GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
TD-JEPA: Latent-predictive Representations for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Marco Bagatella; Matteo Pirotta; Ahmed Touati; Alessandro Lazaric; Andrea Tirinzoni
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Latent prediction–where agents learn by predicting their own latents–has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training general representations in machine learning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this approach has been explored to define auxiliary losses for a variety of settings, including reward-based and unsupervised RL, behavior cloning, and world modeling. While existing methods are typically limited to single-task learning, one-step prediction, or on-policy trajectory data, we show that temporal difference (TD) learning enables learning representations predictive of long-term latent dynamics across multiple policies from offline, reward-free transitions. Building on this, we introduce TD-JEPA, which leverages TD-based latent-predictive representations into unsupervised RL. TD-JEPA trains explicit state and task encoders, a policy-conditioned multi-step predictor, and a set of parameterized policies directly in latent space. This enables zero-shot optimization of any reward function at test time. Theoretically, we show that an idealized variant of TD-JEPA avoids collapse with proper initialization, and learns encoders that capture a low-rank factorization of long-term policy dynamics, while the predictor recovers their successor features in latent space. Empirically, TD-JEPA matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation tasks across 13 datasets in ExoRL and OGBench, especially in the challenging setting of zero-shot RL from pixels.
Code Aesthetics with Agentic Reward Feedback
Authors: Bang Xiao; Lingjie Jiang; Shaohan Huang; Tengchao Lv; Yupan Huang; Xun Wu; Lei Cui; Furu Wei
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become valuable assistants for developers in code-related tasks. While LLMs excel at traditional programming tasks such as code generation and bug fixing, they struggle with visually-oriented coding tasks, often producing suboptimal aesthetics. In this paper, we introduce a new pipeline to enhance the aesthetic quality of LLM-generated code. We first construct AesCode-358K, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset focused on code aesthetics. Next, we propose agentic reward feedback, a multi-agent system that evaluates executability, static aesthetics, and interactive aesthetics. Building on this, we develop GRPO-AR, which integrates these signals into the GRPO algorithm for joint optimization of functionality and code aesthetics. Finally, we develop OpenDesign, a benchmark for assessing code aesthetics. Experimental results show that combining supervised fine-tuning on AesCode-358K with reinforcement learning using agentic reward feedback significantly improves performance on OpenDesign and enhances results on existing benchmarks such as PandasPlotBench. Notably, our AesCoder-4B surpasses GPT-4o and GPT-4.1, and achieves performance comparable to large open-source models with 480B–685B parameters, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.
Muon Outperforms Adam in Tail-End Associative Memory Learning
Authors: Shuche Wang; Fengzhuo Zhang; Jiaxiang Li; Cunxiao Du; Chao Du; Tianyu Pang; Zhuoran Yang; Mingyi Hong; Vincent Y. F. Tan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through the lens of associative memory. By ablating the transformer components optimized by Muon, we reveal that the associative memory parameters of LLMs, namely the Value and Output (VO) attention weights and Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs), are the primary contributors to Muon’s superiority. Motivated by this associative memory view, we then explain Muon’s superiority on real-world corpora, which are intrinsically heavy-tailed: a few 'head' classes are extremely frequent, while a vast number of 'tail' classes are individually rare. The superiority is explained through two key properties: (i) its update rule consistently yields a more isotropic singular spectrum than Adam; and as a result, (ii) on heavy-tailed data, it optimizes tail classes more effectively than Adam. Beyond empirical evidence, we theoretically confirm these findings by analyzing a one-layer associative memory model under class-imbalanced data. We prove that Muon consistently achieves balanced learning across classes regardless of feature embeddings, whereas Adam can induce large disparities in learning errors depending on embedding properties. In summary, our empirical observations and theoretical analyses reveal Muon’s core advantage: its update rule aligns with the outer-product structure of linear associative memories, enabling more balanced and effective learning of tail classes in heavy-tailed distributions than Adam.
Personalized Collaborative Learning with Affinity-Based Variance Reduction
Authors: Chenyu Zhang; Navid Azizan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multi-agent learning faces a fundamental tension: leveraging distributed collaboration without sacrificing the personalization needed for diverse agents. This tension intensifies when aiming for full personalization while adapting to unknown heterogeneity levels—gaining collaborative speedup when agents are similar, without performance degradation when they are different. Embracing the challenge, we propose personalized collaborative learning (PCL), a novel framework for heterogeneous agents to collaboratively learn personalized solutions with seamless adaptivity. Through carefully designed bias correction and importance correction mechanisms, our method AffPCL robustly handles both environment and objective heterogeneity. We prove that AffPCL reduces sample complexity over independent learning by a factor of $\max\\{n^{-1}, \delta\\}$, where $n$ is the number of agents and $\delta\in[0,1]$ measures their heterogeneity. This *affinity-based* acceleration automatically interpolates between the linear speedup of federated learning in homogeneous settings and the baseline of independent learning, without requiring prior knowledge of the system. Our analysis further reveals that an agent may obtain linear speedup even by collaborating with arbitrarily dissimilar agents, unveiling new insights into personalization and collaboration in the high heterogeneity regime.
A Convergence Analysis of Adaptive Optimizers under Floating-point Quantization
Authors: Xuan Tang; Jichu Li; Difan Zou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has made low-precision training essential for reducing memory, improving efficiency, and enabling larger models and datasets. Existing convergence theories for adaptive optimizers, however, assume all components are exact and neglect hardware-aware quantization, leaving open the question of why low-precision training remains effective. We introduce the first theoretical framework for analyzing the convergence of adaptive optimizers, including Adam and Muon, under floating-point quantization of gradients, weights, and optimizer states (e.g., moment estimates). Within this framework, we derive convergence rates on smooth non-convex objectives under standard stochastic gradient assumptions, explicitly characterizing how quantization errors from different components affect convergence. We show that both algorithms retain rates close to their full-precision counterparts provided mantissa length scales only logarithmically with the number of iterations. Our analysis further reveals that Adam is highly sensitive to weights and second-moment quantization due to its reliance on $\beta_2 \to 1$, while Muon requires weaker error control and is thus potentially more robust. These results narrow the gap between empirical success and theoretical understanding of low-precision training methods. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data corroborate our theory.
ERGO: Efficient High-Resolution Visual Understanding for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Jewon Lee; Wooksu Shin; Seungmin Yang; Ki-Ung Song; DongUk Lim; Jaeyeon Kim; Tae-Ho Kim; Bo-Kyeong Kim
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Efficient processing of high-resolution images is crucial for real-world vision–language applications. However, existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of vision tokens. With the advent of "thinking with images" models, reasoning now extends beyond text to the visual domain. This capability motivates our two-stage "coarse-to-fine" reasoning pipeline: first, a downsampled image is analyzed to identify task-relevant regions; then, only these regions are cropped at full resolution and processed in a subsequent reasoning stage. This approach reduces computational cost while preserving fine-grained visual details where necessary. A major challenge lies in inferring which regions are truly relevant to a given query. Recent related methods often fail in the first stage after input-image downsampling, due to perception-driven reasoning, where clear visual information is required for effective reasoning. To address this issue, we propose ERGO (Efficient Reasoning & Guided Observation) that performs reasoning-driven perception—leveraging multimodal context to determine where to focus. Our model can account for perceptual uncertainty, expanding the cropped region to cover visually ambiguous areas for answering questions. To this end, we develop simple yet effective reward components in a reinforcement learning framework for coarse-to-fine perception. Across multiple datasets, our approach delivers higher accuracy than the original model and competitive methods, with greater efficiency. For instance, ERGO surpasses Qwen2.5-VL-7B on the V* benchmark by 4.7 points while using only 23% of the vision tokens, achieving a 3× inference speedup.  The code is available at https://github.com/nota-github/ERGO.
Graph-Theoretic Intrinsic Reward: Guiding RL with Effective Resistance
Authors: Jatin Chauhan; Shivam Bhardwaj; Aditya Saibewar; Aditya Ramesh; Sadbhavana Babar; Manohar Kaul
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Exploration of dynamic environments with sparse rewards is a significant challenge in Reinforcement Learning, often leading to inefficient exploration and brittle policies. To address this, we introduce a novel graph-based intrinsic reward using Effective Resistance, a metric from spectral graph theory. This reward formulation guides the agent to seek configurations that are directly correlated to successful goal reaching states. We provide theoretical guarantees, proving that our method not only learns a robust policy but also achieves faster convergence by serving as a variance reduction baseline to the standard discounted reward formulation. We perform extensive empirical analysis across several challenging environments to demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating improvements of up to 59% in success rate, 56% in timesteps taken to reach the goal, and 4 times more accumulated reward. We augment all of the supporting lemmas and theoretically motivated hyperparameter choices with corresponding experiments.
Learn-to-Distance: Distance Learning for Detecting LLM-Generated Text
Authors: Hongyi Zhou; Jin Zhu; Kai Ye; Ying Yang; Erhan Xu; Chengchun Shi
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude, and Gemini have transformed the way we learn, work, and communicate. Yet, their ability to produce highly human-like text raises serious concerns about misinformation and academic integrity, making it an urgent need for reliable algorithms to detect LLM-generated content. In this paper, we start by presenting a geometric approach to demystify rewrite-based detection algorithms, revealing their underlying rationale and demonstrating their generalization ability. Building on this insight, we introduce a novel rewrite-based detection algorithm that adaptively learns the distance between the original and rewritten text. Theoretically, we demonstrate that employing an adaptively learned distance function is more effective for detection than using a fixed distance. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments with over 100 settings, and find that our approach demonstrates superior performance over baseline algorithms in the majority of scenarios. In particular, it achieves relative improvements from 54.3% to 75.4% over the strongest baseline across different target LLMs (e.g., GPT, Claude, and Gemini). A python implementation of our proposal is publicly available at https://github.com/Mamba413/L2D.
VideoZoomer: Reinforcement-Learned Temporal Focusing for Long Video Reasoning
Authors: Yang Ding; Xin Lai; Yizhen Zhang; Wei Li; Ruihang Chu; Yujiu Yang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language tasks yet remain limited in long video understanding due to the limited context window. Consequently, prevailing approaches tend to rely on uniform frame sampling or static pre-selection, which might overlook critical evidence and unable to correct its initial selection error during its reasoning process. To overcome these limitations, we propose VideoZoomer, a novel agentic framework that enables MLLMs to dynamically control their visual focus during reasoning. Starting from a coarse low-frame-rate overview, VideoZoomer invokes a temporal zoom tool to obtain high-frame-rate clips at autonomously chosen moments, thereby progressively gathering fine-grained evidence in a multi-turn interactive manner. Accordingly, we adopt a two-stage training strategy: a cold-start supervised fine-tuning phase on a curated dataset of distilled exemplar and reflection trajectories, followed by reinforcement learning to further refine the agentic policy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 7B model demonstrates diverse and complex reasoning patterns, yielding strong results across a broad set of long video understanding and reasoning benchmarks. These emergent capabilities allow it to consistently surpass existing open-source models and even rival proprietary systems on challenging tasks, while achieving superior efficiency under reduced frame budgets.
Learning Nonlinear Causal Reductions to Explain Reinforcement Learning Policies
Authors: Armin Kekić; Jan Schneider; Dieter Büchler; Bernhard Schölkopf; Michel Besserve
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? 
This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. 
We take a causal perspective on explaining the global behavior of RL policies by viewing the states, actions, and rewards as variables in a low-level causal model. 
We introduce random perturbations to policy actions during execution and observe their effects on the cumulative reward, learning a simplified high-level causal model that explains these relationships.
To this end, we develop a nonlinear Causal Model Reduction framework that ensures approximate interventional consistency, i.e., the simplified high-level model responds to interventions in a way consistent with the original complex system. 
We prove that for a class of nonlinear causal models, there exists a unique solution that achieves exact interventional consistency, ensuring learned explanations reflect meaningful causal patterns.
Experiments on both synthetic causal models and practical RL tasks—including pendulum control and robot table tennis—demonstrate that our approach can uncover important behavioral patterns, biases, and failure modes in trained RL policies.
Self-Consistency Improves the Trustworthiness of Self-Interpretable GNNs
Authors: Wenxin Tai; Ting Zhong; Goce Trajcevski; Fan Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve strong predictive performance but offer limited transparency in their decision-making. Self-Interpretable GNNs (SI-GNNs) address this by generating built-in explanations, yet their training objectives are misaligned with evaluation criteria such as faithfulness. This raises two key questions: (i) can faithfulness be explicitly optimized during training, and (ii) does such optimization truly improve explanation quality? We show that faithfulness is intrinsically tied to explanation self-consistency and can therefore be optimized directly. Empirical analysis further reveals that self-inconsistency predominantly occurs on unimportant features, linking it to redundancy-driven explanation inconsistency observed in recent work and suggesting untapped potential for improving explanation quality. Building on these insights, we introduce a simple, model-agnostic self-consistency (SC) fine-tuning strategy. Without changing model architectures, SC consistently improves explanation quality across multiple dimensions and benchmarks, offering an effective and scalable pathway to more trustworthy GNN explanations. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/ICDM-UESTC/SelfConsistencyXGNN}.
Compositional Generalization from Learned Skills via CoT Training: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis for Reasoning
Authors: Xinhao Yao; Ruifeng Ren; Yun Liao; Lizhong Ding; Yong Liu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training has markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet the mechanisms by which CoT training enhances generalization remain inadequately understood. In this work, we demonstrate that compositional generalization is fundamental: models systematically combine simpler learned skills during CoT training to address novel and more complex problems. Through a theoretical and structural analysis, we formalize this process: 1) Theoretically, the information-theoretic generalization bounds through distributional divergence can be decomposed into in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) components. Specifically, the non-CoT models fail on OOD tasks due to unseen compositional patterns, whereas CoT-trained models achieve strong generalization by composing previously learned skills. In addition, controlled experiments and real-world validation confirm that CoT training accelerates convergence and enhances generalization from ID to both ID and OOD scenarios while maintaining robust performance even with tolerable noise. 2) Structurally, CoT training internalizes reasoning into a two-stage compositional circuit, where the number of stages corresponds to the explicit reasoning steps during training. Notably, CoT-trained models resolve intermediate results at shallower layers compared to non-CoT counterparts, freeing up deeper layers to specialize in subsequent reasoning steps.  A key insight is that CoT training teaches models how to think—by fostering compositional reasoning—rather than merely what to think, through the provision of correct answers alone. This paper offers valuable insights for designing CoT strategies to enhance LLMs' reasoning robustness.
Diversity-Incentivized Exploration for Versatile Reasoning
Authors: Zican Hu; Shilin Zhang; Yafu Li; Jianhao Yan; Xuyang Hu; Leyang Cui; Xiaoye Qu; Chunlin Chen; Yu Cheng; Zhi Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for incentivizing reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to vast state-action spaces and reward sparsity in reasoning tasks, existing methods often struggle with deficient exploration and poor sample efficiency. In the paper, we propose **DIVER** (**D**iversity-**I**ncentivized Exploration for **V**ersatil**E** **R**easoning), an innovative framework that highlights the pivotal role of global sequence-level diversity to incentivize deep exploration for versatile reasoning. We first conduct a primary empirical study to reveal a strong positive correlation between global diversity and reasoning capacity. Building on this insight, we introduce global diversity incentives as an intrinsic reward to promote deep exploration in a semantically structured space. Incorporating the intrinsic reward, we develop a potential-based reward shaping mechanism to preserve optimal policy invariance and design simple heuristics to mitigate possible reward hacking. Experimental results show that DIVER outperforms competitive RLVR baselines with various exploration strategies on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks, excelling in both Pass@1 and Pass@k evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/DIVER.
Rating Quality of Diverse Time Series Data by Meta-learning from LLM Judgment
Authors: Shunyu Wu; Dan Li; Wenjie Feng; Haozheng Ye; Jian Lou; See-Kiong Ng
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: High-quality time series (TS) data are essential for ensuring TS model performance, rendering research on rating TS data quality indispensable. Existing methods have shown promising rating accuracy within individual domains, primarily by extending data quality rating techniques such as influence functions and Shapley values to account for temporal characteristics. However, they neglect the fact that real-world TS data can span vastly different domains and exhibit distinct properties, hampering the accurate and efficient rating of diverse TS data. 

In this paper, we propose TSRating, a novel and unified framework for rating the quality of time series data crawled from diverse domains. TSRating leverages LLMs' inherent ample knowledge, acquired during their extensive pretraining, to comprehend and discern quality differences in diverse TS data. We verify this by devising a series of prompts to elicit quality comparisons from LLMs for pairs of TS samples. We then fit a dedicated rating model, termed TSRater, to convert the LLMs' judgments into efficient quality predictions by inferring future TS samples through TSRater's inference. To ensure cross-domain adaptability, we develop a meta-learning scheme to train TSRater on quality comparisons collected from nine distinct domains. To improve training efficiency, we employ signSGD for inner-loop updates, thus circumventing the demanding computation of hypergradients. Extensive experimental results on eleven benchmark datasets across three time series tasks, each using both conventional TS models and TS foundation models, demonstrate that TSRating outperforms baselines in terms of estimation accuracy, efficiency, and domain adaptability.
Learning from Label Proportions via Proportional Value Classification
Authors: Tianhao Ma; Wei Wang; Ximing Li; Gang Niu; Masashi Sugiyama
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Learning from Label Proportions~(LLP) aims to use bags of instances associated with the proportions of each label within the bag to learn an instance-level classifier. Proportion matching is a widely used strategy that aligns the average model outputs of all instances in a bag with the label proportions in order to induce the classifier. However, simply fitting the label proportions does not encourage discriminative instance-level predictions and may cause over-smoothing problems, resulting in poor classification performance. In this paper, we propose a novel LLP approach that can mitigate the over-smoothing problems with theoretical guarantees. Rather than fitting the label proportions directly, we treat them as targets for an auxiliary proportional value classification task to induce the target classifier. Our approach only requires the incorporation of an aggregation function after the classification layer. We also introduce an efficient computational approach with a divide-and-conquer strategy. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets and under different bag-generation strategies demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art LLP methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/TianhaoMa5/ICLR2026_LLP-PVC.