GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
xRFM: Accurate, scalable, and interpretable feature learning models for tabular data
Authors: Daniel Beaglehole; David Holzmüller; Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan; Mikhail Belkin
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Inference from tabular data, collections of continuous and categorical variables organized into matrices, is a foundation for modern technology and science. Yet, in contrast to the explosive changes in the rest of AI, the best practice for these predictive tasks has been relatively unchanged and is still primarily based on variations of Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs). Very recently, there has been renewed interest in developing state-of-the-art methods for tabular data based on recent developments in neural networks and feature learning methods.  In this work, we introduce xRFM, an algorithm that combines feature learning kernel machines with a tree structure to both adapt to the local structure of the data and scale to essentially unlimited amounts of training data. We show that compared to $31$ other methods, including recently introduced tabular foundation models (TabPFN-v2) and GBDTs,  xRFM achieves best performance across $100$ regression datasets and is competitive to the best methods across $200$ classification datasets outperforming GBDTs. Additionally, xRFM provides  interpretability natively through the Average Gradient Outer Product.
ProTDyn: A Foundation Protein Language Model for Thermodynamics and Dynamics Generation
Authors: Yikai Liu; Haoyang Zheng; Lining Mao; Yanbin Wang; Ming Chen; Guang Lin
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation has long been the principal computational tool for exploring protein conformational landscapes, but its application is limited by high computational cost. We present ProTDyn, a foundation protein language model that unifies conformational ensemble generation and multi-timescale dynamics modeling within a single framework. Unlike prior approaches that treat these tasks separately, ProTDyn allows flexible i.i.d ensemble sampling and dynamic trajectory simulation. Across diverse protein systems, ProTDyn yields thermodynamically consistent ensembles, faithfully reproduces dynamical properties over multiple timescales, and generalizes to proteins beyond its training data—offering a scalable and efficient alternative to conventional MD simulations.
Watermark-based Attribution of AI-Generated Content
Authors: Zhengyuan Jiang; Moyang Guo; Yuepeng Hu; Yupu Wang; Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Several companies have deployed watermark-based detection to identify AI-generated content. However, attribution--the ability to trace back to the user of a generative AI (GenAI) service who created the given AI-generated content--remains largely unexplored despite its growing importance. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by conducting the first systematic study on watermark-based, user-level attribution of AI-generated content. Our key idea is to assign a unique watermark to each user of the GenAI service and embed this watermark into the AI-generated content created by that user. Attribution is then performed by identifying the user whose watermark best matches the one extracted from the given content. This approach, however, faces a key challenge: How should watermarks be selected for users to maximize attribution performance? To address the challenge, we first theoretically derive lower bounds on detection and attribution performance through rigorous probabilistic analysis for any given set of user watermarks. Then, we select watermarks for users to maximize these lower bounds, thereby optimizing detection and attribution performance. Our theoretical and empirical results show that watermark-based attribution inherits both the accuracy and (non-)robustness properties of the underlying watermark. Specifically, attribution remains highly accurate when the watermarked AI-generated content is either not post-processed or subjected to common post-processing such as JPEG compression, as well as black-box adversarial post-processing with limited query budgets.
Why Prototypes Collapse: Diagnosing and Preventing Partial Collapse in Prototypical Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Gabriel Y. Arteaga; Marius Aasan; Rwiddhi Chakraborty; Martine Hjelkrem-Tan; Thalles Silva; Michael Kampffmeyer; Adín Ramírez Rivera
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Prototypical self-supervised learning methods consistently suffer from partial prototype collapse, where multiple prototypes converge to nearly identical representations. This undermines their central purpose—providing diverse and informative targets to guide encoders toward rich representations—and has led practitioners to over-parameterize prototype sets or add ad-hoc regularizers, which mitigate symptoms rather than address the root cause. We empirically trace the collapse to the joint optimization of encoders and prototypes, which encourages a type of shortcut learning: early in training prototypes drift toward redundant representations that minimize loss without necessarily enhancing representation diversity. To break the joint optimization, we introduce a fully decoupled training strategy that learns prototypes and encoders under separate objectives. Concretely, we model prototypes as a Gaussian mixture updated with an online EM-style procedure, independent of the encoder's loss. This simple yet principled decoupling eliminates prototype collapse without explicit regularization and yields consistently diverse prototypes, which in several settings translate to improved downstream performance.
Your VAR Model is Secretly an Efficient and Explainable Generative Classifier
Authors: Yi-Chung Chen; David I. Inouye; Jing Gao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Generative classifiers, which leverage conditional generative models for classification, have recently demonstrated desirable properties such as robustness to distribution shifts. However, recent progress in this area has been largely driven by diffusion-based models, whose substantial computational cost limits their scalability in practice.
To address the efficiency concern, we investigate generative classifier built upon recent advances in visual autoregressive (VAR) modeling. Owing to their tractable likelihood, VAR-based generative classifier enable significantly more efficient inference compared to diffusion-based counterparts. Building on this foundation, we introduce the Adaptive VAR Classifier$^+$ (A-VARC$^+$), which further improves accuracy while reducing computational cost, substantially enhancing practical usability.
Beyond efficiency, we also study several properties of VAR-based generative classifiers that distinguish them from conventional discriminative models. In particular, the tractable likelihood facilitates visual explainability via token-wise mutual information, and the model naturally adapts to class-incremental learning without requiring additional replay data.
SysMoBench: Evaluating AI on Formally Specifying Complex Real-World Systems
Authors: Qian Cheng; Ruize Tang; Emilie Ma; Finn Hackett; Peiyang He; Yiming Su; Ivan Beschastnikh; Yu Huang; Xiaoxing Ma; Tianyin Xu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Formal models are essential to specifying large, complex computer systems and verifying their correctness, but are notoriously expensive to write and maintain. Recent advances in generative AI show promise in generating certain forms of specifications. However, existing work mostly targets small programs, not complete systems. It is unclear whether AI can deal with realistic system artifacts, as this requires abstracting their complex behavioral properties into formal models. We present SysMoBench, a benchmark that evaluates AI's ability to formally model large, complex systems. We focus on concurrent and distributed systems, which are keystones of today's critical infrastructure, encompassing operating systems and cloud infrastructure. We focus on TLA+, the de facto specification language for concurrent and distributed systems, though SysMoBench has been extended to other languages. We address the primary challenge of evaluating AI-generated models by automating metrics like syntactic and runtime correctness, conformance to system code, and invariant correctness. SysMoBench currently includes eleven diverse system artifacts: the Raft implementation of Etcd and Redis, ZooKeeper's leader election, the Spinlock, Mutex, and Ringbuffer in Asterinas OS, etc., with more being added. SysMoBench enables us to understand the capabilities and limitations of today's LLMs and agents, providing a firm footing for tools in this area and opening up promising new research directions.
Off-Policy Safe Reinforcement Learning with Cost-Constrained Optimistic Exploration
Authors: Guopeng Li; Matthijs T. J. Spaan; Julian F. P. Kooij
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: When safety is formulated as a limit of cumulative cost, safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that maximize return subject to the cost constraint in data collection and deployment. Off-policy safe RL methods, although offering high sample efficiency, suffer from constraint violations due to cost-agnostic exploration and estimation bias in cumulative cost. To address this issue, we propose Constrained Optimistic eXploration Q-learning (COX-Q), an off-policy safe RL algorithm that integrates cost-bounded online exploration and conservative offline distributional value learning. First, we introduce a novel cost-constrained optimistic exploration strategy that resolves gradient conflicts between reward and cost in the action space and adaptively adjusts the trust region to control the training cost. Second, we adopt truncated quantile critics to stabilize the cost value learning. Quantile critics also quantify epistemic uncertainty to guide exploration. Experiments on safe velocity, safe navigation, and autonomous driving tasks demonstrate that COX-Q achieves high sample efficiency, competitive test safety performance, and controlled data collection cost. The results highlight COX-Q as a promising RL method for safety-critical applications.
ELViS: Efficient Visual Similarity from Local Descriptors that Generalizes Across Domains
Authors: Pavel Suma; Giorgos Kordopatis-Zilos; Yannis Kalantidis; Giorgos Tolias
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large-scale instance-level training data is scarce, so models are typically trained on domain-specific datasets. Yet in real-world retrieval, they must handle diverse domains, making generalization to unseen data critical. We introduce ELViS, an image-to-image similarity model that generalizes effectively to unseen domains. Unlike conventional approaches, our model operates in similarity space rather than representation space, promoting cross-domain transfer. It leverages local descriptor correspondences, refines their similarities through an optimal transport step with data-dependent gains that suppress uninformative descriptors, and aggregates strong correspondences via a voting process into an image-level similarity. This design injects strong inductive biases, yielding a simple, efficient, and interpretable model. To assess generalization, we compile a benchmark of eight datasets spanning landmarks, artworks, products, and multi-domain collections,
and evaluate ELViS as a re-ranking method. Our experiments show that ELViS outperforms competing methods by a large margin in out-of-domain scenarios and on average, while requiring only a fraction of their computational cost.
Seeing Across Views: Benchmarking Spatial Reasoning of Vision-Language Models in Robotic Scenes
Authors: ZhiYuan Feng; Zhaolu Kang; Qijie Wang; Zhiying Du; Jiongrui Yan; Shi Shubin; Chengbo Yuan; Huizhi Liang; Yu Deng; Qixiu Li; Rushuai Yang; Ruichuan An; Leqi Zheng; Weijie Wang; Shuang Chen; Sicheng Xu; Yaobo Liang; Jiaolong Yang; Baining Guo
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are essential to Embodied AI, enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act in complex environments. They also serve as the foundation for the recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Yet most evaluations of VLMs focus on single-view settings, leaving their ability to integrate multi-view information underexplored. At the same time, multi-camera setups are increasingly standard in robotic platforms, as they provide complementary perspectives to mitigate occlusion and depth ambiguity. Whether VLMs can effectively leverage such multi-view inputs for robotic reasoning therefore remains an open question. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{MV-RoboBench}, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the multi-view spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs in robotic manipulation. MV-RoboBench consists of 1.7k manually curated QA items across eight subtasks, divided into two primary categories: spatial understanding and robotic execution. We evaluate a diverse set of existing VLMs, including both open-source and closed-source models, along with enhanced versions incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-inspired techniques. The results show that state-of-the-art models remain far below human performance, underscoring the substantial challenges VLMs face in multi-view robotic perception. Additionally, our analysis uncovers two key findings: (i) spatial intelligence and robotic task execution are positively correlated in multi-view robotic scenarios; and (ii) strong performance on existing general-purpose single-view spatial understanding benchmarks does not reliably translate to success in the robotic spatial tasks assessed by our benchmark. We release MV-RoboBench as an open resource to foster progress in spatially grounded VLMs and VLAs, providing not only data but also a standardized evaluation protocol for multi-view embodied reasoning.
Endowing GPT-4 with a Humanoid Body: Building the Bridge Between Off-the-Shelf VLMs and the Physical World
Authors: Yingzhao Jian; Zhongan Wang; Yi Yang; Hehe Fan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we explore how to empower general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to control humanoid agents. General-purpose VLMs (e.g., GPT-4) exhibit strong open-world generalization, and remove the need for additional fine-tuning data. To build such an agent, two key components are required: (1) an embodied instruction compiler, which enables the VLM to observe the scene and translate high-level user instructions into low-level control parameters; and (2) a motion executor, which generates human motions from these parameters while adapting to real-time physical feedback.
We present BiBo, a VLM-driven humanoid agent composed of an embodied instruction compiler and a diffusion-based motion executor. The compiler interprets user instructions in context with the environment, and leverages a chain of visual question answering (VQA) to guide the VLM in specifying control parameters (e.g., motion captions, locations). The diffusion executor extends future joint trajectories from prior motion, conditioned on both control parameters and environmental feedback.
Experiments demonstrate that BiBo achieves an interaction task success rate of 90.2\% in open environments, and improves the precision of text-guided motion execution by 16.3\% over prior methods. BiBo handles not only basic interaction but also diverse motions, and even dancing while striking at a sandbag. The code will be released upon publication.
Never Saddle for Reparameterized Steepest Descent as Mirror Flow
Authors: Tom Jacobs; Chao Zhou; Rebekka Burkholz
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: How does the choice of optimization algorithm shape a model’s ability to learn features? To address this question for steepest descent methods --including sign descent, which is closely related to Adam --we introduce steepest mirror flows as a unifying theoretical framework. This framework reveals how optimization geometry governs learning dynamics, implicit bias, and sparsity and it provides two explanations for why Adam and AdamW often outperform SGD in fine-tuning. Focusing on diagonal linear networks and deep diagonal linear reparameterizations (a simplified proxy for attention), we show that steeper descent facilitates both saddle-point escape and feature learning. In contrast, gradient descent requires unrealistically large learning rates to escape saddles, an uncommon regime in fine-tuning. Empirically, we confirm that saddle-point escape is a central challenge in fine-tuning. Furthermore, we demonstrate that decoupled weight decay, as in AdamW, stabilizes feature learning by enforcing novel balance equations. Together, these results highlight two mechanisms how steepest descent can aid modern optimization.
GeneBreaker: Jailbreak Attacks against DNA Language Models with Pathogenicity Guidance
Authors: ZAIXI ZHANG; Zhenghong Zhou; Ruofan Jin; Le Cong; Mengdi Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: DNA, encoding genetic instructions for almost all living organisms, fuels groundbreaking advances in genomics and synthetic biology. Recently, DNA Language Models have achieved success in designing synthetic functional DNA sequences, even whole genomes of novel bacteriophage, verified with wet lab experiments.  Such remarkable generative power also brings severe biosafety concerns about whether DNA language models can design human viruses. With the goal of exposing vulnerabilities and informing the development of robust safeguarding techniques, we perform a systematic biosafety evaluation of DNA language models through the lens of jailbreak attacks. Specifically, we introduce JailbreakDNABench, a benchmark centered on high-priority human viruses, together with an end-to-end jailbreak framework, GeneBreaker. GeneBreaker integrates three key components: (1) an LLM agent equipped with customized bioinformatics tools to design high-homology yet non-pathogenic jailbreak prompts, (2) beam search guided by PathoLM and log-probability heuristics to steer sequence generation toward pathogen-like outputs, and (3) a BLAST- and function-annotation–based evaluation pipeline to identify successful jailbreaks. On JailbreakDNABench, GeneBreaker successfully jailbreaks the latest Evo series models across 6 viral categories consistently (up to 60\% Attack Success Rate for Evo2-40B). Further case studies on SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and HIV-1 envelope protein demonstrate the sequence and structural fidelity of jailbreak output, while evolutionary modeling of SARS-CoV-2 underscores biosecurity risks. Our findings also reveal that scaling DNA language models amplifies dual-use risks, motivating enhanced safety alignment and tracing mechanisms.
Time-to-Move: Training-Free Motion-Controlled Video Generation via Dual-Clock Denoising
Authors: Assaf Singer; Noam Rotstein; Amir Mann; Ron Kimmel; Or Litany
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Diffusion-based video generation can create realistic videos, yet existing image- and text-based conditioning fails to offer precise motion control. Prior methods for motion-conditioned synthesis typically require model-specific fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive and restrictive. We introduce Time-to-Move (TTM), a training-free, plug-and-play framework for motion- and appearance-controlled video generation with image-to-video (I2V) diffusion models. Our key insight is to use crude reference animations obtained through user-friendly manipulations such as cut-and-drag or depth-based reprojection. Motivated by SDEdit’s use of coarse layout cues for image editing, we treat the crude animations as coarse motion cues and adapt the mechanism to the video domain. We preserve appearance with image conditioning and introduce dual-clock denoising, a region-dependent strategy that enforces strong alignment in motion-specified regions while allowing flexibility elsewhere, balancing fidelity to user intent with natural dynamics. This lightweight modification of the sampling process incurs no additional training or runtime cost and is compatible with any backbone. Extensive experiments on object and camera motion benchmarks show that TTM matches or exceeds existing training-based baselines in realism and motion control. Beyond this, TTM introduces a unique capability: precise appearance control through pixel-level conditioning, exceeding the limits of text-only prompting. Visit our project page (https://time-to-move.github.io) for video examples and code.
Automatic Stage Lighting Control: Is it a Rule-Driven Process or Generative Task?
Authors: Zijian Zhao; Dian Jin; Zijing Zhou; Xiaoyu Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Stage lighting is a vital component in live music performances, shaping an engaging experience for both musicians and audiences. In recent years, Automatic Stage Lighting Control (ASLC) has attracted growing interest due to the high costs of hiring or training professional lighting engineers. However, most existing ASLC solutions only classify music into limited categories and map them to predefined light patterns, resulting in formulaic and monotonous outcomes that lack rationality. To address this gap, this paper presents Skip-BART, an end-to-end model that directly learns from experienced lighting engineers and predict vivid, human-like stage lighting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to conceptualize ASLC as a generative task rather than merely a classification problem. Our method adapts the BART model to take audio music as input and produce light hue and value (intensity) as output, incorporating a novel skip connection mechanism to enhance the relationship between music and light within the frame grid. To address the lack of available datasets, we create the first stage lighting dataset, along with several pre-training and transfer learning techniques to improve model training with limited data. We validate our method through both quantitative analysis and an human evaluation, demonstrating that Skip-BART outperforms conventional rule-based methods across all evaluation metrics and shows only a limited gap compared to real lighting engineers. The self-collected dataset, code, and trained model parameters of this paper are provided at https://github.com/RS2002/Skip-BART .
Vid2World: Crafting Video Diffusion Models to Interactive World Models
Authors: Siqiao Huang; Jialong Wu; Qixing Zhou; Shangchen Miao; Mingsheng Long
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: World models, which predict future transitions from past observation and action sequences, have shown great promise for improving data efficiency in sequential decision-making. However, existing world models often require extensive domain-specific training and still produce low-fidelity, coarse predictions, limiting their usefulness in complex environments. In contrast, video diffusion models trained on large-scale internet data have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-quality videos that capture diverse real-world dynamics. In this work, we present _Vid2World_, a general approach for leveraging and transferring pre-trained video diffusion models into interactive world models. To bridge the gap, Vid2World systematically explores _video diffusion causalization_, reshaping both the architecture and training objective of pre-trained models to enable autoregressive generation. Additionally, it incorporates a _causal action guidance_ mechanism to enhance action controllability in the resulting interactive world models. Extensive experiments across multiple domains, including robot manipulation, 3D game simulation, and open-world navigation, demonstrate that our method offers a scalable and effective pathway for repurposing highly capable video diffusion models into interactive world models.