GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Unlocking State-Tracking in Linear RNNs Through Negative Eigenvalues
Authors: Riccardo Grazzi; Julien Siems; Arber Zela; Jörg K.H. Franke; Frank Hutter; Massimiliano Pontil
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: Linear Recurrent Neural Networks (LRNNs) such as Mamba, RWKV, GLA, mLSTM, and DeltaNet have emerged as efficient alternatives to Transformers for long sequences. However, both Transformers and LRNNs struggle to perform state-tracking, which may impair performance in tasks such as code evaluation. In one forward pass, current architectures are unable to solve even parity, the simplest state-tracking task, which non-linear RNNs can handle effectively. Recently, Sarrof et al. (2024) demonstrated that the failure of LRNNs like Mamba to solve parity stems from restricting the value range of their diagonal state-transition matrices to $[0, 1]$ and that incorporating negative values can resolve this issue. We extend this result to non-diagonal LRNNs such as DeltaNet. We prove that finite precision LRNNs with state-transition matrices having only positive eigenvalues cannot solve parity, while non-triangular matrices are needed to count modulo $3$. Notably, we also prove that LRNNs can learn any regular language when their state-transition matrices are products of identity minus vector outer product matrices, each with eigenvalues in the range $[-1, 1]$. Our experiments confirm that extending the eigenvalue range of Mamba and DeltaNet to include negative values not only enables them to solve parity but consistently improves their performance on state-tracking tasks. We also show that state-tracking enabled LRNNs can be pretrained  stably and efficiently at scale (1.3B parameters), achieving competitive performance on language modeling and showing promise on code and math tasks.
E(3)-equivariant models cannot learn chirality: Field-based molecular generation
Authors: Alexandru Dumitrescu; Dani Korpela; Markus Heinonen; Yogesh Verma; Valerii Iakovlev; Vikas Garg; Harri Lähdesmäki
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Obtaining the desired effect of drugs is highly dependent on their molecular geometries. Thus, the current prevailing paradigm focuses on 3D point-cloud atom representations, utilizing graph neural network (GNN) parametrizations, with rotational symmetries baked in via E(3) invariant layers. We prove that such models must necessarily disregard chirality, a geometric property of the molecules that cannot be superimposed on their mirror image by rotation and translation. Chirality plays a key role in determining drug safety and potency. To address this glaring issue, we introduce a novel field-based representation, proposing reference rotations that replace rotational symmetry constraints. The proposed model captures all molecular geometries including chirality, while still achieving highly competitive performance with E(3)-based methods across standard benchmarking metrics.
One Model Transfer to All: On Robust Jailbreak Prompts Generation against LLMs
Authors: Linbao Li; Yannan Liu; Daojing He; YU LI
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly compromised by jailbreak attacks, which can manipulate these models to generate harmful or unintended content. Investigating these attacks is crucial for uncovering model vulnerabilities. However, many existing jailbreak strategies fail to keep pace with the rapid development of defense mechanisms, such as defensive suffixes, rendering them ineffective against defended models. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel attack method called ArrAttack, specifically designed to target defended LLMs. ArrAttack automatically generates robust jailbreak prompts capable of bypassing various defense measures. This capability is supported by a universal robustness judgment model that, once trained, can perform robustness evaluation for any target model with a wide variety of defenses. By leveraging this model, we can rapidly develop a robust jailbreak prompt generator that efficiently converts malicious input prompts into effective attacks. Extensive evaluations reveal that ArrAttack significantly outperforms existing attack strategies, demonstrating strong transferability across both white-box and black-box models, including GPT-4 and Claude-3. Our work bridges the gap between jailbreak attacks and defenses, providing a fresh perspective on generating robust jailbreak prompts.
PaPaGei: Open Foundation Models for Optical Physiological Signals
Authors: Arvind Pillai; Dimitris Spathis; Fahim Kawsar; Mohammad Malekzadeh
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) is the leading non-invasive technique for monitoring biosignals and cardiovascular health, with widespread adoption in both clinical settings and consumer wearable devices. While machine learning models trained on PPG signals have shown promise, they tend to be task-specific and struggle with generalization. Current research is limited by the use of single-device datasets, insufficient exploration of out-of-domain generalization, and a lack of publicly available models, which hampers reproducibility. To address these limitations, we present PaPaGei, the first open foundation model for PPG signals. The model is pre-trained on over 57,000 hours of data, comprising 20 million unlabeled PPG segments from publicly available datasets. We introduce a novel representation learning approach that leverages domain knowledge of PPG signal morphology across individuals, enabling the capture of richer representations compared to traditional contrastive learning methods. We evaluate PaPaGei against state-of-the-art time-series foundation models and self-supervised learning benchmarks across 20 tasks from 10 diverse datasets, spanning cardiovascular health, sleep disorders, pregnancy monitoring, and wellbeing assessment. Our model demonstrates superior performance, improving classification and regression metrics by 6.3% and 2.9% respectively in at least 14 tasks. Notably, PaPaGei achieves these results while being more data- and parameter-efficient, outperforming models that are 70x larger. Beyond accuracy, we examine model robustness across different skin tones, establishing a benchmark for bias evaluation in future models. PaPaGei can serve as both a feature extractor and an encoder for multimodal models, opening up new opportunities for multimodal health monitoring. Models, data, and code are available at: https://github.com/nokia-bell-labs/papagei-foundation-model
Sensitivity-Constrained Fourier Neural Operators for Forward and Inverse Problems in Parametric Differential Equations
Authors: Abdolmehdi Behroozi; Chaopeng Shen; Daniel Kifer
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Parametric differential equations of the form  $\frac{\partial u}{\partial t} = f(u, x, t, p)$ are fundamental in science and engineering. While deep learning frameworks like the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) efficiently approximate differential equation solutions, they struggle with inverse problems, sensitivity calculations  $\frac{\partial u}{\partial p}$, and concept drift.  We address these challenges by introducing a novel sensitivity loss regularizer, demonstrated through Sensitivity-Constrained Fourier Neural Operators (SC-FNO). Our approach maintains high accuracy for solution paths and outperforms both standard FNO and FNO with Physics-Informed Neural Network regularization. SC-FNO exhibits superior performance in parameter inversion tasks, accommodates more complex parameter spaces (tested with up to 82 parameters), reduces training data requirements, and decreases training time while maintaining accuracy.  These improvements apply across various differential equations and neural operators, enhancing their reliability without significant computational overhead (30%–130% extra training time per epoch). Models and selected experiment code are available at:  [https://github.com/AMBehroozi/SC_Neural_Operators](https://github.com/AMBehroozi/SC_Neural_Operators).
Captured by Captions: On Memorization and its Mitigation in CLIP Models
Authors: Wenhao Wang; Adam Dziedzic; Grace C. Kim; Michael Backes; Franziska Boenisch
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Multi-modal models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated strong performance in aligning visual and textual representations, excelling in tasks like image retrieval and zero-shot classification. Despite this success, the mechanisms by which these models utilize training data, particularly the role of memorization, remain unclear. In uni-modal models, both supervised and self-supervised, memorization has been shown to be essential for generalization. However, it is not well understood how these findings would apply to CLIP, which incorporates elements from both supervised learning via captions that provide a supervisory signal similar to labels, and from self-supervised learning via the contrastive objective.
To bridge this gap in understanding, we propose a formal definition of memorization in CLIP (CLIPMem) and use it to quantify memorization in CLIP models. Our results indicate that CLIP’s memorization behavior falls between the supervised and self-supervised paradigms, with "mis-captioned" samples exhibiting highest levels of memorization. 
Additionally, we find that the text encoder contributes more to memorization than the image encoder, suggesting that mitigation strategies should focus on the text domain. 
Building on these insights, we propose multiple strategies to reduce memorization while at the same time improving utility---something that had not been shown before for traditional learning paradigms where reducing memorization typically results in utility decrease.
CHASE-SQL: Multi-Path Reasoning and Preference Optimized Candidate Selection in Text-to-SQL
Authors: Mohammadreza Pourreza; Hailong Li; Ruoxi Sun; Yeounoh Chung; Shayan Talaei; Gaurav Tarlok Kakkar; Yu Gan; Amin Saberi; Fatma Ozcan; Sercan O Arik
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: We present CHASE-SQL, a novel framework addressing large language model (LLM) performance challenges for Text-to-SQL tasks by leveraging multi-agent modeling and test-time compute for improved candidate generation and selection. CHASE-SQL uses LLMs to generate diverse SQL candidates with: (1) a divide-and-conquer approach to break down complex queries, (2) chain-of-thought reasoning based on query execution plans, and (3) instance-aware synthetic example generation for tailored few-shot demonstrations. A selection agent ranks candidates via pairwise comparisons using a fine-tuned binary selection LLM, offering robust performance. This framework improves SQL query quality and diversity, achieving state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 73.0% on the BIRD Text-to-SQL benchmark test set, topping the leaderboard at the time of submission.
JPEG Inspired Deep Learning
Authors: Ahmed H. Salamah; Kaixiang Zheng; Yiwen Liu; EN-HUI YANG
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Although it is traditionally believed that lossy image compression, such as JPEG compression, has a negative impact on the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs), it is shown by recent works that well-crafted JPEG compression can actually improve the performance of deep learning (DL). Inspired by this, we propose JPEG-DL, a novel DL framework that prepends any underlying DNN architecture with a trainable JPEG compression layer. To make the quantization operation in JPEG compression trainable, a new differentiable soft quantizer is employed at the JPEG layer, and then the quantization operation and underlying DNN are jointly trained. Extensive experiments show that in comparison with the standard DL,  JPEG-DL delivers significant accuracy improvements across various datasets and model architectures while enhancing robustness against adversarial attacks. Particularly, on some fine-grained image classification datasets, JPEG-DL can increase prediction accuracy by as much as 20.9%. Our code is available on https://github.com/AhmedHussKhalifa/JPEG-Inspired-DL.git.
MLLM as Retriever: Interactively Learning Multimodal Retrieval for Embodied Agents
Authors: Junpeng Yue; Xinrun Xu; Börje F. Karlsson; Zongqing Lu
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: MLLM agents demonstrate potential for complex embodied tasks by retrieving multimodal task-relevant trajectory data. However, current retrieval methods primarily focus on surface-level similarities of textual or visual cues in trajectories, neglecting their effectiveness for the specific task at hand. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, MART, which enhances the performance of embodied agents by utilizing interaction data to fine-tune an MLLM retriever based on preference learning, such that the retriever fully considers the effectiveness of trajectories and prioritize them for unseen tasks. We also introduce Trajectory Abstraction, a mechanism that leverages MLLMs' summarization capabilities to represent trajectories with fewer tokens while preserving key information, enabling agents to better comprehend milestones in the trajectory. Experimental results across various environments demonstrate our method significantly improves task success rates in unseen scenes compared to baseline methods. This work presents a new paradigm for multimodal retrieval in embodied agents, by fine-tuning a general-purpose MLLM as the retriever to assess trajectory effectiveness. All the code for benchmark tasks, simulator modifications and the MLLM retriever is available at https://github.com/PKU-RL/MART.
Divergence-Regularized Discounted Aggregation: Equilibrium Finding in Multiplayer Partially Observable Stochastic Games
Authors: Runyu Lu; Yuanheng Zhu; Dongbin Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: This paper presents Divergence-Regularized Discounted Aggregation (DRDA), a multi-round learning system for solving partially observable stochastic games (POSGs). DRDA is based on action values and applicable to multiplayer POSGs, which can unify normal-form games (NFGs), extensive-form games (EFGs) with perfect recall, and Markov games (MGs). In each single round, DRDA can be viewed as a discounted variant of Follow the Regularized Leader (FTRL) under a general value function for POSGs. While previous studies on discounted FTRL have demonstrated its last-iterate convergence towards quantal response equilibrium (QRE) in NFGs, this paper extends the theoretical results to POSGs under divergence regularization and generalizes the QRE concept of Nash distribution. The linear last-iterate convergence of single-round DRDA to its rest point is proved under the assumption on the hypomonotonicity of the game. When the rest point is unique, it induces the unique Nash distribution defined in the POSG, which has a bounded deviation from Nash equilibrium (NE). Under multiple learning rounds, DRDA keeps replacing the base policy for divergence regularization with the policy at the rest point in the previous round. It is further proved that the limit point of multi-round DRDA must be an exact NE (rather than a QRE). In experiments, discrete-time DRDA can converge to NE at a near-exponential rate in (multiplayer) NFGs and outperform the existing baselines for EFGs, MGs, and typical POSGs.
The Case for Cleaner Biosignals: High-fidelity Neural Compressor Enables Transfer from Cleaner iEEG to Noisier EEG
Authors: Francesco S. Carzaniga; Gary Tom Hoppeler; Michael Hersche; Kaspar Schindler; Abbas Rahimi
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: All data modalities are not created equal, even when the signal they measure comes from the same source. In the case of the brain, two of the most important data modalities are the scalp electroencephalogram (EEG), and the intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG). iEEG benefits from a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), as it measures the electrical activity directly in the brain, while EEG is noisier and has lower spatial and temporal resolutions. Nonetheless, both EEG and iEEG are important sources of data for human neurology, from healthcare to brain–machine interfaces. They are used by human experts, supported by deep learning (DL) models, to accomplish a variety of tasks, such as seizure detection and motor imagery classification. Although the differences between EEG and iEEG are well understood by human experts, the performance of DL models across these two modalities remains under-explored. To help characterize the importance of clean data on the performance of DL models, we propose BrainCodec, a high-fidelity EEG and iEEG neural compressor. We find that training BrainCodec on iEEG and then transferring to EEG yields higher reconstruction quality than training on EEG directly. In addition, we also find that training BrainCodec on both EEG and iEEG improves fidelity when reconstructing EEG. Our work indicates that data sources with higher SNR, such as iEEG, provide better performance across the board also in the medical time-series domain. This finding is consistent with reports coming from natural language processing, where clean data sources appear to have an outsized effect on the performance of the DL model overall. BrainCodec also achieves up to a 64x compression on iEEG and EEG without a notable decrease in quality. BrainCodec markedly surpasses current state-of-the-art compression models both in final compression ratio and in reconstruction fidelity. We also evaluate the fidelity of the compressed signals objectively on a seizure detection and a motor imagery task performed by standard DL models. Here, we find that BrainCodec achieves a reconstruction fidelity high enough to ensure no performance degradation on the downstream tasks. Finally, we collect the subjective assessment of an expert neurologist, that confirms the high reconstruction quality of BrainCodec in a realistic scenario. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/eeg-ieeg-brain-compressor.
Preference Diffusion for Recommendation
Authors: Shuo Liu; An Zhang; Guoqing Hu; Hong Qian; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Recommender systems aim to predict personalized item rankings by modeling user preference distributions derived from historical behavior data. While diffusion models (DMs) have recently gained attention for their ability to model complex distributions, current DM-based recommenders typically rely on traditional objectives such as mean squared error (MSE) or standard recommendation objectives. These approaches are either suboptimal for personalized ranking tasks or fail to exploit the full generative potential of DMs. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{PreferDiff}, an optimization objective tailored for DM-based recommenders. PreferDiff reformulates the traditional Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) objective into a log-likelihood generative framework, enabling it to effectively capture user preferences by integrating multiple negative samples. To handle the intractability, we employ variational inference, minimizing the variational upper bound. Furthermore, we replace MSE with cosine error to improve alignment with recommendation tasks, and we balance generative learning and preference modeling to enhance the training stability of DMs. PreferDiff devises three appealing properties. First, it is the first personalized ranking loss designed specifically for DM-based recommenders. Second, it improves ranking performance and accelerates convergence by effectively addressing hard negatives. Third, we establish its theoretical connection to Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), demonstrating its potential to align user preferences within a generative modeling framework. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks validate PreferDiff's superior recommendation performance. 
Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/lswhim/PreferDiff}.
Rethinking Evaluation of Sparse Autoencoders through the Representation of Polysemous Words
Authors: Gouki Minegishi; Hiroki Furuta; Yusuke Iwasawa; Yutaka Matsuo
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have gained a lot of attention as a promising tool to improve the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) by mapping the complex superposition of *polysemantic* neurons into *monosemantic* features and composing a sparse dictionary of words.

However, traditional performance metrics like Mean Squared Error and $\mathrm{L}_{0}$ sparsity ignore the evaluation of the semantic representational power of SAEs - whether they can acquire interpretable monosemantic features while preserving the semantic relationship of words.For instance, it is not obvious whether a learned sparse feature could distinguish different meanings in one word.

In this paper, we propose a suite of evaluations for SAEs to analyze the quality of monosemantic features by focusing on polysemous words.
Our findings reveal that SAEs developed to improve the MSE-$\mathrm{L}_0$ Pareto frontier may confuse interpretability, which does not necessarily enhance the extraction of monosemantic features.
The analysis of SAEs with polysemous words can also figure out the internal mechanism of LLMs; deeper layers and the Attention module contribute to distinguishing polysemy in a word.

Our semantics-focused evaluation offers new insights into the polysemy and the existing SAE objective and contributes to the development of more practical SAEs.
Tool-Planner: Task Planning with Clusters across Multiple Tools
Authors: Yanming Liu; Xinyue Peng; Jiannan Cao; Shi Bo; Yuwei Zhang; Xuhong Zhang; Sheng Cheng; Xun Wang; Jianwei Yin; Tianyu Du
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities, enabling them to solve various complex problems. Recently, this ability has been applied to the paradigm of tool learning. Tool learning involves providing examples of tool usage and their corresponding functions, allowing LLMs to formulate plans and demonstrate the process of invoking and executing each tool. LLMs can address tasks that they cannot complete independently, thereby enhancing their potential across different tasks. However, this approach faces two key challenges. First, redundant error correction leads to unstable planning and long execution time. Additionally, designing a correct plan among multiple tools is also a challenge in tool learning. To address these issues, we propose Tool-Planner, a task-processing framework based on toolkits. Tool-Planner groups tools based on the API functions with the same function into a toolkit and allows LLMs to implement planning across the various toolkits. When a tool error occurs, the language model can reselect and adjust tools based on the toolkit. Experiments show that our approach demonstrates a high pass and win rate across different datasets and optimizes the planning scheme for tool learning in models such as GPT-4 and Claude 3, showcasing the potential of our method. Our code is public at
 https://github.com/OceannTwT/Tool-Planner.
On a Connection Between Imitation Learning and RLHF
Authors: Teng Xiao; Yige Yuan; Mingxiao Li; Zhengyu Chen; Vasant G Honavar
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: This work studies the alignment of large language models with preference data from an imitation learning  perspective. We establish a close theoretical connection between reinforcement learning from human feedback RLHF and imitation learning (IL), revealing that RLHF implicitly performs imitation learning on the preference data distribution. Building on this connection, we propose DIL, a principled framework that directly optimizes the imitation learning objective. DIL provides a unified imitation learning perspective on alignment, encompassing existing alignment algorithms as special cases while naturally introducing new variants. By bridging IL and RLHF, DIL offers new insights into alignment with RLHF. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIL outperforms existing methods on various challenging benchmarks.