GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Regularized Langevin Dynamics for Combinatorial Optimization
Authors: Shengyu Feng; Yiming Yang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: This work proposes a simple yet effective sampling framework for combinatorial optimization (CO). Our method builds on discrete Langevin dynamics (LD), an efficient gradient-guided generative paradigm. However, we observe that directly applying LD often leads to limited exploration. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Regularized Langevin Dynamics (RLD), which enforces an expected distance between the sampled and current solutions, effectively avoiding local minima. We develop two CO solvers on top of RLD, one based on simulated annealing (SA), and the other one based on neural network (NN). Empirical results on three classic CO problems demonstrate that both of our methods can achieve comparable or better performance against the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) SA- and NN-based solvers. In particular, our SA algorithm reduces the runtime of the previous SOTA SA method by up to 80\%, while achieving equal or superior performance. In summary, RLD offers a promising framework for enhancing both traditional heuristics and NN models to solve CO problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shengyu-Feng/RLD4CO.
Sampling Binary Data by Denoising through Score Functions
Authors: Francis Bach; Saeed Saremi
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Gaussian smoothing combined with a probabilistic framework for denoising via the empirical Bayes formalism, i.e., the Tweedie-Miyasawa formula (TMF), are the two key ingredients in the success of score-based generative models in Euclidean spaces. Smoothing holds the key for easing the problem of learning and sampling in high dimensions, denoising is needed for recovering the original signal, and TMF ties these together via the score function of noisy data. In this work, we extend this paradigm to the problem of learning and sampling the distribution of binary data on the Boolean hypercube by adopting Bernoulli noise, instead of Gaussian noise, as a smoothing device. We first derive a TMF-like expression for the optimal denoiser for the Hamming loss, where a score function naturally appears. Sampling noisy binary data is then achieved using a Langevin-like sampler which we theoretically analyze for different noise levels. At high Bernoulli noise levels sampling becomes easy, akin to log-concave sampling in Euclidean spaces. In addition, we extend the sequential multi-measurement sampling of Saremi et al. (2024) to the binary setting where we can bring the "effective noise" down by sampling multiple noisy measurements at a fixed noise level, without the need for continuous-time stochastic processes. We validate our formalism and theoretical findings by experiments on synthetic data and binarized images.
Near-Optimal Sample Complexity for MDPs via Anchoring
Authors: Jongmin Lee; Mario Bravo; Roberto Cominetti
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We study a new model-free algorithm to compute  $\varepsilon$-optimal policies for average reward Markov decision processes, in the weakly communicating setting. Given a generative model, our procedure combines a recursive sampling technique with Halpern's anchored iteration, and computes an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy with sample and time complexity $\widetilde{O}(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|\||h\||^{2}/\varepsilon^{2})$  both in high probability and in expectation.  To our knowledge, this is the best complexity among model-free algorithms, matching the known lower bound up to a factor $ \||h\|| $.  Although the complexity bound involves the span seminorm $ \||h\|| $ of the unknown  bias vector, the algorithm requires no  prior knowledge  and  implements a stopping rule which guarantees  with probability 1 that the procedure terminates in finite time. We also analyze how these techniques can be adapted for discounted MDPs.
How to Evaluate and Mitigate IP Infringement in Visual Generative AI?
Authors: Zhenting Wang; Chen Chen; Vikash Sehwag; Minzhou Pan; Lingjuan Lyu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: The popularity of visual generative AI models like DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Video Diffusion, and Sora has been increasing. Through extensive evaluation, we discovered that the state-of-the-art visual generative models can generate content that bears a striking resemblance to characters protected by intellectual property rights held by major entertainment companies (such as Sony, Marvel, and Nintendo), which raises potential legal concerns. This happens when the input prompt contains the character's name or even just descriptive details about their characteristics. To mitigate such IP infringement problems, we also propose a defense method against it. In detail, we develop a revised generation paradigm that can identify potentially infringing generated content and prevent IP infringement by utilizing guidance techniques during the diffusion process. It has the capability to recognize generated content that may be infringing on intellectual property rights, and mitigate such infringement by employing guidance methods throughout the diffusion process without retrain or fine-tune the pretrained models. Experiments on well-known character IPs like Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Superman demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed defense method.
Gradient Flow Provably Learns Robust Classifiers for Orthonormal GMMs
Authors: Hancheng Min; Rene Vidal
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Deep learning-based classifiers are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing methods for defending against such attacks require adding a defense mechanism or modifying the learning procedure (e.g., by adding adversarial examples). This paper shows that for certain data distributions one can learn a provably robust classifier using standard learning methods and without adding a defense mechanism. More specifically, this paper addresses the problem of finding a robust classifier for a binary classification problem in which the data comes from an isotropic mixture of Gaussians with orthonormal cluster centers. First, we characterize the largest $\ell_2$-attack any classifier can defend against while maintaining high accuracy, and show the existence of optimal robust classifiers achieving this maximum $\ell_2$-robustness. Next, we show that given data from the orthonormal Gaussian mixture model, gradient flow on a two-layer network with a polynomial ReLU activation and without adversarial examples provably finds an optimal robust classifier.
Overcoming Multi-step Complexity in Multimodal Theory-of-Mind Reasoning: A Scalable Bayesian Planner
Authors: Chunhui Zhang; Zhongyu Ouyang; Kwonjoon Lee; Nakul Agarwal; Sean Dae Houlihan; Soroush Vosoughi; Shao-Yuan Lo
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 spotlightposter)

Abstract: Theory-of-mind (ToM) enables humans to infer mental states—such as beliefs, desires, and intentions—forming the foundation of social cognition. Existing computational ToM methods rely on structured workflows with ToM-specific priors or deep model fine-tuning but struggle with scalability in multimodal environments. They remain trapped within the gravitational pull of multi-step planning complexity, failing to generalize as task demands increase. To overcome these limitations, we propose a scalable Bayesian ToM planner. It breaks down ToM complexity into stepwise Bayesian updates. Meanwhile, weak-to-strong control specializes smaller LMs to refine ToM-specific likelihood estimation, transferring their ToM reasoning behavior to larger LMs (7B to 405B) for social and world knowledge integration. This synergistic approach enables scalability, aligning large-model inference with human mental states with Bayesian principles. Extensive experiments demonstrate a 4.6% improvement in accuracy over state-of-the-art methods on multimodal ToM benchmarks, including unseen scenarios, establishing a new standard for modeling human mental states in complex environments.
David and Goliath: Small One-step Model Beats Large Diffusion with Score Post-training
Authors: Weijian Luo; colin zhang; Debing Zhang; Zhengyang Geng
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We propose Diff-Instruct*(DI*), a data-efficient post-training approach to one-step text-to-image generative models to improve its human preferences without requiring image data. Our method frames alignment as online reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which optimizes a human reward function while regularizing the generator to stay close to a reference diffusion process. Unlike traditional RLHF approaches, which rely on the KL divergence for regularization, we introduce a novel score-based divergence regularization that substantially improves performance. Although such a score-based RLHF objective seems intractable when optimizing, we derive a strictly equivalent tractable loss function in theory that can efficiently compute its gradient for optimizations. Building upon this framework, we train DI*-SDXL-1step, a 1-step text-to-image model based on Stable Diffusion-XL (2.6B parameters), capable of generating 1024x1024 resolution images in a single step. The 2.6B DI*-SDXL-1step model outperforms the 12B FLUX-dev model in ImageReward, PickScore, and CLIP score on the Parti prompts benchmark while using only 1.88% of the inference time. This result strongly supports the thought that with proper post-training, the small one-step model is capable of beating huge multi-step models. We will open-source our industry-ready model to the community.
Latent Diffusion Planning for Imitation Learning
Authors: Amber Xie; Oleh Rybkin; Dorsa Sadigh; Chelsea Finn
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 spotlightposter)

Abstract: Recent progress in imitation learning has been enabled by policy architectures that scale to complex visuomotor tasks, multimodal distributions, and large datasets. However, these methods often rely on learning from large amount of expert demonstrations.
To address these shortcomings, we propose Latent Diffusion Planning (LDP), a modular approach consisting of a planner which can leverage action-free demonstrations, and an inverse dynamics model which can leverage suboptimal data, that both operate over a learned latent space. First, we learn a compact latent space through a variational autoencoder, enabling effective forecasting of future states in image-based domains. Then, we train a planner and an inverse dynamics model with diffusion objectives. By separating planning from action prediction, LDP can benefit from the denser supervision signals of suboptimal and action-free data.
On simulated visual robotic manipulation tasks, LDP outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning approaches, as they cannot leverage such additional data.
Exact risk curves of signSGD in High-Dimensions: quantifying preconditioning and noise-compression effects
Authors: Ke Liang Xiao; Noah Marshall; Atish Agarwala; Elliot Paquette
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: In recent years, SignSGD has garnered interest as both a practical optimizer as well as a simple model to understand adaptive optimizers like Adam. Though there is a general consensus that SignSGD acts to precondition optimization and reshapes noise, quantitatively understanding these effects in theoretically solvable settings remains difficult. We present an analysis of SignSGD in a high dimensional limit, and derive a limiting SDE and ODE to describe the risk. Using this framework we quantify four effects of SignSGD: effective learning rate, noise compression, diagonal preconditioning, and gradient noise reshaping. Our analysis is consistent with experimental observations but moves beyond that by quantifying the dependence of these effects on the data and noise distributions. We conclude with a conjecture on how these results might be extended to Adam.
Elucidating Flow Matching ODE Dynamics via Data Geometry and Denoisers
Authors: Zhengchao Wan; Qingsong Wang; Gal Mishne; Yusu Wang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Flow matching (FM) models extend ODE sampler based diffusion models into a general framework, significantly reducing sampling steps through learned vector fields. However, the theoretical understanding of FM models, particularly how their sample trajectories interact with underlying data geometry, remains underexplored. A rigorous theoretical analysis of FM ODE is essential for sample quality, stability, and broader applicability. In this paper, we advance the theory of FM models through a comprehensive analysis of sample trajectories. Central to our theory is the discovery that the denoiser, a key component of FM models, guides ODE dynamics through attracting and absorbing behaviors that adapt to the data geometry. We identify and analyze the three stages of ODE evolution: in the initial and intermediate stages, trajectories move toward the mean and local clusters of the data. At the terminal stage, we rigorously establish the convergence of FM ODE under weak assumptions, addressing scenarios where the data lie on a low-dimensional submanifold---cases that previous results could not handle. Our terminal stage analysis offers insights into the memorization phenomenon and establishes equivariance properties of FM ODEs. These findings bridge critical gaps in understanding flow matching models, with practical implications for optimizing sampling strategies and architectures guided by the intrinsic geometry of data.
PhantomWiki: On-Demand Datasets for Reasoning and Retrieval Evaluation
Authors: Albert Gong; Kamilė Stankevičiūtė; Chao Wan; Anmol Kabra; Raphael Thesmar; Johann Lee; Julius Klenke; Carla P Gomes; Kilian Q Weinberger
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: High-quality benchmarks are essential for evaluating reasoning and retrieval capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, curating datasets for this purpose is not a permanent solution as they are prone to data leakage and inflated performance results. 
To address these challenges, we propose PhantomWiki: a pipeline to generate unique, factually consistent document corpora with diverse question-answer pairs. Unlike prior work, PhantomWiki is neither a fixed dataset, nor is it based on any existing data. Instead, a new PhantomWiki instance is generated on demand for each evaluation. We vary the question difficulty and corpus size to disentangle reasoning and retrieval capabilities, respectively, and find that PhantomWiki datasets are surprisingly challenging for frontier LLMs. Thus, we contribute a scalable and data leakage-resistant framework for disentangled evaluation of reasoning, retrieval, and tool-use abilities.
Near-optimal Regret Using Policy Optimization in Online MDPs with Aggregate Bandit Feedback
Authors: Tal Lancewicki; Yishay Mansour
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We study online finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes with adversarially changing loss and aggregate bandit feedback (a.k.a full-bandit). Under this type of feedback, the agent observes only the total loss incurred over the entire trajectory, rather than the individual losses at each intermediate step within the trajectory. We introduce the first Policy Optimization algorithms for this setting. In the known-dynamics case, we achieve the first *optimal* regret bound of $\tilde \Theta(H^2\sqrt{SAK})$, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $H$ is the episode horizon, $S$ is the number of states, and $A$ is the number of actions. In the unknown dynamics case we establish regret bound of $\tilde O(H^3 S \sqrt{AK})$, significantly improving the best known result by a factor of $H^2 S^5 A^2$.
"Who experiences large model decay and why?" A Hierarchical Framework for Diagnosing Heterogeneous Performance Drift
Authors: Harvineet Singh; Fan Xia; Alexej Gossmann; Andrew Chuang; Julian C. Hong; Jean Feng
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Machine learning (ML) models frequently experience performance degradation when deployed in new contexts. Such degradation is rarely uniform: some subgroups may suffer large performance decay while others may not. Understanding where and how large differences in performance arise is critical for designing *targeted* corrective actions that mitigate decay for the most affected subgroups while minimizing any unintended effects. Current approaches do not provide such detailed insight, as they either (i) explain how *average* performance shifts arise or (ii) identify adversely affected subgroups without insight into how this occurred. To this end, we introduce a **S**ubgroup-scanning **H**ierarchical **I**nference **F**ramework for performance drif**T** (SHIFT). SHIFT first asks "Is there any subgroup with unacceptably large performance decay due to covariate/outcome shifts?" (*Where?*) and, if so, dives deeper to ask "Can we explain this using more detailed variable(subset)-specific shifts?" (*How?*). In real-world experiments, we find that SHIFT identifies interpretable subgroups affected by performance decay, and suggests targeted actions that effectively mitigate the decay.
Sparse-pivot: Dynamic correlation clustering for node insertions
Authors: Mina Dalirrooyfard; Konstantin Makarychev; Slobodan Mitrović
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 spotlightposter)

Abstract: We present a new Correlation Clustering algorithm for a dynamic setting where nodes are added one at a time. In this model, proposed by Cohen-Addad, Lattanzi, Maggiori, and Parotsidis (ICML 2024), the algorithm uses database queries to access the input graph and updates the clustering as each new node is added.
Our algorithm has the amortized update time of $\log^{O(1)}(n)$. Its approximation factor is $20+\varepsilon$, which is a substantial improvement over the approximation factor of the algorithm by Cohen-Addad et al. 

We complement our theoretical findings by empirically evaluating the approximation guarantee of our algorithm. The results show that it outperforms the algorithm by Cohen-Addad et al.~in practice.
Compositional Scene Understanding through Inverse Generative Modeling
Authors: Yanbo Wang; Justin Dauwels; Yilun Du
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Generative models have demonstrated remarkable abilities in generating high-fidelity visual content. In this work, we explore how generative models can further be used not only to synthesize visual content but also to understand the properties of a scene given a natural image. We formulate scene understanding as an inverse generative modeling problem, where we seek to find conditional parameters of a visual generative model to best fit a given natural image. To enable this procedure to infer scene structure from images substantially different than those seen during training, we further propose to build this visual generative model compositionally from smaller models over pieces of a scene. We illustrate how this procedure enables us to infer the set of objects in a scene, enabling robust generalization to new test scenes with an increased number of objects of new shapes. We further illustrate how this enables us to infer global scene factors, likewise enabling robust generalization to new scenes. Finally, we illustrate how this approach can be directly applied to existing pretrained text-to-image generative models for zero-shot multi-object perception. Code and visualizations are at https://energy-based-model.github.io/compositional-inference.
The Jailbreak Tax: How Useful are Your Jailbreak Outputs?
Authors: Kristina Nikolić; Luze Sun; Jie Zhang; Florian Tramèr
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 spotlightposter)

Abstract: Jailbreak attacks bypass the guardrails of large language models to produce harmful outputs.
In this paper, we ask whether the model outputs produced by existing jailbreaks are actually *useful*. For example, when jailbreaking a model to give instructions for building a bomb, does the jailbreak yield good instructions?
Since the utility of most unsafe answers (e.g., bomb instructions) is hard to evaluate rigorously, we build new jailbreak evaluation sets with known ground truth answers, by aligning models to refuse questions related to benign and easy-to-evaluate topics (e.g., biology or math).
Our evaluation of eight representative jailbreaks across five utility benchmarks reveals a consistent drop in model utility in jailbroken responses, which we term the *jailbreak tax*. For example, while all jailbreaks we tested bypass guardrails in models aligned to refuse to answer math, this comes at the expense of a drop of up to 92% in accuracy.
Overall, our work proposes jailbreak utility as a new important metric in AI safety, and introduces benchmarks to evaluate existing and future jailbreaks.  We make the benchmark available at https://github.com/ethz-spylab/jailbreak-tax
Theoretical Limitations of Ensembles in the Age of Overparameterization
Authors: Niclas Dern; John Patrick Cunningham; Geoff Pleiss
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 oral)

Abstract: Classic ensembles generalize better than any single component model. In contrast, recent empirical studies find that modern ensembles of (overparameterized) neural networks may not provide any inherent generalization advantage over single but larger neural networks. This paper clarifies how modern overparameterized ensembles differ from their classic underparameterized counterparts, using ensembles of random feature (RF) regressors as a basis for developing theory. In contrast to the underparameterized regime, where ensembling typically induces regularization and increases generalization, we prove with minimal assumptions that infinite ensembles of overparameterized RF regressors become pointwise equivalent to (single) infinite-width RF regressors, and finite width ensembles rapidly converge to single models with the same parameter budget. These results, which are exact for ridgeless models and approximate for small ridge penalties, imply that overparameterized ensembles and single large models exhibit nearly identical generalization. We further characterize the predictive variance amongst ensemble members, demonstrating that it quantifies the expected effects of increasing capacity rather than capturing any conventional notion of uncertainty. Our results challenge common assumptions about the advantages of ensembles in overparameterized settings, prompting a reconsideration of how well intuitions from underparameterized ensembles transfer to deep ensembles and the overparameterized regime.
Representative Language Generation
Authors: Charlotte Peale; Vinod Raman; Omer Reingold
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We introduce "representative generation," extending the theoretical framework for generation proposed by Kleinberg et al. (2024) and formalized by Li et al. (2024), to additionally address diversity and bias concerns in generative models. 
Our notion requires outputs of a generative model to proportionally represent groups of interest from the training data.  We characterize representative uniform and non-uniform generation, introducing the ``group closure dimension'' as a key combinatorial quantity. For representative generation in the limit, we analyze both information-theoretic and computational aspects, demonstrating feasibility for countably infinite hypothesis classes and collections of groups under certain conditions, but proving a negative result for computability using only membership queries. This contrasts with Kleinberg et al.'s (2024) positive results for standard generation in the limit. Our findings provide a rigorous foundation for developing more diverse and representative generative models.