GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Magnetic Preference Optimization: Achieving Last-iterate Convergence for Language Model Alignment
Authors: Mingzhi Wang; Chengdong Ma; Qizhi Chen; Linjian Meng; Yang Han; Jiancong Xiao; Zhaowei Zhang; Jing Huo; Weijie J Su; Yaodong Yang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Self-play methods have demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing model capabilities across various domains. In the context of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), self-play not only boosts Large Language Model (LLM) performance but also overcomes the limitations of traditional Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumptions by finding the Nash equilibrium (NE) of a preference-based, two-player constant-sum game. However, existing methods either guarantee only average-iterate convergence, incurring high storage and inference costs, or converge to the NE of a regularized game, failing to accurately reflect true human preferences. In this paper, we introduce Magnetic Preference Optimization (MPO), a novel approach capable of achieving last-iterate convergence to the NE of the original game, effectively overcoming the limitations of existing methods. Building upon Magnetic Mirror Descent (MMD), MPO attains a linear convergence rate, making it particularly suitable for fine-tuning LLMs. To ensure our algorithm is both theoretically sound and practically viable, we present a simple yet effective implementation that adapts the theoretical insights to the RLHF setting. Empirical results demonstrate that MPO can significantly enhance the performance of LLMs, highlighting the potential of self-play methods in alignment.
Cached Multi-Lora Composition for Multi-Concept Image Generation
Authors: Xiandong Zou; Mingzhu Shen; Christos-Savvas Bouganis; Yiren Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted technique in text-to-image models, enabling precise rendering of multiple distinct elements, such as characters and styles, in multi-concept image generation. However, current approaches face significant challenges when composing these LoRAs for multi-concept image generation, particularly as the number of LoRAs increases, resulting in diminished generated image quality. 
In this paper, we initially investigate the role of LoRAs in the denoising process through the lens of the Fourier frequency domain.
Based on the hypothesis that applying multiple LoRAs could lead to "semantic conflicts", we have conducted empirical experiments and find that certain LoRAs amplify high-frequency features such as edges and textures, whereas others mainly focus on low-frequency elements, including the overall structure and smooth color gradients.
Building on these insights, we devise a frequency domain based sequencing strategy to determine the optimal order in which LoRAs should be integrated during inference. This strategy offers a methodical and generalizable solution compared to the naive integration commonly found in existing LoRA fusion techniques.
To fully leverage our proposed LoRA order sequence determination method in multi-LoRA composition tasks, we introduce a novel, training-free framework, Cached Multi-LoRA (CMLoRA), designed to efficiently integrate multiple LoRAs while maintaining cohesive image generation.
With its flexible backbone for multi-LoRA fusion and a non-uniform caching strategy tailored to individual LoRAs, CMLoRA has the potential to reduce semantic conflicts in LoRA composition and improve computational efficiency.
Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that CMLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art training-free LoRA fusion methods by a significant margin -- it achieves an average improvement of $2.19$% in CLIPScore, and $11.25%$% in MLLM win rate compared to LoraHub, LoRA Composite, and LoRA Switch.
The Effectiveness of Curvature-Based Rewiring and the Role of Hyperparameters in GNNs Revisited
Authors: Floriano Tori; Vincent Holst; Vincent Ginis
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Message passing is the dominant paradigm in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The efficiency of message passing, however, can be limited by the topology of the graph. This happens when information is lost during propagation due to being oversquashed when travelling through bottlenecks. To remedy this, recent efforts have focused on graph rewiring techniques, which disconnect the input graph originating from the data and the computational graph, on which message passing is performed. A prominent approach for this is to use discrete graph curvature measures, of which several variants have been proposed, to identify and rewire around bottlenecks, facilitating information propagation. While oversquashing has been demonstrated in synthetic datasets, in this work we reevaluate the performance gains that curvature-based rewiring brings to real-world datasets. We show that in these datasets, edges selected during the rewiring process are not in line with theoretical criteria identifying bottlenecks. This implies they do not necessarily oversquash information during message passing. Subsequently, we demonstrate that SOTA accuracies on these datasets are outliers originating from sweeps of hyperparameters—both the ones for training and dedicated ones related to the rewiring algorithm—instead of consistent performance gains. In conclusion, our analysis nuances the effectiveness of curvature-based rewiring in real-world datasets and brings a new perspective on the methods to evaluate GNN accuracy improvements.
Utilitarian Algorithm Configuration for Infinite Parameter Spaces
Authors: Devon R. Graham; Kevin Leyton-Brown
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Utilitarian algorithm configuration is a general-purpose technique for automatically searching the parameter space of a given algorithm to optimize its performance, as measured by a given utility function, on a given set of inputs. Recently introduced utilitarian configuration procedures offer optimality guarantees about the returned parameterization while provably adapting to the hardness of the underlying problem. However, the applicability of these approaches is severely limited by the fact that they only search a finite, relatively small set of parameters. They cannot effectively search the configuration space of algorithms with continuous or uncountable parameters. In this paper we introduce a new procedure, which we dub COUP (Continuous, Optimistic Utilitarian Procrastination). COUP is designed to search infinite parameter spaces efficiently to find good configurations quickly. Furthermore, COUP maintains the theoretical benefits of previous utilitarian configuration procedures when applied to finite parameter spaces but is significantly faster, both provably and experimentally.
Triples as the Key: Structuring Makes Decomposition and Verification Easier in LLM-based TableQA
Authors: Zhen Yang; Ziwei Du; Minghan Zhang; Wei Du; Jie Chen; Zhen Duan; Shu Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: As the mainstream approach, LLMs have been widely applied and researched in TableQA tasks. Currently, the core of LLM-based TableQA methods typically include three phases: question decomposition, sub-question TableQA reasoning, and answer verification. However, several challenges remain in this process: i) Sub-questions generated by these methods often exhibit significant gaps with the original question due to critical information overlooked during the LLM's direct decomposition; ii) Verification of answers is typically challenging because LLMs tend to generate optimal responses during self-correct. To address these challenges, we propose a Triple-Inspired Decomposition and vErification (TIDE) strategy, which leverages the structural properties of triples to assist in decomposition and verification in TableQA. The inherent structure of triples (head entity, relation, tail entity) requires the LLM to extract as many entities and relations from the question as possible. Unlike direct decomposition methods that may overlook key information, our transformed sub-questions using triples encompass more critical details. Additionally, this explicit structure facilitates verification. By comparing the triples derived from the answers with those from the question decomposition, we can achieve easier and more straightforward validation than when relying on the LLM's self-correct tendencies. By employing triples alongside established LLM modes, Direct Prompting and Agent modes, TIDE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple TableQA datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.
Words in Motion: Extracting Interpretable Control Vectors for Motion Transformers
Authors: Omer Sahin Tas; Royden Wagner
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Transformer-based models generate hidden states that are difficult to interpret. In this work, we analyze hidden states and modify them at inference, with a focus on motion forecasting. We use linear probing to analyze whether interpretable features are embedded in hidden states. Our experiments reveal high probing accuracy, indicating latent space regularities with functionally important directions. Building on this, we use the directions between hidden states with opposing features to fit control vectors. At inference, we add our control vectors to hidden states and evaluate their impact on predictions. Remarkably, such modifications preserve the feasibility of predictions. We further refine our control vectors using sparse autoencoders (SAEs). This leads to more linear changes in predictions when scaling control vectors. Our approach enables mechanistic interpretation as well as zero-shot generalization to unseen dataset characteristics with negligible computational overhead.
ProtPainter: Draw or Drag Protein via Topology-guided Diffusion
Authors: Zhengxi Lu; Shizhuo Cheng; Tintin Jiang; Yan Zhang; Min Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in protein backbone generation have achieved promising results under structural, functional, or physical constraints. However, existing methods lack the flexibility for precise topology control, limiting navigation of the backbone space. We present $\textbf{ProtPainter}$, a diffusion-based approach for generating protein backbones conditioned on 3D curves. ProtPainter follows a two-stage process: curve-based sketching and sketch-guided backbone generation. For the first stage, we propose $\textbf{CurveEncoder}$, which predicts secondary structure annotations from a curve to parametrize sketch generation. For the second stage, the sketch guides the generative process in Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modeling (DDPM) to generate backbones. During the process, we further introduce a fusion scheduling scheme, Helix-Gating, to control the scaling factors. To evaluate, we propose the first benchmark for topology-conditioned protein generation, introducing Protein Restoration Task and a new metric, self-consistency Topology Fitness (scTF). Experiments demonstrate ProtPainter's ability to generate topology-fit (scTF $>$ 0.8) and designable (scTM $>$ 0.5) backbones, with drawing and dragging tasks showcasing its flexibility and versatility.
KinPFN: Bayesian Approximation of RNA Folding Kinetics using Prior-Data Fitted Networks
Authors: Dominik Scheuer; Frederic Runge; Jörg K.H. Franke; Michael T. Wolfinger; Christoph Flamm; Frank Hutter
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: RNA is a dynamic biomolecule crucial for cellular regulation, with its function largely determined by its folding into complex structures, while misfolding can lead to multifaceted biological sequelae. During the folding process, RNA traverses through a series of intermediate structural states, with each transition occurring at variable rates that collectively influence the time required to reach the functional form. Understanding these folding kinetics is vital for predicting RNA behavior and optimizing applications in synthetic biology and drug discovery. While in silico kinetic RNA folding simulators are often computationally intensive and time-consuming, accurate approximations of the folding times can already be very informative to assess the efficiency of the folding process. In this work, we present KinPFN, a novel approach that leverages prior-data fitted networks to directly model the posterior predictive distribution of RNA folding times. By training on synthetic data representing arbitrary prior folding times, KinPFN efficiently approximates the cumulative distribution function of RNA folding times in a single forward pass, given only a few initial folding time examples. Our method offers a modular extension to existing RNA kinetics algorithms, promising significant computational speed-ups orders of magnitude faster, while achieving comparable results. We showcase the effectiveness of KinPFN through extensive evaluations and real-world case studies, demonstrating its potential for RNA folding kinetics analysis, its practical relevance, and generalization to other biological data.
Sketch2Diagram: Generating Vector Diagrams from Hand-Drawn Sketches
Authors: Itsumi Saito; Haruto Yoshida; Keisuke Sakaguchi
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: We address the challenge of automatically generating high-quality vector diagrams from hand-drawn sketches. 
Vector diagrams are essential for communicating complex ideas across various fields, offering flexibility and scalability. 
While recent research has progressed in generating diagrams from text descriptions, converting hand-drawn sketches into vector diagrams remains largely unexplored due to the lack of suitable datasets. 
To address this gap, we introduce SketikZ, a dataset comprising 3,231 pairs of hand-drawn sketches and thier corresponding TikZ codes as well as reference diagrams.
Our evaluations reveal the limitations of state-of-the-art vision and language models (VLMs), positioning SketikZ as a key benchmark for future research in sketch-to-diagram conversion.
Along with SketikZ, we present ImgTikZ, an image-to-TikZ model that integrates a 6.7B parameter code-specialized open-source large language model (LLM) with a pre-trained vision encoder. 
Despite its relatively compact size, ImgTikZ performs comparably to GPT-4o.
This success is driven by using our two data augmentation techniques and a multi-candidate inference strategy.
Our findings open promising directions for future research in sketch-to-diagram conversion and broader image-to-code generation tasks. SketikZ is publicly available.
Transformers Provably Solve Parity Efficiently with Chain of Thought
Authors: Juno Kim; Taiji Suzuki
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: This work provides the first theoretical analysis of training transformers to solve complex problems by recursively generating intermediate states, analogous to fine-tuning for chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. We consider training a one-layer transformer to solve the fundamental $k$-parity problem, extending the work on RNNs by \citet{Wies23}. We establish three key results: (1) any finite-precision gradient-based algorithm, without intermediate supervision, requires substantial iterations to solve parity with finite samples. (2) In contrast, when intermediate parities are incorporated into the loss function, our model can learn parity in one gradient update when aided by \emph{teacher forcing}, where ground-truth labels of the reasoning chain are provided at each generation step. (3) Even without teacher forcing, where the model must generate CoT chains end-to-end, parity can be learned efficiently if augmented data is employed to internally verify the soundness of intermediate steps. Our findings, supported by numerical experiments, show that task decomposition and stepwise reasoning naturally arise from optimizing transformers with CoT; moreover, self-consistency checking can improve multi-step reasoning ability, aligning with empirical studies of CoT.
Adaptive Gradient Clipping for Robust Federated Learning
Authors: Youssef Allouah; Rachid Guerraoui; Nirupam Gupta; Ahmed Jellouli; Geovani Rizk; John Stephan
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: Robust federated learning aims to maintain reliable performance despite the presence of adversarial or misbehaving workers. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) robust distributed gradient descent (Robust-DGD) methods were proven theoretically optimal, their empirical success has often relied on pre-aggregation gradient clipping.
However, existing static clipping strategies yield inconsistent results: enhancing robustness against some attacks while being ineffective or even detrimental against others.
To address this limitation, we propose a principled adaptive clipping strategy, Adaptive Robust Clipping (ARC), which dynamically adjusts clipping thresholds based on the input gradients. We prove that ARC not only preserves the theoretical robustness guarantees of SOTA Robust-DGD methods but also provably improves asymptotic convergence when the model is well-initialized. Extensive experiments on benchmark image classification tasks confirm these theoretical insights, demonstrating that ARC significantly enhances robustness, particularly in highly heterogeneous and adversarial settings.
Agents' Room:  Narrative Generation through Multi-step Collaboration
Authors: Fantine Huot; Reinald Kim Amplayo; Jennimaria Palomaki; Alice Shoshana Jakobovits; Elizabeth Clark; Mirella Lapata
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Writing compelling fiction is a multifaceted process combining elements such as crafting a plot, developing interesting characters, and using evocative language. While large language models (LLMs) show promise for story writing, they currently rely heavily on intricate prompting, which limits their use. We propose Agents' Room, a generation framework inspired by narrative theory, that decomposes narrative writing into subtasks tackled by specialized agents. To illustrate our method, we introduce Tell Me A Story, a high-quality dataset of complex writing prompts and human-written stories, and a novel evaluation framework designed specifically for assessing long narratives. We show that Agents' Room generates stories that are preferred by expert evaluators over those produced by baseline systems by leveraging collaboration and specialization to decompose the complex story writing task into tractable components. We provide extensive analysis with automated and human-based metrics of the generated output.
How Does Vision-Language Adaptation Impact the Safety of Vision Language Models?
Authors: Seongyun Lee; Geewook Kim; Jiyeon Kim; Hyunji Lee; Hoyeon Chang; Sue Hyun Park; Minjoon Seo
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-Language adaptation (VL adaptation) transforms Large Language Models (LLMs) into Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for multimodal tasks, but this process often compromises the inherent safety capabilities embedded in the original LLMs. Despite potential harmfulness due to weakened safety measures, in-depth analysis on the effects of VL adaptation on safety remains under-explored. This study examines how VL adaptation influences safety and evaluates the impact of safety fine-tuning methods. Our analysis reveals that safety degradation occurs during VL adaptation, even when the training data is safe. While safety tuning techniques like supervised fine-tuning with safety datasets or reinforcement learning from human feedback mitigate some risks, they still lead to safety degradation and a reduction in helpfulness due to over-rejection issues. Further analysis of internal model weights suggests that VL adaptation may impact certain safety-related layers, potentially lowering overall safety levels. Additionally, our findings demonstrate that the objectives of VL adaptation and safety tuning are divergent, which often results in their simultaneous application being suboptimal. To address this, we suggest the weight merging approach as an optimal solution effectively reducing safety degradation while maintaining helpfulness. These insights help guide the development of more reliable and secure LVLMs for real-world applications.
Oscillatory State-Space Models
Authors: T. Konstantin Rusch; Daniela Rus
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Oral)

Abstract: We propose Linear Oscillatory State-Space models (LinOSS) for efficiently learning on long sequences. Inspired by cortical dynamics of biological neural networks, we base our proposed LinOSS model on a system of forced harmonic oscillators. A stable discretization, integrated over time using fast associative parallel scans, yields the proposed state-space model. We prove that LinOSS produces stable dynamics only requiring nonnegative diagonal state matrix. This is in stark contrast to many previous state-space models relying heavily on restrictive parameterizations. Moreover, we rigorously show that LinOSS is universal, i.e., it can approximate any continuous and causal operator mapping between time-varying functions, to desired accuracy. In addition, we show that an implicit-explicit discretization of LinOSS perfectly conserves the symmetry of time reversibility of the underlying dynamics. Together, these properties enable efficient modeling of long-range interactions, while ensuring stable and accurate long-horizon forecasting. Finally, our empirical results, spanning a wide range of time-series tasks from mid-range to very long-range classification and regression, as well as long-horizon forecasting, demonstrate that our proposed LinOSS model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art sequence models. Notably, LinOSS outperforms Mamba and LRU by nearly 2x on a sequence modeling task with sequences of length 50k.
Imputation for prediction: beware of diminishing returns.
Authors: Marine Le Morvan; Gael Varoquaux
Venue: ICLR 2025 (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)

Abstract: Missing values are prevalent across various fields, posing challenges for training and deploying predictive models. In this context, imputation is a common practice, driven by the hope that accurate imputations will enhance predictions. However, recent theoretical and empirical studies indicate that simple constant imputation can be consistent and competitive. This empirical study aims at clarifying 
*if* and *when* investing in advanced imputation methods yields significantly better predictions. Relating imputation and predictive accuracies across combinations of imputation and predictive models on 19 datasets, we show that imputation accuracy matters less i) when using expressive models, ii) when incorporating missingness indicators as complementary inputs, iii) matters much more for generated linear outcomes than for real-data outcomes. Interestingly, we also show that the use of the missingness indicator is beneficial to the prediction performance, even in MCAR scenarios. Overall, on real-data with powerful models, imputation quality has only a minor effect on prediction performance. Thus, investing in better imputations for improved predictions often offers limited benefits.