GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
SeRI: Gradient-Free Sensitive Region Identification in Decision-Based Black-Box Attacks
Authors: Feiyang Wang; Xingquan Zuo; Hai Huang; Gang Chen; Hangwei Qian
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where small, carefully crafted perturbations are added to input images to cause misclassification. These perturbations are particularly effective when concentrated in sensitive regions of an image that strongly influence the model’s prediction. However, in decision-based black-box settings, where only the top-1 predicted label is observable and query budgets are strictly limited, identifying sensitive regions becomes extremely challenging. This issue is critical because without accurate region information, decision-based attacks cannot refine adversarial examples effectively, limiting both their efficiency and accuracy.
We propose Sensitive Region Identification, SeRI, the first decision-based method that assigns a continuous sensitivity score to each image pixel. It enables fine-grained region discovery and substantially improves the efficiency of adversarial attacks, all without access to gradients, confidence scores, or surrogate models.
SeRI progressively partitions the image into finer sub-regions and refines a continuous sensitivity score to capture their true importance. At each iteration, it generates two perturbation variants of the selected region by scaling its magnitude up or down, and compares their decision boundaries to derive an accurate, continuous characterization of pixel sensitivity.
SeRI further divides selected region into smaller sub-regions, recursively refining the search for sensitive areas. This recursive refinement process enables more precise sensitivity estimation through fine-grained analysis, distinguishing SeRI from prior binary or one-shot region selection approaches. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that SeRI significantly enhances state-of-the-art decision-based attacks in both targeted and non-targeted attack scenarios. Additionally, SeRI generates precise heatmaps that identify sensitive image regions. The code is available at https://github.com/BUPTAIOC/SeRI.
Massively Multimodal Foundation Models: A Framework for Capturing Interactions with Specialized Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Xing Han; Hsing-Huan Chung; Joydeep Ghosh; Paul Pu Liang; Suchi Saria
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Modern applications increasingly involve many heterogeneous input streams, such as clinical sensors, wearable device data, imaging, and text, each with distinct measurement models, sampling rates, and noise characteristics. We define this as massively multimodal setting, where each sensor constitutes a separate modality. As modality counts grow, capturing their complex, time-varying interactions such as delayed physiological cascades between sensors, has becomes essential yet challenging. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are naturally suited for this setting since their sparse routing mechanism enables efficient scaling across many modalities. However, existing MoE architectures route tokens based on similarity alone, overlooking the rich temporal dependencies across modalities: this prevents the model from capturing delayed cross-modal effects, leading to suboptimal expert specialization and reduced accuracy.
We propose a framework that explicitly quantifies temporal dependencies between modality pairs across multiple discrete time intervals, defined as delays between an event in one input stream and its manifested effect in another, and uses these to guide MoE routing. A interaction-aware router dispatches tokens to specialized experts based on interaction type. This principled routing enables experts to learn generalizable interaction-processing skills. Experiments across healthcare, activity recognition, and affective computing benchmarks demonstrate substantial performance gains and interpretable routing patterns aligned with domain knowledge.
Open-Set Semantic Gaussian Splatting SLAM with Expandable Representation
Authors: Yucheng Yan; Chen Liang; Wenguan Wang; Yi Yang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: This work enables everyday devices, e.g., smartphones, to dynamically capture open-ended 3D scenes with rich, expandable semantics for immersive virtual worlds. While 3DGS and foundation models hold promise for semantic scene understanding, existing solutions suffer from unscalable semantic integration, prohibitive memory costs, and cross-view inconsistency. To respond, we propose Open-Set Semantic Gaussian Splatting SLAM, a GS-SLAM system augmented by an expandable semantic feature pool that decouples condensed scene-level semantics from individual 3D Gaussians. Each Gaussian references semantics via a lightweight indexing vector, reducing memory overhead by orders of magnitude while supporting dynamic updates. Besides, we introduce a consistency-aware optimization strategy alongside a Semantic Stability Guidance mechanism to enhance long-term, cross-view semantic consistency and resolve inconsistencies. Experiments demonstrate that our system achieves high-fidelity rendering with scalable, open-set semantics across both controlled and in-the-wild environments, supporting applications like 3D localization and scene editing. These results mark an initial yet solid step towards high-quality, expressive, and accessible 3D virtual world modeling. Our code will be publicly released.
Towards Self-Evolving Agent Benchmarks : Validatable Agent Trajectory via Test-Time Exploration
Authors: Dadi Guo; Tianyi Zhou; Dongrui Liu; Chen Qian; Qihan Ren; Shuai Shao; Zhiyuan Fan; Yi R. Fung; Kun Wang; Linfeng Zhang; Jing Shao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and agent system designs have empowered agents with unprecedented levels of capability. However, existing agent benchmarks are showing a trend of rapid ceiling-hitting by newly developed agents, making it increasingly difficult to meet the demands of evaluating agent abilities. To address this problem, we propose the Trajectory-based Validated-by-Reproducing Agent-benchmark Complexity Evolution (TRACE) framework. This framework takes an original task from an existing benchmark and encourages agents to freely explore and evolve it into a new task with higher difficulty while recording the corresponding execution trajectories. The framework proceeds in three stages: (1) evolutionary proposal mining, which generates task evolution proposals through preliminary exploration and divergent thinking; (2) problem construction via free exploration, where proposals are instantiated into concrete problem instances through agent exploration, with execution trajectories recorded along the process; and (3) multi-level validation, which ensures that the evolved tasks are accompanied by reproducible and logically coherent trajectories. Experiments on the GAIA benchmark demonstrate that the TRACE framework consistently enhances task complexity while improving correctness reliability through trajectory-level validation. In addition, our framework can successfully adapt to and improve reasoning benchmarks such as AIME-2024. This work marks a paradigm shift from static, manually curated benchmarks to dynamic, self-evolving evaluation systems, providing a sustainable and challenging foundation for agent development. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/titanwings/trace-benchmark-evolving.
Mixture-of-World Models: Scaling Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Modular Latent Dynamics
Authors: Boxuan Zhang; Weipu Zhang; Zhaohan Feng; Wei Xiao; Jian Sun; Jie Chen; Gang Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: A fundamental challenge in multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) is achieving sample efficiency in visual domains where tasks exhibit significant heterogeneity in both observations and dynamics. Model-based RL (MBRL) offers a promising path to sample efficiency through world models, but standard monolithic architectures struggle to capture diverse task dynamics, leading to poor reconstruction and prediction accuracy. We introduce the mixture-of-world models (MoW), a scalable architecture that integrates three key components: i) modular VAEs for task-adaptive visual compression, ii) a hybrid Transformer-based dynamics model combining task-conditioned experts with a shared backbone, and, iii) a gradient-based task clustering strategy for efficient parameter allocation. On the Atari 100k benchmark,  **a single MoW agent** (trained once over Atari $26$ games) achieves a mean human-normalized score of $\mathbf{110.4}$%, competitive with the  $\mathbf{114.2}$% achieved by the recent STORM-an ensemble of $26$ task-specific models-while requiring $\mathbf{50}$% fewer parameters. On Meta-World, MoW attains a $\mathbf{74.5}$% average success rate within $300$K steps, establishing a new state-of-the-art. These results demonstrate that MoW provides a scalable and parameter-efficient foundation for generalist world models.
KDP: Simplifying Representation Dynamics in Kernel Space
Authors: Zeyu Ma; Wanying Wang; Guchu Zou; Mingang Chen; Jianhong Wu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: This paper proposes Kernelized Dynamics Pruning (KDP), a novel layer pruning method from the perspective of simplifying representation dynamics within large language models (LLMs). Motivated by the high similarity between consecutive layer representations, we view the LLM's forward pass as a discrete-time dynamical system. We speculate that this phenomenon indicates the model's internal dynamics have entered a ``slow manifold'', which exhibits computational redundancy. Based on this insight, we project the representations into a kernel space where the complex, non-linear transformation between them is simplified to an approximately linear one. Then, a simple network learns the inverse kernel transformation, thereby enabling the pruning of the entire layer block. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of KDP, demonstrating its superiority over existing pruning baselines.
Context Learning for Multi-Agent Discussion
Authors: Xingyuan Hua; Sheng Yue; Xinyi Li; Yizhe Zhao; Jinrui Zhang; Ju Ren
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multi-Agent Discussion (MAD) has garnered increasing attention very recently, where multiple LLM instances collaboratively solve problems via structured discussion. However, we find that current MAD methods easily suffer from discussion inconsistency—LLMs fail to reach a coherent solution—due to the misalignment between their individual contexts. In this paper, we introduce a multi-LLM context learning method (M2CL) that learns a context generator for each agent, capable of dynamically generating context instructions per discussion round via automatic information organization and refinement. Specifically, inspired by our theoretical insights on the context instruction, M2CL trains the generators to control context coherence and output discrepancies via a carefully crafted self-adaptive mechanism. It enables LLMs to avoid premature convergence on “majority noise” and progressively reach the correct consensus. We evaluate M2CL on challenging tasks, including academic reasoning, embodied tasks, and mobile control. The results show that the performance of M2CL significantly surpasses existing methods by 20\%--50\%, while enjoying favorable transferability and computational efficiency.\footnote{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/HansenHua/M2CL-ICLR26}.}
LaplacianFormer:Rethinking Linear Attention with Laplacian Kernel
Authors: Zhe Feng; Sen Lian; Changwei Wang; Muyang Zhang; Tianlong Tan; Rongtao Xu; Weiliang Meng; Xiaopeng Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The quadratic complexity of softmax attention presents a major obstacle for scaling Transformers to high-resolution vision tasks. Existing linear attention variants often replace the softmax with Gaussian kernels to reduce complexity, but such approximations lack theoretical grounding and tend to oversuppress mid-range token interactions. We propose LaplacianFormer, a Transformer variant that employs a Laplacian kernel as a principled alternative to softmax, motivated by empirical observations and theoretical analysis. To address expressiveness degradation under low-rank approximations, we introduce a provably injective feature map that retains fine-grained token information. For efficient computation, we adopt a Nyström approximation of the kernel matrix and solve the resulting system using Newton--Schulz iteration, avoiding costly matrix inversion and SVD. We further develop custom CUDA implementations for both the kernel and solver, enabling high-throughput forward and backward passes suitable for edge deployment. Experiments on ImageNet show that LaplacianFormer achieves strong performance-efficiency trade-offs while improving attention expressiveness. Code is available at the following site: \href{https://mike7472727.github.io/laplacianformer.github.io/}{\textcolor{black}{LaplacianFormer }}.
The Expressive Limits of Diagonal SSMs for State-Tracking
Authors: Mehran Shakerinava; Behnoush Khavari; Siamak Ravanbakhsh; Sarath Chandar
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: State-Space Models (SSMs) have recently been shown to achieve strong empirical performance on a variety of long-range sequence modeling tasks while remaining efficient and highly-parallelizable. However, the theoretical understanding of their expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the expressivity of input-Dependent Complex-valued Diagonal (DCD) SSMs on sequential state-tracking tasks. We show that single-layer DCD SSMs cannot express state-tracking of any non-Abelian group at finite precision. More generally, we show that $k$-layer DCD SSMs can express state-tracking of a group if and only if that group has a subnormal series of length $k$, with Abelian factors. That is, we identify the precise expressivity range of $k$-layer DCD SSMs within the solvable groups. Empirically, we find that multi-layer models often fail to learn state-tracking for non-Abelian groups, highlighting a gap between expressivity and learnability.
Enhancing Learning with Noisy Labels via Rockafellian Relaxation
Authors: Louis Chen; Bobbie Chern; Eric Eckstrand; Amogh Mahapatra; Johannes O. Royset
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Labeling errors in datasets are common, arising in a variety of contexts, such as human labeling and weak labeling. Although neural networks (NNs) can tolerate modest amounts of these errors, their performance degrades substantially once the label error rate exceeds a certain threshold. We propose the Rockafellian Relaxation Method (RRM) -- an architecture-independent, loss reweighting approach to enhance the capacity of neural network methods to accommodate noisy labeled data. More precisely, it functions as a wrapper, modifying any methodology's training loss - particularly, the supervised component. Experiments indicate RRM can provide an increase to accuracy across classification tasks in computer vision and natural language processing (sentiment analysis). This observed potential for increase holds irrespective of dataset size, noise generation (synthetic/human), data domain, and adversarial perturbation.
DND: Boosting Large Language Models with Dynamic Nested Depth
Authors: Tieyuan Chen; Xiaodong Chen; Haoxing Chen; Zhenzhong Lan; Weiyao Lin; Jianguo Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce Dynamic Nested Depth (DND), a novel method that improves performance for off-the-shelf LLMs by selecting critical tokens to reprocess in a nested depth manner. Specifically, at the end of the given transformer layer, DND identifies more critical tokens with a router and feeds them back for an extra round of processing, effectively "reviewing" difficult tokens while avoiding redundant computation for easier ones. The dynamic selection mechanism is tailored for precise control via two novel strategies: a router controlling loss to enhance token selection distinguishability, and a threshold control scheme to ensure selection stability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DND by directly integrating it into pre-trained dense and MoE models during a post-training phase. On diverse benchmarks, DND boosts the performances of the dense Qwen3-1.7B, Llama3.2-1B, and Gemma3-1B by 1.88%, 2.61%, and 2.50% and the MoE Qwen3-30B-A3B by 0.87%, all with a minimal parameter and computing increase.
NextQuill: Causal Preference Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization
Authors: Xiaoyan Zhao; Juntao You; Yang Zhang; Wenjie Wang; Hong Cheng; Fuli Feng; See-Kiong Ng; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Personalizing large language models (LLMs) is increasingly important as they are progressively integrated into real-world applications to support users’ daily lives. However, existing approaches often fail to distinguish which components of response predictions by model and ground-truth response in training data truly reflect user preferences, resulting in shallow personalization alignment. In this paper, we introduce NextQuill, a novel LLM personalization alignment framework grounded in causal preference modeling. We approach personalization from a causal perspective, recognizing that model-predicted responses (model side) and user-written ground-truth responses (data side) are both outcomes shape by user history (characteristics) and other context factors. To better capture user preferences, we define causal preference effects as the causal effect of the  user history/characteristics on outcomes from the model/data side. Building on this foundation, NextQuill introduces two complementary alignment strategies: (1) aligning model-side causal preference effects (on predictions) with those of ground-truth data, rather than indiscriminately aligning all predictions, and (2) emphasizing learning the preference-driven ground-truth tokens, identified via data-side causal preference effects, rather than treating all tokens equally. As such, NextQuill shifts the alignment process toward learning from causal preference effects, facilitating more effective and personalized LLM adaptation. Experiments on multiple personalization benchmarks demonstrate that NextQuill substantially improves personalization quality. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/juntaoyou/NextQuill}.
CoDA: From Text-to-Image Diffusion Models to Training-Free Dataset Distillation
Authors: Letian Zhou; Songhua Liu; Xinchao Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Prevailing Dataset Distillation (DD) methods leveraging generative models confront two fundamental limitations. First, despite pioneering the use of diffusion models in DD and delivering impressive performance, the vast majority of approaches paradoxically require a diffusion model pre-trained on the full target dataset, undermining the very purpose of DD and incurring prohibitive training costs. Second, although some methods turn to general text-to-image models without relying on such target-specific training, they suffer from a significant distributional mismatch, as the web-scale priors encapsulated in these foundation models fail to faithfully capture the target-specific semantics, leading to suboptimal performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose Core Distribution Alignment (CoDA), a framework that enables effective DD using only an off-the-shelf text-to-image model. Our key idea is to first identify the ``intrinsic core distribution'' of the target dataset using a robust density-based discovery mechanism. We then steer the generative process to align the generated samples with this core distribution. By doing so, CoDA effectively bridges the gap between general-purpose generative priors and target semantics, yielding highly representative distilled datasets. Extensive experiments suggest that, without relying on a generative model specifically trained on the target dataset, CoDA achieves performance on par with or even superior to previous methods with such reliance across all benchmarks, including ImageNet-1K and its subsets. Notably, it establishes a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 60.4\% at the 50-images-per-class (IPC) setup on ImageNet-1K. Our code is available on the project webpage: https://github.com/zzzlt422/CoDA
Cross-Tokenizer Likelihood Scoring Algorithms for Language Model Distillation
Authors: Buu Phan; Ashish J Khisti; Karen Ullrich
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Computing next-token likelihood ratios between two language models (LMs) is a standard task in training paradigms such as knowledge distillation. Since this requires both models to share the same probability space, it becomes challenging when the teacher and student LMs use different tokenizers, for instance, when edge-device deployment necessitates a smaller vocabulary size to lower memory overhead. This work addresses this vocabulary misalignment problem by uncovering an implicit recursive structure in the commonly deployed Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm and utilizing it to create a probabilistic framework for \textit{cross-tokenizer likelihood scoring}. Our method enables sequence likelihood evaluation for vocabularies different from the teacher model native tokenizer, addressing two specific scenarios: when the student vocabulary is a subset of the teacher vocabulary, and the general case where it is arbitrary. In the subset regime, our framework computes exact likelihoods and provides next-token probabilities for sequential sampling with only $\mathcal{O}(1)$ model evaluations per token. When used for distillation, this yields up to a 12% reduction in memory footprint for the Qwen2.5-1.5B model while also improving baseline performance up to 4\% on the evaluated tasks. For the general case, we introduce a rigorous lossless procedure that leverages BPE recursive structure, complemented by a fast approximation that keeps large-vocabulary settings practical. Applied to GSM8K mathematical reasoning distillation, our method improves accuracy by over 2%  the current state of the art. Code: https://github.com/truongbuu/cross-tokenizer-scoring
Generalization of Diffusion Models Arises with a Balanced Representation Space
Authors: Zekai Zhang; Xiao Li; Xiang Li; Lianghe Shi; Meng Wu; Molei Tao; Qing Qu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Diffusion models excel at generating high-quality, diverse samples, yet they risk memorizing training data when overfit to the training objective. We analyze the distinctions between memorization and generalization in diffusion models through the lens of representation learning. By investigating a two-layer ReLU denoising autoencoder (DAE), we prove that: *(i)* memorization corresponds to the model storing raw training dataset in the learned weights for encoding and decoding, yielding localized, spiky representations; whereas *(ii)* generalization arises when the model captures local data statistics, producing balanced representations. Furthermore, we validate our theoretical findings on real-world unconditional and text-to-image diffusion models, demonstrating that the same representation structures emerge in deep generative models with significant practical implications. Building on these insights, we propose a representation-based method for detecting memorization and a training-free editing technique that allows precise control via representation steering. Together, our results highlight that *learning good representations is central to novel and meaningful generative modelling*. Code is available at https://github.com/la0ka1/diffusion-gen-from-rep.