GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
EffiCoder: Enhancing Code Generation in Large Language Models through Efficiency-Aware Fine-tuning
Authors: Dong HUANG; Guangtao Zeng; Jianbo Dai; Meng Luo; Han Weng; Yuhao QING; Heming Cui; Zhijiang Guo; Jie Zhang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) play an increasingly important role in code generation, enhancing both correctness and efficiency has become crucial. Current methods primarily focus on correctness, often overlooking efficiency. To address this gap, we introduce SWIFTCODE to improve both aspects by fine-tuning LLMs on a high-quality dataset comprising correct and efficient code samples. Our methodology involves leveraging multiple LLMs to generate diverse candidate code solutions for various tasks across different programming languages. We then evaluate these solutions by directly measuring their execution time and memory usage through local execution. The code solution with the lowest execution time and memory consumption is selected as the final output for each task. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements when fine-tuning with SWIFTCODE. For instance, Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct's pass@1 score increases from 44.8\% to 57.7\%, while the average execution time for correct tasks decreases by 48.4\%. SWIFTCODE offers a scalable and effective solution for advancing AI-driven code generation, benefiting both software development and computational problem-solving.
From Complex to Atomic: Enhancing Augmented Generation via Knowledge-Aware Dual Rewriting and Reasoning
Authors: Jinyu Wang; Jingjing Fu; Rui Wang; Lei Song; Jiang Bian
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have significantly enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge retrieval. However, the sole reliance on retrieval is often inadequate for mining deep, domain-specific knowledge and for performing logical reasoning from specialized datasets. To tackle these challenges, we present an approach, which is designed to extract, comprehend, and utilize domain knowledge while constructing a coherent rationale. At the heart of our approach lie four pivotal components: a knowledge atomizer that extracts atomic questions from raw data, a query proposer that generates subsequent questions to facilitate the original inquiry, an atomic retriever that locates knowledge based on atomic knowledge alignments, and an atomic selector that determines which follow-up questions to pose guided by the retrieved information. Through this approach, we implement a knowledge-aware task decomposition strategy that adeptly extracts multifaceted knowledge from segmented data and iteratively builds the rationale in alignment with the initial query and the acquired knowledge. We conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach across various benchmarks, particularly those requiring multihop reasoning steps. The results indicate a significant enhancement in performance, up to 12.6\% over the second-best method, underscoring the potential of the approach in complex, knowledge-intensive applications.
Differentially Private Federated $k$-Means Clustering with Server-Side Data
Authors: Jonathan Scott; Christoph H. Lampert; David Saulpic
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Clustering is a cornerstone of data analysis that is particularly suited to identifying coherent subgroups or substructures in unlabeled data, as are generated continuously in large amounts these days. However, in many cases traditional clustering methods are not applicable, because data are increasingly being produced and stored in a distributed way, e.g. on edge devices, and privacy concerns prevent it from being transferred to a central server. To address this challenge, we present FedDP-KMeans, a new algorithm for $k$-means clustering that is fully-federated as well as differentially private. Our approach leverages (potentially small and out-of-distribution) server-side data to overcome the primary challenge of differentially private clustering methods: the need for a good initialization. Combining our initialization with a simple federated DP-Lloyds algorithm we obtain an algorithm that achieves excellent results on synthetic and real-world benchmark tasks. We also provide a theoretical analysis of our method that provides bounds on the convergence speed and cluster identification success.
DocVXQA: Context-Aware Visual Explanations for Document Question Answering
Authors: Mohamed Ali Souibgui; Changkyu Choi; Andrey Barsky; Kangsoo Jung; Ernest Valveny; Dimosthenis Karatzas
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We propose **DocVXQA**, a novel framework for visually self-explainable document question answering, where the goal is not only to produce accurate answers to questions but also to learn visual heatmaps that highlight critical regions, offering interpretable justifications for the model decision. To integrate explanations into the learning process, we quantitatively formulate explainability principles as explicit learning criteria.
Unlike conventional relevance map methods that solely emphasize regions relevant to the answer, our context-aware DocVXQA delivers explanations that are contextually sufficient yet representation-efficient. This fosters user trust while achieving a balance between predictive performance and interpretability in document visual question answering applications. Extensive experiments, including human evaluation, provide strong evidence supporting the effectiveness of our method.
On the Adversarial Robustness of Multi-Kernel Clustering
Authors: Hao Yu; Weixuan Liang; KE LIANG; Suyuan Liu; Meng Liu; Xinwang Liu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multi-kernel clustering (MKC) has emerged as a powerful method for capturing diverse data patterns, offering robust and generalized representations of data structures. However, the increasing deployment of MKC in real-world applications raises concerns about its vulnerability to adversarial perturbations. While adversarial robustness has been extensively studied in other domains, its impact on MKC remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we address the challenge of assessing the adversarial robustness of MKC methods in a black-box setting. Specifically, we propose *AdvMKC*, a novel reinforcement-learning-based adversarial attack framework designed to inject imperceptible perturbations into data and mislead MKC methods. AdvMKC leverages proximal policy optimization with an advantage function to overcome the instability of clustering results during optimization. Additionally, it introduces a generator-clusterer framework, where a generator produces adversarial perturbations, and a clusterer approximates MKC behavior, significantly reducing computational overhead. We provide theoretical insights into the impact of adversarial perturbations on MKC and validate these findings through experiments. Evaluations across seven datasets and eleven MKC methods (seven traditional and four robust) demonstrate AdvMKC's effectiveness, robustness, and transferability.
GRADEO: Towards Human-Like Evaluation for Text-to-Video Generation via Multi-Step Reasoning
Authors: Zhun Mou; Bin Xia; Zhengchao Huang; Wenming Yang; Jiaya Jia
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Recent great advances in video generation models have demonstrated their potential to produce high-quality videos, bringing challenges to effective evaluation. Unlike human evaluation, existing automated evaluation metrics lack high-level semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities for video, thus making them infeasible and unexplainable. To fill this gap, we curate **GRADEO-Instruct**, a multi-dimensional T2V evaluation instruction tuning dataset, including 3.3k videos from over 10 existing video generation models and multi-step reasoning assessments converted by 16k human annotations. We then introduce **GRADEO**, one of the first specifically designed video evaluation models, which **grades** AI-generated **videos** for explainable scores and assessments through multi-step reasoning. Experiments show that our method aligns better with human evaluations than existing methods. Furthermore, our benchmarking reveals that current video generation models struggle to produce content that aligns with human reasoning and complex real-world scenarios. The models, datasets, and codes will be released soon.
Geometric Resampling in Nearly Linear Time for Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader with Best-of-Both-Worlds Guarantee in Bandit Problems
Authors: Botao Chen; Jongyeong Lee; Junya Honda
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: This paper studies the complexity and optimality of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) policy in the $K$-armed bandit problems. FTPL is a promising policy that achieves the Best-of-Both-Worlds (BOBW) guarantee without solving an optimization problem unlike Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL). However, FTPL needs a procedure called geometric resampling to estimate the loss, which needs $O(K^2)$ per-round average complexity, usually worse than that of FTRL. To address this issue, we propose a novel technique, which we call Conditional Geometric Resampling (CGR), for unbiased loss estimation applicable to general perturbation distributions. CGR reduces the average complexity to $O(K\log K)$ without sacrificing the regret bounds. We also propose a biased version of CGR that can control the worst-case complexity while keeping the BOBW guarantee for a certain perturbation distribution. We confirm through experiments that CGR does not only significantly improve the average and worst-case runtime but also achieve better regret thanks to the stable loss estimation.
Are High-Quality AI-Generated Images More Difficult for Models to Detect?
Authors: Yao Xiao; Binbin Yang; Weiyan Chen; Jiahao Chen; Zijie Cao; ZiYi Dong; Xiangyang Ji; Liang Lin; Wei Ke; Pengxu Wei
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: The remarkable evolution of generative models has enabled the generation of high-quality, visually attractive images, often perceptually indistinguishable from real photographs to human eyes. This has spurred significant attention on AI-generated image (AIGI) detection. Intuitively, higher image quality should increase detection difficulty. However, our systematic study on cutting-edge text-to-image generators reveals a counterintuitive finding: AIGIs with higher quality scores, as assessed by human preference models, tend to be more easily detected by existing models. To investigate this, we examine how the text prompts for generation and image characteristics influence both quality scores and detector accuracy. We observe that images from short prompts tend to achieve higher preference scores while being easier to detect. Furthermore, through clustering and regression analyses, we verify that image characteristics like saturation, contrast, and texture richness collectively impact both image quality and detector accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate that the performance of off-the-shelf detectors can be enhanced across diverse generators and datasets by selecting input patches based on the predicted scores of our regression models, thus substantiating the broader applicability of our findings. Code and data are available at \href{https://github.com/Coxy7/AIGI-Detection-Quality-Paradox}{GitHub}.
Learning to Reuse Policies in State Evolvable Environments
Authors: Ziqian Zhang; Bohan Yang; Lihe Li; Yuqi Bian; Ruiqi Xue; Feng Chen; Yi-Chen Li; Lei Yuan; Yang Yu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: The policy trained via reinforcement learning (RL) makes decisions based on sensor-derived state features. It is common for state features to evolve for reasons such as periodic sensor maintenance or the addition of new sensors for performance improvement. The deployed policy fails in new state space when state features are unseen during training. Previous work tackles this challenge by training a sensor-invariant policy or generating multiple policies and selecting the appropriate one with limited samples. However, both directions struggle to guarantee the performance when faced with unpredictable evolutions. In this paper, we formalize this problem as state evolvable reinforcement learning (SERL), where the agent is required to mitigate policy degradation after state evolutions without costly exploration. We propose **Lapse** by reusing policies learned from the old state space in two distinct aspects. On one hand, Lapse directly reuses the *robust* old policy by composing it with a learned state reconstruction model to handle vanishing sensors. On the other hand, the behavioral experience from the old policy is reused by Lapse to train a newly adaptive policy through offline learning, better utilizing new sensors. To leverage advantages of both policies in different scenarios, we further propose *automatic ensemble weight adjustment* to effectively aggregate them. Theoretically, we justify that robust policy reuse helps mitigate uncertainty and error from both evolution and reconstruction. Empirically, Lapse achieves a significant performance improvement, outperforming the strongest baseline by about $2\times$ in benchmark environments.
Approximating Latent Manifolds in Neural Networks via Vanishing Ideals
Authors: Nico Pelleriti; Max Zimmer; Elias Samuel Wirth; Sebastian Pokutta
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Deep neural networks have reshaped modern machine learning by learning powerful latent representations that often align with the manifold hypothesis: high-dimensional data lie on lower-dimensional manifolds. In this paper, we establish a connection between manifold learning and computational algebra by demonstrating how vanishing ideals can characterize the latent manifolds of deep networks. To that end, we propose a new neural architecture that (i) truncates a pretrained network at an intermediate layer, (ii) approximates each class manifold via polynomial generators of the vanishing ideal, and (iii) transforms the resulting latent space into linearly separable features through a single polynomial layer. The resulting models have significantly fewer layers than their pretrained baselines, while maintaining comparable accuracy, achieving higher throughput, and utilizing fewer parameters. Furthermore, drawing on spectral complexity analysis, we derive sharper theoretical guarantees for generalization, showing that our approach can in principle offer tighter bounds than standard deep networks. Numerical experiments confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.
Balancing Efficiency and Expressiveness: Subgraph GNNs with Walk-Based Centrality
Authors: Joshua Southern; Yam Eitan; Guy Bar-Shalom; Michael M. Bronstein; Haggai Maron; Fabrizio Frasca
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Subgraph GNNs have emerged as promising architectures that overcome the expressiveness limitations of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by processing bags of subgraphs. Despite their compelling empirical performance, these methods are afflicted by a high computational complexity: they process bags whose size grows linearly in the number of nodes, hindering their applicability to larger graphs. In this work, we propose an effective and easy-to-implement approach to dramatically alleviate the computational cost of Subgraph GNNs and unleash broader applications thereof. Our method, dubbed HyMN, leverages walk-based centrality measures to sample a small number of relevant subgraphs and drastically reduce the bag size. By drawing a connection to perturbation analysis, we highlight the strength of the proposed centrality-based subgraph sampling, and further prove that these walk-based centralities can be additionally used as Structural Encodings for improved discriminative power. A comprehensive set of experimental results demonstrates that HyMN provides an effective synthesis of expressiveness, efficiency, and downstream performance, unlocking the application of Subgraph GNNs to dramatically larger graphs. Not only does our method outperform more sophisticated subgraph sampling approaches, it is also competitive, and sometimes better, than other state-of-the-art approaches for a fraction of their runtime.
FedPHA: Federated Prompt Learning for Heterogeneous Client Adaptation
Authors: Chengying Fang; Wenke Huang; Guancheng Wan; Yihao Yang; Mang Ye
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Federated Prompt Learning (FPL) adapts pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to federated learning through prompt tuning, leveraging their transferable representations and strong generalization capabilities. Traditional methods often require uniform prompt lengths for federated aggregation, limiting adaptability to clients with diverse prompt lengths and distribution biases. In this paper, we propose **Fed**erated **P**rompt Learning for **H**eterogeneous Client **A**daptation (FedPHA), a novel framework that combines a fixed-length global prompt for efficient aggregation with local prompts of varying lengths to capture client-specific data characteristics. Additionally, FedPHA designs Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based projection and bidirectional alignment to disentangle global conflicts arising from client heterogeneity, ensuring that personalized client tasks effectively utilize non-harmful global knowledge. This approach ensures that global knowledge improves model generalization while local knowledge preserves local optimization. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of FedPHA in achieving a balance between global and personalized knowledge in federated learning scenarios.
Can Classic GNNs Be Strong Baselines for Graph-level Tasks? Simple Architectures Meet Excellence
Authors: Yuankai Luo; Lei Shi; Xiao-Ming Wu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are often criticized for their limited expressiveness, issues like over-smoothing and over-squashing, and challenges in capturing long-range dependencies. Conversely, Graph Transformers (GTs) are regarded as superior due to their employment of global attention mechanisms, which potentially mitigate these challenges. Literature frequently suggests that GTs outperform GNNs in graph-level tasks, especially for graph classification and regression on small molecular graphs. In this study, we explore the untapped potential of GNNs through an enhanced framework, GNN+, which integrates six widely used techniques: edge feature integration, normalization, dropout, residual connections, feed-forward networks, and positional encoding, to effectively tackle graph-level tasks. We conduct a systematic re-evaluation of three classic GNNs—GCN, GIN, and GatedGCN—enhanced by the GNN+ framework across 14 well-known graph-level datasets. Our results reveal that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, these classic GNNs consistently match or surpass the performance of GTs, securing top-three rankings across all datasets and achieving first place in eight. Furthermore, they demonstrate greater efficiency, running several times faster than GTs on many datasets. This highlights the potential of simple GNN architectures, challenging the notion that complex mechanisms in GTs are essential for superior graph-level performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/LUOyk1999/GNNPlus.
Nonparametric Teaching for Graph Property Learners
Authors: Chen Zhang; Weixin Bu; Zeyi Ren; Zhengwu Liu; Yik Chung WU; Ngai Wong
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 spotlightposter)

Abstract: Inferring properties of graph-structured data, *e.g.*, the solubility of molecules, essentially involves learning the implicit mapping from graphs to their properties. This learning process is often costly for graph property learners like Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). To address this, we propose a paradigm called Graph Nonparametric Teaching (GraNT) that reinterprets the learning process through a novel nonparametric teaching perspective. Specifically, the latter offers a theoretical framework for teaching implicitly defined (*i.e.*, nonparametric) mappings via example selection. Such an implicit mapping is realized by a dense set of graph-property pairs, with the GraNT teacher selecting a subset of them to promote faster convergence in GCN training. By analytically examining the impact of graph structure on parameter-based gradient descent during training, and recasting the evolution of GCNs—shaped by parameter updates—through functional gradient descent in nonparametric teaching, we show *for the first time* that teaching graph property learners (*i.e.*, GCNs) is consistent with teaching structure-aware nonparametric learners. These new findings readily commit GraNT to enhancing learning efficiency of the graph property learner, showing significant reductions in training time for graph-level regression (-36.62\%), graph-level classification (-38.19\%), node-level regression (-30.97\%) and node-level classification (-47.30\%), all while maintaining its generalization performance.
To Steer or Not to Steer? Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention for Language Models
Authors: Anna Hedström; Salim I. Amoukou; Tom Bewley; Saumitra Mishra; Manuela Veloso
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually tuned steering strengths, often resulting in under or oversteering, MERA addresses these limitations by (i) optimising the intervention direction, and (ii) calibrating when and how much to steer, thereby provably improving performance or abstaining when no confident correction is possible. Experiments across diverse datasets and LM families demonstrate safe, effective, non-degrading error correction and that MERA outperforms existing baselines. Moreover, MERA can be applied on top of existing steering techniques to further enhance their performance, establishing it as a general-purpose and efficient approach to mechanistic activation steering.
Conservative Offline Goal-Conditioned Implicit V-Learning
Authors: Kaiqiang Ke; Qian Lin; Zongkai Liu; Shenghong He; Chao Yu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) learns a goal-conditioned value function to train policies for diverse goals with pre-collected datasets. Hindsight experience replay addresses the issue of sparse rewards by treating intermediate states as goals but fails to complete goal-stitching tasks where achieving goals requires stitching different trajectories. While cross-trajectory sampling is a potential solution that associates states and goals belonging to different trajectories, we demonstrate that this direct method degrades performance in goal-conditioned tasks due to the overestimation of values on unconnected pairs. To this end, we propose Conservative Goal-Conditioned Implicit Value Learning (CGCIVL), a novel algorithm that introduces a penalty term to penalize value estimation for unconnected state-goal pairs and leverages the quasimetric framework to accurately estimate values for connected pairs. Evaluations on OGBench, a benchmark for offline GCRL, demonstrate that CGCIVL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks.