GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Towards Learning to Complete Anything in Lidar
Authors: Ayça Takmaz; Cristiano Saltori; Neehar Peri; Tim Meinhardt; Riccardo de Lutio; Laura Leal-Taixé; Aljosa Osep
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We propose CAL (Complete Anything in Lidar) for Lidar-based shape-completion in-the-wild. This is closely related to Lidar-based semantic/panoptic scene completion. However, contemporary methods can only complete and recognize objects from a closed vocabulary labeled in existing Lidar datasets. Different to that, our zero-shot approach leverages the temporal context from multi-modal sensor sequences to mine object shapes and semantic features of observed objects. These are then distilled into a Lidar-only instance-level completion and recognition model. Although we only mine partial shape completions, we find that our distilled model learns to infer full object shapes from multiple such partial observations across the dataset. We show that our model can be prompted on standard benchmarks for Semantic and Panoptic Scene Completion, localize objects as (amodal) 3D bounding boxes, and recognize objects beyond fixed class vocabularies.
Adaptive Self-improvement LLM Agentic System for ML Library Development
Authors: Genghan Zhang; Weixin Liang; Olivia Hsu; Kunle Olukotun
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: ML libraries, often written in architecture-specific programming languages (ASPLs) that target domain-specific architectures, are key to efficient ML systems. However, writing these high-performance ML libraries is challenging because it requires expert knowledge of both ML algorithms and the ASPL. Large language models (LLMs), on the other hand, have shown general coding capabilities. However, challenges remain when using LLMs for generating ML libraries using ASPLs because 1) this task is complicated even for human experts and 2) there are limited code examples due to the esoteric and evolving nature of ASPLs. We present an adaptive self-improvement agentic system that enables LLMs to perform such complex reasoning under limited data by iteratively improving their capability through self-generated experience. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our system, we construct a benchmark of a typical ML library and generate ASPL code with both open and closed-source LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show improvements of up to $3.9\times$ over a baseline single LLM.
Target Concrete Score Matching: A Holistic Framework for Discrete Diffusion
Authors: Ruixiang ZHANG; Shuangfei Zhai; Yizhe Zhang; James Thornton; Zijing Ou; Joshua M. Susskind; Navdeep Jaitly
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Discrete diffusion is a promising framework for modeling and generating discrete data.
In this work, we present Target Concrete Score Matching (TCSM), a novel and versatile objective for training and fine-tuning discrete diffusion models.
TCSM provides a general framework with broad applicability. It supports pre-training discrete diffusion models directly from data samples, and many existing discrete diffusion approaches naturally emerge as special cases of our more general TCSM framework.
Furthermore, the same TCSM objective extends to post-training of discrete diffusion models, including fine-tuning using reward functions or preference data, and distillation of knowledge from pre-trained autoregressive models.
These new capabilities stem from the core idea of TCSM, estimating the concrete score of the target distribution, which resides in the original (clean) data space. This allows seamless integration with reward functions and pre-trained models, which inherently only operate in the clean data space rather than the noisy intermediate spaces of diffusion processes.
Our experiments on language modeling tasks demonstrate that TCSM matches or surpasses current methods. Additionally, TCSM is versatile, applicable to both pre-training and post-training scenarios, offering greater flexibility and sample efficiency.
Universal Sparse Autoencoders: Interpretable Cross-Model Concept Alignment
Authors: Harrish Thasarathan; Julian Forsyth; Thomas Fel; Matthew Kowal; Konstantinos G. Derpanis
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a single model, USAEs jointly learn a universal concept space that can reconstruct and interpret the internal activations of multiple models at once. Our core insight is to train a single, overcomplete sparse autoencoder (SAE) that ingests activations from any model and decodes them to approximate the activations of any other model under consideration. By optimizing a shared objective, the learned dictionary captures common factors of variation—concepts—across different tasks, architectures, and datasets. We show that USAEs discover semantically coherent and important universal concepts across vision models; ranging from low-level features (e.g., colors and textures) to higher-level structures (e.g., parts and objects). Overall, USAEs provide a powerful new method for interpretable cross-model analysis and offers novel applications—such as coordinated activation maximization—that open avenues for deeper insights in multi-model AI systems.
Representation Shattering in Transformers: A Synthetic Study with Knowledge Editing
Authors: Kento Nishi; Rahul Ramesh; Maya Okawa; Mikail Khona; Hidenori Tanaka; Ekdeep Singh Lubana
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Knowledge Editing (KE) algorithms alter models' weights to perform targeted updates to incorrect, outdated, or otherwise unwanted factual associations. However, recent work has shown that applying KE can adversely affect models' broader factual recall accuracy and diminish their reasoning abilities. Although these studies give insights into the potential harms of KE algorithms, e.g., performance evaluations on benchmarks, little is understood about why such destructive failures occur. Motivated by this, we define a novel synthetic task in which a Transformer is trained from scratch to internalize a "structured" knowledge graph. The structure enforces relationships between entities of the graph, such that editing a factual association has "trickling effects" on other entities (e.g., altering X's parent is Y to Z affects who X's siblings' parent is). Through evaluations of edited models on this task, we show that KE inadvertently affects representations of entities beyond the targeted one, distorting relevant structures that allow a model to infer unseen knowledge about an entity. We call this phenomenon representation shattering and demonstrate that it degrades models' factual recall and reasoning performance. We further corroborate our findings in naturalistic settings with pre-trained Llama and Mamba models as well. Overall, our work yields a precise mechanistic hypothesis to explain why KE has adverse effects on model abilities.
On Differential Privacy for Adaptively Solving Search Problems via Sketching
Authors: Shiyuan Feng; Ying Feng; George Zhaoqi Li; Zhao Song; David Woodruff; Lichen Zhang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 oral)

Abstract: Recently differential privacy has been used for a number of streaming, data structure, and dynamic graph problems as a means of hiding the internal randomness of the data structure, so that multiple possibly adaptive queries can be made without sacrificing the correctness of the responses. Although these works use differential privacy to show that for some problems it is possible to tolerate $T$ queries using $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ copies of a data structure, such results only apply to {\it numerical estimation problems}, and only return the {\it cost} of an optimization problem rather than the solution itself. In this paper we investigate the use of differential privacy for adaptive queries to {\it search} problems, which are significantly more challenging since the responses to queries can reveal much more about the internal randomness than a single numerical query. We focus on two classical search problems: nearest neighbor queries and regression with arbitrary turnstile updates. We identify key parameters to these problems, such as the number of $c$-approximate near neighbors and the matrix condition number, and use different differential privacy techniques to design algorithms returning the solution point or solution vector with memory and time depending on these parameters. We give algorithms for each of these problems that achieve similar tradeoffs.
Exploring and Mitigating Adversarial Manipulation of Voting-Based Leaderboards
Authors: Yangsibo Huang; Milad Nasr; Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos; Nicholas Carlini; Wei-Lin Chiang; Christopher A. Choquette-Choo; Daphne Ippolito; Matthew Jagielski; Katherine Lee; Ken Liu; Ion Stoica; Florian Tramèr; Chiyuan Zhang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 oral)

Abstract: It is now common to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) by having humans manually vote to evaluate model outputs, in contrast to typical benchmarks that evaluate knowledge or skill at some particular task. Chatbot Arena, the most popular benchmark of this type, ranks models by asking users to select the better response between two randomly selected models (without revealing which model was responsible for the generations).  These platforms are widely trusted as a fair and accurate measure of LLM capabilities. In this paper, we show that if bot protection and other defenses are not implemented, these voting-based benchmarks are potentially vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. Specifically, we show that an attacker can alter the leaderboard (to promote their favorite model or demote competitors) at the cost of roughly a thousand votes (verified in a simulated, offline version of Chatbot Arena). Our attack consists of two steps: first, we show how an attacker can determine which model was used to generate a given reply with more than $95\%$ accuracy; and then, the attacker can use this information to consistently vote for (or against) a target model. Working with the Chatbot Arena developers, we identify, propose, and implement mitigations to improve the robustness of Chatbot Arena against adversarial manipulation, which, based on our analysis, substantially increases the cost of such attacks. Some of these defenses were present before our collaboration, such as bot protection with Cloudflare, malicious user detection, and rate limiting. Others, including reCAPTCHA and login are being integrated to strengthen the security in Chatbot Arena.
Agent-as-a-Judge: Evaluate Agents with Agents
Authors: Mingchen Zhuge; Changsheng Zhao; Dylan R. Ashley; Wenyi Wang; Dmitrii Khizbullin; Yunyang Xiong; Zechun Liu; Ernie Chang; Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi; Yuandong Tian; Yangyang Shi; Vikas Chandra; Jürgen Schmidhuber
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Contemporary evaluation techniques are inadequate for agentic systems. These approaches either focus exclusively on final outcomes---ignoring the step-by-step nature of the thinking done by agentic systems---or require excessive manual labour. To address this, we introduce the **Agent-as-a-Judge** framework, wherein agentic systems are used to evaluate agentic systems. This is a natural extension of the LLM-as-a-Judge framework, incorporating agentic features that enable intermediate feedback for the entire task-solving processes for more precise evaluations. We apply the Agent-as-a-Judge framework to the task of code generation. To overcome issues with existing benchmarks and provide a proof-of-concept testbed for Agent-as-a-Judge, we present **DevAI**, a new benchmark of 55 realistic AI code generation tasks. DevAI includes rich manual annotations, like a total of 365 hierarchical solution requirements, which make it particularly suitable for an agentic evaluator. We benchmark three of the top code-generating agentic systems using Agent-as-a-Judge and find that our framework dramatically outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge and is as reliable as our human evaluation baseline. Altogether, we believe that this work represents a concrete step towards enabling vastly more sophisticated agentic systems. To help that, our dataset and the full implementation of Agent-as-a-Judge will be publically available at https://github.com/metauto-ai/agent-as-a-judge
Fraud-Proof Revenue Division on Subscription Platforms
Authors: Abheek Ghosh; Tzeh Yuan Neoh; Nicholas Teh; Giannis Tyrovolas
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We study a model of subscription-based platforms where users pay a fixed fee for unlimited access to content, and creators receive a share of the revenue. Existing approaches to detecting fraud predominantly rely on machine learning methods, engaging in an ongoing arms race with bad actors. We explore revenue division mechanisms that inherently disincentivize manipulation. We formalize three types of manipulation-resistance axioms and examine which existing rules satisfy these. We show that a mechanism widely used by streaming platforms, not only fails to prevent fraud, but also makes detecting manipulation computationally intractable. We also introduce a novel rule, ScaledUserProp, that satisfies all three manipulation-resistance axioms. Finally, experiments with both real-world and synthetic streaming data support ScaledUserProp as a fairer alternative compared to existing rules.
Confidential Guardian: Cryptographically Prohibiting the Abuse of Model Abstention
Authors: Stephan Rabanser; Ali Shahin Shamsabadi; Olive Franzese; Xiao Wang; Adrian Weller; Nicolas Papernot
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Cautious predictions—where a machine learning model abstains when uncertain—are crucial for limiting harmful errors in safety-critical applications. In this work, we identify a novel threat: a dishonest institution can exploit these mechanisms to discriminate or unjustly deny services under the guise of uncertainty. We demonstrate the practicality of this threat by introducing an uncertainty-inducing attack called Mirage, which deliberately reduces confidence in targeted input regions, thereby covertly disadvantaging specific individuals. At the same time, Mirage maintains high predictive performance across all data points. To counter this threat, we propose Confidential Guardian, a framework that analyzes calibration metrics on a reference dataset to detect artificially suppressed confidence. Additionally, it employs zero-knowledge proofs of verified inference to ensure that reported confidence scores genuinely originate from the deployed model. This prevents the provider from fabricating arbitrary model confidence values while protecting the model’s proprietary details. Our results confirm that Confidential Guardian effectively prevents the misuse of cautious predictions, providing verifiable assurances that abstention reflects genuine model uncertainty rather than malicious intent.
GPTAQ: Efficient Finetuning-Free Quantization for Asymmetric Calibration
Authors: Yuhang Li; Ruokai Yin; Donghyun Lee; Shiting Xiao; Priyadarshini Panda
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: We introduce GPTAQ, a novel finetuning-free quantization method for compressing large-scale transformer architectures.
Unlike the previous GPTQ method, which independently calibrates each layer, we always match the quantized layer's output to the exact output in the full-precision model, resulting in a scheme that we call *asymmetric calibration*. Such a scheme can effectively reduce the quantization error accumulated in previous layers. We analyze this problem using optimal brain compression to derive a close-formed solution. The new solution explicitly minimizes the quantization error as well as the accumulated asymmetry error. Furthermore, we utilize various techniques to parallelize the solution calculation, including channel parallelization, neuron decomposition, and Cholesky reformulation for matrix fusion. As a result, GPTAQ is easy to implement, simply using 20 more lines of code than GPTQ but improving its performance under low-bit quantization. Remarkably, on a single GPU, we quantize a 405B language transformer as well as EVA-02—the rank first vision transformer that achieves 90% pretraining Imagenet accuracy. Code is available at [Github](https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/GPTAQ).
Robust Sparsification via Sensitivity
Authors: Chansophea Wathanak In; Yi Li; David Woodruff; Xuan Wu
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Robustness to outliers is important in machine learning. Many classical problems, including subspace embedding, clustering, and low-rank approximation, lack scalable, outlier-resilient algorithms. This paper considers machine learning problems of the form $\min_{x\in \mathbb{R}^d} F(x)$, where $F(x)=\sum_{i=1}^n F_i(x)$, and their robust counterparts $\min_{x\in\mathbb{R}^d} F^{(m)}(x)$, where $F^{(m)}(x)$ denotes the sum of all but the $m$ largest $F_i(x)$ values. 

We develop a general framework for constructing $\epsilon$-coresets for such robust problems, where an $\epsilon$-coreset is a weighted subset of functions $\{F_1(x),\dots,F_n(x)\}$ that provides a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation to $F(x)$. Specifically, if the original problem $F$ has total sensitivity $T$ and admits a vanilla $\epsilon$-coreset of size $S$, our algorithm constructs an $\epsilon$-coreset of size $\tilde{O}(\frac{mT}{\epsilon})+S$ for the robust objective $F^{(m)}$. This coreset size can be shown to be near-tight for $\ell_2$ subspace embedding. Our coreset algorithm has scalable running time and leads to new or improved algorithms for the robust optimization problems. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our coresets outperform uniform sampling on real-world data sets.
TeDS: Joint Learning of Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives in Quaternion Space for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Jiujiang Guo; Mankun Zhao; Wenbin Zhang; Tianyi Xu; Linying Xu; Yu Jian; Yu Mei; Yu Ruiguo
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Existing research on temporal knowledge graph completion treats temporal information as supplementary, without simulating various features of facts from a temporal perspective. This work summarizes features of temporalized facts from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives: (1) Diachronicity. Facts often exhibit varying characteristics and trends across different temporal domains; (2) Synchronicity. In specific temporal contexts, various relations between entities influence each other, generating latent semantics. To track above issues, we design a quaternion-based model, TeDS, which divides timestamps into diachronic and synchronic timestamps to support dual temporal perception: (a) Two composite quaternions fusing time and relation information are generated by reorganizing synchronic timestamp and relation quaternions, and Hamilton operator achieves their interaction. (b) Each time point is sequentially mapped to an angle and converted to scalar component of a quaternion using trigonometric functions to build diachronic timestamps. We then rotate relation by using Hamilton operator between it and diachronic timestamp. In this way, TeDS achieves deep integration of relations and time while accommodating different perspectives. Empirically, TeDS significantly outperforms SOTA models on six benchmarks.
DLP: Dynamic Layerwise Pruning in Large Language Models
Authors: Yuli Chen; Bo Cheng; Jiale Han; Yingying Zhang; Yingting Li; Shuhao Zhang
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Pruning has recently been widely adopted to reduce the parameter scale and improve the inference efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs). Mainstream pruning techniques often rely on uniform layerwise pruning strategies, which can lead to severe performance degradation at high sparsity levels. Recognizing the varying contributions of different layers in LLMs, recent studies have shifted their focus toward non-uniform layerwise pruning. However, these approaches often rely on pre-defined values, which can result in suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method called Dynamic Layerwise Pruning (DLP). This approach adaptively determines the relative importance of each layer by integrating model weights with input activation information, assigning pruning rates accordingly. Experimental results show that DLP effectively preserves model performance at high sparsity levels across multiple LLMs. Specifically, at   70% sparsity, DLP reduces the perplexity of LLaMA2-7B by 7.79 and improves the average accuracy by 2.7% compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, DLP is compatible with various existing LLM compression techniques and can be seamlessly integrated into Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). We release the code\footnote{The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/ironartisan/DLP}.} to facilitate future research.
Aequa: Fair Model Rewards in Collaborative Learning via Slimmable Networks
Authors: Nurbek Tastan; Samuel Horváth; Karthik Nandakumar
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: Collaborative learning enables multiple participants to learn a single global model by exchanging focused updates instead of sharing data. One of the core challenges in collaborative learning is ensuring that participants are rewarded fairly for their contributions, which entails two key sub-problems: contribution assessment and reward allocation. This work focuses on fair reward allocation, where the participants are incentivized through model rewards - differentiated final models whose performance is commensurate with the contribution. In this work, we leverage the concept of slimmable neural networks to collaboratively learn a shared global model whose performance degrades gracefully with a reduction in model width. We also propose a post-training fair allocation algorithm that determines the model width for each participant based on their contributions. We theoretically study the convergence of our proposed approach and empirically validate it using extensive experiments on different datasets and architectures. We also extend our approach to enable training-time model reward allocation.
QMamba: On First Exploration of Vision Mamba for Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Fengbin Guan; Xin Li; Zihao Yu; Yiting Lu; Zhibo Chen
Venue: ICML 2025 (ICML 2025 poster)

Abstract: In this work, we take the first exploration of the recently popular foundation model, *i.e.,* State Space Model/Mamba, in image quality assessment (IQA), aiming at observing and excavating the perception potential in vision Mamba.  A series of works on Mamba has shown its significant potential in various fields, *e.g.,* segmentation and classification. However, the perception capability of Mamba remains under-explored. Consequently, we propose QMamba by revisiting and adapting the Mamba model for three crucial IQA tasks, *i.e.,* task-specific, universal, and transferable IQA, which reveals its clear advantages over existing foundational models, *e.g.,* Swin Transformer, ViT, and CNNs, in terms of perception and computational cost.  To improve the transferability of QMamba, we propose the StylePrompt tuning paradigm, where lightweight mean and variance prompts are injected to assist task-adaptive transfer learning of pre-trained QMamba for different downstream IQA tasks. Compared with existing prompt tuning strategies, our StylePrompt enables better perceptual transfer with lower computational cost.  Extensive experiments on multiple synthetic, authentic IQA datasets, and cross IQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed QMamba.