GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
The Geometry of LLM Quantization: GPTQ as Babai's Nearest Plane Algorithm
Authors: Jiale Chen; Yalda Shabanzadeh; Elvir Crnčević; Torsten Hoefler; Dan Alistarh
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Quantizing the weights of large language models (LLMs) from 16-bit to lower bitwidth is the de facto approach to deploy massive transformers onto more affordable accelerators. While GPTQ emerged as one of the standard methods for one-shot post-training quantization at LLM scale, its inner workings are described as a sequence of algebraic updates that obscure geometric meaning or worst-case guarantees. In this work, we show that, when executed back-to-front (from the last to first dimension) for a linear layer, GPTQ is mathematically identical to Babai's nearest plane algorithm for the classical closest vector problem (CVP) on a lattice defined by the Hessian matrix of the layer's inputs. This equivalence is based on a sophisticated mathematical argument, and has two analytical consequences: first, the GPTQ error propagation step gains an intuitive geometric interpretation; second, GPTQ inherits the error upper bound of Babai's algorithm under the assumption that no weights are clipped. Leveraging this bound, we design post-training quantization methods that avoid clipping, and outperform the original GPTQ. In addition, we provide efficient GPU inference kernels for the resulting representation. Taken together, these results place GPTQ on a firm theoretical footing and open the door to importing decades of progress in lattice algorithms towards the design of future quantization algorithms for billion-parameter models. Source code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/GPTQ-Babai.
Progressive Online Video Understanding with Evidence-Aligned Timing and Transparent Decisions
Authors: Kecheng Zhang; Zongxin Yang; Mingfei Han; Haihong Hao; Yunzhi Zhuge; Changlin Li; junhan zhao; Zhihui Li; Xiaojun Chang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Visual agents operating in the wild must respond to queries precisely when sufficient evidence first appears in a video stream, a critical capability that is overlooked by conventional video LLMs evaluated in offline settings. The shift to an online, streaming paradigm introduces significant challenges: a lack of decision transparency, the difficulty of aligning response timing with visual evidence, and the need to maintain a global, causally consistent understanding under tight computational budgets. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that decouples reasoning control from memory integration. We introduce Thinking-QwenVL, an instantiation of this framework with two core components. First, the Active Thinking Decision Maker (ATDM) is a transparent reasoning controller that externalizes its decision process using observable progress ($\boldsymbol{\rho}$) and confidence ($\boldsymbol{c}$) metrics. This allows it to precisely time its response $t_r$ to match the first-sufficient-evidence timestamp $t^\star$ while streaming its reasoning to the user. Second, the Hierarchical Progressive Semantic Integration (HPSI) module acts as an efficient memory system. It employs a set of learnable, multi-level aggregation tokens that are propagated across clips to build a rich, global cognitive state without exceeding token budgets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ATDM and HPSI, e.g., Thinking-QwenVL improves the accuracy of the previous state-of-the-art from 67.63\% to 71.60\% on the StreamingBench benchmark.
Neural Graduated Assignment for Maximum Common Edge Subgraphs
Authors: Chaolong Ying; Yingqi Ruan; Xuemin Chen; Yaomin Wang; Tianshu Yu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The Maximum Common Edge Subgraph (MCES) problem is a crucial challenge with significant implications in domains such as biology and chemistry. Traditional approaches, which include transformations into max-clique and search-based algorithms, suffer from scalability issues when dealing with larger instances. This paper introduces ``Neural Graduated Assignment'' (NGA), a simple, scalable, unsupervised-training-based method that addresses these limitations. Central to NGA is stacking of differentiable assignment optimization with neural components, enabling high-dimensional parameterization of the matching process through a learnable temperature mechanism. We further theoretically analyze the learning dynamics of NGA, showing its design leads to fast convergence, better exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and ability to escape local optima. Extensive experiments across MCES computation, graph similarity estimation, and graph retrieval tasks reveal that NGA not only significantly improves computation time and scalability on large instances but also enhances performance compared to existing methodologies. The introduction of NGA marks a significant advancement in the computation of MCES and offers insights into other assignment problems.
JanusVLN: Decoupling Semantics and Spatiality with Dual Implicit Memory for Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Shuang Zeng; Dekang Qi; Xinyuan Chang; Feng Xiong; Xie Shichao; Xiaolong Wu; Shiyi Liang; Mu Xu; Xing Wei
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to navigate through unseen environments, guided by natural language instructions and a continuous video stream. Recent advances in VLN have been driven by the powerful semantic understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, these methods typically rely on explicit semantic memory, such as building textual cognitive maps or storing historical visual frames. This type of method suffers from spatial information loss, computational redundancy, and memory bloat, which impede efficient navigation. Inspired by the implicit scene representation in human navigation, analogous to the left brain's semantic understanding and the right brain's spatial cognition, we propose JanusVLN, a novel VLN framework featuring a dual implicit neural memory that models spatial-geometric and visual-semantic memory as separate, compact, and fixed-size neural representations. This framework first extends the MLLM to incorporate 3D prior knowledge from the spatial-geometric encoder, thereby enhancing the spatial reasoning capabilities of models based solely on RGB input. Then, the historical key-value (KV) caches from the spatial-geometric and visual-semantic encoders are constructed into a dual implicit memory. By retaining only the KVs of tokens in the initial and sliding window, redundant computation is avoided, enabling efficient incremental updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JanusVLN outperforms over 20 recent methods to achieve SOTA performance. For example, the success rate improves by 10.5-35.5 compared to methods using multiple data types as input and by 3.6-10.8 compared to methods using more RGB training data. This indicates that the proposed dual implicit neural memory, as a novel paradigm, explores promising new directions for future VLN research.
QuantSparse: Comprehensively Compressing Video Diffusion Transformer with Model Quantization and Attention Sparsification
Authors: Weilun Feng; Chuanguang Yang; Haotong Qin; Mingqiang Wu; Yuqi Li; Xiangqi Li; Zhulin An; Libo Huang; Yulun Zhang; Michele Magno; Yongjun Xu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Diffusion transformers exhibit remarkable video generation capability, yet their prohibitive computational and memory costs hinder practical deployment. Model quantization and attention sparsification are two promising directions for compression, but each alone suffers severe performance degradation under aggressive compression. Combining them promises compounded efficiency gains, but naive integration is ineffective. The sparsity-induced information loss exacerbates quantization noise, leading to amplified attention shifts. To address this, we propose **QuantSparse**, a unified framework that integrates model quantization with attention sparsification. Specifically, we introduce *Multi-Scale Salient Attention Distillation*, which leverages both global structural guidance and local salient supervision to mitigate quantization-induced bias. In addition, we develop *Second-Order Sparse Attention Reparameterization*, which exploits the temporal stability of second-order residuals to efficiently recover information lost under sparsity. Experiments on HunyuanVideo-13B demonstrate that QuantSparse achieves 20.88 PSNR, substantially outperforming the state-of-the-art quantization baseline Q-VDiT (16.85 PSNR), while simultaneously delivering a **3.68$\times$** reduction in storage and **1.88$\times$** acceleration in end-to-end inference.
Sample Lottery: Unsupervised Discovery of Critical Instances for LLM Reasoning
Authors: Zhiping Xiao; Yusheng Zhao; Qixin Zhang; Jiaye Xie; Wanjia Zhao; Weizhi Zhang; Xiao Luo; Philip S. Yu; Ming Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has equipped large language models (LLMs) with the capability of reasoning over complicated logical problems through policy optimization. However, conventional methods require complete annotation of the entire dataset and allocate computation uniformly over all samples. We articulate the lottery sample hypothesis in policy optimization of LLMs: a large training set contains a small subset that, when trained alone, yields performance comparable to that of the full dataset. This paper therefore explores the following question: How can we identify these lottery-winning samples from the original dataset without access to answers? Unlike prior efforts that analyze the effect of different samples in the training set with complete annotation, this paper focuses on the unsupervised discovery of critical instances for LLM reasoning and proposes a novel framework termed Complementary Conformal Selection (CONST). Specifically, CONST evaluates the importance of samples by considering two complementary components: procedural volatility and outcome volatility. Procedural volatility measures the potential variations during the LLM’s reasoning process, while outcome volatility captures inconsistencies in the final answer. Subsequently, conformal prediction is used to obtain a prediction set whose cardinality serves as the criterion for selecting the lottery-winning samples for annotation. We also provide a theoretical analysis, showing that CONST can effectively approximate the optimal policy. Extensive experiments on various LLMs across different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CONST.
Learning To Draft: Adaptive Speculative Decoding with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jiebin Zhang; Zhenghan Yu; Liang Wang; Nan Yang; Eugene J. Yu; Zheng Li; Yifan Song; Dawei Zhu; Xingxing Zhang; Furu Wei; Sujian Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens for a larger target model to verify. The efficacy of this technique hinges on the trade-off between the time spent on drafting candidates and verifying them. However, current state-of-the-art methods rely on a static time allocation, while recent dynamic approaches optimize for proxy metrics like acceptance length, often neglecting the true time cost and treating the drafting and verification phases in isolation. To address these limitations, we introduce Learning to Draft (LTD), a novel method that directly optimizes for throughput of each draft-and-verify cycle. We formulate the problem as a reinforcement learning environment and train two co-adaptive policies to dynamically coordinate the draft and verification phases.  This encourages the policies to adapt to each other and explicitly maximize decoding efficiency.
We conducted extensive evaluations on five diverse LLMs and four distinct tasks. Our results show that LTD achieves speedup ratios ranging from 2.24x to 4.32x, outperforming the state-of-the-art method Eagle3 up to
36.4\%.
Heterogeneous Agent Q-weighted Policy Optimization
Authors: Bor-Jiun Lin; Chun-Yi Lee
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) confronts a fundamental tension between stability and expressiveness. Stability requires avoiding divergence under non-stationary updates, while expressiveness demands capturing multimodal strategies for heterogeneous coordination. Existing methods sacrifice one for the other: value-decomposition and trust-region approaches ensure stability but assume restrictive unimodal policies, while expressive generative models lack optimization guarantees. To address this challenge, we introduce **H**eterogeneous **A**gent **Q**-weighted Policy **O**ptimization (**HAQO**), a framework unifying sequential advantage-aware updates, Q-weighted variational surrogates, and entropy regularization. Our analysis establishes monotone improvement guarantees under bounded critic bias, extending trust-region theory to diffusion-based policies with intractable log-likelihoods. HAQO achieves superior returns and reduced variance compared to policy-gradient baselines across diverse benchmarks. The ablation studies confirm sequential updates ensure stability, expressive policies enable multimodality, and entropy regularization prevents collapse. HAQO reconciles stability and expressiveness in MARL with theoretical rigor and practical effectiveness.
OpenFly: A COMPREHENSIVE PLATFORM FOR AERIAL VISION-LANGUAGE NAVIGATION
Authors: Yunpeng Gao; Chenhui Li; Zhongrui You; Junli Liu; Li Zhen; Pengan CHEN; Qizhi Chen; Zhonghan Tang; Liansheng Wang; Yangpenghui; Yiwen Tang; Yuhang Tang; Shuai Liang; Songyi Zhu; Ziqin Xiong; Yifei Su; Xinyi Ye; Jianan Li; Yan Ding; Dong Wang; Zhigang Wang; Bin Zhao; Xuelong Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Aerial Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) seeks to guide UAVs by leveraging language instructions and visual cues, establishing a new paradigm for human-UAV interaction. However, the collection of VLN data demands extensive human effort to construct trajectories and corresponding instructions, hindering the development of large-scale datasets and capable models. To address this problem, we propose OpenFly, a comprehensive platform for aerial VLN. Firstly, OpenFly integrates 4 rendering engines and advanced techniques for diverse environment simulation, including Unreal Engine, GTA V, Google Earth, and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D GS). Particularly, 3D GS supports real-to-sim rendering, further enhancing the realism of our environments. Secondly, we develop a highly automated toolchain for aerial VLN data collection, streamlining point cloud acquisition, scene semantic segmentation, flight trajectory creation, and instruction generation. Thirdly, based on the toolchain, we construct a large-scale aerial VLN dataset with 100k trajectories, covering samples of diverse scenarios and assets across 18 scenes. Moreover, we propose OpenFly-Agent, a keyframe-aware VLN model emphasizing key observations to promote performance and reduce computations. For benchmarking, extensive experiments and analyses are conducted, where our navigation success rate outperforms others by 14.0\% and 7.9\% on the seen and unseen scenarios, respectively. The toolchain, dataset, and codes will be open-sourced.
Incentivizing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning with Functional Monte Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Kongcheng Zhang; QI YAO; Baisheng Lai; Jiaxing Huang; Wenkai Fang; Dacheng Tao; Mingli Song; Shunyu Liu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: In this work, we propose ***R**einforced **F**unctional **T**oken **T**uning* (RFTT), a novel reinforced fine-tuning framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with learn-to-reason capabilities. Unlike prior prompt-driven reasoning efforts, RFTT embeds a rich set of learnable functional tokens (*e.g.*, \<analyze\>, \<verify\>, \<refine\>) directly into the model vocabulary, enabling chain-of-thought construction with diverse human-like reasoning behaviors. Specifically, RFTT comprises two phases: (1) supervised fine-tuning performs prompt-driven tree search to obtain self-generated training data annotated with functional tokens, which warms up the model to learn these tokens for initial reasoning capability; and (2) online reinforcement learning further allows the model to explore diverse reasoning pathways through functional token sampling without relying on prompts, thereby facilitating effective self-improvement for functional reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed RFTT on mathematical benchmarks and highlight its strong generalization capability to other general domains. Moreover, the performance of RFTT exhibits consistent gains with increased test-time computation through additional search rollouts. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/sastpg/RFTT.
Streaming Drag-Oriented Interactive Video Manipulation: Drag Anything, Anytime!
Authors: Junbao Zhou; Yuan Zhou; Kesen Zhao; Qingshan Xu; Beier Zhu; Richang Hong; Hanwang Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Achieving streaming, fine-grained control over the outputs of autoregressive video diffusion models remains challenging, making it difficult to ensure that they consistently align with user expectations. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{stReaming drag-oriEnted interactiVe vidEo manipuLation (REVEL)}, a new task that enables users to modify generated videos \emph{anytime} on \emph{anything} via fine-grained, interactive drag. Beyond DragVideo and SG-I2V, REVEL unifies drag-style video manipulation as editing and animating video frames with both supporting user-specified translation, deformation, and rotation effects, making drag operations versatile. In resolving REVEL, we observe: \emph{i}) drag-induced perturbations accumulate in latent space, causing severe latent distribution drift that halts the drag process; \emph{ii}) streaming drag is easily disturbed by context frames, thereby yielding visually unnatural outcomes. We thus propose a training-free approach, \textbf{DragStream}, comprising: \emph{i}) an adaptive distribution self-rectification strategy that leverages neighboring frames' statistics to effectively constrain the drift of latent embeddings; \emph{ii}) a spatial-frequency selective optimization mechanism, allowing the model to fully exploit contextual information while mitigating its interference via selectively propagating visual cues along generation. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into existing autoregressive video diffusion models, and extensive experiments firmly demonstrate the effectiveness of our DragStream.
EchoGen: Generating Visual Echoes in Any Scene via Feed-Forward Subject-Driven Auto-Regressive Model
Authors: Ruixiao Dong; Zhendong Wang; Keli Liu; Li Li; Ying Chen; Kai Li; Daowen Li; Houqiang Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Subject-driven generation is a critical task in creative AI; yet current state-of-the-art methods present a stark trade-off. They either rely on computationally expensive, per-subject fine-tuning, sacrificing efficiency and zero-shot capability, or employ feed-forward architectures built on diffusion models, which are inherently plagued by slow inference speeds. 
Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) models are renowned for their rapid sampling speeds and strong generative quality, making them an ideal yet underexplored foundation for resolving this tension.
To bridge this gap, we introduce EchoGen, 
a pioneering framework that empowers VAR models with subject-driven generation capabilities.
The core design of EchoGen is an effective dual-path injection strategy that disentangles a subject's high-level semantic identity from its low-level fine-grained details, enabling enhanced controllability and fidelity. 
We employ a semantic encoder to extract the subject's abstract identity, which is injected through decoupled cross-attention to guide the overall composition. Concurrently, a content encoder captures intricate visual details, which are integrated via a multi-modal attention mechanism to ensure high-fidelity texture and structural preservation.
To the best of our knowledge, EchoGen is the first feed-forward subject-driven framework built upon VAR models. Both quantitative and qualitative results substantiate our design, demonstrating that EchoGen achieves subject fidelity and image quality comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods with significantly lower sampling latency.
Learning Hierarchical and Geometry-Aware Graph Representations for Text-to-CAD
Authors: Shengjie Gong; Wenjie Peng; Hongyuan Chen; Gangyu Zhang; Yunqing Hu; Huiyuan Zhang; Shuangping Huang; Tianshui Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Text-to-CAD code generation is a long-horizon task, requiring the translation of instructions into a long sequence of interdependent operations. This process is exceptionally fragile, as minor early errors can propagate through the sequence and ultimately invalidate an entire complex assembly. Existing methods typically decode instructions directly into executable code (e.g., bpy) without an explicit representation of assembly hierarchy or geometric constraints. This flat decoding strategy vastly expands the search space, amplifying local errors and leading to cascading failures in contextual operations. We address this gap by learning an intermediate representation: a hierarchical and geometry-aware graph. The graph represents an assembly-based decomposition, with multi-level nodes modeling the product's parts and components, and edges defining the explicit geometric constraints between them. Rather than mapping text directly to code, our graph paradigm first predicts high-level structure and constraints, then conditions the sequencing of operations and program generation, thereby narrowing the search space and improving both geometric fidelity and constraint satisfaction. Furthermore, we introduce a structure-aware progressive curriculum learning mechanism to enhance the model's ability to generate sophisticated decomposition graphs, allowing it to handle more complex assemblies. The mechanism constructs graded tasks via controlled edits to object structure, probes the model’s capability boundary, and synthesizes boundary examples for subsequent training rounds. We also introduce a 12K-instruction dataset annotated with instructions, geometric decomposition graphs, action sequences, and bpy code, together with metrics for node- and hierarchy-level graph accuracy and a measure of constraint satisfaction. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms existing methods in terms of both geometric fidelity and accurate fulfillment of geometric constraints.