GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Reward Models Inherit Value Biases from Pretraining
Authors: Brian Christian; Jessica A F Thompson; Elle; Vincent Adam; Hannah Rose Kirk; Christopher Summerfield; Tsvetomira Dumbalska
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Reward models (RMs) are central to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values but have received less attention than pretrained and post-trained LLMs themselves. Because RMs are initialized from LLMs, they inherit representations that shape their behavior, but the nature and extent of this influence remain understudied. In a comprehensive study of 10 leading open-weight RMs using validated psycholinguistic corpora, we show that RMs exhibit significant differences along multiple dimensions of human value as a function of their base model. Using the "Big Two" psychological axes, we show a robust preference of Llama RMs for "agency" and a corresponding robust preference of Gemma RMs for "communion." This phenomenon holds even when the preference data and finetuning process are identical, and we trace it back to the logits of the respective instruction-tuned and pretrained models. These log-probability differences themselves can be formulated as an implicit RM; we derive usable implicit reward scores and show that they exhibit the very same agency/communion difference. We run experiments training RMs with ablations for preference data source and quantity, which demonstrate that this effect is not only repeatable but surprisingly durable. Despite RMs being designed to represent human preferences, our evidence shows that their outputs are influenced by the pretrained LLMs on which they are based. This work underscores the importance of safety and alignment efforts at the pretraining stage, and makes clear that open-source developers' choice of base model is as much a consideration of values as of performance.
ResearchRubrics: A Benchmark of Prompts and Rubrics For Evaluating Deep Research Agents
Authors: Manasi Sharma; Chen Bo Calvin Zhang; Chaithanya Bandi; Clinton Wang; Ankit Aich; Huy Nghiem; Tahseen Rabbani; Ye Htet; Brian Jang; Sumana Basu; Aishwarya Balwani; Denis Peskoff; Marcos Ayestaran; Sean M. Hendryx; Brad Kenstler; Bing Liu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Deep Research (DR) is an emerging agent application that leverages large language models (LLMs) to address open-ended queries. It requires the integration of several capabilities, including multi-step reasoning, cross-document synthesis, and the generation of evidence-backed, long-form answers. Evaluating DR remains challenging because responses are lengthy and diverse, admit many valid solutions, and often depend on dynamic information sources. We introduce ResearchRubrics, a standardized benchmark for DR built with over 2,800+ hours of human labor that pairs realistic, domain-diverse prompts with 2,500+ expert‑written, fine‑grained rubrics to assess factual grounding, reasoning soundness, and clarity. We also propose a new complexity framework for categorizing DR tasks along three axes: conceptual breadth, logical nesting, and exploration. In addition, we develop human and model-based evaluation protocols that measure rubric adherence for DR agents. We evaluate several state‑of‑the‑art DR systems and find that even leading agents like Gemini's DR and OpenAI's DR achieve under 68% average compliance with our rubrics, primarily due to missed implicit context and inadequate reasoning about retrieved information. Our results highlight the need for robust, scalable assessment of deep research capabilities, to which end we release ResearchRubrics (including all prompts, rubrics, and evaluation code) to facilitate progress toward well‑justified research assistants.
Generalization of RLVR Using Causal Reasoning as a Testbed
Authors: Brian Lu; Hongyu Zhao; Shuo Sun; Hao Peng; Rui Ding; Hongyuan Mei
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, the conditions under which RLVR yields robust generalization remain underexplored. This paper provides an empirical study of RLVR generalization in the setting of probabilistic inference over causal graphical models. 
This setting offers two natural axes along which to examine generalization: (i) the level of the probabilistic query---associational, interventional, or counterfactual---and (ii) the structural complexity of the query, measured by the size of its relevant subgraph. We construct a dataset of causal graphs and queries spanning these difficulty axes and fine-tune Qwen-2.5-Instruct models using RLVR or supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We vary both the model scale (3B-32B) and the query level included in training. We find that RLVR yields stronger within-level and across-level generalization than SFT, but only for specific combinations of model size and training query level. Further analysis shows that RLVR's effectiveness depends on the model's initial reasoning competence.
With sufficient initial competence, RLVR improves an LLM's marginalization strategy and reduces errors in intermediate probability calculations, producing substantial accuracy gains, particularly on more complex queries. These results show that RLVR can improve specific causal reasoning subskills, with its benefits emerging only when the model has sufficient initial competence. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/zhichul/rlcausal.
From Predictors to Samplers via the Training Trajectory
Authors: Soumya Ram; Akhila Ram
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Sampling from trained predictors is fundamental for interpretability and as a compute-light alternative to diffusion models, but local samplers struggle on the rugged, high-frequency functions such models learn. We observe that standard neural‑network training implicitly produces a coarse‑to‑fine sequence of models. Early checkpoints suppress high‑degree/ high‑frequency components (Boolean monomials; spherical harmonics under NTK), while later checkpoints restore detail. We exploit this by running a simple annealed sampler across the training trajectory, using early checkpoints for high‑mobility proposals and later ones for refinement. In the Boolean domain, this can turn the exponential bottleneck arising from rugged landscapes or needle gadgets into a near-linear one. In the continuous domain, under the NTK regime, this corresponds to smoothing under the NTK kernel. Requiring no additional compute, our method shows strong empirical gains across a variety of synthetic and real-world tasks, including  constrained sampling tasks that diffusion models are unable to handle.
Scaling Behavior of Discrete Diffusion Language Models
Authors: Dimitri von Rütte; Janis Fluri; Omead Pooladzandi; Bernhard Schölkopf; Thomas Hofmann; Antonio Orvieto
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Modern LLM pre-training consumes vast amounts of compute and training data, making the scaling behavior, or scaling laws, of different models a key distinguishing factor.
Discrete diffusion language models (DLMs) have been proposed as an alternative to autoregressive language models (ALMs).
However, their scaling behavior has not yet been fully explored, with prior work suggesting that they require more data and compute to match the performance of ALMs.

We study the scaling behavior of DLMs on different noise types by smoothly interpolating between masked and uniform diffusion while paying close attention to crucial hyperparameters such as batch size and learning rate.
Our experiments reveal that the scaling behavior of DLMs strongly depends on the noise type and is considerably different from ALMs.
While all noise types converge to similar loss values in compute-bound scaling, we find that uniform diffusion requires more parameters and less data for compute-efficient training compared to masked diffusion, making them a promising candidate in data-constrained training environments.
We scale our uniform diffusion model up to 10B parameters trained for $10^{22}$ FLOPs, confirming the predicted scaling behavior and making it the largest publicly known uniform diffusion model to date.
In the process of deriving the scaling laws, we reformulate the discrete diffusion ELBO in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, closing the gap to continuous diffusion theory and simplifying both theory and implementation.
Training code and models are open-sourced: upon acceptance
Nudging the Boundaries of LLM Reasoning
Authors: Justin Chen; XIANGYU PENG; Prafulla Kumar Choubey; Kung-Hsiang Huang; Jiaxin Zhang; Mohit Bansal; Chien-Sheng Wu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Current online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms like GRPO share a key limitation in LLM reasoning: they cannot learn from problems that are "unsolvable" to the model. In other words, they can only improve performance on problems where the model is capable of exploring the correct answer. If a problem is too difficult -- such that even hundreds of attempts never produce a correct solution -- the model cannot learn from it. Consequently, the model's "upper limit" remains unchanged after RL training, even though the likelihood of solving easier, solvable problems may increase. These hard, unsolvable samples -- though potentially rich in learning signal -- cannot contribute to training, as no rollouts yield rewards and thus no gradients are produced. To unlock learning from these hard samples, we propose NuRL, a "nudging" method that aims to push the upper bound of LLM reasoning using self-generated hints, i.e., abstract cues that help reduce the problem difficulty for the model. Given a question and its gold answer, the model generates a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and then produces a hint containing the core knowledge needed to solve the problem. During online RL training, we generate G rollouts from the base policy and use the pass rate to decide whether the hint should be injected. For hard samples with a 0% pass rate, we inject the offline-generated hint and regenerate a new batch of trajectories. This yields two benefits: (1) the hint boosts pass rates (from 0% to non-zero), thereby introducing training signals for previously unsolvable samples, and (2) the hints are self-generated (conditioned on the gold answer), avoiding distributional shift and do not rely on external models. Compared to standard GRPO, NuRL achieves consistent improvements across six diverse benchmarks and three models, while remaining complementary to test-time scaling. Notably, NuRL can raise the model's upper limit, whereas GRPO leaves pass@1024 unchanged from the base model. Furthermore, we present a systematic study of what makes an effective hint and when hints are most useful. Interestingly, the best hints are abstract and high-level -- as revealing gold answers actually hurt performance -- and are most beneficial when applied necessarily and after GRPO has converged.
Guided Query Refinement: Multimodal Hybrid Retrieval with Test-Time Optimization
Authors: Omri Uzan; Asaf Yehudai; roi pony; Eyal Shnarch; Ariel Gera
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal encoders have pushed the boundaries of visual document retrieval, matching textual tokens directly to image patches and achieving state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks. Recent models relying on this paradigm have massively scaled the dimensionality of their query and document representations, presenting obstacles to deployment and scalability in real-world pipelines.
Furthermore, purely vision-centric approaches may be constrained by the inherent modality gap still exhibited by modern vision-language models. In this work, we connect these challenges to the paradigm of hybrid retrieval, investigating whether a lightweight dense text retriever can enhance a stronger vision-centric model. Existing hybrid methods, which rely on coarse-grained fusion of ranks or scores,
fail to exploit the rich interactions within each model’s representation space. To address this, we introduce Guided Query Refinement (GQR), a novel test-time optimization method that refines a primary retriever’s query embedding using guidance from a complementary retriever’s scores. Through extensive experiments on visual document retrieval benchmarks, we demonstrate that GQR allows ColPali-based models to match the performance of models with significantly larger representations, while being up to 14x faster and requiring 54x less memory. Our findings show that GQR effectively pushes the Pareto frontier for performance and efficiency in multimodal retrieval. We release our code at https://github.com/IBM/test-time-hybrid-retrieval
Matching Multiple Experts: On the Exploitability of Multi-Agent Imitation Learning
Authors: Antoine Bergerault; Volkan Cevher; Negar Mehr
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multi-agent imitation learning (MA-IL) aims to learn optimal policies from expert demonstrations of interactions in multi-agent interactive domains. Despite existing guarantees on the performance of the resulting learned policies, characterizations of how far the learned polices are from a Nash equilibrium are missing for offline MA-IL. In this paper, we demonstrate impossibility and hardness results of learning low-exploitable policies in general $n$-player Markov Games. We do so by providing examples where even exact measure matching fails, and demonstrating a new hardness result on characterizing the Nash gap given a fixed measure matching error. We then show how these challenges can be overcome using strategic dominance assumptions on the expert equilibrium. Specifically, for the case of dominant strategy expert equilibria, assuming Behavioral Cloning error $\epsilon_{\text{BC}}$, this provides a Nash imitation gap of $\mathcal{O}\left(n\epsilon_{\text{BC}}/(1-\gamma)^2\right)$ for a discount factor $\gamma$. We generalize this result with a new notion of best-response continuity, and argue that this is implicitly encouraged by standard regularization techniques.
MASS: MoErging through Adaptive Subspace Selection
Authors: Donato Crisostomi; Alessandro Zirilli; Antonio Andrea Gargiulo; Maria Sofia Bucarelli; Simone Scardapane; Fabrizio Silvestri; Iacopo Masi; Emanuele Rodolà
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Model merging has recently emerged as a lightweight alternative to ensembling, combining multiple fine-tuned models into a single set of parameters with no additional training overhead. Yet, existing merging methods fall short of matching the full accuracy of separately fine-tuned endpoints. We present MASS (MoErging through Adaptive Subspace Selection), a new approach that closes this gap by unifying multiple fine-tuned models while retaining near state-of-the-art performance across tasks. Building on the low-rank decomposition of per-task updates, MASS stores only the most salient singular components for each task and merges them into a shared model. At inference time, a non-parametric, data-free router identifies which subspace (or combination thereof) best explains an input's intermediate features and activates the corresponding task-specific block. This procedure is fully training-free and introduces only a two-pass inference overhead plus a ~2 storage factor compared to a single pretrained model, irrespective of the number of tasks. We evaluate MASS on CLIP-based image classification using ViT-B-16, ViT-B-32 and ViT-L-14 for benchmarks of 8, 14 and 20 tasks respectively, establishing a new state-of-the-art. Most notably, MASS recovers up to ~98% of the average accuracy of individual fine-tuned models, making it a practical alternative to ensembling at a fraction of the storage cost.
Once-More: Continuous Self-Correction for Large Language Models via Perplexity-Guided Intervention
Authors: Jiaxun Gao; Him Wai Ng; Z. Jane Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often experience compounding errors during long text generation. Early mistakes can propagate and lead to drift, faulty reasoning, or repetition. While scaling up models improves capabilities, it requires substantial computational resources, and the resulting self-correction behaviour remains unpredictable at inference time. Self-correction is a promising technique for addressing this issue. However, existing approaches have limitations. Supervised training methods can build self-correcting behaviours into models, but require training data collection and lack cross-domain generalizability. Current post-hoc iterative refinement methods operate only at inference time, but must wait for substantial portions of the draft to be generated before providing feedback. This feedback does not guarantee effective guidance, and the same mistake patterns can still reappear. In this paper, we introduce Once-More, a model-agnostic post-hoc self-correction framework that intervenes during generation. Once-More leverages token-level perplexity and feedback from verifiers to provide continuous guided steering of the generation path through a logit redistribution mechanism. This approach essentially helps accumulate "more correct" steps throughout the generation process. Evaluation on multiple benchmarks demonstrates that Once-More achieves state-of-the-art results compared to other self-correction methods. To our knowledge, Once-More is the first post-hoc method to leverage token perplexity and external feedback to perform continuous guided self-correction.
Label-Free Mitigation of Spurious Correlations in VLMs using Sparse Autoencoders
Authors: Bharat Chandra Yalavarthi; Nalini K. Ratha; Venu Govindaraju
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities across a wide range of tasks and domains. However, their performance is often compromised by learned spurious correlations, which can adversely affect downstream applications. Existing mitigation strategies typically depend on additional data, model retraining, labeled features or classes, domain-specific expertise, or external language models posing scalability and generalization challenges. In contrast, we introduce a fully interpretable, zero-shot method that requires no auxiliary data or external supervision named DIAL (Disentangle, Identify, And Label-free removal). Our approach begins by filtering the representations that might be disproportionately influenced by spurious features, using distributional analysis. We then apply a sparse autoencoder to disentangle the representations and identify the feature directions associated with spurious features. To mitigate their impact, we remove the subspace spanned by these spurious directions from the affected representations. 
Additionally, for cases where prior knowledge of spurious features in a dataset is unknown, we introduce DIAL+ which can detect and mitigate the spurious features. We validate our method through extensive experiments on widely used spurious correlation benchmarks. Results show that our approach consistently outperforms or matches existing baselines in terms of overall accuracy and worst-group performance, offering a scalable and interpretable solution to a persistent challenge in VLMs.
GDPval: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable Tasks
Authors: Tejal Patwardhan; Rachel Dias; Elizabeth Proehl; Grace Kim; Michele Wang; Olivia Watkins; Simon Posada Fishman; Marwan Aljubeh; Phoebe Thacker; Laurance Fauconnet; Natalie S. Kim; Samuel Miserendino; Gildas Chabot; David Li; Patrick Chao; Michael Sharman; Alexandra Barr; Amelia Glaese; Jerry Tworek
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce GDPval, a benchmark evaluating AI model capabilities on real-world economically valuable knowledge-work tasks. GDPval covers the majority of Department of Labor O*NET Work Activities for 44 occupations across the top 9 sectors contributing to U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Tasks are constructed from the representative work of industry professionals with an average of 14 years of experience. We find that frontier model performance on GDPval is improving roughly linearly over time, and that the current best frontier models are approaching industry experts in deliverable quality. We analyze the potential for frontier models, when paired with human oversight, to perform GDPval tasks cheaper and faster than unaided experts. We also demonstrate that increased reasoning effort, increased task context, and increased scaffolding improves model performance on GDPval. Finally, we open-source a gold subset of 220 tasks and provide a public automated grading service to facilitate future research in understanding real-world model capabilities.
Pre-training under infinite compute
Authors: Konwoo Kim; Suhas Kotha; Percy Liang; Tatsunori Hashimoto
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Since compute grows much faster than web text available for language model pre-training, we ask how one should approach pre-training under fixed data and no compute constraints. We first show that existing data-constrained approaches of increasing epoch count and parameter count overfit, and we improve upon such recipes by tuning regularization, finding that the optimal weight decay is $30\times$ larger than standard practice. Since our regularized recipe monotonically decreases loss following a power law in parameter count, we estimate its best possible performance via the \textbf{asymptote} of its scaling law rather than the performance at a fixed compute budget. We then identify that ensembling independently trained models achieves a significantly lower loss asymptote than the regularized recipe. Our best intervention combining epoching, regularization, parameter scaling, and ensemble scaling achieves an asymptote at 200M tokens using $5.17\times$ less data than our baseline, and our data scaling laws predict that this improvement persists at higher token budgets. We find that our data efficiency gains can be realized at smaller parameter counts as we can distill an ensemble into a student model that is 8$\times$ smaller and retains $83$% of the ensembling benefit. Finally, our interventions designed for validation loss generalize to downstream benchmarks, achieving a $9$% improvement for pre-training evals. Our results show that simple algorithmic improvements can enable significantly more data-efficient pre-training in a compute-rich future.
LoopFormer: Elastic-Depth Looped Transformers for Latent Reasoning via Shortcut Modulation
Authors: Ahmadreza Jeddi; Marco Ciccone; Babak Taati
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Looped Transformers have emerged as an efficient and powerful class of models for reasoning in the language domain. Recent studies show that these models achieve strong performance on algorithmic and reasoning tasks, suggesting that looped architectures possess an inductive bias toward latent reasoning. However, prior approaches fix the number of loop iterations during training and inference, leaving open the question of whether these models can flexibly adapt their computational depth under variable compute budgets. We introduce LoopFormer, a looped Transformer trained on variable-length trajectories to enable budget-conditioned reasoning. Our core contribution is a shortcut-consistency training scheme that aligns trajectories of different lengths, ensuring that shorter loops yield informative representations while longer loops continue to refine them. LoopFormer conditions each loop on the current time and step size, enabling representations to evolve consistently across trajectories of varying length rather than drifting or stagnating. Empirically, LoopFormer demonstrates robust performance on language modeling and reasoning benchmarks even under aggressive compute constraints, while scaling gracefully with additional budget. These results show that looped Transformers are inherently suited for adaptive language modeling, opening a path toward controllable and budget-aware large language models.