GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
LogicXGNN:  Grounded Logical Rules for Explaining Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Chuqin Geng; Ziyu Zhao; Zhaoyue Wang; Haolin Ye; Yuhe Jiang; Xujie Si
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Existing rule-based explanations for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide global interpretability but often optimize and assess fidelity in an intermediate, uninterpretable concept space, overlooking the grounding quality of the final subgraph explanations for end users. This gap yields explanations that may appear faithful yet be unreliable in practice. To this end, we propose LogicXGNN, a post hoc framework that constructs logical rules over reliable predicates explicitly designed to capture the GNN's message-passing structure, thereby ensuring effective grounding. We further introduce data-grounded fidelity ($Fid_D$), a realistic metric that evaluates explanations in their final-graph form, along with complementary utility metrics such as coverage and validity. Across extensive experiments, LogicXGNN improves $Fid_D$ by over 20% on average relative to state-of-the-art methods while being 10-100 times faster. With strong scalability and utility performance, LogicXGNN produces explanations that are faithful to the model's logic and reliably grounded in observable data.
Adaptive Mixture of Disentangled Experts for Dynamic Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Authors: Haibo Chen; Xin Wang; Guanheng Chen; Yuan Meng; Haoyang Li; Yang Yao; Zeyang Zhang; Zhiqiang Zhang; JUN ZHOU; Ling Feng; Wenwu Zhu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Dynamic graph out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization has drawn an increasing amount of attention in the research community, given its wide applicability in real-world scenarios. Existing methods typically employ a fixed-architecture design to extract invariant patterns. However, there may exist evolving distribution shifts in dynamic graphs, leading to suboptimal performance of fixed-architecture designs. To address this issue, we propose a novel adaptive-architecture design to handle evolving distribution shifts over time, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time. The proposed adaptive-architecture design introduces an adaptive mixture of architecture experts to capture invariant patterns under evolving distribution shifts, which imposes three challenges: 1) How to detect and characterize evolving distribution shifts to inform architectural decisions; 2) How to dynamically route different expert architectures to handle varying distribution characteristics; 3) How to ensure that the adaptive mixture of experts effectively discovers invariant patterns. To solve these challenges, we propose a novel **Ada**ptive **Mix**ture of Disentangled Experts (**AdaMix**) model to adaptively route architecture experts to varying distribution shifts and jointly learn spatio-temporal invariant patterns. Specifically, we propose a spatio-temporal distribution detector to infer evolving distribution shifts by jointly leveraging historical and current information. Building upon this, we develop a prototype-guided mixture of disentangled experts that adaptively routes experts with disentangled factors to different distribution shifts. Finally, we design a distribution-aware intervention mechanism that discovers invariant patterns based on expert selection of nodes. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed **AdaMix** model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
K²-Agent: Co-Evolving Know-What and Know-How for Hierarchical Mobile Device Control
Authors: Zhe Wu; Donglin Mo; Hongjin Lu; Junliang Xing; Jianheng Liu; Yuheng Jing; Kai Li; Kun Shao; Jianye HAO; Yuanchun Shi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Existing mobile device control agents often perform poorly when solving complex tasks requiring long-horizon planning and precise operations, typically due to a lack of relevant task experience or unfamiliarity with skill execution. We propose $\textbf{K²-Agent}$, a hierarchical framework that models human-like cognition by separating and co-evolving declarative ("knowing what") and procedural ("knowing how") knowledge for planning and execution. K²-Agent’s high level reasoner is bootstrapped from a single demonstration per task and runs a Summarize–Reflect–Locate–Revise (SRLR) loop to distill and iteratively refine task-level declarative knowledge through self-evolution. The low-level executor is trained with our curriculum-guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (C-GRPO), which (i) constructs a balanced sample pool using decoupled reward signals and (ii) employs dynamic demonstration injection to guide the model in autonomously generating successful trajectories for training. On the challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, K$^2$-Agent achieves a new $\textbf{state of the art}$ with $\textbf{76.1\% success rate}$, ranking $\textbf{1st}$ among all methods $\textbf{using only raw screenshots and open-source backbones}$. Furthermore, K²-Agent shows powerful dual generalization: its high-level declarative knowledge transfers across diverse base models, while its low-level procedural skills achieve competitive performance on unseen tasks in ScreenSpot-v2 and Android-in-the-Wild (AitW).
Fast Data Mixture Optimization via Gradient Descent
Authors: Haoru Tan; Sitong Wu; Yanfeng Chen; Jun Xia; Ruobing Xie; Bin Xia; Xingwu Sun; Xiaojuan Qi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: While large and diverse datasets have driven recent advances in large models, identifying the optimal data mixture for pre-training and post-training remains a significant open problem. We address this challenge with FastMix, a novel framework that automates data mixture discovery while training only a single proxy model. Instead of relying on predefined heuristics or resource-intensive simulations, FastMix jointly optimizes mixture coefficients and model parameters, substantially improving efficiency and scalability over prior approaches. At the core of FastMix is a reformulation of mixture selection as a bilevel optimization problem.
Under this reformulation, we show that optimizing mixture ratios is mathematically equivalent to assigning per-source loss weights under uniform source sampling. This embeds the mixture coefficients directly into the differentiable iterative optimization objective, enabling efficient, gradient-based optimization of both mixture and model. To solve the optimization problem, FastMix implements an approximate iterative optimization procedure, alternating between (i) updating model parameters on data sampled according to current mixture ratios (inner loop) and (ii) updating mixture ratios based on validation feedback (outer loop). Across pre- and post-training, FastMix outperforms baselines while drastically reducing search cost: in pre-training, it attains an average score of 48.2 with 1.3 GPU-hours ($\times 550$ vs. RegMix; $\times 55$ vs. CLIMB), and in post-training (SFT) it leads with 65.4 with a $+5.5$ gain over the next best, completing search in 2.2 GPU-hours compared to the 115 GPU-hours required by CLIMB/RegMix.
Adaptive Thinking: Large Language Models Know When to Think in Latent Space
Authors: Pingzhi Li; Bairu Hou; Yun Zhu; Yihao Feng; Ke Ye; Tao Lei; Zhifeng Chen; Tianlong Chen; Xianzhi Du
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) test-time computing have introduced the capability to perform intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning (thinking) before generating answers. While increasing the thinking budget yields smooth performance improvements at inference time, the relationship between LLM capability, query complexity, and optimal budget allocation remains poorly understood for achieving compute-optimal inference. To address this challenge, we utilize $\textit{self-consistency}$, the agreement among multiple reasoning paths, as a proxy for thinking necessity. We first identify that lower self-consistency indicates when queries require extended thinking to reach correct answers. Building on this insight, we introduce $\texttt{Sonata}$ (Self-Consistency-Guided Adapter for Thinking Allocation), a lightweight approach that adaptively allocates thinking budgets to optimize the performance-efficiency tradeoff. $\texttt{Sonata}$ includes an adapter trained offline on a calibration dataset to predict self-consistency directly from the last layer hidden representations during the query prefilling stage. This prediction then guides on-the-fly budget allocation before thinking. The adapter is general, transferable across diverse tasks once trained, and introduces $<1$$\textperthousand$ computational overhead during inference. Notably, Sonata is compatible with existing CoT compression methods, enabling further efficiency gains when managing thinking budgets across queries. Extensive experiments on multiple models (Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-32B, GPT-OSS-120B, Qwen3-235B-A22B) and benchmarks~(AIME25, GSM8K, MATH500, GPQA, LiveCodeBench) demonstrate that $\texttt{Sonata}$ achieves $20\\%$ to $60\\%$ reduction in thinking tokens while maintaining the same accuracy, or up to $2\\%$ improvement in accuracy with the same token cost.
Rethinking Driving World Model as Synthetic Data Generator for Perception Tasks
Authors: Kai Zeng; Zhanqian Wu; Kaixin Xiong; Xiaobao Wei; Xiangyu Guo; Zhenxin Zhu; Kalok Ho; Lijun Zhou; Bohan Zeng; Ming Lu; Haiyang Sun; BING WANG; Guang Chen; Hangjun Ye; Wentao Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in driving world models enable controllable generation of high-quality RGB videos or multimodal videos. 
Existing methods primarily focus on metrics related to generation quality and controllability. 
However, they often overlook the evaluation of downstream perception tasks, which are {\bf really crucial} for the performance of autonomous driving. 
Existing methods usually leverage a training strategy that first pretrains on synthetic data and finetunes on real data, resulting in twice the epochs compared to the baseline (real data only). 
When we double the epochs in the baseline, the benefit of synthetic data becomes negligible.
To thoroughly demonstrate the benefit of synthetic data, we introduce Dream4Drive, a novel synthetic data generation framework designed for enhancing the downstream perception tasks.
Dream4Drive first decomposes the input video into several 3D-aware guidance maps and subsequently renders the 3D assets onto these guidance maps.
Finally, the driving world model is fine-tuned to produce the edited, multi-view photorealistic videos, which can be used to train the downstream perception models.
Dream4Drive enables unprecedented flexibility in generating multi-view corner cases at scale, significantly boosting corner case perception in autonomous driving. 
To facilitate future research, we also contribute a large-scale 3D asset dataset named DriveObj3D, covering the typical categories in driving scenarios and enabling diverse 3D-aware video editing.
We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that Dream4Drive can effectively boost the performance of downstream perception models under various training epochs. 
Project website: \url{https://wm-research.github.io/Dream4Drive/}.
Exploring State-Space Models for Data-Specific Neural Representations
Authors: Jinsung Lee; Suha Kwak
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of data-specific neural representations, aiming for compact, flexible, and modality-agnostic storage of individual visual data using neural networks. Our approach considers a visual datum as a set of discrete observations of an underlying continuous signal, thus requiring models capable of capturing the inherent structure of the signal. For this purpose, we investigate state-space models (SSMs), which are well-suited for modeling latent signal dynamics. We first explore the appealing properties of SSMs for data-specific neural representation and then present a novel framework that integrates SSMs into the representation pipeline. The proposed framework achieved compact representations and strong reconstruction performance across a range of visual data formats, suggesting the potential of SSMs for data-specific neural representations.
Content-Aware Mamba for Learned Image Compression
Authors: Yunuo Chen; Zezheng Lyu; Bing He; Hongwei Hu; Qi Wang; Yuan Tian; Li Song; Wenjun Zhang; Guo Lu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent learned image compression (LIC) leverages Mamba-style state-space models (SSMs) for global receptive fields with linear complexity. However, the standard Mamba adopts content-agnostic, predefined raster (or multi-directional) scans under strict causality. This rigidity hinders its ability to effectively eliminate redundancy between tokens that are content-correlated but spatially distant.
We introduce Content-Aware Mamba (CAM), an SSM that dynamically adapts its processing to the image content.
Specifically, CAM overcomes prior limitations with two novel mechanisms. First, it replaces the rigid scan with a content-adaptive token permutation strategy to prioritize interactions between content-similar tokens regardless of their location. Second, it overcomes the sequential dependency by injecting sample-specific global priors into the state-space model, which effectively mitigates the strict causality without multi-directional scans.
These innovations enable CAM to better capture global redundancy while preserving computational efficiency. Our Content-Aware Mamba-based LIC model (CMIC) achieves state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance, surpassing VTM-21.0 by 15.91\%, 21.34\%, and 17.58\% in BD-rate on the Kodak, Tecnick, and CLIC datasets, respectively. Code will be released at https://github.com/UnoC-727/CMIC.
CineTrans: Learning to Generate Videos with Cinematic Transitions via Masked Diffusion Models
Authors: Xiaoxue Wu; Bingjie Gao; Yu Qiao; Yaohui Wang; Xinyuan Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Despite significant advances in video synthesis, research into multi-shot video generation remains in its infancy. Even with scaled-up models and massive datasets, the shot transition capabilities remain rudimentary and unstable, largely confining generated videos to single-shot sequences. In this work, we introduce CineTrans, a novel framework for generating coherent multi-shot videos with cinematic, film-style transitions. To facilitate insights into the film editing style, we construct a multi-shot video-text dataset Cine250K with detailed shot annotations. Furthermore, our analysis of existing video diffusion models uncovers a correspondence between attention maps in the diffusion model and shot boundaries, which we leverage to design a mask-based control mechanism that enables transitions at arbitrary positions and transfers effectively in a training-free setting. After fine-tuning on our dataset with the mask mechanism, CineTrans produces cinematic multi-shot sequences while adhering to the film editing style, avoiding unstable transitions or naive concatenations. Finally, we propose specialized evaluation metrics for transition control, temporal consistency and overall quality, and demonstrate through extensive experiments that CineTrans significantly outperforms existing baselines across all criteria.
ZeroTuning: Unlocking the Initial Token's Power to Enhance Large Language Models Without Training
Authors: Feijiang Han; Xiaodong Yu; Jianheng Tang; Delip Rao; Weihua Du; Lyle Ungar
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Token-level attention tuning -- a class of training-free methods including Post-hoc Attention Steering (PASTA) and Attention Calibration (ACT) -- has emerged as a promising approach for improving frozen LLMs via interpretable interventions. However, these methods rely on auxiliary heuristics to identify important task-specific tokens, which can introduce bias and limit applicability when token importance is ambiguous or when optimized kernels make attention maps inaccessible. We propose a simpler alternative: intervening only on the initial token (e.g., <BOS> in LLaMA). We theoretically show that adding lightweight biases to this token’s attention logits systematically shifts and reshapes downstream attention patterns -- an effect amplified by its natural role as an attention sink. Empirically, we find that this tuning can improve LLM performance and better elicit pretrained knowledge, with stronger effects in early layers and distinct scaling preferences across attention heads. Building on these findings, we introduce ZeroTuning, a training-free method that improves LLM performance by applying head-specific attention adjustments to the initial token, requiring no parameter updates. We present two variants: a supervised mode that calibrates on validation examples, and an unsupervised mode that directly minimizes output entropy. ZeroTuning requires no KV-cache or decoding changes and is kernel-agnostic (works with SDPA and FlashAttention). It requires only four lines of modification to standard \texttt{LlamaAttention} code, achieves gains across 15 datasets, and outperforms prior, more complex methods. For example, on Llama-3.1-8B, it yields relative improvements of 19.9% on classification, 4.5% on question answering, and 2.1% on dialogue. ZeroTuning also works out of the box with quantized inference and maintains its improvements as context length increases. Our work provides a lightweight tool for inference-time improvement, advancing both optimization and interpretability. Our code and runnable demo are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ZeroTuning.
SP-VLA: A Joint Model Scheduling and Token Pruning Approach for VLA Model Acceleration
Authors: Ye Li; Yuan Meng; Zewen Sun; Kangye Ji; Chen Tang; Jiajun Fan; Xinzhu Ma; Shu-Tao Xia; Zhi Wang; Wenwu Zhu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have attracted increasing attention for their strong control capabilities. However, their high computational cost and low execution frequency hinder their suitability for real-time tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous navigation. Existing VLA acceleration methods primarily focus on structural optimization, overlooking the fact that these models operate in sequential decision-making environments. As a result, temporal redundancy in sequential action generation and spatial redundancy in visual input remain unaddressed. To this end, we propose SP-VLA, a unified framework that accelerates VLA models by jointly scheduling models and pruning tokens. Specifically, we design an action-aware model scheduling mechanism that reduces temporal redundancy by dynamically switching between VLA model and a lightweight generator.  Inspired by the human motion pattern of focusing on key decision points while relying on intuition for other actions, we categorize VLA actions into deliberative and intuitive, assigning the former to the VLA model and the latter to the lightweight generator, enabling frequency-adaptive execution through collaborative model scheduling. To address spatial redundancy, we further develop a spatio-semantic dual-aware token pruning method.  Tokens are classified into spatial and semantic types and pruned based on their dual-aware importance to accelerate VLA inference. These two mechanisms work jointly to guide the VLA in focusing on critical actions and salient visual information, achieving effective acceleration while maintaining high accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves 1.5$\times$ lossless acceleration in LIBERO and 2.4$\times$ in SimplerEnv, with up to 6\% average performance gain. Inference frequency and latency improve by 2.2$\times$ in SimplerEnv and 1.4$\times$ in LIBERO.
AEGIS: Adversarial Target-Guided Retention-Data-Free Robust Concept Erasure from Diffusion Models
Authors: Fengpeng Li; Kemou Li; Qizhou Wang; Bo Han; Jiantao Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Concept erasure helps stop diffusion models (DMs) from generating harmful content; but current methods face robustness-retention trade-off. **Robustness** means the model fine-tuned by concept erasure methods resists reactivation of erased concepts, even under semantically related prompts. **Retention** means unrelated concepts are preserved so the model’s overall utility stays intact. Both are critical for concept erasure in practice, yet addressing them simultaneously is challenging, as existing works typically improve one factor while sacrificing the other. Prior work typically strengthens one while degrading the other—e.g., mapping a single erased prompt to a fixed safe target leaves class-level remnants exploitable by prompt attacks, whereas retention-oriented schemes underperform against adaptive adversaries.  This paper introduces Adversarial Erasure with Gradient-Informed Synergy (AEGIS), a retention-data-free framework that advances both robustness and retention. First, AEGIS replaces handpicked targets with an Adversarial Erasure Target (AET) optimized to approximate the semantic center of the erased concept class. By aligning the model’s prediction on the erased prompt to an AET-derived target in the shared text–image space, AEGIS increases predicted-noise distances not just for the instance but for semantically related variants, substantially hardening the DMs against state-of-the-art adversarial prompt attacks. Second, AEGIS preserves utility without auxiliary data via Gradient Regularization Projection (GRP), a conflict-aware gradient rectification that selectively projects away the destructive component of the retention update only when it opposes the erasure direction. This directional, data-free projection mitigates interference between erasure and retention, avoiding dataset bias and accidental relearning. Extensive experiments show that AEGIS markedly reduces attack success rates across various concepts while maintaining or improving FID/CLIP versus advanced baselines, effectively pushing beyond the prevailing robustness–retention trade-off. The source code is in https://github.com/Feng-peng-Li/AEGIS.
CylinderSplat: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Cylindrical Triplanes for Panoramic Novel View Synthesis
Authors: Qiwei Wang; Xianghui Ze; Jingyi Yu; Yujiao Shi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown great promise for real-time novel view synthesis, but its application to panoramic imagery remains challenging. Existing methods often rely on multi-view cost volumes for geometric refinement, which struggle to resolve occlusions in sparse-view scenarios. Furthermore, standard volumetric representations like Cartesian Triplanes are poor in capturing the inherent geometry of $360^\circ$ scenes, leading to distortion and aliasing.

In this work, we introduce CylinderSplat, a feed-forward framework for panoramic 3DGS that addresses these limitations. The core of our method is a new {cylindrical Triplane} representation, which is better aligned with panoramic data and real-world structures adhering to the Manhattan-world assumption. We use a dual-branch architecture: a pixel-based branch reconstructs well-observed regions, while a volume-based branch leverages the cylindrical Triplane to complete occluded or sparsely-viewed areas. Our framework is designed to flexibly handle a variable number of input views, from single to multiple panoramas. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CylinderSplat achieves state-of-the-art results in both single-view and multi-view panoramic novel view synthesis, outperforming previous methods in both reconstruction quality and geometric accuracy.