GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
LingoLoop Attack: Trapping MLLMs via Linguistic Context and State Entrapment into Endless Loops
Authors: Jiyuan Fu; Kaixun Jiang; Lingyi Hong; Jinglun Li; HaiJing Guo; Dingkang Yang; Zhaoyu Chen; Wenqiang Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown great promise but require substantial computational resources during inference. Attackers can exploit this by inducing excessive output, leading to resource exhaustion and service degradation. Prior energy-latency attacks aim to increase generation time by broadly shifting the output token distribution away from the EOS token, but they neglect the influence of token-level Part-of-Speech (POS) characteristics on EOS and sentence-level structural patterns on output counts, limiting their efficacy. To address this, we propose \textbf{LingoLoop}, an attack designed to induce MLLMs to generate excessively verbose and repetitive sequences. First, we find that the POS tag of a token strongly affects the likelihood of generating an EOS token. Based on this insight, we propose a \textbf{POS-Aware Delay Mechanism} to postpone EOS token generation by adjusting attention weights guided by POS information. Second, we identify that constraining output diversity to induce repetitive loops is effective for sustained generation. We introduce a \textbf{Generative Path Pruning Mechanism} that limits the magnitude of hidden states, encouraging the model to produce persistent loops. Extensive experiments on models like Qwen2.5-VL-3B demonstrate LingoLoop's powerful ability to trap them in generative loops; it consistently drives them to their generation limits and, when those limits are relaxed, can induce outputs with up to \textbf{367$\times$} more tokens than clean inputs, triggering a commensurate surge in energy consumption. These findings expose significant MLLMs' vulnerabilities, posing challenges for their reliable deployment.
Reinforced Latent Reasoning for LLM-based Recommendation
Authors: Yang Zhang; Wenxin Xu; Xiaoyan Zhao; Wenjie Wang; Fuli Feng; Xiangnan He; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks, sparking growing interest in their application to preference reasoning in recommendation systems. Existing methods typically rely on fine-tuning with explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) data. However, these methods face significant practical limitations due to (1) the difficulty of obtaining high-quality CoT data in recommendation and (2) the high inference latency caused by generating CoT reasoning. 
In this work, we explore an alternative approach that shifts from explicit CoT reasoning to compact, information-dense latent reasoning. This approach eliminates the need for explicit CoT generation and improves inference efficiency, as few latent tokens can effectively capture the entire reasoning process. 
Building on this idea, we propose \textit{\underline{R}einforced \underline{Latent} \underline{R}easoning for \underline{R}ecommendation} (LatentR$^3$), a novel end-to-end training framework that leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize latent reasoning without relying on any CoT data.
LatentR$^3$ adopts a two-stage training strategy: first, supervised fine-tuning to initialize the latent reasoning module, followed by pure RL training to encourage exploration through a rule-based reward design. Our RL implementation is based on a modified GRPO algorithm, which reduces computational overhead during training and introduces continuous reward signals for more efficient learning.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that LatentR$^3$ enables effective latent reasoning without any direct supervision of the reasoning process, significantly improving performance when integrated with different LLM-based recommendation methods. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/xuwenxinedu/R3} .
Learning with Dual-level Noisy Correspondence for Multi-modal Entity Alignment
Authors: Haobin Li; Yijie Lin; Peng Hu; Mouxing Yang; Xi Peng
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities across heterogeneous multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs), where each entity is described by attributes from various modalities. Existing methods typically assume that both intra-entity and inter-graph correspondences are faultless, which is often violated in real-world MMKGs due to the reliance on expert annotations. In this paper, we reveal and study a highly practical yet under-explored problem in MMEA, termed Dual-level Noisy Correspondence (DNC).
DNC refers to misalignments in both intra-entity (entity-attribute) and inter-graph (entity-entity and attribute-attribute) correspondences. To address the DNC problem, we propose a robust MMEA framework termed RULE. RULE first estimates the reliability of both intra-entity and inter-graph correspondences via a dedicated two-fold principle. Leveraging the estimated reliabilities, RULE mitigates the negative impact of intra-entity noise during attribute fusion and prevents overfitting to noisy inter-graph correspondences during inter-graph discrepancy elimination. Beyond the training-time designs, RULE further incorporates a correspondence reasoning module that uncovers the underlying attribute-attribute connection across graphs, guaranteeing more accurate equivalent entity identification. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our method against DNC compared with seven state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/2026-ICLR-RULE.
AutoDV: An End-to-End Deep Learning Model for High-Dimensional Data Visualization
Authors: Wei Dai; Jicong Fan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: High-dimensional data visualization (HDV) plays an important role in data science and engineering applications. Traditional HDV methods, such as Autoencoder and t-SNE, require hyper-parameter tuning and iterative optimization on every dataset and cannot effectively utilize the knowledge from historical low-dimension representation, which lowers the efficiency, convenience, and accuracy in real applications. In this paper, we present AutoDV, an end-to-end deep learning model, for high-dimensional data visualization. AutoDV is built upon a graph transformer network and an invariant loss function and is trained on a number of diverse datasets converted into multi-weight graphs. Given a new dataset, AutoDV outputs the 2D or 3D embeddings of all data points directly. AutoDV has the following merits: 1) There is no hyper-parameter selection during the data visualization stage; 2) The end-to-end model avoids re-training or iterative optimization when visualizing data; 3) The input dataset can have any number of features and can be from any domain. Our experiments show that AutoDV can successfully generalize to unseen datasets without retraining with 89.37\% precision of t-SNE and 91.05\% precision of UMAP on the unseen CIFAR10 datasets. Compared with existing parametric data visualization deep models, our method obtains a significant improvement with 86.65\% precision gain. AutoDV can perform even better than t-SNE and UMAP on gene and UCI tabular datasets. The project is available at https://github.com/DryDew/AutoDV.
GNN Explanations that do not Explain and How to find Them
Authors: Steve Azzolin; Stefano Teso; Bruno Lepri; Andrea Passerini; Sagar Malhotra
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Explanations provided by Self-explainable Graph Neural Networks (SE-GNNs) are fundamental for understanding the model's inner workings and for identifying potential misuse of sensitive attributes.
Although recent works have highlighted that these explanations can be suboptimal and potentially misleading, a characterization of their failure cases is unavailable.
In this work, we identify a critical failure of SE-GNN explanations: *explanations can be unambiguously unrelated to how the SE-GNNs infer labels.*
We show that, on the one hand, many SE-GNNs can achieve optimal true risk while producing these degenerate explanations, and on the other, most faithfulness metrics can fail to identify these failure modes.
Our empirical analysis reveals that degenerate explanations can be maliciously planted (allowing an attacker to hide the use of sensitive attributes) and can also emerge naturally, highlighting the need for reliable auditing.
To address this, we introduce a novel faithfulness metric that reliably marks degenerate explanations as unfaithful, in both malicious and natural settings.
Our code is available on [GitHub](https://github.com/steveazzolin/gnn_deg_expl).
Pinet: Optimizing hard-constrained neural networks with orthogonal projection layers
Authors: Panagiotis D. Grontas; Antonio Terpin; Efe C. Balta; Raffaello D'Andrea; John Lygeros
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: We introduce an output layer for neural networks that ensures satisfaction of convex constraints. Our approach, $\Pi$net, leverages operator splitting for rapid and reliable projections in the forward pass, and the implicit function theorem for backpropagation. We deploy $\Pi$net as a feasible-by-design optimization proxy for parametric constrained optimization problems and obtain modest-accuracy
solutions faster than traditional solvers when solving a single problem, and significantly faster for a batch of problems. 
We surpass state-of-the-art learning approaches by orders of magnitude in terms of training time, solution quality, and robustness to hyperparameter tuning, while maintaining similar inference times. Finally, we tackle multi-vehicle motion planning with non-convex trajectory preferences and provide $\Pi$net as a GPU-ready package implemented in JAX.
Ghost in the Cloud: Your Geo-Distributed Large Language Models Training is Easily Manipulated
Authors: Zichen TANG; Zhenheng Tang; Gaoning Pan; Buhua Liu; Xin He; Kunfeng Lai; Xiaowen Chu; Bo Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Geo-distributed training and Federated Learning (FL) provide viable solutions to address the substantial data and computational resource needs associated with training large language models (LLMs). However, we empirically demonstrate that a single adversarial participant can significantly compromise the safety alignment of LLMs through malicious training, exposing serious security risks.
We identify two existing server-side defense strategies that effectively counter naive jailbreak attacks—Task Performance Check (TPC), which filters out model updates with low downstream performance, and Malicious Output Scrutiny (MOS), which detects harmful outputs by prompting uploaded models with malicious queries.
To evade both defenses, we design a trigger-based jailbreak variant that preserves downstream performance using a novel regularization method to limit the excessive model updates on jailbreak datasets. We further conceal malicious triggers by mixing the malicious dataset with pseudo-contrastive safety-aligned answers to maintain the original safety alignment.
Experiments on three widely-used safety-aligned LLMs show that a single adversarial participant can implant triggers into the global model without degrading downstream performance, achieving an 80\% attack success rate (ASR) with a 7\% low detection true rate (DTR).
ParaRNN: Unlocking Parallel Training of Nonlinear RNNs for Large Language Models
Authors: Federico Danieli; Pau Rodriguez; Miguel Sarabia; Xavier Suau; Luca Zappella
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) laid the foundation for sequence modeling, but their intrinsic sequential nature restricts parallel computation, creating a fundamental barrier to scaling. This has led to the dominance of parallelizable architectures like Transformers and, more recently, State Space Models (SSMs). While SSMs achieve efficient parallelization through structured linear recurrences, this linearity constraint limits their expressive power and precludes modeling complex, nonlinear sequence-wise dependencies.
To address this, we present ParaRNN, a framework that breaks the sequence-parallelization barrier for nonlinear RNNs. Building on prior work, we cast the sequence of nonlinear recurrence relationships as a single system of equations, which we solve in parallel using Newton's iterations combined with custom parallel reductions. Our implementation achieves speedups of up to $665\times$ over na\"ive sequential application, allowing training nonlinear RNNs at unprecedented scales. To showcase this, we apply ParaRNN to adaptations of LSTM and GRU architectures, successfully training models of 7B parameters that attain perplexity comparable to similarly-sized Transformers and Mamba2 architectures.
To accelerate research in efficient sequence modeling, we release the ParaRNN codebase as an open-source framework for automatic training-parallelization of nonlinear RNNs, enabling researchers and practitioners to explore new nonlinear RNN models at scale.
Capability-Based Scaling Trends for LLM-Based Red-Teaming
Authors: Alexander Panfilov; Paul Kassianik; Maksym Andriushchenko; Jonas Geiping
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: As large language models grow in capability and agency, identifying vulnerabilities through red-teaming becomes vital for safe deployment. However, traditional prompt-engineering approaches may prove ineffective once red-teaming turns into a \emph{weak-to-strong} problem, where target models surpass red-teamers in capabilities. To study this shift, we frame red-teaming through the lens of the \emph{capability gap} between attacker and target. We evaluate more than 600 attacker-target pairs using LLM-based jailbreak attacks that mimic human red-teamers across diverse families, sizes, and capability levels.  Three strong trends emerge: (i) more capable models are better attackers, (ii) attack success drops sharply once the target’s capability exceeds the attacker's, and (iii) attack success rates correlate with high performance on social science splits of the MMLU-Pro benchmark. From these observations, we derive a \emph{jailbreaking scaling curve} that predicts attack success for a fixed target based on attacker-target capability gap. These findings suggest that fixed-capability attackers (e.g., humans) may become ineffective against future models, increasingly capable open-source models amplify risks for existing systems, and model providers must accurately measure and control models' persuasive and manipulative abilities to limit their effectiveness as attackers.
Fast Frank–Wolfe Algorithms with Adaptive Bregman Step-Size for Weakly Convex Functions
Authors: Shota Takahashi; Sebastian Pokutta; Akiko Takeda
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We propose Frank–Wolfe (FW) algorithms with an adaptive Bregman step-size strategy for smooth adaptable (also called: relatively smooth) (weakly-) convex functions. This means that the gradient of the objective function is not necessarily Lipschitz continuous, and we only require the smooth adaptable property. Compared with existing FW algorithms, our assumptions are less restrictive. We establish convergence guarantees in various settings, including convergence rates ranging from sublinear to linear, depending on the assumptions for convex and nonconvex objective functions. Assuming that the objective function is weakly convex and satisfies the local quadratic growth condition, we provide both local sublinear and local linear convergence with respect to the primal gap. We also propose a variant of the away-step FW algorithm using Bregman distances over polytopes. We establish faster global convergence (up to a linear rate) for convex optimization under the Hölder error bound condition and local linear convergence for nonconvex optimization under the local quadratic growth condition. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed FW algorithms outperform existing methods.
Preserve and Personalize: Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Distributional Drift
Authors: Gihoon Kim; Hyungjin Park; Taesup Kim
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Personalizing text-to-image diffusion models involves integrating novel visual concepts from a small set of reference images while retaining the model’s original generative capabilities. However, this process often leads to overfitting, where the model ignores the user’s prompt and merely replicates the reference images. We attribute this issue to a fundamental misalignment between the true goals of personalization, which are subject fidelity and text alignment, and the training objectives of existing methods that fail to enforce both objectives simultaneously. Specifically, prior approaches often overlook the need to explicitly preserve the pretrained model’s output distribution, resulting in distributional drift that undermines diversity and coherence. To resolve these challenges, we introduce a Lipschitz-based regularization objective that constrains parameter updates during personalization, ensuring bounded deviation from the original distribution. This promotes consistency with the pretrained model’s behavior while enabling accurate adaptation to new concepts. Furthermore, our method offers a computationally efficient alternative to commonly used, resource-intensive sampling techniques. Through extensive experiments across diverse diffusion model architectures, we demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance in both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations, consistently excelling in visual fidelity and prompt adherence. We further support these findings with comprehensive analyses, including ablation studies and visualizations.
Pairwise is Not Enough: Hypergraph Neural Networks for Multi-Agent Pathfinding
Authors: Rishabh Jain; Keisuke Okumura; Michael Amir; Pietro Lio; Amanda Prorok
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a representative multi-agent coordination problem, where multiple agents are required to navigate to their respective goals without collisions. Solving MAPF optimally is known to be NP-hard, leading to the adoption of learning-based approaches to alleviate the online computational burden. Prevailing approaches, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are typically constrained to *pairwise* message passing between agents. However, this limitation leads to suboptimal behaviours and critical issues, such as attention dilution, particularly in dense environments where group (i.e. beyond just two agents) coordination is most critical. Despite the importance of such higher-order interactions, existing approaches have not been able to fully explore them. To address this representational bottleneck, we introduce HMAGAT (Hypergraph Multi-Agent Attention Network), a novel architecture that leverages attentional mechanisms over directed hypergraphs to explicitly capture group dynamics. Empirically, HMAGAT establishes a new state-of-the-art among learning-based MAPF solvers: e.g., despite having just 1M parameters and being trained on 100$\times$ less data, it outperforms the current SoTA 85M parameter model. Through detailed analysis of HMAGAT's attention values, we demonstrate how hypergraph representations mitigate the attention dilution inherent in GNNs and capture complex interactions where pairwise methods fail. Our results illustrate that appropriate inductive biases are often more critical than the training data size or sheer parameter count for multi-agent problems.
DriveAgent-R1: Advancing VLM-based Autonomous Driving with Active Perception and Hybrid Thinking
Authors: Weicheng Zheng; Xiaofei Mao; Nanfei Ye; Pengxiang Li; Kun Zhan; XianPeng Lang; Hang Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The advent of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced end-to-end autonomous driving, demonstrating powerful reasoning abilities for high-level behavior planning tasks. However, existing methods are often constrained by a passive perception paradigm, relying solely on text-based reasoning. This passivity restricts the model’s capacity to actively seek crucial visual evidence when faced with uncertainty. To address this, we introduce DriveAgent-R1, an autonomous driving agent capable of active perception for planning. In complex scenarios, DriveAgent-R1 proactively invokes tools to perform visual reasoning, firmly grounding its decisions in visual evidence, thereby enhancing both interpretability and reliability. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid thinking framework, inspired by human driver cognitive patterns, allowing the agent to adaptively switch between efficient text-only reasoning and robust tool-augmented visual reasoning based on scene complexity. This capability is cultivated through a three-stage progressive training strategy, featuring a core Cascaded Reinforcement Learning (Cascaded RL) phase. Extensive experiments on the Drive-Internal dataset, which is rich in long-tail scenarios, and the public nuScenes dataset show that, with only 3B parameters, DriveAgent-R1 achieves competitive performance comparable to top closed model systems such as GPT-5 and to human driving proficiency while remaining deployment-friendly, offering a proven path toward building more intelligent autonomous driving systems.
Topological Flow Matching
Authors: Kacper Wyrwal; Ismail Ilkan Ceylan; Alexander Tong
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Flow matching is a powerful generative modeling framework, valued for its simplicity and strong empirical performance. However, its standard formulation treats signals on structured spaces---such as fMRI data on brain graphs---as points in Euclidean space, overlooking the rich topological features of their domains. To address this, we introduce \emph{topological flow matching}, a topology-aware generalization of flow matching. We interpret flow matching as a framework for solving a degenerate Schrödinger bridge problem and inject topological information by augmenting the reference process with a Laplacian-derived drift. This principled modification captures the structure of the underlying domain while preserving the desirable properties of flow matching: a stable, simulation-free objective and deterministic sample paths. As a result, our framework serves as a plug-and-play replacement for standard flow matching. We demonstrate its effectiveness on diverse structured datasets, including brain fMRIs, ocean currents, seismic events, and traffic flows.
Topology-Preserved Auto-regressive Mesh Generation in the Manner of Weaving Silk
Authors: Gaochao Song; Zibo Zhao; Haohan Weng; Jingbo Zeng; Rongfei Jia; Shenghua Gao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Existing auto-regressive mesh generation approaches suffer from ineffective topology preservation, which is crucial for practical applications. 
This limitation stems from previous mesh tokenization methods treating meshes as simple collections of equivalent triangles, lacking awareness of the overall topological structure during generation. To address this issue, we propose a novel mesh tokenization algorithm that provides a canonical topological framework through vertex layering and ordering, ensuring critical geometric properties including manifoldness, watertightness, face normal consistency, and part awareness in the generated meshes. Measured by Compression Ratio and Bits-per-face, we also achieved state-of-the-art compression efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce an online non-manifold data processing algorithm and a training resampling strategy to expand the scale of trainable dataset and avoid costly manual data curation.
Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing not only intricate mesh generation but also significantly improved geometric integrity.