GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
QVLA: Not All Channels Are Equal in Vision-Language-Action Model's Quantization
Authors: Yuhao Xu; Yantai Yang; Zhenyang Fan; Yufan Liu; Yuming Li; Bing Li; Zhipeng Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The advent of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models represents a significant leap for embodied intelligence, yet their immense computational demands critically hinder deployment on resource-constrained robotic platforms. Intuitively, low-bit quantization is a prevalent and preferred technique for large-scale model compression. However, we find that a systematic analysis of VLA model's quantization is fundamentally lacking. We argue that naively applying uniform-bit quantization from Large Language Models (LLMs) to robotics is flawed, as these methods prioritize passive data fidelity while ignoring how minor action deviations compound into catastrophic task failures. To bridge this gap, we introduce AutoQVLA, the first action-centric quantization framework specifically designed for embodied control. In a sharp departure from the rigid, uniform-bit quantization of LLM-based methods, AutoQVLA introduces a highly granular, channel-wise bit allocation strategy. Its core mechanism is to directly measure the final action-space sensitivity when quantizing each individual channel to various bit-widths. This process yields a precise, per-channel importance metric that guides a global optimization, which elegantly unifies quantization and pruning (0-bit) into a single, cohesive framework. Extensive evaluations on different baselines demonstrate the superiority of our approach. In the LIBERO, the quantization version of OpenVLA-OFT with our method requires only 29.2% of the original model's VRAM while maintaining 98.9% of its original performance and achieving a 1.49$\times$ speedup. This translates to a 22.6% performance improvement over the LLM-derived method SmoothQuant. Our work establishes a new, principled foundation for compressing VLA models in robotics, paving the way for deploying powerful, large-scale models on real-world hardware.
Ada-Diffuser: Latent-Aware Adaptive Diffusion for Decision-Making
Authors: Fan Feng; Selena Ge; Minghao Fu; Zijian Li; Yujia Zheng; Zeyu Tang; Yingyao Hu; Biwei Huang; Kun Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent work has framed decision-making as a sequence modeling problem using generative models such as diffusion models. Although promising, these approaches often overlook latent factors that exhibit evolving dynamics, elements that are fundamental to environment transitions, reward structures, and high-level agent behavior. Explicitly modeling these hidden processes is essential for both precise dynamics modeling and effective decision-making. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that explicitly incorporates latent dynamic inference into generative decision-making from minimal yet sufficient observations. We theoretically show that under mild conditions, the latent process can be identified from small temporal blocks of observations. Building on this insight, we introduce Ada-Diffuser, a causal diffusion model that learns the temporal structure of observed interactions and the underlying latent dynamics simultaneously, and furthermore, leverages them for planning and control. With a modular design, Ada-Diffuser supports both planning and policy learning tasks, enabling adaptation to latent variations in dynamics, rewards, and latent actions. Experiments on locomotion and robotic manipulation benchmarks demonstrate its effectiveness in accurate latent inference, long-horizon planning, and adaptive policy learning
Proper Velocity Neural Networks
Authors: Ziheng Chen; Zihan Su; Bernhard Schölkopf; Nicu Sebe
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Hyperbolic Neural Networks (HNNs) have shown remarkable success in representing hierarchical and tree-like structures, yet most existing work relies on the Poincaré ball and hyperboloid models. While these models admit closed-form Riemannian operators, their constrained nature potentially leads to numerical instabilities, especially near model boundaries. In this work, we explore the Proper Velocity (PV) space, an unconstrained representation of hyperbolic space rooted in Einstein’s special relativity, as a stable alternative. We first establish the complete Riemannian toolkit of the PV space. Building on this foundation, we introduce Proper Velocity Neural Networks (PVNNs) with core layers including Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR), Fully Connected (FC), convolutional, activation, and batch normalization layers. Extensive experiments across four tasks, namely numerical stability, image classification, graph node classification, and genomic sequence learning, demonstrate the stability and effectiveness of PVNNs. The code is available at https://github.com/NickyoyoSu/PVNN.
BED-LLM: Intelligent Information Gathering with LLMs and Bayesian Experimental Design
Authors: Deepro Choudhury; Sinead Williamson; Adam Golinski; Ning Miao; Freddie Bickford Smith; Michael Kirchhof; Yizhe Zhang; Tom Rainforth
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We propose a general-purpose approach for improving the ability of large language models (LLMs) to intelligently and adaptively gather information from a user or other external source using the framework of sequential Bayesian experimental design (BED). This enables LLMs to act as effective multi-turn conversational agents and interactively interface with external environments. Our approach, which we call BED-LLM (Bayesian experimental design with large language models), is based on iteratively choosing questions or queries that maximize the expected information gain (EIG) with respect to a variable of interest given the responses gathered previously. We show how this EIG can be formulated (and then estimated) in a principled way using a probabilistic model derived from the LLM's predictive distributions and provide detailed insights into key decisions in its construction and updating procedure. We find that BED-LLM achieves substantial gains in performance across a wide range of tests based on the 20 Questions game and using the LLM to actively infer user preferences, compared to purely prompting-based design generation and other adaptive design strategies.
Multimodal Dataset Distillation via Phased Teacher Models
Authors: Shengbin Guo; Hang Zhao; Senqiao Yang; Chenyang Jiang; Yuhang Cheng; Xiangru Peng; Rui Shao; Zhuotao Tian
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal dataset distillation aims to construct compact synthetic datasets that enable efficient compression and knowledge transfer from large-scale image-text data. However, existing approaches often fail to capture the complex, dynamically evolving knowledge embedded in the later training stages of teacher models. This limitation leads to degraded student performance and compromises the quality of the distilled data. To address critical challenges such as pronounced cross-stage performance gaps and unstable teacher trajectories, we propose Phased Teacher Model with Shortcut Trajectory (PTM-ST)—a novel phased distillation framework. PTM-ST leverages stage-aware teacher modeling and a shortcut-based trajectory construction strategy to accurately fit the teacher’s learning dynamics across distinct training phases. This enhances both the stability and expressiveness of the distillation process. Through theoretical analysis and comprehensive experiments, we show that PTM-ST significantly mitigates optimization oscillations and inter-phase knowledge gaps, while also reducing storage overhead. Our method consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on Flickr30k and COCO, achieving up to 13.5\% absolute improvement and an average gain of 9.53\% on Flickr30k. Code: \url{https://github.com/Previsior/PTM-ST}.
Heterogeneous Federated Fine-Tuning with Parallel One-Rank Adaptation
Authors: Zikai Zhang; Rui Hu; Jiahao Xu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in adapting to downstream tasks through fine-tuning. Federated Learning (FL) extends this capability by enabling collaborative fine-tuning across distributed clients using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), while preserving data privacy by avoiding raw data sharing. However, practical deployments face challenges when clients have heterogeneous resources and thus adopt different LoRA ranks, leading to substantial initialization and aggregation noise that undermines performance. To address these challenges, we propose Fed-PLoRA, a novel lightweight heterogeneous federated fine-tuning (FFT) framework. Fed-PLoRA introduces Parallel One-Rank Adaptation (PLoRA), a new LoRA variant that replaces the classic multi-rank LoRA module with multiple parallel one-rank modules, and a novel Select-N-Fold strategy that folds untrained PLoRA modules into the pre-trained weights before local training, thereby accommodating heterogeneous client resources. We provide a unified analysis of initialization and aggregation noise of Fed-PLoRA and demonstrate how it addresses the limitations of state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on diverse LLM fine-tuning tasks demonstrate that Fed-PLoRA consistently outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and efficiency. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/TNI-playground/Fed-PLoRA}.
Exploring Specular Reflection Inconsistency for Generalizable Face Forgery Detection
Authors: Hongyan Fei; Zexi Jia; Chuanwei Huang; Jinchao Zhang; Jie Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Detecting deepfakes has become increasingly challenging as forgery faces synthesized by AI-generated methods, particularly diffusion models, achieve unprecedented quality and resolution. Existing forgery detection approaches relying on spatial and frequency features demonstrate limited efficacy against high-quality, entirely synthesized forgeries. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method grounded in the observation that facial attributes governed by complex physical laws and multiple parameters are inherently difficult to replicate. Specifically, we focus on illumination, particularly the specular reflection component in the Phong illumination model, which poses the greatest replication challenge due to its parametric complexity and nonlinear formulation. We introduce a fast and accurate face texture estimation method based on Retinex theory to enable precise specular reflection separation. Furthermore, drawing from the mathematical formulation of specular reflection, we posit that forgery evidence manifests not only in the specular reflection itself but also in its relationship with corresponding face texture and direct light. To address this issue, we design the Specular-Reflection-Inconsistency-Network (SRI-Net), incorporating a two-stage cross-attention mechanism to capture these correlations and integrate specular reflection related features with image features for robust forgery detection. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on both traditional deepfake datasets and generative deepfake datasets, particularly those containing diffusion-generated forgery faces.
Credit-Budgeted ICPC-Style Coding: When Agents Must Pay for Every Decision
Authors: Lingfeng Zhou; Junhao Shi; Jin Gao; Dequan Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: As autonomous agents and agent swarms become increasingly capable at complex coding tasks, the focus must shift from mere accuracy to real-world efficiency. Unconstrained agents often waste massive resources and time, incurring high opportunity costs. To be practical, agents must manage a generalized "credit" budget covering generated tokens, local tests, and elapsed time. To evaluate this resource awareness, we introduce USACOArena, an interactive ACM-ICPC style arena where every decision consumes credits from a fixed pool. This transforms a static coding benchmark into a dynamic resource management challenge. Our experiments reveal that frontier models—including the Codex framework and leading single agents—struggle to optimally balance these economic constraints. Through competitive profiling and self-play, we uncover distinct, path-dependent decision strategies. Ultimately, enforcing a strict credit economy is essential for developing highly efficient, cost-aware agent swarms.
A Cognitive Process-Inspired Architecture for Subject-Agnostic Brain Visual Decoding
Authors: Jingyu Lu; Haonan Wang; Qixiang ZHANG; Xiaomeng Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Subject-agnostic brain decoding, which aims to reconstruct continuous visual experiences from fMRI without subject-specific training, holds great potential for clinical applications. However, this direction remains underexplored due to challenges in cross-subject generalization and the complex nature of brain signals.
In this work, we propose Visual Cortex Flow Architecture (VCFlow), a novel hierarchical decoding framework  that explicitly models the ventral-dorsal architecture of the human visual system to learn multi-dimensional representations. By disentangling and leveraging features from early visual cortex, ventral, and dorsal streams, VCFlow captures diverse and complementary cognitive information essential for visual reconstruction.
Furthermore, we introduce a feature-level contrastive learning strategy to enhance the extraction of subject-invariant semantic representations, thereby enhancing subject-agnostic applicability to previously unseen subjects. 
Unlike conventional pipelines that need more than 12 hours of per-subject data and heavy computation, VCFlow sacrifices only 7\% accuracy on average yet generates each reconstructed video in 10 seconds without any retraining, offering a fast and clinically scalable solution.
Privacy Beyond Pixels: Latent Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Video Understanding
Authors: Joseph Fioresi; Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave; Mubarak Shah
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce a novel formulation of visual privacy preservation for video foundation models that operates entirely in the latent space. While spatio-temporal features learned by foundation models have deepened general understanding of video content, sharing or storing these extracted visual features for downstream tasks inadvertently reveals sensitive personal information like skin color, gender, or clothing. Current privacy preservation methods focus on input-pixel-level anonymization, which requires retraining the entire utility video model and results in task-specific anonymization, making them unsuitable for recent video foundational models. To address these challenges, we introduce a lightweight Anonymizing Adapter Module (AAM) that removes private information from video features while retaining general task utility. AAM can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion to frozen video encoders, minimizing the computational burden of finetuning and re-extracting features. Our framework employs three newly designed training objectives: (1) a clip-level self-supervised privacy objective to reduce mutual information between static clips, (2) a co-training objective to retain utility across seen tasks, and (3) a latent consistency loss for generalization on unseen tasks. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a significant 35% reduction in privacy leakage while maintaining near-baseline utility performance across various downstream tasks: Action Recognition (Kinetics400, UCF101, HMDB51), Temporal Action Detection (THUMOS14), and Anomaly Detection (UCF-Crime). We also provide an analysis on anonymization for sensitive temporal attribute recognition. Additionally, we propose new protocols for assessing gender bias in action recognition models, showing that our method effectively mitigates such biases and promotes more equitable video understanding.
LayerSync: Self-aligning Intermediate Layers
Authors: Yasaman Haghighi; Bastien Van Delft; Mariam Hassan; Alexandre Alahi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We propose LayerSync, a domain-agnostic approach for improving the generation quality and the training efficiency of diffusion models. Prior studies have highlighted the connection between the quality of generation and the representations learned by diffusion models, showing that external guidance on model intermediate representations accelerates training. We reconceptualize this paradigm by regularizing diffusion models with their own intermediate representations. Building on the observation that representation quality varies across diffusion model layers, we show that the most semantically rich representations can act as an intrinsic guidance for weaker ones, reducing the need for external supervision. Our approach, LayerSync, is a self-sufficient, plug-and-play regularizer term with no overhead on diffusion model training and generalizes beyond the visual domain to other modalities. LayerSync requires no pretrained models nor additional data. We extensively evaluate the method on image generation and demonstrate its applicability to other domains such as audio, video, and motion generation. We show that it consistently improves the generation quality and the training efficiency. For example, we speed up the training of flow-based transformer by over 8.75$\times$ on ImageNet dataset and improve the generation quality by 23.6\%.
CardioComposer: Leveraging Differentiable Geometry for Compositional Control of Anatomical Diffusion Models
Authors: Karim Kadry; Shoaib A. Goraya; Ajay Manicka; Abdalla Abdelwahed; Naravich Chutisilp; Farhad R. Nezami; Elazer R Edelman
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Generative models of 3D cardiovascular anatomy can synthesize informative structures for clinical research and medical device evaluation, but face a trade-off between geometric controllability and realism. We propose CardioComposer: a programmable, inference time framework for generating multi-class anatomical label maps from interpretable ellipsoidal primitives. These primitives represent geometric attributes such as the size, shape, and position of discrete substructures. We specifically develop differentiable measurement functions based on voxel-wise geometric moments, enabling loss-based gradient guidance during diffusion model sampling. We demonstrate that these losses can constrain individual geometric attributes in a disentangled manner and provide compositional control over multiple substructures. Finally, we show that our method is compatible with a broad range of anatomical systems containing non-convex substructures, spanning cardiac, vascular, and skeletal organs. We release our code at https://github.com/kkadry/CardioComposer.
Anchor Frame Bridging for Coherent First-Last Frame Video Generation
Authors: Xuehan Hou; Meng Fan; Pengchong Qiao; Zesen Cheng; Yian Zhao; Lei Zhu; Kaiwen Cheng; Chang Liu; Jie Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: First-last frame video generation has recently gained significant attention. It enables coherent motion generation between specified first and last frames. However, this approach suffers from semantic degradation in intermediate frames, causing scene distortion and subject deformation that undermine temporal consistency.
 To address this issue, we introduce Anchor Frame Bridging (AFB), a novel plug-and-play method that explicitly bridges semantic continuity from boundary frames to intermediate frames, offering training-free adaptability and generalizability. By adaptively interpolating anchor frames at temporally critical locations exhibiting maximal semantic discontinuities, our approach effectively mitigates semantic drift in intermediate frames. Specifically, we propose an adaptive anchor frame selection module, which generates text-aligned candidate frames via frame order reversal and selects anchors based on semantic continuity. Subsequently, we develop anchor frame guided generation, which leverages the selected anchor frames to guide semantic propagation across intermediate frames, ensuring consistent boundary semantics and preserving temporal coherence throughout the video sequence. The final video is synthesized using the first frame, last frame, selected anchor frames, and the text prompt.
 The results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the temporal consistency and overall quality of generated videos. Specifically, when applied to the Wan2.1-I2V model, it yields improvements of 16.58\% in FVD and 10.21\% in PSNR. The codes are provided in the supplementary material.
Foundation Visual Encoders Are Secretly Few-Shot Anomaly Detectors
Authors: Guangyao Zhai; Yue Zhou; Xinyan Deng; Lars Heckler-Kram; Nassir Navab; Benjamin Busam
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Few-shot anomaly detection streamlines and simplifies industrial safety inspection. However, limited samples make accurate differentiation between normal and abnormal features challenging, and even more so under category-agnostic conditions. Large-scale pre-training of foundation visual encoders has advanced many fields, as the enormous quantity of data helps to learn the general distribution of normal images.
We observe that the anomaly amount in an image directly correlates with the difference in the learnt embeddings and utilize this to design a few-shot anomaly detector termed FoundAD.
This is done by learning a nonlinear projection operator onto the natural image manifold.
The simple operator acts as an effective tool for anomaly detection to characterize and identify out-of-distribution regions in an image.
Extensive experiments show that our approach supports multi-class detection and achieves competitive performance compared to other approaches, while surpassing them in model size and inference efficiency.
Backed up by evaluations with multiple foundation encoders, including fresh DINOv3, we believe this idea broadens the perspective on foundation features and advances the field of few-shot anomaly detection.  Our code is at https://github.com/ymxlzgy/FoundAD.
Towards Quantifying Long-Range Interactions in Graph Machine Learning: a Large Graph Dataset and a Measurement
Authors: Huidong Liang; Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde; Baskaran Sripathmanathan; Michael M. Bronstein; Xiaowen Dong
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Long-range dependencies are critical for effective graph representation learning, yet most existing datasets focus on small graphs tailored to inductive tasks, offering limited insight into long-range interactions. Current evaluations primarily compare models employing global attention (e.g., graph transformers) with those using local neighborhood aggregation (e.g., message-passing neural networks) without a direct measurement of long-range dependency. In this work, we introduce $\texttt{City-Networks}$, a novel large-scale transductive learning dataset derived from real-world city road networks. This dataset features graphs with over $10^5$ nodes and significantly larger diameters than those in existing benchmarks, naturally embodying long-range information. We annotate the graphs based on local node eccentricities, ensuring that the classification task inherently requires information from distant nodes. Furthermore, we propose a generic measurement based on the Jacobians of neighbors from distant hops, offering a principled quantification of long-range dependencies. Finally, we provide theoretical justifications for both our dataset design and the proposed measurement—particularly by focusing on over-smoothing and influence score dilution—which establishes a robust foundation for further exploration of long-range interactions in graph neural networks.