GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
FoNE: Precise Single-Token Number Embeddings via Fourier Features
Authors: Tianyi Zhou; Deqing Fu; Mahdi Soltanolkotabi; Robin Jia; Vatsal Sharan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Language models treat numbers in the same way as ordinary word tokens, which introduces two major issues: (1) embeddings of numerical tokens primarily reflect their frequency in text corpora rather than their inherent numerical properties, leading to frequency bias, and (2) numbers are often split into multiple tokens, forcing the model to aggregate these pieces to recover their values.  Inspired by the observation that pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) internally learn Fourier-like features for number tokens, we propose **Fo**urier **N**umber **E**mbedding **(FoNE)**, a novel method that directly maps numbers into the embedding space with their Fourier features. FoNE encodes each number as a single token with only two embedding dimensions per digit, effectively capturing numerical values without fragmentation. 
Compared to traditional subword and digit-wise embeddings, FoNE achieves higher accuracy on arithmetic tasks, requires significantly less training data, and offers more efficient training and inference. 
A $38$M-parameter Transformer trained from scratch with FoNE outperforms a fine-tuned Llama-3.2-1B model on addition, subtraction, and multiplication. FoNE is also the only method that achieves $100\\%$ accuracy on over 100,000 test examples across these tasks. On 6-digit decimal addition, FoNE needs 64$\times$ less data than subword and digit-wise embeddings to reach $\ge 99\\%$ accuracy, while using 3$\times$ and 6$\times$ fewer tokens per number, respectively.
LatentQA: Teaching LLMs to Decode Activations Into Natural Language
Authors: Alexander Pan; Lijie Chen; Jacob Steinhardt
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Top-down transparency typically analyzes language model activations using probes with scalar or single-token outputs, limiting the range of behaviors that can be captured. To alleviate this issue, we develop a more expressive probe that can directly output natural language, performing LatentQA: the task of answering open-ended questions about activations. A key difficulty in developing such a probe is collecting a dataset mapping activations to natural-language descriptions. In response, we propose an approach for generating a dataset of activations and associated question-answer pairs and develop a fine-tuning method for training a decoder LLM on this dataset. We then validate our decoder's fidelity by assessing its ability to read and control model activations. First, we evaluate the decoder on a number of supervised reading tasks with a known answer, such as uncovering hidden system prompts and relational knowledge extraction, and observe that it outperforms competitive probing baselines. Second, we demonstrate that the decoder is precise enough to steer the target model to exhibit behaviors unseen during training. Finally, we show that LatentQA scales well with increasing dataset and model size.
Unleashing Guidance Without Classifiers for Human-Object Interaction Animation
Authors: Ziyin Wang; Sirui Xu; chuan guo; Bing Zhou; Jiangshan Gong; Jian Wang; Yu-Xiong Wang; Liangyan Gui
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Generating realistic human-object interaction (HOI) animations remains challenging because it requires jointly modeling dynamic human actions and diverse object geometries. Prior diffusion-based approaches often rely on handcrafted contact priors or human-imposed kinematic constraints to improve contact quality. We propose a data-driven alternative in which guidance emerges from the denoising pace itself, reducing dependence on manually designed priors. Building on diffusion forcing, we factor the representation into modality-specific components and assign individualized noise levels with asynchronous denoising schedules. In this paradigm, cleaner components guide noisier ones through cross-attention, yielding guidance without auxiliary classifiers. We find that this data-driven guidance is inherently contact-aware, and can be further enhanced when training is augmented with a broad spectrum of synthetic object geometries, encouraging invariance of contact semantics to geometric diversity. Extensive experiments show that pace-induced guidance more effectively mirrors the benefits of contact priors than conventional classifier-free guidance, while achieving higher contact fidelity, more realistic HOI generation, and stronger generalization to unseen objects and tasks.
SceneStreamer: Continuous Scenario Generation as Next Token Group Prediction
Authors: Zhenghao Peng; Yuxin Liu; Bolei Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Realistic and interactive traffic simulation is essential for training and evaluating autonomous driving systems. However, most existing data-driven simulation methods rely on static initialization or log-replay data, limiting their ability to model dynamic, long-horizon scenarios with evolving agent populations. 
We propose SceneStreamer, a unified autoregressive framework for continuous scenario generation that represents the entire scene as a sequence of tokens, including traffic light signals, agent states, and motion vectors, and generates them step by step with a transformer model. This design enables SceneStreamer to continuously introduce and retire agents over an unbounded horizon, supporting realistic long-duration simulation. Experiments demonstrate that SceneStreamer produces realistic, diverse, and adaptive traffic behaviors. Furthermore, reinforcement learning policies trained in SceneStreamer-generated scenarios achieve superior robustness and generalization, validating its utility as a high-fidelity simulation environment for autonomous driving. More information is available at https://vail-ucla.github.io/scenestreamer/ .
Joint Distillation for Fast Likelihood Evaluation and Sampling in Flow-based Models
Authors: Xinyue Ai; Yutong He; Albert Gu; Ruslan Salakhutdinov; J Zico Kolter; Nicholas Matthew Boffi; Max Simchowitz
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Log-likelihood evaluation enables important capabilities in generative models, including model comparison, certain fine-tuning objectives, and many downstream applications. Yet paradoxically, some of today's best generative models -- diffusion and flow-based models -- still require hundreds to thousands of neural function evaluations (NFEs) to compute a single likelihood. While recent distillation methods have successfully accelerated sampling to just a few steps, they achieve this at the cost of likelihood tractability: existing approaches either abandon likelihood computation entirely or still require expensive integration over full trajectories. We present fast flow joint distillation (F2D2), a framework that simultaneously reduces the number of NFEs required for both sampling and likelihood evaluation by two orders of magnitude. Our key insight is that in continuous normalizing flows, the coupled ODEs for sampling and likelihood are computed from a shared underlying velocity field, allowing us to jointly distill both the sampling trajectory and cumulative divergence using a single flow map.   F2D2 is modular, compatible with existing flow-based few-step sampling models, and requires only an additional divergence prediction head. Experiments demonstrate F2D2's capability of achieving accurate log-likelihood with few-step evaluations while maintaining high sample quality, solving a long-standing computational bottleneck in flow-based generative models. As an application of our approach, we propose a lightweight self-guidance method that enables a 2-step MeanFlow to outperform a 1024 step flow matching model with only a single additional backward NFE.
SEED-SET: Scalable Evolving Experimental Design for System-level Ethical Testing
Authors: Anjali Parashar; Yingke Li; Eric Yang Yu; Fei Chen; James Neidhoefer; Devesh Upadhyay; Chuchu Fan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: As autonomous systems such as drones, become increasingly deployed in high-stakes, human-centric domains, it is critical to evaluate the ethical alignment since failure to do so imposes imminent danger to human lives, and long term bias in decision-making. Automated ethical benchmarking of these systems is understudied due to the lack of ubiquitous, well-defined metrics for evaluation, and stakeholder-specific subjectivity, which cannot be modeled analytically.  To address these challenges, we propose SEED-SET, a Bayesian experimental design framework that incorporates domain-specific objective evaluations, and subjective value judgments from stakeholders. SEED-SET models both evaluation types separately with hierarchical Gaussian Processes, and uses a novel acquisition strategy to propose interesting test candidates based on learnt qualitative preferences and objectives that align with the stakeholder preferences.
    We validate our approach for ethical benchmarking of autonomous agents on two applications and find our method to perform the best. Our method provides an interpretable and efficient trade-off between exploration and exploitation, by generating up to $2\times$ optimal test candidates compared to baselines, with $1.25\times$ improvement in coverage of high dimensional search spaces.
Understanding the Mechanisms of Fast Hyperparameter Transfer
Authors: Nikhil Ghosh; Denny Wu; Alberto Bietti
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The growing scale of deep learning models has rendered exhaustive hyperparameter (HP) optimization prohibitively expensive. A promising solution is the use of scale-aware HPs, which can enable direct transfer of optimal settings from small-scale grid searches to large models with minimal performance loss. Such approaches are useful when the optimal settings converge "fast" enough with scale. While approaches like the Maximal Update Parameterization ($\mu$P) have empirically displayed fast transfer when scaling model width, a deeper conceptual understanding of the mechanisms that enable this is still missing. Our work establishes a systematic conceptual framework for analyzing fast HP transfer across different synthetic and practical scenarios. In synthetic settings, we present various quantitative examples where transfer either offers a provable computational advantage or fails even under $\mu$P. 
  We then propose a key property that enables the fast transfer often observed in practice: through a novel decomposition of the optimization trajectory, we identify one component that rapidly converges with model width and determines the optimal HPs, and the other that continues to improve the loss with increased width but has negligible impact on HP choice. We conjecture that this decomposition elucidates the key mechanisms behind fast transfer and empirically validate it in practical settings such as LLM training.
Score-based Greedy Search for Structure Identification of Partially Observed Causal Models
Authors: Xinshuai Dong; Ignavier Ng; Haoyue Dai; Jiaqi Sun; Xiangchen Song; Peter Spirtes; Kun Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Identifying the structure of a partially observed causal system is essential to various scientific fields. Recent advances have focused on constraint-based causal discovery to solve this problem, and yet in practice these methods often face challenges related to multiple testing and error propagation. These issues could be mitigated by a score-based method and thus it has raised great attention whether there exists a score-based greedy search method that can handle the partially observed scenario. In this work, we propose the first score-based greedy search method for the identification of structure involving latent variables with identifiability guarantees. Specifically, we propose Generalized N Factor Model and establish the global consistency: the true structure including latent variables can be identified up to the Markov equivalence class by using score. We then design Latent variable Greedy Equivalence Search (LGES), a greedy search algorithm for this class of model with well-defined operators, which search very efficiently over the graph space to find the optimal structure. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-life data validate the effectiveness of our method.
Concepts' Information Bottleneck Models
Authors: Karim Galliamov; Syed M Ahsan Kazmi; Adil Khan; Adín Ramírez Rivera
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim to deliver interpretable predictions by routing decisions through a human-understandable concept layer, yet they often suffer reduced accuracy and concept leakage that undermines faithfulness. We introduce an explicit Information Bottleneck regularizer on the concept layer that penalizes $I(X;C)$ while preserving task-relevant information in $I(C;Y)$, encouraging minimal-sufficient concept representations. We derive two practical variants (a variational objective and an entropy-based surrogate) and integrate them into standard CBM training without architectural changes or additional supervision. Evaluated across six CBM families and three benchmarks, the IB-regularized models consistently outperform their vanilla counterparts. Information-plane analyses further corroborate the intended behavior. These results indicate that enforcing a minimal-sufficient concept bottleneck improves both predictive performance and the reliability of concept-level interventions. The proposed regularizer offers a theoretic-grounded, architecture-agnostic path to more faithful and intervenable CBMs, resolving prior evaluation inconsistencies by aligning training protocols and demonstrating robust gains across model families and datasets.
OSCAR: Online Soft Compression for RAG
Authors: Maxime Louis; Thibault Formal; Hervé Déjean; Stéphane Clinchant
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge, leading to improved accuracy and relevance. However, scaling RAG pipelines remains computationally expensive as context length grows. On one hand, hard compression methods have recently proposed to prune the retrieved text on-the-fly with a limited compression ration. On the other hand, soft compression method performs a costly offline compression thanks a dedicated LLM but with a higher compression rate. In this paper, we introduce OSCAR, a novel query-dependent online soft compression method for RAG. OSCAR bridges the gap between online hard and offline soft compression methods, bringing the best of both: OSCAR dynamically compresses retrieved information at inference time, eliminating storage overhead and enabling higher compression rates than existing methods. Our experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with a 2-5x speed-up in inference and minimal, if any, accuracy loss, for LLMs ranging from 1B to 24B parameters.
SurvHTE-Bench: A Benchmark for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation in Survival Analysis
Authors: Shahriar Noroozizadeh; Xiaobin Shen; Jeremy Weiss; George H. Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) from right-censored survival data is critical in high-stakes applications such as precision medicine and individualized policy-making. Yet, the survival analysis setting poses unique challenges for HTE estimation due to censoring, unobserved counterfactuals, and complex identification assumptions. Despite recent advances, from causal survival forests to survival meta-learners and outcome imputation approaches, evaluation practices remain fragmented and inconsistent. We introduce SurvHTE‐Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark for HTE estimation with censored outcomes. The benchmark spans (i) a modular suite of synthetic datasets with known ground truth, systematically varying causal assumptions and survival dynamics, (ii) semi-synthetic datasets that pair real-world covariates with simulated treatments and outcomes, and (iii) real-world datasets from a twin study (with known ground truth) and from an HIV clinical trial. Across synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world settings, we provide the first rigorous comparison of survival HTE methods under diverse conditions and realistic assumption violations. SurvHTE‐Bench establishes a foundation for fair, reproducible, and extensible evaluation of causal survival methods.
Tell me Habibi, is it Real or Fake?
Authors: Kartik Kuckreja; Parul Gupta; Injy Hamed; Thamar Solorio; Muhammad Haris Khan; Abhinav Dhall
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Deepfake generation methods are evolving fast, making fake media harder to detect and raising serious societal concerns. Most deepfake detection and dataset creation research focuses on monolingual content, often overlooking the challenges of multilingual and code-switched speech, where multiple languages are mixed within the same discourse. Code-switching, especially between Arabic and English, is common in the Arab world and is widely used in digital communication. This linguistic mixing poses extra challenges for deepfake detection, as it can confuse models trained mostly on monolingual data. To address this, we introduce ArEnAV, the first large-scale Arabic-English audio-visual deepfake dataset featuring intra-utterance code-switching, dialectal variation, and monolingual Arabic content. It contains 387k videos and over 765 hours of real and fake videos. Our dataset is generated using a novel pipeline integrating four Text-To-Speech and two lip-sync models, enabling comprehensive analysis of multilingual multimodal deepfake detection. We benchmark our dataset against existing monolingual and multilingual datasets, state-of-the-art deepfake detection models, and a human evaluation, highlighting its potential to advance deepfake research. The dataset is [public](https://huggingface.co/datasets/kartik060702/ArEnAV-Full).
Rethinking Bottlenecks in Safety Fine-Tuning of Vision Language Models
Authors: Yi Ding; Lijun Li; Bing Cao; Jing Shao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their deployment in safety-critical domains poses significant challenges. Existing safety fine-tuning methods, which focus on textual or multimodal content, fall short in addressing challenging cases or disrupt the balance between helpfulness and harmlessness. Our evaluation highlights a safety reasoning gap: these methods lack safety visual reasoning ability, leading to such bottlenecks. To address this limitation and enhance both visual perception and reasoning in safety-critical contexts, we propose a novel dataset that integrates multi-image inputs with safety Chain-of-Thought (CoT) labels as fine-grained reasoning logic to improve model performance. Specifically, we introduce the Multi-Image Safety (MIS) dataset, an instruction-following dataset tailored for multi-image safety scenarios, consisting of training and test splits. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning InternVL2.5-8B with MIS significantly outperforms both powerful open-source models and API-based models in challenging multi-image tasks requiring safety-related visual reasoning. This approach not only delivers exceptional safety performance but also preserves general capabilities without any trade-offs. Specifically, fine-tuning with MIS increases average accuracy by 0.83% across five general benchmarks and reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) on multiple safety benchmarks by a large margin.
Massive Memorization with Hundreds of Trillions of Parameters for Sequential Transducer Generative Recommenders
Authors: Zhimin Chen; Chenyu Zhao; Ka Chun Mo; Yunjiang Jiang; Jane H. Lee; Khushhall Chandra Mahajan; Ning Jiang; Kai Ren; Charlie Li; Wen-Yun Yang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Modern large-scale recommendation systems rely heavily on user interaction history sequences to enhance the model performance. 
The advent of large language models and sequential modeling techniques, particularly transformer architectures, has led to significant advancements (e.g., HSTU, SIM, and TWIN models). While scaling to ultra-long user histories (10k to 100k items) generally improves model performance, it also creates significant challenges on latency, queries per second (QPS) and GPU cost in industry-scale recommendation systems. Existing models do not adequately address these industrial scalability issues. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage modeling framework, namely \emph{VIrtual Sequential Target Attention} (VISTA), which decomposes traditional target attention from a candidate item to user history items into two distinct stages: (1) user history summarization into a few hundred tokens; followed by (2) candidate item attention to those tokens. These summarization token embeddings are then cached in storage system and then utilized as sequence features for downstream model training and inference. This novel design for scalability enables VISTA to scale to lifelong user histories (up to one million items) while keeping downstream training and inference costs fixed, which is essential in industry.
Our approach achieves significant improvements in offline and online metrics and has been successfully deployed on an industrial platform serving billions of users.
REAP the Experts: Why Pruning Prevails for One-Shot MoE compression
Authors: Mike Lasby; Ivan Lazarevich; Nish Sinnadurai; Sean Lie; Yani Ioannou; Vithursan Thangarasa
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) models offer efficient pre-training and low latency but their large parameter counts create significant memory overhead, motivating research into expert compression. Contrary to recent findings favouring expert *merging* on discriminative benchmarks, we find that expert *pruning* is a superior strategy for generative tasks. We demonstrate that existing merging techniques introduce an irreducible error due to the loss of fine-grained routing control over experts. Leveraging this insight, we propose Router-weighted Expert Activation Pruning (REAP), a novel pruning criterion that considers both router gate-values and expert activation norms to minimize the reconstruction error bound. Across a diverse set of SMoE models ranging from 20B to 1T parameters, REAP consistently outperforms merging and other pruning methods on generative benchmarks, especially at 50% compression. Notably, our method achieves near-lossless compression on code generation tasks with Qwen3-Coder-480B and Kimi-K2, even after pruning 50% of experts.
TTSDS2: Resources and Benchmark for Evaluating Human-Quality Text to Speech Systems
Authors: Christoph Minixhofer; Ondrej Klejch; Peter Bell
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Evaluation of Text to Speech (TTS) systems is challenging and resource-intensive. Subjective metrics such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS) are not easily comparable between works. Objective metrics are frequently used, but rarely validated against subjective ones. Both kinds of metrics are challenged by recent TTS systems capable of producing synthetic speech indistinguishable from real speech. In this work, we introduce Text to Speech Distribution Score 2 (TTSDS2), a more robust and improved version of TTSDS. Across a range of domains and languages, it is the only one out of 16 compared metrics to correlate with a Spearman correlation above 0.50 for every domain and subjective score evaluated. We also release a range of resources for evaluating synthetic speech close to real speech: A dataset with over 11,000 subjective opinion score ratings; a pipeline for recreating a multilingual test dataset to avoid data leakage; and a benchmark for TTS in 14 languages.