GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Latent Geometry-Driven Network Automata for Complex Network Dismantling
Authors: Thomas Adler; Marco Grassia; Ziheng Liao; Giuseppe Mangioni; Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Complex networks model the structure and function of critical technological, biological, and communication systems. Network dismantling, the targeted removal of nodes to fragment a network, is essential for analyzing and improving system robustness. Existing dismantling methods suffer from key limitations: they depend on global structural knowledge, exhibit slow running times on large networks, and overlook the network’s latent geometry, a key feature known to govern the dynamics of complex systems. Motivated by these findings, we introduce Latent Geometry-Driven Network Automata (LGD-NA), a novel framework that leverages local network automata rules to approximate effective link distances between interacting nodes. LGD-NA is able to identify critical nodes and capture latent manifold information of a network for effective and efficient dismantling. We show that this latent geometry-driven approach outperforms all existing dismantling algorithms, including spectral Laplacian-based methods and machine learning ones such as graph neural networks and . We also find that a simple common-neighbor-based network automata rule achieves near state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the effectiveness of minimal local information for dismantling. LGD-NA is extensively validated on the largest and most diverse collection of real-world networks to date (1,475 real-world networks across 32 complex systems domains) and scales efficiently to large networks via GPU acceleration. Finally, we leverage the explainability of our common-neighbor approach to engineer network robustness, substantially increasing the resilience of real-world networks. We validate LGD-NA's practical utility on domain-specific functional metrics, spanning neuronal firing rates in the Drosophila Connectome, transport efficiency in flight maps, outbreak sizes in contact networks, and communication pathways in terrorist cells. Our results confirm latent geometry as a fundamental principle for understanding the robustness of real-world systems, adding dismantling to the growing set of processes that network geometry can explain.
LearnPruner: Rethinking Attention-based Token Pruning in Vision Language Models
Authors: Rinyoichi Takezoe; Yaqian Li; Zi-Hao Bo; Anzhou Hou; Mo Guang; Kaiwen Long
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding and reasoning, but they also impose significant computational burdens due to long visual sequence inputs. Recent works address this issue by pruning unimportant visual tokens, achieving substantial computational reduction while maintaining model performance. The core of token pruning lies in determining token importance, with current approaches primarily relying on attention scores from vision encoders or Large Language Models (LLMs). 
In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of attention mechanisms in both vision encoders and LLMs. We find that vision encoders suffer from attention sink, leading to poor focus on informative foreground regions, while in LLMs, although prior studies have identified attention bias toward token positions, text-to-vision attention demonstrates resistance to this bias and enables effective pruning guidance in middle layers. 
Based on these observations, we propose $\textbf{LearnPruner}$, a two-stage token pruning framework that first removes redundant vision tokens via a learnable pruning module after the vision encoder, then retains only task-relevant tokens in the LLM's middle layer. 
Experimental results show that our LearnPruner can preserve approximately 95\% of the original performance while using only 5.5\% of vision tokens, and achieve 3.2$\times$ inference acceleration, demonstrating a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
Knowledge Exchange with Confidence: Cost-Effective LLM Integration for Reliable and Efficient Visual Question Answering
Authors: Mahsa Mozaffari; Hitesh Sapkota; Xumin Liu; Qi Yu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved the accuracy of visual question answering (VQA) systems. However, directly applying LLMs to VQA still presents several challenges: (a) suboptimal performance when handling questions from specialized domains, (b) higher computational costs and slower inference speed due to large model sizes, and (c) the absence of a systematic approach to precisely quantify the uncertainty of LLM responses, raising concerns about their reliability in high-stakes tasks. To address these issues, we propose an UNcertainty-aware LLM-Integrated VQA model ($\texttt{Uni-VQA}$). This model facilitates knowledge exchange between the LLM and a calibrated task-specific model (\ie \texttt{TS-VQA}), guided by reliable confidence scores, resulting in improved VQA accuracy, reliability and inference speed. Our framework strategically leverages these confidence scores to manage the interaction between the LLM and $\texttt{TS-VQA}$: the specialized questions are answered by the $\texttt{TS-VQA}$ model, while general knowledge questions are handled by the LLM. For questions requiring both specialized and general knowledge, the $\texttt{TS-VQA}$ provides candidate answers, which the LLM then combines with its internal knowledge to generate a more accurate response. Extensive experiments on VQA datasets demonstrate the theoretically justified advantages of $\texttt{Uni-VQA}$ over using the LLM or $\texttt{TS-VQA}$ alone.
Towards Privacy-Guaranteed Label Unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning: Few-Shot Forgetting Without Disclosure
Authors: Hanlin Gu; Hong Xi Tae; Lixin Fan; Chee Seng Chan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: This paper addresses the critical challenge of unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning (VFL), a setting that has received far less attention than its horizontal counterpart. Specifically, we propose the first method tailored to *label unlearning* in VFL, where labels play a dual role as both essential inputs and sensitive information. To this end, we employ a representation-level manifold mixup mechanism to generate synthetic embeddings for both unlearned and retained samples. This is to provide richer signals for the subsequent gradient-based label forgetting and recovery steps. These augmented embeddings are then subjected to gradient-based label forgetting, effectively removing the associated label information from the model. To recover performance on the retained data, we introduce a recovery-phase optimization step that refines the remaining embeddings. This design achieves effective label unlearning while maintaining computational efficiency. We validate our method through extensive experiments on diverse datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ModelNet, Brain Tumor MRI, COVID-19 Radiography, and Yahoo Answers demonstrate strong efficacy and scalability. Overall, this work establishes a new direction for unlearning in VFL, showing that re-imagining mixup as an efficient mechanism can unlock practical and utility-preserving unlearning. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/bryanhx/Towards-Privacy-Guaranteed-Label-Unlearning-in-Vertical-Federated-Learning.
HalluGuard: Demystifying Data-Driven and Reasoning-Driven Hallucinations in LLMs
Authors: Xinyue Zeng; Junhong Lin; Yujun Yan; Feng Guo; Liang Shi; Jun Wu; Dawei Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, and scientific discovery is often compromised by hallucinations. These failures typically stem from two sources: *data-driven hallucinations* and *reasoning-driven hallucinations*. However, existing detection methods usually address only one source and rely on task-specific heuristics, limiting their generalization to complex scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the *Hallucination Risk Bound*, a unified theoretical framework that formally decomposes hallucination risk into data-driven and reasoning-driven components, linked respectively to training-time mismatches and inference-time instabilities. This provides a principled foundation for analyzing how hallucinations emerge and evolve. Building on this foundation, we introduce **HalluGuard**, an NTK-based score that leverages the induced geometry and captured representations of the NTK to jointly identify data-driven and reasoning-driven hallucinations. We evaluate **HalluGuard** on 10 diverse benchmarks, 11 competitive baselines, and 9 popular LLM backbones, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance in detecting diverse forms of LLM hallucinations. We open-source our proposed \model{} model at https://github.com/Susan571/HalluGuard-ICLR2026.
Omni-Reward: Towards Generalist Omni-Modal Reward Modeling with Free-Form Preferences
Authors: Zhuoran Jin; Hongbang Yuan; Kejian Zhu; Jiachun Li; Pengfei Cao; Yubo Chen; Kang Liu; Jun Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in aligning AI behaviors with human preferences, yet they face two fundamental challenges: (1) Modality Imbalance, where most RMs are mainly focused on text and image modalities, offering limited support for video, audio, and other modalities; and (2) Preference Rigidity, where training on fixed binary preference pairs fails to capture the complexity and diversity of personalized preferences. To address the above challenges, we propose Omni-Reward, a step toward generalist omni-modal reward modeling with support for free-form preferences, consisting of: (1) Evaluation: We introduce Omni-RewardBench, the first omni-modal RM benchmark with free-form preferences, covering nine tasks across five modalities including text, image, video, audio, and 3D; (2) Data: We construct Omni-RewardData, a multimodal preference dataset comprising 248K general preference pairs and 69K instruction-tuning pairs for training generalist omni-modal RMs; (3) Model: We propose Omni-RewardModel, which includes both discriminative and generative RMs, and achieves strong performance on Omni-RewardBench as well as other widely used reward modeling benchmarks.
Arbitrary Generative Video Interpolation
Authors: Guozhen Zhang; Haiguang Wang; Chunyu Wang; Yuan Zhou; Qinglin Lu; Limin Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Generative Video Frame Interpolation (VFI), which synthesizes intermediate frames from a given pair of start and end frames, plays a pivotal role in video creation. However, existing generative VFI methods are constrained to producing a fixed number of intermediate frames, which significantly limits the flexibility in adjusting the frame rate or duration of videos during the creation process. In this work, we present \textbf{ArbInterp}, a novel generative VFI framework that enables efficient interpolation at any timestamp and of any length. Specifically, to support interpolation at any timestamp, we propose the Timestamp-aware Rotary Position Embedding (TaRoPE), which modulates positions in temporal RoPE to align generated frames with target normalized timestamps. This design enables fine-grained control over frame timestamps, addressing the inflexibility of fixed-position paradigms in prior work. For any-length interpolation, we decompose long-sequence generation into segment-wise frame synthesis. We further design a novel appearance-motion decoupled conditioning strategy: it leverages prior segment endpoints to enforce appearance consistency and temporal semantics to maintain motion coherence, ensuring seamless spatiotemporal transitions across segments. Experimentally, we build comprehensive benchmarks for multi-scale frame interpolation (2× to 32×) to assess generalizability across arbitrary interpolation factors. Results show that ArbInterp outperforms prior methods across all scenarios with higher fidelity and more seamless spatiotemporal continuity. Video demos are provided on the website: https://mcg-nju.github.io/ArbInterp-Web.
Midway Network: Learning Representations for Recognition and Motion from Latent Dynamics
Authors: Christopher Hoang; Mengye Ren
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Object recognition and motion understanding are key components of perception that complement each other.
    While self-supervised learning methods have shown promise in their ability to learn from unlabeled data, they have primarily focused on obtaining rich representations for either recognition or motion rather than both in tandem.
    On the other hand, latent dynamics modeling has been used in decision making to learn latent representations of observations and their transformations over time for control and planning tasks.
    In this work, we present Midway Network, a new self-supervised learning architecture that is the first to learn strong visual representations for both object recognition and motion understanding solely from natural videos, by extending latent dynamics modeling to this domain.
    Midway Network leverages a _midway_ top-down path to infer motion latents between video frames, as well as a dense forward prediction objective and hierarchical structure to tackle the complex, multi-object scenes of natural videos.
    We demonstrate that after pretraining on two large-scale natural video datasets, Midway Network achieves strong performance on both semantic segmentation and optical flow tasks relative to prior self-supervised learning methods.
    We also show that Midway Network's learned dynamics can capture high-level correspondence via a novel analysis method based on forward feature perturbation.
    Code is provided at https://github.com/agentic-learning-ai-lab/midway-network.
Active Learning for Decision Trees with Provable Guarantees
Authors: Arshia Soltani Moakhar; Tanapoom Laoaron; Faraz Ghahremani; Kiarash Banihashem; MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: This paper advances the theoretical understanding of active learning label complexity for decision trees as binary classifiers. We make two main contributions. First, we provide the first analysis of the **disagreement coefficient** for decision trees—a key parameter governing active learning label complexity. Our analysis holds under two natural assumptions required for achieving polylogarithmic label complexity: (i) each root-to-leaf path queries distinct feature dimensions, and (ii) the input data has a regular, grid-like structure. We show these assumptions are essential, as relaxing them leads to polynomial label complexity. Second, we present the first general active learning algorithm for binary classification that achieves a **multiplicative error guarantee**, producing a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate classifier. By combining these results, we design an active learning algorithm for decision trees that uses only a **polylogarithmic number of label queries** in the dataset size, under the stated assumptions. Finally, we establish a label complexity lower bound, showing our algorithm’s dependence on the error tolerance $\epsilon$ is close to optimal.
Understanding the Robustness of Distributed Self-Supervised Learning Frameworks Against Non-IID Data
Authors: Xuanyu Chen; NAN YANG; Shuai Wang; Dong Yuan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent research has introduced distributed self-supervised learning (D-SSL) approaches to leverage vast amounts of unlabeled decentralized data. However, D-SSL faces the critical challenge of data heterogeneity, and there is limited theoretical understanding of how different D-SSL frameworks respond to this challenge. To fill this gap, we present a rigorous theoretical analysis of the robustness of D-SSL frameworks under non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) settings. Our results show that pre-training with Masked Image Modeling (MIM) is inherently more robust to heterogeneous data than Contrastive Learning (CL), and that the robustness of decentralized SSL increases with average network connectivity, implying that federated learning (FL) is no less robust than decentralized learning (DecL). These findings provide a solid theoretical foundation for guiding the design of future D-SSL algorithms. To further illustrate the practical implications of our theory, we introduce MAR loss, a refinement of the MIM objective with local-to-global alignment regularization. Extensive experiments across model architectures and distributed settings validate our theoretical insights, and additionally confirm the effectiveness of MAR loss as an application of our analysis.
Not All Documents Are What You Need for Extracting Instruction Tuning Data
Authors: Chi Zhang; Huaping Zhong; Hongtao Li; Chengliang Chai; Hongjiawei; Yu-Ping Wang; Yuhao Deng; Jiacheng Wang; Yizhou Yan; Qiu Jiantao; Conghui He; Lei Cao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Instruction tuning improves the LLMs performance but depends on high-quality training data. Recently, LLMs have been used to synthesize data, enhancing training with seeds like question-answer (QA) pairs. However, this synthesis often results in instruction examples similar to the seeds, lacking diversity and biasing real applications. Thus, we propose to extract instruction tuning data from web corpus with much rich knowledge. The most straightforward strategy is to quickly retrieve domain specific documents from the corpus and then extract all QA pairs of these documents for tuning LLMs, which has two main limitations. (1) Extracting all QA pairs using LLMs is prohibitively expensive; and (2) These extracted pairs are not all beneficial for the downstream applications, and incorporating all of them for tuning may even hurt the model performance. To overcome the limitations,  we introduce $\texttt{EQUAL}$, an $\textbf{E}$ffective and scalable data extraction framework that iteratively interleaves  document selection and extract high-$\textbf{QUAL}$ity QA pairs to optimize instruction tuning. $\texttt{EQUAL}$ first clusters the document set based on the embeddings generated by contrastive learning. Then it leverages the multi-armed bandit based strategy to quickly identify document clusters where can extract high-quality QA pairs for training. This iterative framework significantly reduces computational costs while improving model performance much. Experiments on AutoMathText, KnowledgePile and StackOverflow across 13 downstream tasks demonstrate that $\texttt{EQUAL}$ reduces computational costs by 5–10$\times$ while improving accuracy by 2.5\% on LLaMA-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-7B and Mistral-7B. Code and data is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EQUAL-DD20.
Multi-Scale Diffusion-Guided Graph Learning with Power-Smoothing Random Walk Contrast for Multi-View Clustering
Authors: Feiyang Chen; Ruiqiang Guo; Zhibin Gu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Despite the notable advances in graph-based deep multi-view clustering, existing approaches still suffer from three critical limitations:  (1) relying on static graph structures and being unable to model the global semantic relationships across views; (2) contamination from false negative samples in contrastive learning frameworks; and (3) a fundamental trade-off between cross-view consistency and view-specific discrimination. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{M}ulti-sc\textbf{A}le diffusio\textbf{N}-guided \textbf{G}raph learning with p\textbf{O}wer-smoothing random walk contrast (\textbf{MANGO}) for multi-view clustering, a unified framework that combines adaptive multi-scale diffusion, random walk-driven contrastive learning, and structure-aware view consistency modeling. Specifically, the multi-scale diffusion mechanism leverages local entropy guidance to dynamically fuse similarity matrices across different diffusion steps, thereby achieving joint modeling of fine-grained local structures and overall global semantics. Additionally, we introduce a random walk-based correction strategy that explores high-probability semantic paths to filter out false negative samples, and applies a $\beta$-power transformation to adaptively reweight contrastive targets, thereby reducing noise propagation. To further reconcile the consistency-specificity dilemma, the view consistency module enforces semantic alignment across views by sharing structural embeddings, ensuring consistent local structures while preserving heterogeneous features. Extensive experiments on 12 benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MANGO.
AC-Sampler: Accelerate and Correct Diffusion Sampling with Metropolis-Hastings Algorithm
Authors: Minsang Park; Gyuwon Sim; Hyungho Na; Jiseok Kwak; Sumin Lee; Richard Lee Kim; Donghyeok Shin; Byeonghu Na; Yeongmin Kim; Il-chul Moon
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Diffusion-based generative models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in high-fidelity image synthesis. These models learn a sequence of denoising transition kernels that gradually transform a simple prior distribution into a complex data distribution. However, requiring many transitions not only slows down sampling but also accumulates approximation errors.
We introduce the Accelerator-Corrector Sampler (AC-Sampler), which accelerates and corrects diffusion sampling without fine-tuning. It generates samples directly from intermediate timesteps using the Metropolis–Hastings (MH) algorithm while correcting them to target the true data distribution. We derive a tractable density ratio for arbitrary timesteps with a discriminator, enabling computation of MH acceptance probabilities. Theoretically, our method yields samples better aligned with the true data distribution than the original model distribution. Empirically, AC-Sampler achieves FID 2.38 with only 15.8 NFEs, compared to the base sampler’s FID 3.23 with 17 NFEs on unconditional CIFAR-10. On CelebA-HQ 256×256, it attains FID 6.6 with 98.3 NFEs. AC-Sampler can be combined with existing acceleration and correction techniques, demonstrating its flexibility and broad applicability. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/aailab-kaist/AC-Sampler}{https://github.com/aailab-kaist/AC-Sampler.}
ProPerSim: Developing Proactive and Personalized AI Assistants through User-Assistant Simulation
Authors: Jiho Kim; Junseong Choi; Woosog Chay; Daeun Kyung; Yeonsu Kwon; Yohan Jo; Edward Choi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, there is growing demand for AI assistants that are not only reactive but also proactive and personalized. While recent advances have pushed forward proactivity and personalization individually, their combination remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProPerSim, a new task and simulation framework for developing assistants capable of making timely, personalized recommendations in realistic home scenarios. In our simulation environment, a user agent with a rich persona interacts with the assistant, providing ratings on how well each suggestion aligns with its preferences and context. The assistant’s goal is to use these ratings to learn and adapt to achieve higher scores over time. Built on ProPerSim, we propose ProPerAssistant, a retrieval-augmented, preference-aligned assistant that continually learns and adapts through user feedback. Experiments across 32 diverse personas show that ProPerAssistant adapts its strategy and steadily improves user satisfaction, highlighting the promise of uniting proactivity and personalization.