GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Unpacking Human Preference for LLMs: Demographically Aware Evaluation with the HUMAINE Framework
Authors: Nora Petrova; Andrew Gordon; Enzo Blindow
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The evaluation of large language models faces significant challenges. Technical benchmarks often lack real-world relevance, while existing human preference evaluations suffer from unrepresentative sampling, superficial assessment depth, and single-metric reductionism. To address these issues, we introduce HUMAINE, a framework for multidimensional, demographically aware measurement of human-AI interaction. We collected multi-turn, naturalistic conversations from 23,404 participants that were stratified across 22 demographic groups, both in the US and UK, to evaluate 28 state-of-the-art models across five human-centric dimensions. We use a hierarchical Bayesian Bradley-Terry-Davidson (BTD) model, with post-stratification to census data, and our analysis reveals three key insights. $\textbf{(1)}$ We establish a clear performance hierarchy where $\texttt{google/gemini-2.5-pro}$ ranks first overall, with a 95.6\% posterior probability of being the top-ranked model. $\textbf{(2)}$ We uncover significant preference heterogeneity, with user age emerging as the primary demographic axis of disagreement; a model's perceived rank can shift substantially across age groups, exposing failures in generalisation that unrepresentative samples typically mask. $\textbf{(3)}$ We quantify the vast difference in discriminative power across evaluation dimensions, with ambiguous qualities like Trust, Ethics and Safety showing a 65\% tie rate, in stark contrast to the decisive 10\% tie rate for Overall Winner. Our work emphasises the need for a more multidimensional, demographically aware perspective in LLM evaluation. We release our complete dataset, interactive leaderboard, and open-source framework.
From Reproduction to Replication: Evaluating Research Agents with Progressive Code Masking
Authors: Gyeongwon James Kim; Alex Wilf; Louis-Philippe Morency; Daniel Fried
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent progress in autonomous code generation has fueled excitement around AI agents capable of accelerating scientific discovery by running experiments. However, there is currently no benchmark that evaluates whether such agents can implement scientific ideas when given varied amounts of code as a starting point, interpolating between reproduction (running code) and from-scratch replication (fully re-implementing and running code). We introduce AutoExperiment, a benchmark that evaluates AI agents’ ability to implement and run machine learning experiments based on natural language descriptions in research papers. In each task, agents are given a research paper, a codebase with key functions masked out, and a command to run the experiment. The goal is to generate the missing code, execute the experiment in a sandboxed environment, and reproduce the results. AutoExperiment scales in difficulty by varying the number of missing functions $n$, ranging from partial reproduction to full replication. We evaluate state-of-the-art agents and find that performance degrades rapidly as $n$ increases. Agents that can dynamically interact with the environment (e.g. to debug their code) can outperform agents in fixed ``agentless'' harnesses, and there exists a significant gap between single-shot and multi-trial success rates (Pass@1 vs. Pass@5), motivating verifier approaches to our benchmark. Our findings highlight critical challenges in long-horizon code generation, context retrieval, and autonomous experiment execution, establishing AutoExperiment as a new benchmark for evaluating progress in AI-driven scientific experimentation. Our data and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/j1mk1m/AutoExperiment.
ParaS2S: Benchmarking and Aligning Spoken Language Models for Paralinguistic-aware Speech-to-Speech Interaction
Authors: Shu-wen Yang; Ming Tu; Andy T. Liu; Xinghua Qu; Hung-yi Lee; Lu Lu; Yuxuan Wang; Yonghui Wu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Speech-to-Speech (S2S) models have shown promising dialogue capabilities, but their ability to handle paralinguistic cues—such as emotion, tone, and speaker attributes—and to respond appropriately in both content and style remains underexplored. Progress is further hindered by the scarcity of high-quality and expressive demonstrations. To address this, we introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework for paralinguistic-aware S2S, ParaS2S, which evaluates and optimizes both response content and speaking style directly at the waveform level. We first construct ParaS2SBench, a benchmark that evaluates the naturalness of input–output pairs in terms of content and speaking style using expressive and challenging queries. For the automatic judge, we propose a PolyTone training strategy and a multi-stage framework, preventing the style hallucination of end-to-end audio LLM judging. Our judge correlates well with human preferences and is scalable, enabling the model to interact and learn from unlabeled speech via RL. Experiments show that existing S2S models fail to respond appropriately to paralinguistic attributes, performing no better than pipeline-based baselines. Our RL approach (ParaS2SAlign) achieves an 10% relative improvement in the appropriateness of response content and speaking style on ParaS2SBench over supervised fine-tuning (SFT), surpassing all prior models while requiring substantially fewer paired demonstrations than pure SFT. Our findings highlight the need for a scalable and accurate automatic evaluator for speech-to-speech interaction.
Is Pure Exploitation Sufficient in Exogenous MDPs with Linear Function Approximation?
Authors: Hao Liang; Jiayu Cheng; Sean R. Sinclair; Yali Du
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Exogenous MDPs (Exo-MDPs) capture sequential decision-making where uncertainty comes solely from exogenous inputs that evolve independently of the learner’s actions. This structure is especially common in operations research applications such as inventory control, energy storage, and resource allocation, where exogenous randomness (e.g., demand, arrivals, or prices) drives system behavior. Despite decades of empirical evidence that greedy, exploitation-only methods work remarkably well in these settings, theory has lagged behind: all existing regret guarantees for Exo-MDPs rely on explicit exploration or tabular assumptions.
We show that exploration is unnecessary.
We propose Pure Exploitation Learning ($\texttt{PEL}$) and prove the first general finite-sample regret bounds for exploitation-only algorithms in Exo-MDPs. In the tabular case, PEL achieves $\widetilde{O}(H^2|\Xi|\sqrt{K})$. For large, continuous endogenous state spaces, we introduce $\texttt{LSVI-PE}$, a simple linear-approximation method whose regret is polynomial in the feature dimension, exogenous state space, and horizon, independent of the endogenous state and action spaces.
Our analysis introduces two new tools: counterfactual trajectories and Bellman-closed feature transport, which together allow greedy policies to have accurate value estimates without optimism.
Experiments on synthetic and resource-management tasks show $\texttt{PEL}$ consistently outperforming  baselines. Overall, our results overturn the conventional wisdom that exploration is required, demonstrating that in Exo-MDPs, pure exploitation is enough.
Rethinking Radiology Report Generation: From Narrative Flow to Topic-Guided Findings
Authors: Sheng Cheng; Devika Subramanian
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for radiology report generation are typically trained to mimic the narrative flow of human experts. However, we identify a potential limitation in this conventional paradigm. We hypothesize that optimizing for narrative coherence encourages models to rely on linguistic priors and inter-sentence correlations, which can weaken their grounding in direct visual evidence and lead to factual inaccuracies. To investigate this, we design a controlled experiment demonstrating that as textual context increases, a model's reliance on the input image systematically decays. We propose LLaVA-TA (Topic-guided and Anatomy-aware), a new fine-tuning framework that directly addresses this challenge by re-engineering the generation process. Instead of producing a linear narrative, LLaVA-TA decomposes the report into a set of independent, clinically-relevant topics. By training the model to generate a discrete finding for each topic conditioned on both the full image and its corresponding anatomical region, we reduce the model's reliance on narrative flow and enforce stricter visual grounding. Our experiments show that LLaVA-TA sets a new state of the art on the MIMIC-CXR dataset, significantly improving clinical accuracy on metrics like RadGraph F1 (from 29.4 to 44.0) and CheXpert F1-14 (from 39.5 to 71.5) over strong baselines. Our work demonstrates that dismantling a report's narrative structure to enforce independent, visually-grounded observations is a crucial and effective step toward building more accurate and reliable medical VLMs.
Neural Message-Passing on Attention Graphs for Hallucination Detection
Authors: Fabrizio Frasca; Guy Bar-Shalom; Yftah Ziser; Haggai Maron
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate incorrect or unsupported content, known as hallucinations. Existing detection methods rely on heuristics or simple models over isolated computational traces such as activations, or attention maps. We unify these signals by representing them as attributed graphs, where tokens are nodes, edges follow attentional flows, and both carry features from attention scores and activations. Our approach, CHARM, casts hallucination detection as a graph learning task and tackles it by applying GNNs over the above attributed graphs. We show that CHARM provably subsumes prior attention-based heuristics and, experimentally, it consistently outperforms other leading approaches across diverse benchmarks. Our results shed light on the relevant role played by the graph structure and on the benefits of combining computational traces,  whilst showing CHARM exhibits promising zero-shot performance on cross-dataset transfer.
The Gaussian-Head OFL Family: One-Shot Federated Learning from Client Global Statistics
Authors: Fabio Turazza; Marco Picone; Marco Mamei
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Classical Federated Learning relies on a multi-round iterative process of model exchange and aggregation between server and clients, with high communication costs and privacy risks from repeated model transmissions. In contrast, one-shot federated learning (OFL) alleviates these limitations by reducing communication to a single round, thereby lowering overhead and enhancing practical deployability. Nevertheless, most existing one-shot approaches remain either impractical or constrained, for example, they often depend on the availability of a public dataset, assume homogeneous client models, or require uploading additional data or model information. To overcome these issues, we introduce the Gaussian-Head OFL (GH-OFL) family, a suite of one-shot federated methods that assume class-conditional Gaussianity of pretrained embeddings. Clients transmit only sufficient statistics (per-class counts and first/second-order moments) and the server builds heads via three components: (i) Closed-form Gaussian heads (NB/LDA/QDA) computed directly from the received statistics; (ii) FisherMix, a linear head trained on synthetic samples drawn in an estimated Fisher subspace; and (iii) Proto-Hyper, a lightweight low-rank residual head that refines Gaussian logits via knowledge distillation on those synthetic samples. In our experiments, GH-OFL methods deliver state-of-the-art robustness and accuracy under strong non-IID skew while remaining strictly data-free.
Protein Structure Tokenization via Geometric Byte Pair Encoding
Authors: Michael Sun; Weize Yuan; Gang Liu; Wojciech Matusik; Marinka Zitnik
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Protein structure is central to biological function, and enabling multimodal protein models requires joint reasoning over sequence, structure, and function. A key barrier is the lack of principled protein structure tokenizers (PSTs): existing approaches fix token size or rely on continuous vector codebooks, limiting interpretability, multi-scale control, and transfer across architectures. We introduce GeoBPE, a geometry-grounded PST that transforms continuous, noisy, multi-scale backbone conformations into discrete ``sentences'' of geometry while enforcing global constraints. Analogous to byte-pair encoding, GeoBPE generates a hierarchical vocabulary of geometric primitives by iteratively (i) clustering Geo-Pair occurrences with k-medoids to yield a resolution-controllable vocabulary; (ii) quantizing each Geo-Pair to its closest medoid prototype; and (iii) reducing drift through differentiable inverse kinematics that optimizes boundary glue angles under an $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ end-frame loss. GeoBPE offers compression ($>$10× reduction in bits-per-residue at similar distortion rate), data efficiency ($>$10× less training data), and generalization (maintains test/train distortion ratio of $1.0-1.1$). It is architecture-agnostic: (a) its hierarchical vocabulary provides a strong inductive bias for coarsening residue-level embeddings from large PLMs into motif- and protein-level representations, consistently outperforming leading PSTs across $12$ tasks and $24$ test splits; (b) paired with a transformer, GeoBPE supports unconditional backbone generation via language modeling; and (c) tokens align with CATH functional families and support expert-interpretable case studies, offering functional meaning absent in prior PSTs.
When Reasoning Meets Compression: Understanding the Effects of LLMs Compression on Large Reasoning Models
Authors: Nan Zhang; Eugene Kwek; Yusen Zhang; Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen; Prasenjit Mitra; Rui Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Compression methods, including quantization, distillation, and pruning, improve the computational efficiency of large reasoning models (LRMs). However, existing studies either fail to sufficiently compare all three compression methods on LRMs or lack in-depth interpretation analysis. In this paper, we investigate how the reasoning capabilities of LRMs are compromised during compression, through performance benchmarking and mechanistic interpretation. To uncover the effects of compression on reasoning performance, we benchmark quantized, distilled, and pruned DeepSeek-R1 models on four reasoning datasets (AIME 2024, FOLIO, Temporal Sequences, and MuSiQue). To precisely locate compression effects on model weights, we adapt difference of means and attribution patching techniques, focusing on the activation of every linear component in compressed LRMs, to interpret fine-grained causal relationships between weights and various reasoning capabilities. This fine-grained interpretation addresses a fundamental question of compression: which weights are the most important for reasoning? Overall, we find dynamically quantized 2.51-bit R1 reaches close-to-R1 performance. With empirical verification, we present three main findings that generalize across both R1 and non-R1 LRMs: (1) Weight count has a greater impact on LRMs' knowledge memorization than reasoning, highlighting the risks of pruning and distillation; (2) The MLP up projection in the final layer of distilled LRMs is one of the most important components, offering a new perspective on locating critical weights - a fundamental problem in model compression; and (3) Current quantization methods overly compress the final-layer modules and MLP gate projections, so protecting just 2% of all weights that are excessively compressed can raise average accuracy by 6.57%, greatly surpassing the state-of-the-art.
Weak Correlations as the Underlying Principle for Linearization of Gradient-Based Learning Systems
Authors: Ori Shem-Ur; Khen Cohen; Yaron Oz
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Deep learning models, such as wide neural networks, can be viewed as nonlinear dynamical systems composed of numerous interacting degrees of freedom. When such systems approach the limit of infinite number of degrees of freedom, their dynamics tend to simplify. This paper investigates gradient descent-based learning algorithms that exhibit linearization in their parameters. We establish that this apparent linearity, arises from weak correlations between the first, and higher-order derivatives of the hypothesis function with respect to the parameters, at initialization. Our findings indicate that these weak correlations fundamentally underpin the observed linearization phenomenon of wide neural networks. Leveraging this connection, we derive bounds on the deviation from linearity during stochastic gradient descent training. To support our analysis, we introduce a novel technique for characterizing the asymptotic behavior of random tensors. We validate our theoretical insights through empirical studies, comparing the linearized dynamics to the observed correlations.
Efficient and Sharp Off-Policy Learning under Unobserved Confounding
Authors: Konstantin Hess; Dennis Frauen; Valentyn Melnychuk; Stefan Feuerriegel
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We develop a novel method for personalized off-policy learning in scenarios with unobserved confounding. Thereby, we address a key limitation of standard policy learning: standard policy learning assumes unconfoundedness, meaning that no unobserved factors influence both treatment assignment and outcomes. However, this assumption is often violated, because of which standard policy learning produces biased estimates and thus leads to policies that can be harmful. To address this limitation, we employ causal sensitivity analysis and derive a semi-parametrically efficient estimator for a sharp bound on the value function under unobserved confounding. Our estimator has three advantages: (1) Unlike existing works, our estimator avoids unstable minimax optimization based on inverse propensity weighted outcomes. (2) Our estimator is semi-parametrically efficient. (3) We prove that our estimator leads to the optimal confounding-robust policy. Finally, we extend our theory to the related task of policy improvement under unobserved confounding, i.e., when a baseline policy such as the standard of care is available. We show in experiments with synthetic and real-world data that our method outperforms simple plug-in approaches and existing baselines. Our method is highly relevant for decision-making where unobserved confounding can be problematic, such as in healthcare and public policy.
Breaking Agent Backbones: Evaluating the Security of Backbone LLMs in AI Agents
Authors: Julia Bazinska; Max Mathys; Francesco Casucci; Mateo Rojas-Carulla; Xander Davies; Alexandra Souly; Niklas Pfister
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are being deployed at scale, yet we lack a systematic understanding of how the choice of backbone LLM affects agent security.
The non-deterministic sequential nature of AI agents complicates security modeling, while the integration of traditional software with AI components entangles novel LLM vulnerabilities with conventional security risks.
Existing frameworks only partially address these challenges as they either capture specific vulnerabilities only or require modeling of complete agents.
To address these limitations, we introduce threat snapshots: a framework that isolates specific states in an agent's execution flow where LLM vulnerabilities manifest, enabling the systematic identification and categorization of security risks that propagate from the LLM to the agent level.
We apply this framework to construct the $b^3$ benchmark, a security benchmark based on 194,331 unique crowdsourced adversarial attacks. We then evaluate 34 popular LLMs with it, revealing, among other insights, that enhanced reasoning capabilities improve security, while model size does not correlate with security.
We release our benchmark, dataset, and evaluation code to facilitate widespread adoption by LLM providers and practitioners, offering guidance for agent developers and incentivizing model developers to prioritize backbone security improvements.
Robust Reward Modeling via Causal Rubrics
Authors: Pragya Srivastava; Harman Singh; Rahul Madhavan; Gandharv Patil; Sravanti Addepalli; Arun Suggala; Rengarajan Aravamudhan; Soumya Sharma; Anirban Laha; Aravindan Raghuveer; Karthikeyan Shanmugam; Doina Precup
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Reward models (RMs) are fundamental to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) via human feedback, yet they often suffer from reward hacking. They tend to latch on to superficial or spurious attributes, such as response length or formatting, mistaking these cues learned from correlations in training data for the true causal drivers of quality (e.g., factuality, relevance). This occurs because standard training objectives struggle to disentangle these factors, leading to brittle RMs and misaligned policies. We introduce CROME (Causally Robust Reward Modeling), a novel framework inspired by an explicit causal model designed to mitigate reward hacking. CROME queries an oracle LLM for rubrics that are (or the oracle deems to be) causally relevant to answering a specific prompt. Then, it employs the following synthetic targeted augmentations during training: (1) Causal Augmentations, which are pairs that differ along specific causal attributes (subset of the Oracle identified rubrics), to enforce sensitivity along each causal attribute individually, and (2) Neutral Augmentations, which are tie-label pairs varying primarily in spurious attributes, to enforce invariance along spurious attributes. Notably, our neutral augmentations are produced without any knowledge of unknown spurious factors, via question swapping and response interventions only along causal rubrics. We show that the CROME augmentation strategy using rubrics from popular LLM APIs significantly outperforms standard baselines on RewardBench, improving average accuracy by up to 5.3% and achieving gains of up to 7.1% and 12.4% in reasoning and safety. The robustness of CROME is further testified by significant gains in DPO-aligned policies and Best-of-N alignment across various benchmarks, including AlpacaEval 2.0, RewardBench, safety-focused WildGuardTest, and the reasoning-specific GSM8k.