GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Learning with Selectively Labeled Data from Multiple Decision-makers
Authors: Jian Chen; Zhehao Li; Xiaojie Mao
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We study the problem of classification with selectively labeled data, whose distribution may differ from the full population due to historical decision-making. We exploit the fact that in many applications historical decisions were made by multiple decision-makers, each with different decision rules. We analyze this setup under a principled instrumental variable (IV) framework and rigorously study the identification of classification risk. We establish conditions for the exact identification of classification risk and derive tight partial identification bounds when exact identification fails. We further propose a unified cost-sensitive learning (UCL) approach to learn classifiers robust to selection bias in both identification settings. Finally, we theoretically and numerically validate the efficacy of our proposed method.
FlexiReID: Adaptive Mixture of Expert for Multi-Modal Person Re-Identification
Authors: Zhen Sun; Lei Tan; Yunhang Shen; Chengmao Cai; Xing Sun; Pingyang Dai; Liujuan Cao; Rongrong Ji
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Multimodal person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to match pedestrian images across different modalities. However, most existing methods focus on limited cross-modal settings and fail to support arbitrary query-retrieval combinations, hindering practical deployment. We propose FlexiReID, a flexible framework that supports seven retrieval modes across four modalities: RGB, infrared, sketches, and text. FlexiReID introduces an adaptive mixture-of-experts (MoE) mechanism to dynamically integrate diverse modality features and a cross-modal query fusion module to enhance multimodal feature extraction. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we construct CIRS-PEDES, a unified dataset extending four popular Re-ID datasets to include all four modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexiReID achieves state-of-the-art performance and offers strong generalization in complex scenarios.
DS-VLM: Diffusion Supervision Vision Language Model
Authors: Zhen Sun; Yunhang Shen; Jie Li; Xing Sun; Pingyang Dai; Liujuan Cao; Rongrong Ji
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face two critical limitations in visual representation learning: degraded supervision due to information loss during gradient propagation, and the inherent semantic sparsity of textual supervision compared to visual data. We propose the Diffusion Supervision Vision-Language Model (DS-VLM), a plug-and-play framework that introduces diffusion-based direct supervision for vision-language alignment. By reconstructing input images through a diffusion model conditioned on outputs of the visual encoder and the connector, our method establishes a short-path gradient propagation channel from pixel space to visual features. This approach simultaneously preserves high-level semantic alignment through conventional text supervision while enhancing visual feature quality via pixel-level reconstruction constraints. Extensive experiments conducted across various visual encoders and LLMs of different scales demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Avoiding Catastrophe in Online Learning by Asking for Help
Authors: Benjamin Plaut; Hanlin Zhu; Stuart Russell
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Most learning algorithms with formal regret guarantees assume that all mistakes are recoverable and essentially rely on trying all possible behaviors. This approach is problematic when some mistakes are *catastrophic*, i.e., irreparable. We propose an online learning problem where the goal is to minimize the chance of catastrophe. Specifically, we assume that the payoff in each round represents the chance of avoiding catastrophe in that round and try to maximize the product of payoffs (the overall chance of avoiding catastrophe) while allowing a limited number of queries to a mentor. We also assume that the agent can transfer knowledge between similar inputs. We first show that in general, any algorithm either queries the mentor at a linear rate or is nearly guaranteed to cause catastrophe. However, in settings where the mentor policy class is learnable in the standard online model, we provide an algorithm whose regret and rate of querying the mentor both approach 0 as the time horizon grows. Although our focus is the product of payoffs, we provide matching bounds for the typical additive regret. Conceptually, if a policy class is learnable in the absence of catastrophic risk, it is learnable in the presence of catastrophic risk if the agent can ask for help.
Demystifying Singular Defects in Large Language Models
Authors: Haoqi Wang; Tong Zhang; Mathieu Salzmann
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Large transformer models are known to produce high-norm tokens. In vision transformers (ViTs), such tokens have been mathematically modeled through the singular vectors of the linear approximations of layers. However, in large language models (LLMs), the underlying causes of high-norm tokens remain largely unexplored, and their different properties from those of ViTs require a new analysis framework. In this paper, we provide both theoretical insights and empirical validation across a range of recent models, leading to the following observations: i) The layer-wise singular direction predicts the abrupt explosion of token norms in LLMs. ii) The negative eigenvalues of a layer explain its sudden decay. iii) The computational pathways leading to high-norm tokens differ between initial and noninitial tokens. iv) High-norm tokens are triggered by the right leading singular vector of the matrix approximating the corresponding modules. We showcase two practical applications of these findings: the improvement of quantization schemes and the design of LLM signatures. Our findings not only advance the understanding of singular defects in LLMs but also open new avenues for their application. We expect that this work will stimulate further research into the internal mechanisms of LLMs. Code is released at https://github.com/haoqiwang/singular_defect.
How Much Can Transfer? BRIDGE: Bounded Multi-Domain Graph Foundation Model with Generalization Guarantees
Authors: Haonan Yuan; Qingyun Sun; Junhua Shi; Xingcheng Fu; Bryan Hooi; Jianxin Li; Philip S. Yu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Graph Foundation Models hold significant potential for advancing multi-domain graph learning, yet their full capabilities remain largely untapped. Existing works show promising task performance with the “pretrain-then-prompt” paradigm, which lacks theoretical foundations to understand why it works and how much knowledge can be transferred from source domains to the target. In this paper, we introduce BRIDGE, a bounded graph foundation model pre-trained on multi-domains with Generalization guarantees. To learn discriminative source knowledge, we align multi-domain graph features with domain-invariant aligners during pre-training. Then, a lightweight Mixture of Experts (MoE) network is proposed to facilitate downstream prompting through self-supervised selective knowledge assembly and transfer. Further, to determine the maximum amount of transferable knowledge, we derive an optimizable generalization error upper bound from a graph spectral perspective given the Lipschitz continuity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of BRIDGE on both node and graph classification compared with 15 state-of-the-art baselines.
Focal-SAM: Focal Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Long-Tailed Classification
Authors: Sicong Li; Qianqian Xu; Zhiyong Yang; Zitai Wang; Linchao Zhang; Xiaochun Cao; Qingming Huang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Real-world datasets often follow a long-tailed distribution, making generalization to tail classes difficult. Recent methods resorted to long-tail variants of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), such as ImbSAM and CC-SAM, to improve generalization by flattening the loss landscape. However, these attempts face a trade-off between computational efficiency and control over the loss landscape. On the one hand, ImbSAM is efficient but offers only coarse control as it excludes head classes from the SAM process. On the other hand,  CC-SAM provides fine-grained control through class-dependent perturbations but at the cost of efficiency due to multiple backpropagations. Seeing this dilemma, we introduce Focal-SAM, which assigns different penalties to class-wise sharpness, achieving fine-grained control without extra backpropagations, thus maintaining efficiency. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze Focal-SAM's generalization ability and derive a sharper generalization bound. Extensive experiments on both traditional and foundation models validate the effectiveness of Focal-SAM.
Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-Language Navigation with Feedback-based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Sungjune Kim; Gyeongrok Oh; Heeju Ko; Daehyun Ji; Dongwook Lee; Byung-Jun Lee; Sujin Jang; Sangpil Kim
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Navigating in an unfamiliar environment during deployment poses a critical challenge for a vision-language navigation (VLN) agent. Yet, test-time adaptation (TTA) remains relatively underexplored in robotic navigation, leading us to the fundamental question: what are the key properties of TTA for online VLN? In our view, effective adaptation requires three qualities: 1) flexibility in handling different navigation outcomes, 2) interactivity with external environment, and 3) maintaining a harmony between plasticity and stability. To address this, we introduce FeedTTA, a novel TTA framework for online VLN utilizing feedback-based reinforcement learning. Specifically, FeedTTA learns by maximizing binary episodic feedback, a practical setup in which the agent receives a binary scalar after each episode that indicates the success or failure of the navigation. Additionally, we propose a gradient regularization technique that leverages the binary structure of FeedTTA to achieve a balance between plasticity and stability during adaptation. Our extensive experiments on challenging VLN benchmarks demonstrate the superior adaptability of FeedTTA, even outperforming the state-of-the-art offline training methods in REVERIE benchmark with a single stream of learning.
3D Question Answering via only 2D Vision-Language Models
Authors: FENGYUN WANG; Sicheng Yu; Jiawei Wu; Jinhui Tang; Hanwang Zhang; Qianru Sun
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced numerous fields. In this work, we explore how to harness their potential to address 3D scene understanding tasks, using 3D question answering (3D-QA) as a representative example. Due to the limited training data in 3D, we do not train LVLMs but infer in a zero-shot manner. Specifically, we sample 2D views from a 3D point cloud and feed them into 2D models to answer a given question. When the 2D model is chosen, e.g., LLAVA-OV, the quality of sampled views matters the most. We propose cdViews, a novel approach to automatically selecting critical and diverse Views for 3D-QA. cdViews consists of two key components: viewSelector prioritizing critical views based on their potential to provide answer-specific information, and viewNMS enhancing diversity by removing redundant views based on spatial overlap. We evaluate cdViews on the widely-used ScanQA and SQA benchmarks, demonstrating that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D-QA while relying solely on 2D models without fine-tuning. These findings support our belief that 2D LVLMs are currently the most effective alternative (of the resource-intensive 3D LVLMs) for addressing 3D tasks.
Exploring Criteria of Loss Reweighting to Enhance LLM Unlearning
Authors: Puning Yang; Qizhou Wang; Zhuo Huang; Tongliang Liu; Chengqi Zhang; Bo Han
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Loss reweighting has shown significant benefits for machine unlearning with large language models (LLMs). However, their exact functionalities are left unclear and the optimal strategy remains an open question, thus impeding the understanding and improvement of existing methodologies. In this paper, we identify two distinct goals of loss reweighting, namely, Saturation and Importance---the former indicates that those insufficiently optimized data should be emphasized, while the latter stresses some critical data that are most influential for loss minimization. To study their usefulness, we design specific reweighting strategies for each goal and evaluate their respective effects on unlearning. We conduct extensive empirical analyses on well-established benchmarks, and summarize some important observations as follows:
(i) Saturation enhances efficacy more than importance-based reweighting, and their combination can yield additional improvements.
(ii) Saturation typically allocates lower weights to data with lower likelihoods, whereas importance-based reweighting does the opposite.
(iii) The efficacy of unlearning is also largely influenced by the smoothness and granularity of the weight distributions.
Based on these findings, we propose SatImp, a simple reweighting method that combines the advantages of both saturation and importance.
Empirical results on extensive datasets validate the efficacy of our method, potentially bridging existing research gaps and indicating directions for future research.
Our code is available at https://github.com/tmlr-group/SatImp.
GRU: Mitigating the Trade-off between Unlearning and Retention for LLMs
Authors: Yue Wang; Qizhou Wang; Feng Liu; Wei Huang; Yali Du; Xiaojiang Du; Bo Han
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) unlearning has demonstrated its essential role in removing privacy and copyright-related responses, crucial for their legal and safe applications. However, the pursuit of complete unlearning often comes with substantial costs due to its compromises in their general functionality, leading to a notorious trade-off between unlearning and retention. It motivates this paper to explore enhanced unlearning schemes that can mitigate this trade-off. Specifically, we propose Gradient Rectified Unlearning (GRU), an improved framework that regulates the directions of gradient updates during the unlearning procedure such that their side impacts on other, unrelated responses can be minimized. GRU is easy and general to implement, demonstrating practical effectiveness across a variety of well-established unlearning benchmarks.
FlexiClip: Locality-Preserving Free-Form Character Animation
Authors: Anant Khandelwal
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Animating clipart images with seamless motion while maintaining visual fidelity and temporal coherence presents significant challenges. Existing methods, such as AniClipart, effectively model spatial deformations but often fail to ensure smooth temporal transitions, resulting in artifacts like abrupt motions and geometric distortions. Similarly, text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models struggle to handle clipart due to the mismatch in statistical properties between natural video and clipart styles. This paper introduces FlexiClip, a novel approach designed to overcome these limitations by addressing the intertwined challenges of temporal consistency and geometric integrity. FlexiClip extends traditional Bézier curve-based trajectory modeling with key innovations: temporal Jacobians to correct motion dynamics incrementally, continuous-time modeling via probability flow ODEs (pfODEs) to mitigate temporal noise, and a flow matching loss inspired by GFlowNet principles to optimize smooth motion transitions. These enhancements ensure coherent animations across complex scenarios involving rapid movements and non-rigid deformations. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of FlexiClip in generating animations that are not only smooth and natural but also structurally consistent across diverse clipart types, including humans and animals. By integrating spatial and temporal modeling with pre-trained video diffusion models, FlexiClip sets a new standard for high-quality clipart animation, offering robust performance across a wide range of visual content. Project Page: https://creative-gen.github.io/flexiclip.github.io/
FRUGAL: Memory-Efficient Optimization by Reducing State Overhead for Scalable Training
Authors: Philip Zmushko; Aleksandr Beznosikov; Martin Takáč; Samuel Horváth
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: With the increase in the number of parameters in large language models, the training process increasingly demands larger volumes of GPU memory. A significant portion of this memory is typically consumed by the optimizer state. To overcome this challenge, recent approaches such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA), low-rank gradient projection (GaLore), and blockwise optimization (BAdam) have been proposed. 
However, in all these algorithms, the *effective rank of the weight updates remains low-rank*, which can lead to a substantial loss of information from the gradient. This loss can be critically important, especially during the pre-training stage. In this paper, we introduce FRUGAL (**F**ull-**R**ank **U**pdates with **G**r**A**dient sp**L**itting), a new memory-efficient optimization framework. FRUGAL leverages gradient splitting to perform low-dimensional updates using advanced algorithms (such as Adam), while updates along the remaining directions are executed via state-free methods like SGD or signSGD. Our framework can be integrated with various low-rank update selection techniques, including GaLore and BAdam. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for our framework when using SGDM for low-dimensional updates and SGD for state-free updates. Additionally, our method consistently outperforms concurrent approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results in pre-training and fine-tuning tasks while balancing memory efficiency and performance metrics.
Enhancing Statistical Validity and Power in Hybrid Controlled Trials: A Randomization Inference Approach with Conformal Selective Borrowing
Authors: Ke Zhu; Shu Yang; Xiaofei Wang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: External controls from historical trials or observational data can augment randomized controlled trials when large-scale randomization is impractical or unethical, such as in drug evaluation for rare diseases. However, non-randomized external controls can introduce biases, and existing Bayesian and frequentist methods may inflate the type I error rate, particularly in small-sample trials where external data borrowing is most critical. To address these challenges, we propose a randomization inference framework that ensures finite-sample exact and model-free type I error rate control, adhering to the “analyze as you randomize” principle to safeguard against hidden biases. Recognizing that biased external controls reduce the power of randomization tests, we leverage conformal inference to develop an individualized test-then-pool procedure that selectively borrows comparable external controls to improve power. Our approach incorporates selection uncertainty into randomization tests, providing valid post-selection inference. Additionally, we propose an adaptive procedure to optimize the selection threshold by minimizing the mean squared error across a class of estimators encompassing both no-borrowing and full-borrowing approaches. The proposed methods are supported by non-asymptotic theoretical analysis, validated through simulations, and applied to a randomized lung cancer trial that integrates external controls from the National Cancer Database.
ENSUR: Equitable and Statistically Unbiased Recommendation
Authors: Nitin Bisht; Xiuwen Gong; Guandong Xu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Although Recommender Systems (RS) have been well-developed for various fields of applications, they often suffer from a crisis of platform credibility with respect to RS confidence and fairness, which may drive users away, threatening the platform's long-term success. In recent years, some works have tried to solve these issues; however, they lack strong statistical guarantees. Therefore, there is an urgent need to solve both issues with a unifying framework with robust statistical guarantees. In this paper, we propose a novel and reliable framework called Equitable and Statistically Unbiased Recommendation (ENSUR)) to dynamically generate prediction sets for users across various groups, which are guaranteed 1) to include ground-truth items with user-predefined high confidence/probability (e.g., 90\%); 2) to ensure user fairness across different groups; 3) to have minimum efficient average prediction set sizes.
We further design an efficient algorithm named Guaranteed User Fairness Algorithm (GUFA) to optimize the proposed method and derive upper bounds of risk and fairness metrics to speed up the optimization process.
Moreover, we provide rigorous theoretical analysis concerning risk and fairness control and minimum set size. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, which aligns with our theoretical analysis.
COKE: Core Kernel for More Efficient Approximation of Kernel Weights in Multiple Kernel Clustering
Authors: Weixuan Liang; Xinwang Liu; KE LIANG; Jiyuan Liu; En Zhu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Inspired by the well-known coreset in clustering algorithms, we introduce the definition of the core kernel for multiple kernel clustering (MKC) algorithms. The core kernel refers to running MKC algorithms on smaller-scale base kernel matrices to obtain kernel weights similar to those obtained from the original full-scale kernel matrices. Specifically, the core kernel refers to a set of kernel matrices of size $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ that perform MKC algorithms on them can achieve a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation for the kernel weights. Subsequently, we can leverage approximated kernel weights to obtain a theoretically guaranteed large-scale extension of MKC algorithms. In this paper, we propose a core kernel construction method based on singular value decomposition and prove that it satisfies the definition of the core kernel for three mainstream MKC algorithms. Finally, we conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets to verify the correctness of theoretical results and the efficiency of the proposed method.
Bifurcate then Alienate: Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Coupled Distribution Learning with Linear Overhead
Authors: Shengju Yu; Yiu-ming Cheung; Siwei Wang; Xinwang Liu; En Zhu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Despite remarkable advances, existing incomplete multi-view clustering (IMC) methods typically  leverage  either perspective-shared or perspective-specific determinants to encode cluster representations. To address this limitation, we introduce a BACDL algorithm designed to explicitly capture both concurrently, thereby exploiting heterogeneous data more effectively. It chooses to bifurcate feature clusters and further alienate them  to enlarge the discrimination. With distribution learning, it successfully couples view guidance into feature clusters to alleviate  dimension inconsistency. Then, building on the principle  that samples in one common cluster own similar marginal distribution and conditional distribution, it unifies the association between feature clusters and sample clusters to bridge all views. Thereafter, all incomplete sample clusters are reordered and mapped to a common one to formulate  clustering embedding. Last, the overall linear overhead endows it with a resource-efficient characteristic.