GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Let's Think in Two Steps: Mitigating Agreement Bias in MLLMs with Self-Grounded Verification
Authors: Moises Andrade; Joonhyuk Cha; Brandon Ho; Vriksha Srihari; Karmesh Yadav; Zsolt Kira
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Verifiers—functions assigning rewards to agent behavior—have been key to AI progress in domains such as math, code, and games. However, extending these gains to domains without clear-cut success criteria (e.g., computer use) remains a challenge: while humans can recognize desired outcomes, translating this intuition into scalable rules is nontrivial. Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) emerge as a promising solution, given vast world knowledge, human-preference alignment, and reasoning capabilities. We evaluate MLLMs as verifiers across web navigation, computer use, and robotics, spanning 13+ model families, 28+ evaluation templates, curated trajectories from diverse agents and of varying lengths, and distinct verifier applications. We identify a critical limitation: a strong tendency for MLLMs to over-validate agent behavior—a phenomenon we term agreement bias. This bias is pervasive across models, resilient to test-time scaling, and can harm methods relying on MLLM evaluations, such as filtered behavior cloning and self-improvement. We provide guidance on the design and evaluation of MLLM verifiers, and introduce Self-Grounded Verification (SGV), a lightweight method that harnesses MLLMs' own sampling mechanisms by modulating (un)conditional generation to better leverage their knowledge, alignment, and reasoning. SGV operates in two steps: first, the MLLM is elicited to generate broad priors about desired behavior, independent of the data under evaluation. Then, conditioned on self-generated priors, it reasons over and evaluates a candidate trajectory. Our methods yield gains across models and environments, improving failure detection by up to 25pp and accuracy by 14pp, with benefits extending to downstream applications. In self-improvement and online supervision, SGV boosts task completion of a GUI specialist in OSWorld, a diffusion policy in robomimic, and a ReAct agent in VisualWebArena—setting a new state of the art, surpassing the previous best by 20pp. Finally, we release an updated version of VisualWebArena featuring strong agent baselines, more human-aligned evaluators, high-fidelity environment parallelism, runtime speedups exceeding 10x, and VisualWebArena-Lite, a 1/3-scale subset with comparable evaluation fidelity. Our code, models, and data are publicly available at [our project page](https://mshalimay.github.io/agreement-bias-sgv/).
Communication-Efficient Decentralized Optimization via Double-Communication Symmetric ADMM
Authors: Jinrui Huang; Xueqin Wang; Dong Liu; Jingguo Lan; Runxiong Wu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: This paper focuses on decentralized composite optimization over networks without a central coordinator. We propose a novel decentralized Symmetric ADMM algorithm that incorporates multiple communication rounds within each iteration, derived from a new constraint formulation that enables information exchange beyond immediate neighbors. While increasing per-iteration communication, our approach significantly reduces the total number of iterations and overall communication cost. We further design optimal communication rules that minimize the number of rounds and variables transmitted per iteration. The proposed algorithms are shown to achieve linear convergence under standard assumptions. Extensive experiments on regression and classification tasks validate the theoretical results and demonstrate superior performance compared to existing decentralized optimization methods.
Meta-RL Induces Exploration in Language Agents
Authors: Yulun Jiang; Liangze Jiang; Damien Teney; Michael Moor; Maria Brbic
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled the training of Large Language Model (LLM) agents to interact with the environment and to solve multi-turn longhorizon tasks. However, the RL-trained agents often struggle in tasks that require active exploration and fail to efficiently adapt from trial-and-error experiences. In this paper, we present LaMer, a general Meta-RL framework that enables LLM agents to actively explore and learn from the environment feedback at test time. LaMer consists of two key components: (i) a cross-episode training framework to encourage exploration and long term rewards optimization; and (ii) in-context policy adaptation via reflection, allowing the agent to adapt their policy from task feedback signal without gradient update. Experiments across diverse environments show that LaMer significantly improves performance over RL baselines, with 11\%, 14\%, and 19\%  performance gains on Sokoban, MineSweeper and Webshop, respectively. Moreover, LaMer also demonstrates better generalization to more challenging or previously unseen tasks compared to the RL-trained agents. Overall, our results demonstrate that meta-reinforcement learning provides a principled approach to induce exploration in language agents, enabling more robust adaptation to novel environments through learned exploration strategies.
Micro-Macro Retrieval: Reducing Long-Form Hallucination in Large Language Models
Authors: Yujie Feng; Jian Li; Zhihan Zhou; Pengfei Xu; Yujia Zhang; xiaoyu li; Xiaohui Zhou; Alan Zhao; Xi Chen; Xiao-Ming Wu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across many tasks but remain prone to hallucination, especially in long-form generation where redundant retrieved contexts and lengthy reasoning chains amplify factual errors. Recent studies highlight a critical phenomenon: the closer key information appears to the model outputs, the higher the factual accuracy. However, existing retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) lack effective mechanisms to ensure this proximity — external evidence is injected into reasoning via multi-turn retrieval, but this cannot ensure key information stays close to the outputs. We propose Micro–Macro Retrieval ($M^2R$), a novel retrieve-while-generate framework to fill this gap. At the macro level, $M^2R$ retrieves coarse-grained evidence from external sources; at the micro level, it extracts essential results from a key information repository built during reasoning and reuses them while generating answers. This design directly addresses the key-information–to-output proximity bottleneck, effectively reducing hallucination in long-form tasks. $M^2R$ is trained with a curriculum learning–based reinforcement learning strategy using customized rule-based rewards, enabling stable acquisition of retrieval and grounding skills.  Extensive experiments across different benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of $M^2R$, especially in lengthy-context settings.
Do We Really Need Permutations? Impact of Model Width on Linear Mode Connectivity
Authors: Akira Ito; Masanori Yamada; Daiki Chijiwa; Atsutoshi Kumagai
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recently, Ainsworth et al. empirically demonstrated that, given two independently trained models, applying a parameter permutation that preserves the input–output behavior allows the two models to be connected by a low-loss linear path. When such a path exists, the models are said to achieve linear mode connectivity (LMC). Prior studies, including Ainsworth et al. (2023), have reported that achieving LMC requires not only an appropriate permutation search but also sufficiently wide models (e.g., a 32 $\times$ width multiplier for ResNet-20). This is broadly believed to be because increasing the model width ensures a large enough space of candidate permutations, increasing the chance of finding one that yields LMC. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that, __even without any permutations__, simply widening the models is sufficient for achieving LMC when using a suitable softmax temperature calibration. We further explain why this phenomenon arises by analyzing intermediate layer outputs. Specifically, we introduce layerwise exponentially weighted connectivity (LEWC), which states that the output of each layer of the merged model can be represented as an exponentially weighted sum of the outputs of the corresponding layers of the original models. Consequently the merged model's output matches that of an ensemble of the original models, facilitating LMC. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to show that widening the model not only facilitates __nonlinear__ mode connectivity, as suggested in prior research, but also significantly increases the possibility of achieving __linear__ mode connectivity.
Enhancing Visual Token Representations for Video Large Language Models via Training-free Spatial-Temporal Pooling and Gridding
Authors: Bingjun Luo; Tony Wang; Hanqi Chen; Xinpeng Ding
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced video understanding tasks, yet challenges remain in efficiently compressing visual tokens while preserving spatiotemporal interactions. Existing methods, such as LLaVA family, utilize simplistic pooling or interpolation techniques that overlook the intricate dynamics of visual tokens. To bridge this gap, we propose ST-GridPool, a novel training-free visual token enhancement method designed specifically for Video LLMs. Our approach integrates Pyramid Temporal Gridding (PTG), which captures multi-grained spatiotemporal interactions through hierarchical temporal gridding, and Norm-based Spatial Pooling (NSP), which preserves high-information visual regions by leveraging the correlation between token norms and semantic richness. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that ST-GridPool consistently enhances performance of Video LLMs without requiring costly retraining. 
Our method offers an efficient and plug-and-play solution for improving visual token representations.
Our code is available in [https://github.com/bingjunluo/ST-GridPool](https://github.com/bingjunluo/ST-GridPool).
ProxyAttn: Guided Sparse Attention via Representative Heads
Authors: Yixuan Wang; Huang He; Siqi Bao; Hua Wu; Haifeng Wang; Qingfu Zhu; Wanxiang Che
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms limits the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) on long-text tasks. Recently, methods that dynamically estimate block importance have enabled efficient block sparse attention, leading to significant acceleration in long-text pre-filling of LLMs. However, their block-level coarse-grained estimation inevitably leads to performance degradation at high sparsity ratios. In this work, we propose ProxyAttn, a training-free sparse attention algorithm that achieves token-level estimation by compressing the dimension of attention heads. Based on our observation of the similarity among multiple attention heads in long texts, we use the attention scores of pooled representative heads to approximate the scores for all heads. To account for the varying sparsity among heads, we also propose a block-aware dynamic budget estimation method. By combining the scores from a set of representative heads with a multi-head dynamic budget, we can achieve a more fine-grained block attention evaluation at a low computational cost. Experiments on a variety of mainstream models and extensive benchmarks confirm the underlying similarity among attention heads in long texts. Leveraging a token-level fine-grained estimation, the proposed method achieves substantial gains in performance and efficiency compared to existing methods. More precisely, ProxyAttn can achieve up to 10.3x attention acceleration and 2.4x prefilling acceleration without significant performance loss. Our code is available at https://github.com/wyxstriker/ProxyAttn.
LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generation
Authors: Jizhan Fang; Xinle Deng; Haoming Xu; Ziyan Jiang; Yuqi Tang; Ziwen Xu; Shumin Deng; Yunzhi Yao; Mengru Wang; Shuofei Qiao; Huajun Chen; Ningyu Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Model (LLM) struggle to effectively leverage historical interaction information in dynamic and complex environments. Memory systems enable LLMs to move beyond stateless interactions by introducing persistent information storage, retrieval, and utilization mechanisms. However, existing memory systems often incur substantial time and computational overhead. To this end, we introduce a new memory system called LightMem, which strikes a balance between the performance and efficiency of memory systems. Inspired by the Atkinson–Shiffrin model of human memory, LightMem organizes memory into three complementary stages. First, cognitive-inspired sensory memory rapidly filters irrelevant information through lightweight compression and groups information according to their topics. Next, topic-aware short-term memory consolidates these topic-based groups, organizing and summarizing content for more structured access. Finally, long-term memory with sleep-time update employs an offline procedure that decouples consolidation from online inference. 
Experiments on LongMemEval with GPT and Qwen backbones show that LightMem outperforms strong baselines in accuracy (up to 10.9% gains) while reducing token usage by up to 117×, API calls by up to 159×, and runtime by over 12×. Code will be released on GitHub.
TRAC: Tensor-Train based Across-layer Compression for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Authors: Bangguo Ye; Yuanwei Zhang; Xiaoqun Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models under resource constraints remains challenging due to the massive number of parameters involved. Existing parameter-efficient tuning methods, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants, rely heavily on matrix factorization and often struggle in extremely low-parameter regimes. In this work, we propose TRAC, a novel fine-tuning framework that leverages Tensor-Train decomposition with Across-layer Compression. Specifically, TRAC represents each adaptation module as a compact sequence of tensor-train cores and allows certain cores to be frozen or shared across layers, thereby exploiting the inherent similarity and redundancy among layer weight matrices. To retain layer-specific flexibility, lightweight controllers are introduced, enabling shared tensor cores to adaptively modulate representations. We evaluate TRAC on diverse architectures, including Qwen, LLaMA, GPT, BERT, and ViT, across benchmarks covering text classification, text generation, and image classification. Experimental results demonstrate that TRAC achieves performance comparable to or better than LoRA and its variants, while substantially reducing trainable parameters and storage requirements.
ST-SimDiff: Balancing Spatiotemporal Similarity and Difference for Efficient Video Understanding with MLLMs
Authors: Bingjun Luo; Tony Wang; Chaoqi Chen; Xinpeng Ding
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face significant computational overhead when processing long videos due to the massive number of visual tokens required. To improve efficiency, existing methods primarily reduce redundancy by pruning or merging tokens based on importance or similarity. However, these approaches largely overlook a critical dimension of video content, i.e., changes and turning points, and they lack a collaborative model for spatio-temporal relationships.
To address this, we propose a new perspective: similarity is for identifying redundancy, while difference is for capturing key events. Based on this, we designed a training-free framework named ST-SimDiff. We first construct a spatio-temporal graph from the visual tokens to uniformly model their complex associations. Subsequently, we employ a parallel dual-selection strategy: 1) similarity-based selection uses community detection to retain representative tokens, compressing static information; 2) temporal difference-based selection precisely locates content-changing points to preserve tokens that capture key dynamic shifts. This allows it to preserve both static and dynamic content with a minimal number of tokens. Extensive experiments show our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while substantially reducing computational costs.
Our code is available in [https://github.com/bingjunluo/ST-SimDiff](https://github.com/bingjunluo/ST-SimDiff).
Flow2GAN: Hybrid Flow Matching and GAN with Multi-Resolution Network for Few-step High-Fidelity Audio Generation
Authors: Zengwei Yao; Wei Kang; Han Zhu; Liyong Guo; Lingxuan Ye; Fangjun Kuang; Weiji Zhuang; Zhaoqing Li; Zhifeng Han; Long Lin; Daniel Povey
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Existing dominant methods for audio generation include Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion-based methods like Flow Matching. GANs suffer from slow convergence during training, while diffusion methods require multi-step inference that introduces considerable computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Flow2GAN, a two-stage framework that combines Flow Matching training for learning generative capabilities with GAN fine-tuning for efficient few-step inference. Specifically, given audio's unique properties, we first improve Flow Matching for audio modeling through: 1) reformulating the objective as endpoint estimation, avoiding velocity estimation difficulties when involving empty regions; 2) applying spectral energy-based loss scaling to emphasize perceptually salient quieter regions. Building on these Flow Matching adaptations, we demonstrate that a further stage of lightweight GAN fine-tuning enables us to obtain few-step (e.g., 1/2/4 steps) generators that produce high-quality audio. In addition, we develop a multi-branch network architecture that processes Fourier coefficients at different time-frequency resolutions, which improves the modeling capabilities compared to prior single-resolution designs. Experimental results indicate that our Flow2GAN delivers high-fidelity audio generation from Mel-spectrograms or discrete audio tokens, achieving highly favorable quality-efficiency trade-offs compared to existing state-of-the-art GAN-based and Flow Matching-based methods. Online demo samples are available at \url{https://flow2gan.github.io}, and the source code is released at \url{https://github.com/k2-fsa/Flow2GAN}.
ContextIF: Enhancing Instruction-Following through Context Reward
Authors: Yule Zhong; Jiacheng Yao; Guoxiu He
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference learning (PL) are widely used to enhance the instruction-following ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), they often struggle to generalize to novel or complex instructions and may compromise the models' general capabilities. In-Context Learning (ICL) emerges as a promising alternative due to its strong generalization without modifying the model's parameters, but its effectiveness is constrained by the reliance on high-quality, manually curated demonstration pools. To overcome this limitation, we propose ContextIF, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for automatic context generation. Guided by comprehensive context reward, ContextIF is optimized by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). It aims to generate precise constraint summaries and optimal context demonstrations tailored to given instructions, thereby improving the instruction-following performance of target LLMs. We evaluate ContextIF on multiple representative instruction-following benchmarks using popular open-source LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that ContextIF achieves substantial performance gains over existing SFT and ICL methods, while also generalizing effectively to unseen constraint conditions. Moreover, ContextIF preserves the parameters and general capabilities of the target models, offering strong adaptability and scalability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/ContextIF.
Use the Online Network If You Can: Towards Fast and Stable Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ahmed Hendawy; Henrik Metternich; Théo Vincent; Mahdi Kallel; Jan Peters; Carlo D'Eramo
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The use of target networks is a popular approach for estimating value functions in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). While effective, the target network remains a compromise solution that preserves stability at the cost of slowly moving targets, thus delaying learning. Conversely, using the online network as a bootstrapped target is intuitively appealing, albeit well-known to lead to unstable learning. In this work, we aim to obtain the best out of both worlds by introducing a novel update rule that computes the target using the **MIN**imum estimate between the **T**arget and **O**nline network, giving rise to our method, **MINTO**. Through this simple, yet effective modification, we show that MINTO enables faster and stable value function learning, by mitigating the potential overestimation bias of using the online network for bootstrapping. Notably, MINTO can be seamlessly integrated into a wide range of value-based and actor-critic algorithms with a negligible cost. We evaluate MINTO extensively across diverse benchmarks, spanning online and offline RL, as well as discrete and continuous action spaces. Across all benchmarks, MINTO consistently improves performance, demonstrating its broad applicability and effectiveness.
Efficient Prediction of Large Protein Complexes via Subunit-Guided Hierarchical Refinement
Authors: Chixiang Lu; Yunhua Zhong; Shikang Liang; Xiaojuan Qi; Haibo Jiang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: State-of-the-art protein structure predictors have revolutionized structural biology, yet quadratic memory growth with token length makes end-to-end inference impractical for large complexes beyond a few thousand tokens. We introduce HierAFold, a hierarchical pipeline that exploits the modularity of large complexes via PAE-guided (Predicted Aligned Error) subunit decomposition, targeted interface-aware refinement, and confidence-weighted assembly. PAE maps localize rigid intra-chain segments and sparse inter-chain interfaces, enabling joint refinement of likely interacting subunits to capture multi-body cooperativity without increasing memory. HierAFold matches AlphaFold3 accuracy, raises success rates from 49.9\% (CombFold) to 73.1\% on recent PDB set. While for large complexes, it cuts peak memory by $\sim$25\,GB on a 4,000-token target ($\sim$40\%), successfully models complexes with over $5{,}000$ tokens that are out-of-memory for AlphaFold3, and raises success rates by two-fold compared with CombFold.
FlowSearcher: Synthesizing Memory-Guided Agentic Workflows for Web Information Seeking
Authors: Keyi Xiang; Zeyu Feng; Zhuoyi Lin; Yueming Lyu; Shi Boyuan; Yew-Soon Ong; Ivor Tsang; Haiyan Yin
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Web search is a cornerstone for deep research agents, enabling them to acquire and reason over knowledge beyond static corpora. Yet most existing systems rely on ReAct-style tool chains with rigid, linear workflows,  hindering their ability to adapt to diverse query types and tool-use strategies. We introduce **FlowSearcher**, a novel deep search framework that formulates web information seeking as *memory-guided agentic workflow synthesis*.  FlowSearcher decomposes a query into subgoals and synthesizes a tailored workflow graph for each subgoal, dynamically adapting the depth, ordering, and composition of tool use. Complementing this, a hierarchical memory consolidates past workflows into reusable structural experience, which is retrieved to guide both workflow orchestration and execution on new queries.  By shifting from reactive tool calls to experience-conditioned workflow design, FlowSearcher enables flexible multi-path exploration and reuse without any supervised training or RLHF.  Experiments on GAIA, BrowseComp, and GPQA show that FlowSearcher consistently matches or exceeds the performance of RLHF-trained web agents under the same model backbone. Our code is released at [github.com/XiangKeYiNTU/flowsearcher](https://github.com/XiangKeYiNTU/flowsearcher).