG remarkably outperforms existing state-of-the-art hashing methods.
Zero Shot Generalization of Vision-Based RL Without Data Augmentation
Authors: Sumeet Batra; Gaurav S. Sukhatme
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Generalizing vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) agents to novel environments remains a difficult and open challenge. Current trends are to collect large-scale datasets or use data augmentation techniques to prevent overfitting and improve downstream generalization. However, the computational and data collection costs increase exponentially with the number of task variations and can destabilize the already difficult task of training RL agents. In this work, we take inspiration from recent advances in computational neuroscience and propose a model, Associative Latent DisentAnglement (ALDA), that builds on standard off-policy RL towards zero-shot generalization. Specifically, we revisit the role of latent disentanglement in RL and show how combining it with a model of associative memory achieves zero-shot generalization on difficult task variations *without* relying on data augmentation. Finally, we formally show that data augmentation techniques are a form of weak disentanglement and discuss the implications of this insight.
QEM-Bench: Benchmarking Learning-based Quantum Error Mitigation and QEMFormer as a Multi-ranged Context Learning Baseline
Authors: Tianyi Bao; Ruizhe Zhong; Xinyu Ye; Yehui Tang; Junchi Yan
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Quantum Error Mitigation (QEM) has emerged as a pivotal technique for enhancing the reliability of noisy quantum devices in the *Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum* (NISQ) era. Recently, machine learning (ML)-based QEM approaches have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities without sampling overheads compared to conventional methods. However, evaluating these techniques is often hindered by a lack of standardized datasets and inconsistent experimental settings across different studies. In this work, we present **QEM-Bench**, a comprehensive benchmark suite of *twenty-two* datasets covering diverse circuit types and noise profiles, which provides a unified platform for comparing and advancing ML-based QEM methods. We further propose a refined ML-based QEM pipeline **QEMFormer**, which leverages a feature encoder that preserves local, global, and topological information, along with a two-branch model that captures short-range and long-range dependencies within the circuit. Empirical evaluations on QEM-Bench illustrate the superior performance of QEMFormer over existing baselines, underscoring the potential of integrated ML-QEM strategies.
Metastable Dynamics of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: Provable Benefits of Search, RL and Distillation
Authors: Juno Kim; Denny Wu; Jason D. Lee; Taiji Suzuki
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: A key paradigm to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is to allocate more inference-time compute to search against a verifier or reward model. This process can then be utilized to refine the pretrained model or distill its reasoning patterns into more efficient models. In this paper, we study inference-time computation by viewing chain-of-thought (CoT) generation as a metastable Markov process: easy reasoning steps (e.g., algebraic manipulations) form densely connected clusters, while hard reasoning steps (e.g., applying a relevant theorem) create sparse, low-probability edges between clusters, leading to phase transitions at longer timescales. Under this framework, we prove that implementing a search protocol that rewards sparse edges improves CoT by decreasing the expected number of steps to reach different clusters. In contrast, we establish a limit on reasoning capability when the model is restricted to local information of the pretrained graph. We also show that the information gained by search can be utilized to obtain a better reasoning model: (1) the pretrained model can be directly finetuned to favor sparse edges via policy gradient methods, and moreover (2) a compressed \emph{metastable representation} of the reasoning dynamics can be distilled into a smaller, more efficient model.
A Dynamical Systems-Inspired Pruning Strategy for Addressing Oversmoothing in Graph Attention Networks
Authors: Biswadeep Chakraborty; Harshit Kumar; Saibal Mukhopadhyay
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) face a critical limitation known as oversmoothing, where increasing network depth leads to homogenized node representations, severely compromising their expressiveness. We present a novel dynamical systems perspective on this challenge, revealing oversmoothing as an emergent property of GNNs' convergence to low-dimensional attractor states. Based on this insight, we introduce **DYNAMO-GAT**, which combines noise-driven covariance analysis with Anti-Hebbian learning to dynamically prune attention weights, effectively preserving distinct attractor states. We provide theoretical guarantees for DYNAMO-GAT's effectiveness and demonstrate its superior performance on benchmark datasets, consistently outperforming existing methods while requiring fewer computational resources. This work establishes a fundamental connection between dynamical systems theory and GNN behavior, providing both theoretical insights and practical solutions for deep graph learning.
Rethink GraphODE Generalization within Coupled Dynamical System
Authors: Guancheng Wan; Zijie Huang; Wanjia Zhao; Xiao Luo; Yizhou Sun; Wei Wang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 spotlightposter)

Abstract: Coupled dynamical systems govern essential phenomena across physics, biology, and engineering, where components interact through complex dependencies. While Graph Ordinary Differential Equations (GraphODE) offer a powerful framework to model these systems, their **generalization** capabilities degrade severely under limited observational training data due to two fundamental flaws: (i) the entanglement of static attributes and dynamic states in the initialization process, and (ii) the reliance on context-specific coupling patterns during training, which hinders performance in unseen scenarios. 
In this paper, we propose a Generalizable GraphODE with disentanglement and regularization (GREAT) to address these challenges. Through systematic analysis via the Structural Causal Model, we identify backdoor paths that undermine generalization and design two key modules to mitigate their effects. The *Dynamic-Static Equilibrium Decoupler (DyStaED)* disentangles static and dynamic states via orthogonal subspace projections, ensuring robust initialization. Furthermore, the *Causal Mediation for Coupled Dynamics (CMCD)* employs variational inference to estimate latent causal factors, reducing spurious correlations and enhancing universal coupling dynamics. Extensive experiments across diverse dynamical systems demonstrate that ours outperforms state-of-the-art methods within both in-distribution and out-of-distribution.
LangTime: A Language-Guided Unified Model for Time Series Forecasting with Proximal Policy Optimization
Authors: Wenzhe Niu; Zongxia Xie; Yanru Sun; Wei He; Man Xu; Chao Hao
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent research has shown an increasing interest in utilizing pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for a variety of time series applications. However, there are three main challenges when using LLMs as foundational models for time series forecasting: (1) Cross-domain generalization. (2) Cross-modality alignment. (3) Error accumulation in autoregressive frameworks. To address these challenges, we proposed **LangTime**, a **lan**guage-**g**uided unified model for **time** series forecasting that incorporates cross-domain pre-training with reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning. Specifically, LangTime constructs Temporal Comprehension Prompts (TCPs), which include dataset-wise and channel-wise instructions, to facilitate domain adaptation and condense time series into a single token, enabling LLMs to understand better and align temporal data. To improve autoregressive forecasting, we introduce TimePPO, a reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning algorithm. TimePPO mitigates error accumulation by leveraging a multidimensional rewards function tailored for time series and a repeat-based value estimation strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LangTime achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain forecasting performance, while TimePPO fine-tuning effectively enhances the stability and accuracy of autoregressive forecasting.
EgoPrivacy: What Your First-Person Camera Says About You?
Authors: Yijiang Li; Genpei Zhang; Jiacheng Cheng; Yi Li; Xiaojun Shan; Dashan Gao; Jiancheng Lyu; Yuan Li; Ning Bi; Nuno Vasconcelos
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: While the rapid proliferation of wearable cameras has raised significant concerns about egocentric video privacy, prior work has largely overlooked the unique privacy threats posed to the camera wearer. This work investigates the core question: How much privacy information about the camera wearer can be inferred from their first-person view videos? We introduce EgoPrivacy, the first large-scale benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of privacy risks in egocentric vision. EgoPrivacy covers three types of privacy (demographic, individual, and situational), defining seven tasks that aim to recover private information ranging from fine-grained (e.g., wearer's identity) to coarse-grained (e.g., age group). To further emphasize the privacy threats inherent to egocentric vision, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Attack, a novel attack strategy that leverages ego-to-exo retrieval from an external pool of exocentric videos to boost the effectiveness of demographic privacy attacks. An extensive comparison of the different attacks possible under all threat models is presented, showing that private information of the wearer is highly susceptible to leakage. For instance, our findings indicate that foundation models can effectively compromise wearer privacy even in zero-shot settings by recovering attributes such as identity, scene, gender, and race with 70–80% accuracy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/williamium3000/ego-privacy.
POROver: Improving Safety and Reducing Overrefusal in Large Language Models with Overgeneration and Preference Optimization
Authors: Batuhan K. Karaman; ishmam zabir; Alon Benhaim; Vishrav Chaudhary; Mert R. Sabuncu; Xia Song
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Achieving both high safety and high usefulness simultaneously in large language models has become a critical challenge in recent years.
Models often exhibit unsafe behavior or adopt an overly cautious approach leading to frequent overrefusal of benign prompts, which reduces their usefulness. 
A major factor underlying these behaviors is how the models are finetuned and aligned, particularly the nature and extent of the data used.
In this work, we examine how overgenerating finetuning data with advanced teacher models (e.g., GPT-4o)—covering both general-purpose and toxic prompts—affects safety and usefulness in instruction-following language models.
Additionally, we present POROver, an alignment strategy designed for models that are highly safe but prone to overrefusal. 
POROver employs preference optimization algorithms and leverages completions from an advanced teacher model to reduce overrefusals while maintaining safety.
Our results show that overgenerating completions for general-purpose prompts significantly boosts safety with only a minimal impact on usefulness. 
Specifically, the F1 score calculated between safety and usefulness increases from 74.4% to 91.8% because of a substantial rise in safety. 
Moreover, overgeneration for toxic prompts raises usefulness from 11.1% to 57.6% while preserving safety. 
Finally, applying POROVer increases usefulness further—from 57.6% to 82.1%—while keeping safety at comparable levels.
Random Policy Evaluation Uncovers Policies of Generative Flow Networks
Authors: Haoran He; Emmanuel Bengio; Qingpeng Cai; Ling Pan
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: The Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) is a probabilistic framework in which an agent learns a stochastic policy and flow functions to sample objects with probability proportional to an unnormalized reward function. GFlowNets share a strong connection with reinforcement learning (RL) that typically aims to maximize reward. A number of recent works explored connections between GFlowNets and maximum entropy (MaxEnt) RL, which incorporates entropy regularization into the standard RL objective. However, the relationship between GFlowNets and standard RL remains largely unexplored, despite the inherent similarities in their sequential decision-making nature.
While GFlowNets can discover diverse solutions through specialized flow-matching objectives, connecting them to standard RL can simplify their implementation through well-established RL principles and also improve RL's capabilities in diverse solution discovery (a critical requirement in many real-world applications), and bridging this gap can further unlock the potential of both fields. In this paper, we bridge this gap by revealing a fundamental connection between GFlowNets and one of the most basic components of RL -- policy evaluation. Surprisingly, we find that the value function obtained from evaluating a uniform policy is closely associated with the flow functions in GFlowNets. Building upon these insights, we introduce a rectified random policy evaluation (RPE) algorithm, which achieves the same reward-matching effect as GFlowNets based on simply evaluating a fixed random policy, offering a new perspective. 
Empirical results across extensive benchmarks demonstrate that RPE achieves competitive results compared to previous approaches, shedding light on the previously overlooked connection between (non-MaxEnt) RL and GFlowNets.
Improving Flow Matching by Aligning Flow Divergence
Authors: Yuhao Huang; Taos Transue; Shih-Hsin Wang; William M Feldman; Hong Zhang; Bao Wang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Conditional flow matching (CFM) stands out as an efficient, simulation-free approach for training flow-based generative models, achieving remarkable performance for data generation. However, CFM is insufficient to ensure accuracy in learning probability paths. In this paper, we introduce a new partial differential equation characterization for the error between the learned and exact probability paths, along with its solution. We show that the total variation gap between the two probability paths is bounded above by a combination of the CFM loss and an associated divergence loss. This theoretical insight leads to the design of a new objective function that simultaneously matches the flow and its divergence. Our new approach improves the performance of the flow-based generative model by a noticeable margin without sacrificing generation efficiency. We showcase the advantages of this enhanced training approach over CFM on several important benchmark tasks, including generative modeling for dynamical systems, DNA sequences, and videos. Code is available at \ref{https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Flow_Div_Matching}.
Active Learning with Selective Time-Step Acquisition for PDEs
Authors: Yegon Kim; Hyunsu Kim; Gyeonghoon Ko; Juho Lee
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Accurately solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is critical to understanding complex scientific and engineering phenomena, yet traditional numerical solvers are computationally expensive. Surrogate models offer a more efficient alternative, but their development is hindered by the cost of generating sufficient training data from numerical solvers. In this paper, we present a novel framework for active learning (AL) in PDE surrogate modeling that reduces this cost. Unlike the existing AL methods for PDEs that always acquire entire PDE trajectories, our approach strategically generates only the most important time steps with the numerical solver, while employing the surrogate model to approximate the remaining steps. This dramatically reduces the cost incurred by each trajectory and thus allows the active learning algorithm to try out a more diverse set of trajectories given the same budget. To accommodate this novel framework, we develop an acquisition function that estimates the utility of a set of time steps by approximating its resulting variance reduction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several benchmark PDEs, including the Burgers' equation, Korteweg–De Vries equation, Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation, the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation, and the compressible Navier-Stokes equation.
Experiments show that our approach improves performance by large margins over the best existing method. Our method not only reduces average error but also the 99\%, 95\%, and 50\% quantiles of error, which is rare for an AL algorithm. All in all, our approach offers a data-efficient solution to surrogate modeling for PDEs.