GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
NurValues: Real-World Nursing Values Evaluation for Large Language Models in Clinical Context
Authors: Ben Yao; Qiuchi Li; Yazhou Zhang; Yang siyu; Bohan Zhang; Prayag Tiwari; Jing Qin
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: While LLMs have demonstrated medical knowledge and conversational ability, their deployment in clinical practice raises new risks: patients may place greater trust in LLM-generated responses than in nurses' professional judgments, potentially intensifying nurse–patient conflicts. Such risks highlight the urgent need of evaluating whether LLMs align with the core nursing values upheld by human nurses. This work introduces the first benchmark for nursing value alignment, consisting of five core value dimensions distilled from international nursing codes: _Altruism_, _Human Dignity_, _Integrity_, _Justice_, and _Professionalism_. We define two-level tasks on the benchmark, considering the two characteristics of emerging nurse–patient conflicts. The **Easy-Level** dataset consists of 2,200 value-aligned and value-violating instances, which are collected through a five-month longitudinal field study across three hospitals of varying tiers; The **Hard-Level** dataset is comprised of 2,200 dialogue-based instances that embed contextual cues and subtle misleading signals, which increase adversarial complexity and better reflect the subjectivity and bias of narrators in the context of emerging nurse-patient conflicts. We evaluate a total of 23 SoTA LLMs on their ability to align with nursing values, and find that general LLMs outperform medical ones, and _Justice_ is the hardest value dimension. As the first real-world benchmark for healthcare value alignment, NurValues provides novel insights into how LLMs navigate ethical challenges in clinician–patient interactions.
GHOST: Hallucination-Inducing Image Generation for Multimodal LLMs
Authors: Aryan Yazdan Parast; Parsa Hosseini; Hesam Asadollahzadeh; Arshia Soltani Moakhar; Basim Azam; Soheil Feizi; NAVEED AKHTAR
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Object hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is a persistent failure mode that causes the model to perceive objects absent in the image. This weakness of MLLMs is currently studied using static benchmarks with fixed visual scenarios, which preempts the possibility of uncovering model-specific or unanticipated hallucination vulnerabilities. We introduce GHOST (Generating Hallucinations via Optimizing Stealth Tokens), a method designed to stress-test MLLMs by actively generating images that induce hallucination. GHOST is fully automatic and requires no human supervision or prior knowledge. It operates by optimizing in the image embedding space to mislead the model while keeping the target object absent, and then guiding a diffusion model conditioned on the embedding to generate natural-looking images. The resulting images remain visually natural and close to the original input, yet introduce subtle misleading cues that cause the model to hallucinate. We evaluate our method across a range of models, including reasoning models like GLM-4.1V-Thinking, and achieve a hallucination success rate exceeding 28%, compared to around 1% in prior data-driven discovery methods. We confirm that the generated images are both high-quality and object-free through quantitative metrics and human evaluation. Also, GHOST uncovers transferable vulnerabilities: images optimized for Qwen2.5-VL induce hallucinations in GPT-4o at a 66.5% rate. Finally, we show that fine-tuning on our images mitigates hallucination, positioning GHOST as both a diagnostic and corrective tool for building more reliable multimodal systems.
The Achilles’ Heel of LLMs: How Altering a Handful of Neurons Can Cripple Language Abilities
Authors: Zixuan Qin; Qingchen Yu; Kunlin Lyu; Zhaoxin Fan; Yifan Sun
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational tools in natural language processing, powering a wide range of applications and research. Many studies have shown that LLMs share significant similarities with the human brain. Neuroscience research has found that a small subset of biological neurons in the human brain are crucial for core cognitive functions, which raises a fundamental question: do LLMs also contain a small subset of critical neurons? In this paper, we investigate this question by proposing a Perturbation-based Causal Identification of Critical Neurons method to systematically locate such critical neurons in LLMs. Our findings reveal three key insights:
(1) LLMs contain ultra-sparse critical neuron sets. Disrupting these critical neurons can cause a 72B-parameter model with over 1.1 billion neurons to completely collapse, with perplexity increasing by up to 20 orders of magnitude;
(2) These critical neurons are not uniformly distributed, but tend to concentrate in the outer layers, particularly within the MLP down\_proj components;
(3) Performance degradation exhibits sharp phase transitions, rather than a gradual decline, when these critical neurons are disrupted.
Through comprehensive experiments across diverse model architectures and scales, we provide deeper analysis of these phenomena and their implications for LLM robustness and interpretability. These findings can offer guidance for developing more robust model architectures and improving deployment security in safety-critical applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/qqqqqqqzx/The-Achilles-Heel-of-LLMs.
Frequency-Balanced Retinal Representation Learning with Mutual Information Regularization
Authors: Seunghoon Lee; Seongjae Kang; Inhyuk Park; Gitaek Kwon; Jihyeon Baek; Doohyun Park
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We propose a frequency-oriented perspective on retinal representation learning by analyzing masked autoencoders (MAE) through the lens of spatial frequency. Our analysis shows that MAE favors low-frequency content while under-encoding diagnostically critical high-frequency structures in retinal images. Because retinal pathology often manifests in high-frequency detail, this bias limits diagnostic performance and motivates frequency-balanced representations. Within a mutual-information (MI) formulation of MAE, we introduce the Frequency-Balanced Retinal Masked Autoencoder (RetMAE), which augments the reconstruction objective with a MI regularizer that suppresses low-frequency redundancy and accentuates clinically salient high-frequency information. Without altering the architecture, RetMAE learns frequency-balanced features that surpass those of MAE-based retinal encoders in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. These results suggest that a frequency-oriented view provides a principled foundation for future advances in ophthalmic modeling, offering new insight into how MAE’s reconstruction objective amplifies ViT’s low-pass tendencies in spatially heterogeneous retinal images and enabling a simple MI-based correction that improves retinal encoders.
Distributionally Robust Classification for Multi-source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Seonghwi Kim; Sung Ho Jo; Wooseok Ha; Minwoo Chae
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a statistical learning problem when the distribution of training (source) data is different from that of test (target) data. In this setting, one has access to labeled data only from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. The central objective is to leverage the source data and the unlabeled target data to build models that generalize to the target domain. Despite its potential, existing UDA approaches often struggle in practice, particularly in scenarios where the target domain offers only limited unlabeled data or spurious correlations dominate the source domain. To address these challenges, we propose a novel distributionally robust learning framework that models uncertainty in both the covariate distribution and the conditional label distribution. Our approach is motivated by the multi-source domain adaptation setting but is also directly applicable to the single-source scenario, making it versatile in practice. We develop an efficient learning algorithm that can be seamlessly integrated with existing UDA methods. Extensive experiments under various distribution shift scenarios show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, especially when target data are extremely scarce.
On the Generalization of SFT: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective with Reward Rectification
Authors: Yongliang Wu; Yizhou Zhou; Zhou Ziheng; Yingzhe Peng; Xinyu Ye; Xinting Hu; Wenbo Zhu; Lu Qi; Ming-Hsuan Yang; Xu Yang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through mathematical analysis, we reveal that standard SFT gradients implicitly encode a problematic reward structure that may severely restrict the generalization capabilities of model compared to RL. To rectify this, we propose Dynamic Fine-Tuning (DFT), stabilizing gradient updates for each token by dynamically rescaling the objective function with the probability of this token. With just a single-line change, the method outperforms standard SFT on multiple difficult benchmarks and base models, from math reasoning to code generation and multi-modal tasks, demonstrating improved generalization. Additionally, \model~achieves competitive results in offline RL settings, providing an effective yet streamlined alternative. By bridging theoretical insights with practical solutions, this work advances the state of SFT. The source code will be available at https://github.com/yongliang-wu/DFT.
VitaBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents with Versatile Interactive Tasks in Real-world Applications
Authors: Wei He; Yueqing Sun; Hongyan Hao; Xueyuan Hao; Zhikang Xia; Qi GU; Hui Su; Xunliang Cai
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: As LLMs with agentic abilities are increasingly deployed in real-life scenarios, existing benchmarks fail to capture their inherent complexity of handling extensive information, leveraging diverse resources, and managing dynamic user interactions. To address this gap, we introduce VitaBench, a challenging benchmark that evaluates agents on versatile interactive tasks grounded in real-world settings. Drawing from daily applications in food delivery, in-store consumption, and online travel services, VitaBench presents agents with the most complex life-serving simulation environment to date, comprising 66 tools. Through a framework that eliminates domain-specific policies, we enable flexible composition of these scenarios and tools, yielding 100 cross-scenario tasks (main results) and 300 single-scenario tasks. Each task is derived from multiple real user requests and requires agents to reason across temporal and spatial dimensions, utilize complex tool sets, proactively clarify ambiguous instructions, and track shifting user intent throughout multi-turn conversations. Moreover, we propose a rubric-based sliding window evaluator, enabling robust assessment of diverse solution pathways in complex environments and stochastic interactions. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that even the most advanced models achieve only 30% success rate on cross-scenario tasks, and less than 50% success rate on others. Overall, we believe VitaBench will serve as a valuable resource for advancing the development of AI agents in practical real-world applications.
Uni-NTFM: A Unified Foundation Model for EEG Signal Representation Learning
Authors: Zhisheng Chen; Yingwei Zhang; Qizhen Lan; Tianyu Liu; Huacan Wang; Yi Ding; Ziyu Jia; Ronghao Chen; Kun Wang; Xinliang Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Current foundation models for electroencephalography (EEG) rely on architectures adapted from computer vision or natural language processing, typically treating neural signals as pixel grids or token sequences. This approach overlooks that the neural activity is activated by diverse sparse coding across a complex geometric topological cortex. Inspired by biological neural mechanisms, we propose the Unified Neural Topological Foundation Model (Uni-NTFM), an architecture rooted in three core neuroscience principles. In detail, to align with the brain's decoupled coding mechanism, we design the Heterogeneous Feature Projection Module. This module simultaneously encodes both time-domain non-stationary transients and frequency-domain steady-state rhythms, ensuring high quality in both waveform morphology and spectral rhythms. Moreover, we introduce a Topological Embedding mechanism to inject structured spatial priors and align different sensor configurations onto a unified latent functional topography, effectively reconstructing the geometry of brain regions. Furthermore, we achieve functional modularization and sparse coding efficiency of biological networks by constructing the Mixture-of-Experts Transformer network. This dynamic routing mechanism assigns different signal patterns and tasks to specialized neural subnetworks, and effectively preventing task interference while increasing the model capacity to record-breaking 1.9 billion parameters. Uni-NTFM is pre-trained on a diverse corpus comprising 28,000 hours of EEG data, and outperforms existing models across nine distinct downstream tasks under both linear probing and fine-tuning settings, demonstrating that aligning model architecture with neural mechanisms is significant to learn universal representations and achieve generalizable brain decoding.} Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/czs-ict/Uni-NTFM}
ComputerRL: Scaling End-to-End Online Reinforcement Learning for Computer Use Agents
Authors: Hanyu Lai; Xiao Liu; Yanxiao Zhao; Han Xu; Hanchen Zhang; Bohao Jing; Yanyu Ren; Shuntian Yao; Yuxiao Dong; Jie Tang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce ComputerRL, a framework for autonomous desktop intelligence that enables agents to operate complex digital workspaces skillfully. ComputerRL features the API-GUI paradigm, which unifies programmatic API calls and direct GUI interaction to address the inherent mismatch between machine agents and human-centric desktop environments. Scaling end-to-end RL training is crucial for improvement and generalization across diverse desktop tasks; however, it remains challenging due to environmental inefficiency and instability during extended training. To support scalable and robust training, we develop a distributed RL infrastructure capable of orchestrating thousands of parallel virtual desktop environments to accelerate large-scale online RL. Furthermore, we propose Entropulse, a training strategy that alternates reinforcement learning with supervised fine-tuning, effectively mitigating entropy collapse during extended training runs. We employ ComputerRL on open models GLM-4-9B-0414 and GLM-4.1V-9B-Thinking, and evaluate them on the OSWorld benchmark. The GLM-ComputerRL-9B achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 48.9%, demonstrating significant improvements for general agents in desktop automation. Our code is available at https://github.com/THUDM/ComputerRL.
Curvature-Guided Task Synergy for Skeleton based Temporal Action Segmentation
Authors: Guozhang Li; Xinran Duan; Mei Wang; Lizhi Wang; Hua Huang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Fine-grained temporal action segmentation plays a vital role in comprehensivehuman behavior understanding, with skeleton-based approaches (STAS) gaining prominence for their privacy and robustness. A core challenge in STAS arises from the conflicting feature requirements of action classification (demanding temporal invariance) and boundary localization (requiring temporal sensitivity). Existing methods typically adopt decoupled pipelines, unfortunately overlooking the inherent semantic complementarity between these sub-tasks, leading to information silos that prevent beneficial cross-task synergies. To address this challenge, we propose CurvSeg, a novel approach that synergizes classification and localization within the STAS domain through a unique geometric curvature guidance mechanism. Our key innovation lies in exploiting curvature properties of well-learned classification representations on skeleton sequences. Specifically, we observe that high curvature within action segments and low curvature at transitions effectively serve as geometric priors for precise boundary detection. CurvSeg establishes a virtuous cycle: localization predictions, guided by these curvature
signals, in turn dynamically refine the classification feature space to organize into a geometry conducive to clearer boundaries. To compute stable curvature signals from potentially noisy skeleton features, we further develop a dual-expert weighting mechanism within a Mixture of Experts framework, providing task-adaptive feature extraction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that CurvSeg signif-icantly enhances STAS performance across multiple benchmark datasets, achieving superior results and validating the power of geometric-guided task collaboration for this specific problem.
Multi-ReduNet: Interpretable Class-Wise Decomposition of ReduNet
Authors: Fengrong Li; Delin Chu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: ReduNet has emerged as a promising white-box neural architecture grounded in the principle of maximal coding rate reduction, offering interpretability in deep feature learning. However, its practical applicability is hindered by computational complexity and limited ability to exploit class-specific structures, especially in undersampled regimes. In this work, we propose Multi-ReduNet and its variant Multi-ReduNet-LastNorm, which decompose the global learning objective into class-wise subproblems. These extensions preserve the theoretical foundation of ReduNet while improving training efficiency by reducing matrix inversion costs and enhancing feature separability. We provide a concise theoretical justification for the class-wise decomposition and show through experiments on diverse datasets that our models retain interpretability while achieving superior efficiency and discriminative power under limited supervision. Our findings suggest that class-wise extensions of ReduNet broaden its applicability, bridging the gap between interpretability and practical scalability in deep learning.
Seeing, Listening, Remembering, and Reasoning: A Multimodal Agent with Long-Term Memory
Authors: Lin Long; Yichen He; Wentao Ye; Yiyuan Pan; Yuan Lin; Hang Li; Junbo Zhao; Wei Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce M3-Agent, a novel multimodal agent framework equipped with long-term memory. Like humans, M3-Agent can process real-time visual and auditory inputs to build and update episodic and semantic memories, gradually accumulating world knowledge. Its memory is organized in an entity-centric, multimodal manner, enabling deeper and more consistent understanding of the environment. Given an instruction, M3-Agent autonomously performs multi-turn reasoning and retrieves relevant memories to complete tasks. To evaluate memory effectiveness and memory-based reasoning in multimodal agents, we develop M3-Bench, a long-video question answering benchmark comprising 100 newly recorded robot-perspective videos (M3-Bench-robot) and 920 diverse web-sourced videos (M3-Bench-web). We annotate QA pairs designed to test capabilities essential for agent applications, such as person understanding, general knowledge extraction, and cross-modal reasoning. Experimental results show that M3-Agent, trained via reinforcement learning, outperforms the strongest baseline, a prompting agent using Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o, achieving 6.7%, 7.7%, and 5.3% higher accuracy on M3-Bench-robot, M3-Bench-web and VideoMME-long, respectively. Our work advances multimodal agents toward more human-like long-term memory and provides insights for their practical design. Models, datasets and code are available at https://github.com/ByteDance-Seed/m3-agent.
Meta-UCF: Unified Task-Conditioned LoRA Generation for Continual Learning in Large Language Models
Authors: ShiLin Xiao; Tianxiang Xu; Canran Xiao; Weihao Luo; Liwei Hou; Chuangxin Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in settings where newtasks arrive continuously, yet existing parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) methods either bloat linearly with the task horizon or sacrifice deep adaptation, leaving catastrophic forgetting unresolved. We aim to achieve memory-constant, on-the-fly adaptation for a frozen LLM facing an unbounded stream of tasks. To this end we propose Meta-Unified Contrastive Finetuning(Meta-UCF), which encodes each task into a lightweight layer-normalised mean embedding and feeds it to a single hypernetwork that instantly generates rank-r LoRA updates for every transformer layer; a meta-contrastive coupled with orthogonality objective further steers task embeddings into near-orthogonal directions, preserving past knowledge without inner-loop gradients. On four benchmark streams—Std-CL 5, Seq-GLUE 7, Long-CL 15 and TRACE-8—Meta-UCF raises average accuracy by up to 2.2 pp and cuts forgetting by 13% relative to the strongest LoRA baseline, while using the parameters of a single adapter. By decoupling continual learning from parameter growth, Meta-UCF provides a practical path toward scalable, low-resource lifelong language modelling.
Easier Painting Than Thinking: Can Text-to-Image Models Set the Stage, but Not Direct the Play?
Authors: Ouxiang Li; Yuan Wang; Xinting Hu; Huijuan Huang; Rui Chen; Jiarong Ou; Xin Tao; Pengfei Wan; Xiaojuan Qi; Fuli Feng
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generation aims to synthesize images from textual prompts, which jointly specify what must be shown and imply what can be inferred, which thus correspond to two core capabilities: ***composition*** and ***reasoning***. Despite recent advances of T2I models in both composition and reasoning, existing benchmarks remain limited in evaluation. They not only fail to provide comprehensive coverage across and within both capabilities, but also largely restrict evaluation to low scene density and simple one-to-one reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose **T2I-CoReBench**, a comprehensive and complex benchmark that evaluates both composition and reasoning capabilities of T2I models. To ensure comprehensiveness, we structure composition around scene graph elements (*instance*, *attribute*, and *relation*) and reasoning around the philosophical framework of inference (*deductive*, *inductive*, and *abductive*), formulating a 12-dimensional evaluation taxonomy. To increase complexity, driven by the inherent real-world complexities, we curate each prompt with higher compositional density for composition and greater reasoning intensity for reasoning. To facilitate fine-grained and reliable evaluation, we also pair each evaluation prompt with a checklist that specifies individual *yes/no* questions to assess each intended element independently. In statistics, our benchmark comprises 1,080 challenging prompts and around 13,500 checklist questions. Experiments across 38 current T2I models reveal that their composition capability still remains limited in high compositional scenarios, while the reasoning capability lags even further behind as a critical bottleneck, with all models struggling to infer implicit elements from prompts.