GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Generative Universal Verifier as Multimodal Meta-Reasoner
Authors: Xinchen Zhang; Xiaoying Zhang; Youbin Wu; Yanbin Cao; Renrui Zhang; Ruihang Chu; Ling Yang; Yujiu Yang; Guang Shi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: We introduce *Generative Universal Verifier*, a novel concept and plugin designed for next-generation multimodal reasoning in vision-language models and unified multimodal models, providing the fundamental capability of reflection and refinement on visual outcomes during the reasoning and generation process. This work makes three main contributions: (1) We build **ViVerBench**, a comprehensive benchmark spanning $16$ categories of critical tasks for evaluating visual outcomes in multimodal reasoning. Results show that existing VLMs consistently underperform across these tasks, underscoring a substantial gap from human-level capability in reliable visual verification. (2) We design two automated pipelines to construct large-scale visual verification data and train **OmniVerifier-7B**, the first omni-capable generative verifier trained for universal visual verification and achieves notable gains on ViVerBench(+$8.3$). Through training, we identify three atomic capabilities in visual verification and demonstrate how they generalize and interact synergistically. (3) We propose **OmniVerifier-TTS**, a sequential test-time scaling paradigm that leverages the universal verifier to bridge image generation and editing within unified models, enhancing the upper bound of generative ability through iterative fine-grained optimization. Beyond generation, we extend universal verifier to broader world-modeling interleaved reasoning scenarios. Empirically, OmniVerifier-TTS achieves improvements on T2I-ReasonBench(+$3.7$), and GenEval++(+$4.3$), outperforming existing parallel test-time scaling methods, such as Best-of-N. By endowing multimodal reasoning with reliable visual verification, OmniVerifier advances both reliable reflection during generation and scalable test-time refinement, marking a step toward more trustworthy and controllable next-generation reasoning systems.
Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction
Authors: Xu Zhang; Ruijie Quan; Wenguan Wang; Yi Yang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Reconstructing visual stimuli from fMRI signals is a central challenge bridging machine learning and neuroscience. Recent diffusion-based methods typically map fMRI activity to a single neural embedding, using it as static guidance throughout the entire generation process. However, this fixed guidance collapses hierarchical neural information and is misaligned with the stage-dependent demands of image reconstruction. In response, we propose MindHier, a coarse-to-fine fMRI-to-image reconstruction framework built on scale-wise autoregressive modeling. MindHier introduces three components: a Hierarchical fMRI Encoder to extract multi-level neural embeddings, a Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Alignment scheme to enforce layer-wise correspondence with CLIP features, and a Scale-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Neural Guidance strategy to inject these embeddings into autoregression at matching scales. These designs make MindHier an efficient and cognitively aligned alternative to diffusion-based methods by enabling a hierarchical reconstruction process that synthesizes global semantics before refining local details, akin to human visual perception. Extensive experiments on the NSD dataset show that MindHier achieves superior semantic fidelity, 4.67$\times$ faster inference, and more deterministic results than the diffusion-based baselines.
Untraceable DeepFakes via Traceable Fingerprint Elimination
Authors: Jiewei Lai; Lan Zhang; Chen Tang; Pengcheng Sun; Xinming Wang; YUNHAO WANG
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in DeepFakes attribution technologies have significantly enhanced forensic capabilities, enabling the extraction of traces left by generative models (GMs) in images, making DeepFakes traceable back to their source GMs. Meanwhile, several attacks have attempted to evade attribution models (AMs) for exploring their limitations, calling for more robust AMs.
However, existing attacks fail to eliminate GMs' traces, thus can be mitigated by defensive measures.
In this paper, we identify that untraceable DeepFakes can be achieved through a multiplicative attack, which can fundamentally eliminate GMs' traces.
Therefore, by leveraging the structural prior from content-coupled fingerprints, we design a multiplicative attack framework that instills an explicit inductive bias into the adversarial model, guiding it to eliminate fingerprints within DeepFakes, thereby evading AMs even enhanced with defensive measures. This framework trains the adversarial model solely using real data, applicable for various GMs and agnostic to AMs.
Experimental results demonstrate the outstanding attack capability and universal applicability of our method, achieving an average attack success rate (ASR) of 97.08\% against 6 advanced AMs across 12 GMs.
Even in the presence of defensive mechanisms, our method maintains an ASR exceeding 72.39\%.
Our work underscores the potential challenges posed by multiplicative attacks and highlights the need for more robust AMs.
Distributional Consistency Loss: Beyond Pointwise Data Terms in Inverse Problems
Authors: George Webber; Andrew J. Reader
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recovering true signals from noisy measurements is a central challenge in inverse problems spanning medical imaging, geophysics, and signal processing. Current solutions nearly always balance prior assumptions regarding the true signal (regularization) with agreement to noisy measured data (data-fidelity). Conventional data-fidelity loss functions, such as mean-squared error (MSE) or negative log-likelihood, seek pointwise agreement with noisy measurements, often leading to overfitting to noise. In this work, we instead evaluate data-fidelity collectively by testing whether the observed measurements are statistically consistent with the noise distributions implied by the current estimate. We adopt this aggregated perspective and introduce $\textit{distributional consistency (DC) loss}$, a data-fidelity objective that replaces pointwise matching with distribution-level calibration. DC loss acts as a direct and practical plug-in replacement for standard data consistency terms: i) it is compatible with modern unsupervised regularizers that operate without paired measurement–ground-truth data, ii) it is optimized in the same way as traditional losses, and iii) it avoids overfitting to measurement noise without early stopping or the use of priors. Its scope naturally fits many practical inverse problems where the measurement-noise distribution is known and where the measured dataset consists of many independent noisy values. We demonstrate efficacy in two key example application areas: i) in image denoising with deep image prior, using DC instead of MSE loss removes the need for early stopping and achieves higher PSNR; ii) in medical image reconstruction from Poisson-noisy data, DC loss reduces artifacts in highly-iterated reconstructions and enhances the efficacy of hand-crafted regularization. These results position DC loss as a statistically grounded, performance-enhancing alternative to conventional fidelity losses for an important class of unsupervised noise-dominated inverse problems.
LaTo:  Landmark-tokenized Diffusion Transformer for Fine-grained Human Face Editing
Authors: Zhenghao Zhang; Ziying Zhang; Junchao Liao; Xiangyu Meng; Qiang Hu; Siyu Zhu; Xiaoyun Zhang; Long Qin; Weizhi Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent multimodal models for instruction-based face editing enable semantic manipulation but still struggle with precise attribute control and identity preservation. Structural facial representations such as landmarks are effective for intermediate supervision, yet most existing methods treat them as rigid geometric constraints, which can degrade identity when conditional landmarks deviate significantly from the source (e.g., large expression or pose changes, inaccurate landmark estimates). To address these limitations, we propose LaTo, a landmark-tokenized diffusion transformer for fine-grained, identity-preserving face editing. Our key innovations include: (1) a landmark tokenizer that directly quantizes raw landmark coordinates into discrete facial tokens, obviating the need for dense pixel-wise correspondence; (2) a location-mapped positional encoding and a landmark-aware classifier-free guidance that jointly facilitate flexible yet decoupled interactions among instruction, geometry, and appearance, enabling strong identity preservation; and (3) a landmark predictor that leverages vision–language models to infer target landmarks from instructions and source images, whose structured chain-of-thought improves estimation accuracy and interactive control. To mitigate data scarcity, we curate HFL-150K, to our knowledge the largest benchmark for this task, containing over 150K real face pairs with fine-grained instructions. Extensive experiments show that LaTo outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7.8% in identity preservation and 4.6% in semantic consistency. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/landmark-tokenized-dit.
P$^2$-DPO: Grounding Hallucination in Perceptual Processing via Calibration Direct Preference Optimization
Authors: Ruipeng Zhang; Zhihao Li; Haozhang Yuan; C.L.Philip Chen; Tong Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Hallucination has recently garnered significant research attention in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aims to learn directly from the corrected preferences provided by humans, thereby addressing the hallucination issue. Despite its success, this paradigm has yet to specifically target the perceptual bottleneck in attended regions or address insufficient Visual Robustness against image degradation. Furthermore, existing preference pairs are often vision-agnostic and their inherently off-policy nature limits their effectiveness in guiding model learning. To address these challenges, we propose Perceptual Processing Direct Preference Optimization (P$^2$-DPO), a novel training paradigm in which the model generates and learns from its own preference pairs, thereby directly addressing the identified visual bottlenecks while inherently avoiding the issues of vision-agnostic and off-policy data. It introduces: (1) an on-policy preference pairs construction method targeting Focus-and-Enhance perception and Visual Robustness, and (2) a well-designed Calibration Loss to precisely align visual signals with the causal generation of text. Experimental results demonstrate that with a comparable amount of training data and cost, P$^2$-DPO outperforms strong baselines that rely on costly human feedback on benchmarks. Furthermore, evaluations on Attention Region Fidelity (ARF) and image degradation scenarios validate the effectiveness of P$^2$-DPO in addressing perceptual bottleneck in attended regions and improving Visual Robustness against degraded inputs.
Benefits and Pitfalls of Reinforcement Learning for Language Model Planning: A Theoretical Perspective
Authors: Siwei Wang; Yifei Shen; Haoran Sun; Shi Feng; Shang-Hua Teng; Li Dong; Yaru Hao; Wei Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits and limitations through a tractable graph-based abstraction, focusing on policy gradient (PG) and Q-learning methods. Our theoretical analyses reveal that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) may introduce co-occurrence-based spurious solutions, whereas RL achieves correct planning primarily through exploration, underscoring exploration’s role in enabling better generalization. However, we also show that PG suffers from diversity collapse, where output diversity decreases during training and persists even after perfect accuracy is attained. By contrast, Q-learning provides two key advantages: off-policy learning and diversity preservation at convergence. We further demonstrate that careful reward design is necessary to prevent Q-value bias in Q-learning. Finally, applying our framework to the real-world planning benchmark Blocksworld, we confirm that these behaviors manifest in practice.
The  Price of Amortized inference in Sparse Autoencoders
Authors: Wenjie Sun; Di Wang; Lijie Hu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Polysemy has long been a major challenge in Mechanistic Interpretability (MI), with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) emerging as a promising solution. SAEs employ a shared encoder to map inputs to sparse codes, thereby amortizing inference costs across all instances. However, this parameter-sharing paradigm inherently conflicts with the MI community’s emphasis on instance-level optimality, including the consistency and stitchability of monosemantic features. We first reveal the trade-off relationships among various pathological phenomena, including feature absorption, feature splitting, dead latents, and dense latents under global reconstruction-sparsity constraints from the perspective of training dynamics, finding that increased sparsity typically exacerbates multiple pathological phenomena, and attribute this trade-off relationship to amortized inference. By reducing reliance on amortized inference through the introduction of semi-amortized and non-amortized approaches, we observed that various pathological indicators were significantly mitigated, thereby validating our hypothesis. As the first step in this direction, we propose Local Amortized SAE (LocA-SAE), a method that groups polysemantically close latents based on the angular variance. This method is designed to balance the computational cost
of per-sample optimization with the limitations of amortized inference. Our work provides insights for understanding SAEs and advocates for a paradigm shift in future research on polysemy disentanglement. The code is available \url{https://github.com/wenjie1835/Local_Amotized_SAEs}.
Nemotron-CC-Math: A 133 Billion-Token-Scale High Quality Math Pretraining Dataset
Authors: Rabeeh Karimi mahabadi; Sanjeev Satheesh; Shrimai Prabhumoye; Mostofa Patwary; Mohammad Shoeybi; Bryan Catanzaro
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Pretraining large language models (LLMs) on high-quality, structured data such as mathematics and code substantially enhances reasoning capabilities. However, existing math-focused datasets built from Common Crawl suffer from degraded quality due to brittle extraction heuristics, lossy HTML-to-text conversion, and the failure to reliably preserve mathematical structure. In this work, we intro-
duce Nemotron-CC-Math, a large-scale, high-quality mathematical corpus constructed from Common Crawl using a novel, domain-agnostic pipeline specifically designed for robust scientific text extraction. Unlike previous efforts, our pipeline recovers math across various formats (e.g., MathJax, KaTeX, MathML) by leveraging layout-aware rendering with lynx and a targeted LLM-based cleaning stage. This approach preserves the structural integrity of equations and code blocks while removing boilerplate, standardizing
notation into L A T EX representation, and correcting inconsistencies. We collected a large, high-quality math corpus, namely Nemotron-CC-Math-3+(133B tokens) and Nemotron-CC-Math-4+ (52B tokens). Notably, Nemotron-CC-Math-4+ not only surpasses all prior open math datasets-including Mega-Math, FineMath, and OpenWebMath-but also contains 5.5× more tokens than FineMath-4+, which was previously the highest-quality math pretraining dataset. When used to pretrain a Nemotron-T 8B model, our corpus yields +4.8 to +12.6. 
gains on MATH and +4.6 to +14.3 gains on MBPP+ over strong baselines, while
also improving general-domain performance on MMLU and MMLU-Stem.
We present the first pipeline to reliably extract scientific content—including
math—from noisy web-scale data, yielding measurable gains in math, code, and
general reasoning, and setting a new state of the art among open math pretraining
corpora. To support open-source efforts, we release our code1 and datasets 2
.
RLAP-CLIP: Continual Multimodal Learning with Prototype Adaptation and Difficulty-Aware Routing
Authors: Ruikun Luo; Jiarui Wang; Yuan Gao; Jing Yang; Jieming Yang; Song Wu; Hai Jin; Xiaoyu Xia
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-language models, such as CLIP, achieve strong zero-shot performance through contrastive pre-training but face significant challenges in class-incremental image classification scenarios. When learning new tasks sequentially, current methods suffer from degradation in prototype quality due to passive averaging and underutilize their visual adaptation capabilities. We propose RLAP-CLIP, which addresses these limitations through three components. First, Reinforcement Learning-based Prototype Optimization (RLPO) formulates prototype construction as a reinforcement learning problem to actively optimize class separability rather than relying on simple averaging. Second, difficulty-aware cross-modal fusion uses a mixture-of-experts to route samples through specialized processing pathways based on complexity. Third, dual-modal prompting balances visual and textual adaptation. Experiments on eight image classification benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements, with RLAP-CLIP achieving average accuracy gains of 3.72-4.46 points and final accuracy improvements of 0.49-4.48 points over other methods, validating that RLAP-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Forget Forgetting: Continual Learning in a World of Abundant Memory
Authors: Dongkyu Cho; Taesup Moon; Rumi Chunara; Kyunghyun Cho; Sungmin Cha
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Continual learning (CL) has traditionally focused on minimizing exemplar memory, a constraint often misaligned with modern systems where GPU time, not storage, is the primary bottleneck. This paper challenges this paradigm by investigating a more realistic regime: one where memory is abundant enough to mitigate forgetting, but full retraining from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. In this practical "middle ground", we find that the core challenge shifts from stability to plasticity, as models become biased toward prior tasks and struggle to learn new ones. Conversely, improved stability allows simple replay baselines to outperform the state-of-the-art methods at a fraction of the GPU cost. To address this newly surfaced trade-off, we propose Weight Space Consolidation, a lightweight method that combines (1) rank-based parameter resets to restore plasticity with (2) weight averaging to enhance stability. Validated on both class-incremental learning with image classifiers and continual instruction tuning with large language models, our approach outperforms strong baselines while matching the low computational cost of replay, offering a scalable alternative to expensive full-retraining. These findings challenge long-standing CL assumptions and establish a new, cost-efficient baseline for real-world CL systems where exemplar memory is no longer the limiting factor.
Patch-as-Decodable-Token: Towards Unified Multi-Modal Vision Tasks in MLLMs
Authors: Yongyi Su; Haojie Zhang; Shijie Li; Nanqing Liu; Jingyi Liao; Junyi Pan; Yuan Liu; Xiaofen Xing; Chong Sun; Chen Li; Nancy F. Chen; Shuicheng YAN; Xulei Yang; Xun Xu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly in recent years. However, existing approaches for vision tasks often rely on indirect representations, such as generating coordinates as text for detection, which limits performance and prevents dense prediction tasks like segmentation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Patch-as-Decodable Token (PaDT), a unified paradigm that enables MLLMs to directly generate both textual and diverse visual outputs. Central to PaDT are Visual Reference Tokens (VRTs), derived from visual patch embeddings of query images and interleaved seamlessly with LLM's output textual tokens. A lightweight decoder then transforms LLM's outputs into detection, segmentation, and grounding predictions. Unlike prior methods, PaDT processes VRTs independently at each forward pass and dynamically expands the embedding table, thus improving localization and differentiation among similar objects. We further tailor a training strategy for PaDT by randomly selecting VRTs for supervised fine-tuning and introducing a robust per-token cross-entropy loss. Our empirical studies across four visual perception and understanding tasks suggest PaDT consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance, even compared with significantly larger MLLM models. The code is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/PaDT.
Concept-Aware Privacy Mechanisms for Defending Embedding Inversion Attacks
Authors: Yu-Che Tsai; Hsiang Hsiao; Kuan-Yu Chen; Shou-De Lin
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Text embeddings enable numerous NLP applications but face severe privacy risks from embedding inversion attacks, which can expose sensitive attributes or reconstruct raw text. Existing differential privacy defenses assume uniform sensitivity across embedding dimensions, leading to excessive noise and degraded utility. We propose SPARSE, a user-centric framework for concept-specific privacy protection in text embeddings. SPARSE combines (1) differentiable mask learning to identify privacy-sensitive dimensions for user-defined concepts, and (2) the Mahalanobis mechanism that applies elliptical noise calibrated by dimension sensitivity. Unlike traditional spherical noise injection, SPARSE selectively perturbs privacy-sensitive dimensions while preserving non-sensitive semantics. Evaluated across six datasets with three embedding models and attack scenarios, SPARSE consistently reduces privacy leakage while achieving superior downstream performance compared to state-of-the-art DP methods.
CircuitNet 3.0: A Multi-Modal Dataset with Task-Oriented Augmentation for AI-Driven Circuit Design
Authors: Mingjun Wang; Yihan Wen; Yuntao Lu; Fengrui Liu; Yuxiang Zhao; Boyu Han; Jianan Mu; Yibo Lin; Runsheng Wang; Bei Yu; Huawei Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Integrated circuit (IC) designs require transforming high-level specifications into physical layouts, demanding extensive expertise and specialized tools, as well as months of time and numerous iterations. While machine learning (ML) has shown promise in various research domains, the lack of large-scale, open datasets limits its application in chip design. To address this limitation, we introduce CircuitNet 3.0, a large-scale, comprehensive, and open-source dataset curated to facilitate the evaluation of ML models on challenging timing and power prediction tasks. Starting with a diverse set of 8,659 validated open-source designs, we employ a systematic framework to generate over 15,000 instances. Through specialized syntax-tree mutation strategies and principled, task-oriented filtering methodology, we enrich each design with multi-modal information spanning multiple design stages, including complete design flow documentation, register-transfer-level (RTL) designs and corresponding netlists, detailed physical layouts, and comprehensive performance metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that ML models leveraging the enriched multi-stage, multi-modal circuit representations significantly improve performance over existing open-source datasets in electronic design automation (EDA) tasks, paving the way for efficient and accessible circuit representation learning. The dataset and codes are available in \url{https://github.com/sklp-eda-lab/iclr-circuitnet_3.0/}.