GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
GAS: Improving Discretization of Diffusion ODEs via Generalized Adversarial Solver
Authors: Aleksandr Oganov; Ilya Bykov; Eva Neudachina; Mishan Aliev; Alexander Tolmachev; Alexander Sidorov; Zuev Aleksandr; Andrey Okhotin; Denis Rakitin; Aibek Alanov
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: While diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art generation quality, they still suffer from computationally expensive sampling. Recent works address this issue with gradient-based optimization methods that distill a few-step ODE diffusion solver from the full sampling process, reducing the number of function evaluations from dozens to just a few. However, these approaches often rely on intricate training techniques and do not explicitly focus on preserving fine-grained details. In this paper, we introduce the Generalized Solver: a simple parameterization of the ODE sampler that does not require additional training tricks and improves quality over existing approaches. We further combine the original distillation loss with adversarial training, which mitigates artifacts and enhances detail fidelity. We call the resulting method the Generalized Adversarial Solver and demonstrate its superior performance compared to existing solver training methods under similar resource constraints.
PoLi-RL: A Point-to-List Reinforcement Learning Framework for Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity
Authors: Zixin Song; Bowen Zhang; Qian-Wen Zhang; di yin; Xing Sun; Chunping Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity (C-STS) measures the semantic proximity between text segments under a specific condition, thereby overcoming the ambiguity inherent in traditional STS. However, existing methods are largely confined to discriminative models, failing to fully leverage recent breakthroughs in the NLP community involving Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is a particularly well-suited paradigm for this task, as it can directly optimize the non-differentiable Spearman ranking metric and guide the reasoning process required by C-STS. Nevertheless, we find that naively applying listwise RL fails to produce meaningful improvements, as the model struggles with complex, coarse-grained reward signals, leading to optimization difficulties. To address this challenge, we introduce PoLi-RL, a novel Point-to-List Reinforcement Learning framework. PoLi-RL employs a two-stage curriculum: it first trains the model with a simple pointwise reward to establish fundamental scoring capabilities, then transitions to a hybrid reward that combines pointwise, pairwise, and listwise objectives to refine the model's ability to discern subtle semantic distinctions. Crucially, we propose an innovative Parallel Slice Ranking Reward (PSRR) mechanism that computes ranking rewards in parallel slices, where each slice consists of completions with the same index from different samples. This provides a precise, differentiated learning signal for each individual completion, enabling granular credit assignment and effective optimization. On the official C-STS benchmark, PoLi-RL achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient of 48.18, establishing a new SOTA for the cross-encoder architecture. Furthermore, PoLi-RL also maintains SOTA status on the re-annotated C-STS dataset, confirming its robust generalization capabilities. As the first work to successfully apply RL to C-STS, our study introduces a powerful paradigm for aligning LLMs for complex, ranking-based conditional judgment tasks. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/ZBWpro/PoLi-RL.
SuperF: Neural Implicit Fields for Multi-Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Sander Riisøen Jyhne; Christian Igel; Morten Goodwin; Per-Arne Andersen; Serge Belongie; Nico Lang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: High-resolution imagery is often hindered by limitations in sensor technology, atmospheric conditions, and costs. Such challenges occur in satellite remote sensing, but also with handheld cameras, such as our smartphones. Hence, super-resolution aims to enhance the image resolution algorithmically. Since single-image super-resolution requires to solve an inverse problem, such methods must exploit strong priors, e.g. learned from high-resolution training data, or be constrained by auxiliary data, e.g. by a high-resolution guide from another modality. While qualitatively pleasing, such approaches often lead to "hallucinated" structures that do not match reality. In contrast, multi-image super-resolution (MISR) aims to improve the (optical) resolution by constraining the super-resolution process with multiple views taken with sub-pixel shifts. Here, we propose SuperF, a test-time optimization approach for MISR that leverages coordinate-based neural networks, also called neural fields. Their ability to represent continuous signals with an implicit neural representation (INR) makes them an ideal fit for the MISR task. The key characteristic of our approach is to share an INR for multiple shifted low-resolution frames and to jointly optimize the frame alignment with the INR. Our approach advances related INR baselines, adopted from burst fusion for layer separation, by directly parameterizing the sub-pixel alignment as optimizable affine transformation parameters and by optimizing via a super-sampled coordinate grid that corresponds to the output resolution. Our experiments yield compelling results on simulated bursts of satellite imagery and ground-level images from handheld cameras, with upsampling factors of up to 8. A key advantage of SuperF is that this approach does not rely on any high-resolution training data.
In-Place Test-Time Training
Authors: Guhao Feng; Shengjie Luo; Kai Hua; Ge Zhang; Wenhao Huang; Di He; Tianle Cai
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: The static "train then deploy" paradigm fundamentally limits Large Language Models (LLMs) from dynamically adapting their weights in response to continuous streams of new information inherent in real-world tasks. Test-Time Training (TTT) offers a compelling alternative by updating a subset of model parameters (fast weights) at inference time, yet its potential in the current LLM ecosystem is hindered by critical barriers including architectural incompatibility, computational inefficiency and misaligned fast weight objectives for language modeling. In this work, we introduce **In-Place Test-Time Training (In-Place TTT)**, a framework that seamlessly endows LLMs with Test-Time Training ability. In-Place TTT treats the final projection matrix of the ubiquitous MLP blocks as its adaptable fast weights, enabling a ``drop-in" enhancement for LLMs without costly retraining from scratch. Furthermore, we replace TTT's generic reconstruction objective with a tailored, theoretically-grounded objective explicitly aligned with the Next-Token-Prediction task governing autoregressive language modeling. This principled objective, combined with an efficient chunk-wise update mechanism, results in a highly scalable algorithm compatible with context parallelism. Extensive experiments validate our framework's effectiveness: as an in-place enhancement, it enables a 4B-parameter model to achieve superior performance on tasks with contexts up to 128k, and when pretrained from scratch, it consistently outperforms competitive TTT-related approaches. Ablation study results further provide deeper insights on our design choices. Collectively, our results establish In-Place TTT as a promising step towards a paradigm of continual learning in LLMs.
Cut Less, Fold More: Model Compression through the Lens of Projection Geometry
Authors: Olga Saukh; Dong Wang; Haris Šikić; Yun Cheng; Lothar Thiele
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Compressing neural networks without retraining is vital for deployment at scale. We study calibration-free compression through the lens of projection geometry: structured pruning is an axis-aligned projection, whereas model folding performs a low-rank projection via weight clustering. We formalize both as orthogonal operators and show that, within a rank distance of one, folding provably yields smaller parameter reconstruction error, and under mild smoothness assumptions, smaller functional perturbations than pruning. At scale, we evaluate >1'000 checkpoints spanning ResNet18, PreActResNet18, ViT-B/32, and CLIP ViT-B/32 on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1K, covering diverse training hyperparameters (optimizers, learning rates, augmentations, regularization, sharpness-aware training). We show that folding typically achieves higher post-compression accuracy, with the largest gains at moderate–high compression. The gap narrows and occasionally reverses at specific training setups. Our results position folding as a geometry-aware, calibration-free alternative to pruning that is often superior in practice and principled in theory.
Seeing Through the PRISM: Compound & Controllable Restoration of Scientific Images
Authors: Rupa Kurinchi-Vendhan; Pratyusha Sharma; Antonio Torralba; Sara Beery
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Scientific and environmental imagery often suffer from complex mixtures of noise related to the sensor and the environment. Existing restoration methods typically remove one degradation at a time, leading to cascading artifacts, overcorrection, or loss of meaningful signal. In scientific applications, restoration must be able to simultaneously handle compound degradations while allowing experts to selectively remove subsets of distortions without erasing important features. To address these challenges, we present PRISM (Precision Restoration with Interpretable Separation of Mixtures). PRISM is a prompted conditional diffusion framework which combines compound-aware supervision over mixed degradations with a weighted contrastive disentanglement objective that aligns primitives and their mixtures in the latent space. This compositional geometry enables high-fidelity joint removal of overlapping distortions while also allowing flexible, targeted fixes through natural language prompts. Across microscopy, wildlife monitoring, remote sensing, and urban weather datasets, PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on complex compound degradations, including zero-shot mixtures not seen during training. Importantly, we show that selective restoration significantly improves downstream scientific accuracy in several domains over standard ``black-box'' restoration. These results establish PRISM as a generalizable and controllable framework for high-fidelity restoration in domains where scientific utility is a priority.
Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models via Intermediate Distribution Shaping
Authors: Gautham Govind Anil; Shaan Ul Haque; Nithish Kannen; Dheeraj Mysore Nagaraj; Sanjay Shakkottai; Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Diffusion models are widely used for generative tasks across domains. Given a pre-trained diffusion model, it is often desirable to fine-tune it further either to correct for errors in learning or to align with downstream applications. Towards this, we examine the effect of shaping the distribution at intermediate noise levels induced by diffusion models. First, we show that existing variants of Rejection sAmpling based Fine-Tuning (RAFT), which we unify as GRAFT, can implicitly perform KL regularized reward maximization with reshaped rewards. Motivated by this observation, we introduce P-GRAFT to shape distributions at intermediate noise levels and demonstrate empirically that this can lead to more effective fine-tuning. We mathematically explain this via a bias-variance tradeoff. Next, we look at correcting learning errors in pre-trained flow models based on the developed mathematical framework. In particular, we propose inverse noise correction, a novel algorithm to improve the quality of pre-trained flow models without explicit rewards. We empirically evaluate our methods on text-to-image(T2I) generation, layout generation, molecule generation and unconditional image generation. Notably, our framework, applied to Stable Diffusion v2, improves over policy gradient methods on popular T2I benchmarks in terms of VQAScore and shows an 8.81% relative improvement over the base model. For unconditional image generation, inverse noise correction improves FID of generated images at lower FLOPs/image.
FragFM: Hierarchical Framework for Efficient Molecule Generation via Fragment-Level Discrete Flow Matching
Authors: Joongwon Lee; Seonghwan Kim; Seokhyun Moon; Hyunwoo Kim; Woo Youn Kim
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce FragFM, a novel hierarchical framework via fragment-level discrete flow matching for efficient molecular graph generation. FragFM generates molecules at the fragment level, leveraging a coarse-to-fine autoencoder to reconstruct details at the atom level. Together with a stochastic fragment bag strategy to effectively handle a large fragment space, our framework enables more efficient, scalable molecular generation. We demonstrate that our fragment-based approach achieves better property control than the atom-based method and additional flexibility through conditioning the fragment bag. We also propose a Natural Product Generation benchmark (NPGen) to evaluate the ability of modern molecular graph generative models to generate natural product-like molecules. Since natural products are biologically prevalidated and differ from typical drug-like molecules, our benchmark provides a more challenging yet meaningful evaluation relevant to drug discovery. We conduct a comparative study of FragFM against various models on diverse molecular generation benchmarks, including NPGen, demonstrating superior performance. The results highlight the potential of fragment-based generative modeling for large-scale, property-aware molecular design, paving the way for more efficient exploration of chemical space.
RAIN-Merging: A Gradient-Free Method to Enhance Instruction Following in Large Reasoning Models with Preserved Thinking Format
Authors: Zhehao Huang; Yuhang Liu; Baijiong Lin; Yixin Lou; Zhengbao He; Hanling Tian; Tao Li; Xiaolin Huang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) excel at a long chain of reasoning but often fail to faithfully follow instructions regarding output format, constraints, or specific requirements. We investigate whether this gap can be closed by integrating an instruction-tuned model (ITM) into an LRM. Analyzing their differences in parameter space, namely task vectors, we find that their principal subspaces are nearly orthogonal across key modules, suggesting a lightweight merging with minimal interference. However, we also demonstrate that naïve merges are fragile because they overlook the output format mismatch between LRMs (with explicit *thinking* and *response* segments) and ITMs (answers-only). We introduce **RAIN-Merging** (Reasoning-Aware Instruction-attention guided Null-space projection Merging), a gradient-free method that integrates instruction following while preserving thinking format and reasoning performance. First, with a small reasoning calibration set, we project the ITM task vector onto the null space of forward features at thinking special tokens, which preserves the LRM's structured reasoning mechanisms. Second, using a small instruction calibration set, we estimate instruction attention to derive module-specific scaling that amplifies instruction-relevant components and suppresses leakage. Across four instruction-following benchmarks and nine reasoning & general capability benchmarks, RAIN-Merging substantially improves instruction adherence while maintaining reasoning quality. The gains are consistent across model scales and architectures, translating to improved performance in agent settings.
Adaptive Acquisition Selection for Bayesian Optimization with Large Language Models
Authors: Giang Ngo; Dat Phan Trong; Dang Nguyen; Sunil Gupta; Svetha Venkatesh
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Bayesian Optimization critically depends on the choice of acquisition function, but no single strategy is universally optimal; the best choice is non-stationary and problem-dependent. 
Existing adaptive portfolio methods often base their decisions on past function values while ignoring richer information like remaining budget or surrogate model characteristics. 
To address this, we introduce LMABO, a novel framework that casts a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) as a zero-shot, online strategist for the BO process. 
At each iteration, LMABO uses a structured state representation to prompt the LLM to select the most suitable acquisition function from a diverse portfolio.
In an evaluation across 50 benchmark problems, LMABO demonstrates a significant performance improvement over strong static, adaptive portfolio, and other LLM-based baselines. 
We show that the LLM's behavior is a comprehensive strategy that adapts to real-time progress, proving its advantage stems from its ability to process and synthesize the complete optimization state into an effective, adaptive policy.
Stretching Beyond the Obvious: A Gradient-Free Framework to Unveil the Hidden Landscape of Visual Invariance
Authors: Lorenzo Tausani; Paolo Muratore; Morgan Bruce Talbot; Giacomo Amerio; Gabriel Kreiman; Davide Zoccolan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Uncovering which feature combinations are encoded by visual units is critical to understanding how images are transformed into representations that support recognition. While existing feature visualization approaches typically infer a unit's most exciting images, this is insufficient to reveal the manifold of transformations under which responses remain invariant, which is critical to generalization in vision.
Here we introduce Stretch-and-Squeeze (SnS), an unbiased, model-agnostic, and gradient-free framework to systematically characterize a unit’s maximally invariant stimuli, and its vulnerability to adversarial perturbations, in both biological and artificial visual systems. SnS frames these transformations as bi-objective optimization problems. To probe invariance, SnS seeks image perturbations that maximally alter (stretch) the representation of a reference stimulus in a given processing stage while preserving unit activation downstream (squeeze). To probe adversarial sensitivity, stretching and squeezing are reversed to maximally perturb unit activation while minimizing changes to the upstream representation.
Applied to CNNs, SnS revealed invariant transformations that were farther from a reference image in pixel-space than those produced by affine transformations, while more strongly preserving the target unit's response. The discovered invariant images differed depending on the stage of the image representation used for optimization: pixel-level changes primarily affected luminance and contrast, while stretching mid- and late-layer representations mainly altered texture and pose. 
By measuring how well the hierarchical invariant images obtained for $L_2$-robust (i.e., adversarially trained) networks were classified by humans and other observer networks, we discovered a substantial drop in their interpretability when the representation was stretched in deep layers, while the opposite trend was found for standard (i.e., not robustified) models. This indicates that $L_2$ adversarial training fails to increase the interpretability of high-level invariances, despite good perceptual alignment between humans and robustified models at the pixel level. This demonstrates how SnS can be used as a powerful new tool to measure the alignment between artificial and biological vision.
Beyond Hearing: Learning Task-Agnostic ExG Representations from Earphones via Physiology-Informed Tokenization
Authors: Hyungjun Yoon; Seungjoo Lee; Yu Wu; XiaoMeng Chen; Taiting Lu; Freddy Yifei Liu; Taeckyung Lee; Hyeongheon Cha; Haochen Zhao; Gaoteng Zhao; Dongyao Chen; Cecilia Mascolo; Sung-Ju Lee; Lili Qiu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Electrophysiological (ExG) signals offer valuable insights into human physiology, yet building foundation models that generalize across everyday tasks remains challenging due to two key limitations: (i) insufficient data diversity, as most ExG recordings are collected in controlled labs with bulky, expensive devices; and (ii) task-specific model designs that require tailored processing (i.e., targeted frequency filters) and architectures, which limit generalization across tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce an approach for scalable, task-agnostic ExG monitoring in the wild. We collected 50 hours of unobtrusive free-living ExG data with an earphone-based hardware prototype to narrow the data diversity gap. At the core of our approach is Physiology-informed Multi-band Tokenization (PiMT), which decomposes ExG signals into 12 physiology-informed tokens, followed by a reconstruction task to learn robust representations. This enables adaptive feature recognition across the full frequency spectrum while capturing task-relevant information. Experiments on our new DailySense dataset—the first to enable ExG-based analysis across five human senses—together with four public ExG benchmarks, demonstrate that PiMT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks.
Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Fine-Grained Image Tasks: A Comprehensive Evaluation
Authors: Hongtao Yu; Yuxin Peng; Serge Belongie; Xiu-Shen Wei
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal perception capabilities, garnering significant attention. While numerous evaluation studies have emerged, assessing LVLMs both holistically and on specialized tasks, fine-grained image tasks—fundamental to computer vision—remain largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce a comprehensive fine-grained evaluation benchmark, i.e., FG-BMK, comprising 1.01 million questions and 0.28 million images. Our evaluation systematically examines LVLMs from both human-oriented and machine-oriented perspectives, focusing on their semantic recognition and fine-grained feature representation capabilities. Through extensive experiments on twelve representative LVLMs/VLMs, we uncover key findings regarding the influence of training paradigms, modality alignment, perturbation susceptibility, and fine-grained category reasoning on task performance. This work provides critical insights into the limitations of current LVLMs and offers guidance for future data construction and model design in the development of more advanced LVLMs. Our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/SEU-VIPGroup/FG-BMK.
Learning Brain Representation with Hierarchical Visual Embeddings
Authors: Jiawen Zheng; Haonan Jia; MING LI; Yuhui Zheng; Yufeng Zeng; Yang Gao; Chen Liang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Decoding visual representations from brain signals has attracted significant attention in both neuroscience and artificial intelligence. However, the degree to which brain signals truly encode visual information remains unclear. Current visual decoding approaches explore various brain–image alignment strategies, yet most emphasize high-level semantic features while neglecting pixel-level details, thereby limiting our understanding of the human visual system.
In this paper, we propose a brain–image alignment strategy that leverages multiple pre-trained visual encoders with distinct inductive biases to capture hierarchical and multiscale visual representations, while employing a contrastive learning objective to achieve effective alignment between brain signals and visual embeddings. Furthermore, we introduce a Fusion Prior, which learns a stable mapping on large-scale visual data and subsequently matches brain features to this pre-trained prior, thereby enhancing distributional consistency across modalities. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a favorable balance between retrieval accuracy and reconstruction fidelity.