GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
BideDPO: Conditional Image Generation with Simultaneous Text and Condition Alignment
Authors: Dewei Zhou; Mingwei Li; Zongxin Yang; Yu Lu; Yunqiu Xu; Zhizhong Wang; Zeyi Huang; Yi Yang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Conditional image generation augments text-to-image synthesis with structural, spatial, or stylistic priors and is used in many domains. However, current methods struggle to harmonize guidance from both sources when conflicts arise: 1) input-level conflict, where the semantics of the conditioning image contradict the text prompt, and 2) model-bias conflict, where learned generative biases hinder alignment even when the condition and text are compatible. These scenarios demand nuanced, case-by-case trade-offs that standard supervised fine-tuning struggles to deliver. Preference-based optimization techniques, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), offer a promising solution but remain limited: naive DPO suffers from gradient entanglement between text and condition signals and lacks disentangled, conflict-aware training data for multi-constraint tasks. To overcome these issues, we propose a self-driven, bidirectionally decoupled DPO framework (BideDPO). At its core, our method constructs two disentangled preference pairs for each sample—one for the condition and one for the text—to mitigate gradient entanglement. The influence of these pairs is then managed by an Adaptive Loss Balancing strategy for balanced optimization. To generate these pairs, we introduce an automated data pipeline that iteratively samples from the model and uses vision-language model checks to create disentangled, conflict-aware data. Finally, this entire process is embedded within an iterative optimization strategy that progressively refines both the model and the data. We construct a DualAlign benchmark to evaluate a model’s ability to resolve conflicts between text and condition, and experiments on commonly used modalities show that BideDPO delivers substantial gains in both text success rate (e.g., +35\%) and condition adherence. We also validated the robustness of our approach on the widely used COCO dataset. All models, code, and benchmarks will be released to support future work.
WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow
Authors: Yihan Wang; Jia Deng
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: We introduce Warping-Alone Field Transforms (WAFT), a simple and effective method for optical flow. WAFT is similar to RAFT but replaces cost volume with high-resolution warping, achieving better accuracy with lower memory cost. This design challenges the conventional wisdom that constructing cost volumes is necessary for strong performance. WAFT is a simple and flexible meta-architecture with minimal inductive biases and reliance on custom designs. Compared with existing methods, WAFT ranks 1st on Spring, Sintel, and KITTI benchmarks, achieves the best zero-shot generalization on KITTI, while being 1.3-4.1x faster than existing methods that have competitive accuracy (e.g., 1.3x than Flowformer++, 4.1x than CCMR+). Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/WAFT.
AutoFly: Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Autonomous Navigation in the Wild
Authors: Xiaolou Sun; Wufei Si; Wenhui Ni; Yuntian Li; Dongming Wu; Fei Xie; Runwei Guan; He-Yang Xu; Henghui Ding; Yuan Wu; Yutao Yue; Yongming Huang; Hui Xiong
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Vision-language navigation (VLN) requires intelligent agents to navigate environments by interpreting linguistic instructions alongside visual observations, serving as a cornerstone task in Embodied AI. Current VLN research for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) relies on detailed, pre-specified instructions to guide the UAV along predetermined routes.  However, real-world outdoor exploration typically occurs in unknown environments where detailed navigation instructions are unavailable. Instead, only coarse-grained positional or directional guidance can be provided, requiring UAVs to autonomously navigate through continuous planning and obstacle avoidance. To bridge this gap, we propose AutoFly, an end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for autonomous UAV navigation. AutoFly incorporates a pseudo-depth encoder that derives depth-aware features from RGB inputs to enhance spatial reasoning, coupled with a progressive two-stage training strategy that effectively aligns visual, depth, and linguistic representations with action policies. Moreover, existing VLN datasets have fundamental limitations for real-world autonomous navigation, stemming from their heavy reliance on explicit instruction-following over autonomous decision-making and insufficient real-world data. To address these issues, we construct a novel autonomous navigation dataset that shifts the paradigm from instruction-following to autonomous behavior modeling through: (1) trajectory collection emphasizing continuous obstacle avoidance, autonomous planning, and recognition workflows; (2) comprehensive real-world data integration. Experimental results demonstrate that AutoFly achieves a 3.9\% higher success rate compared to state-of-the-art VLA baselines, with consistent performance across simulated and real environments.
Improving Black-Box Generative Attacks via Generator Semantic Consistency
Authors: Jongoh Jeong; Hunmin Yang; Jaeseok Jeong; Kuk-Jin Yoon
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Transfer attacks optimize on a surrogate and deploy to a black-box target. While iterative optimization attacks in this paradigm are limited by their efficiency and scalability due to multistep gradient updates per input, generative attacks alleviate these by producing adversarial examples in a single forward pass at test time. However, current generative attacks still adhere to optimizing surrogate losses (e.g., feature divergence) and overlook the generator’s internal dynamics, underexploring how the generator’s internal representations shape transferable perturbations. To address this, we enforce semantic consistency by aligning the early generator’s intermediate features to an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher, stabilizing object-aligned representations and improving black-box transfer without inference-time overhead. To ground the mechanism, we quantify semantic stability as the standard deviation of foreground IoU between cluster-derived activation masks and foreground masks across generator blocks, and observe reduced semantic drift under our method. For more reliable evaluation, we also introduce Accidental Correction Rate (ACR) to separate inadvertent corrections from intended misclassifications, complementing the inherent blind spots in traditional Attack Success Rate (ASR), Fooling Rate (FR), and Accuracy metrics. Across architectures, domains, and tasks, our approach can be seamlessly integrated into existing generative attacks with consistent improvements in black-box transfer, while maintaining test-time efficiency.
Color3D: Controllable and Consistent 3D Colorization with Personalized Colorizer
Authors: Yecong Wan; Mingwen Shao; Renlong Wu; Wangmeng Zuo
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: In this work, we present Color3D, a highly adaptable framework for colorizing both static and dynamic 3D scenes from monochromatic inputs, delivering visually diverse and chromatically vibrant reconstructions with flexible user-guided control. In contrast to existing methods that focus solely on static scenarios and enforce multi-view consistency by averaging color variations which inevitably sacrifice both chromatic richness and controllability, our approach is able to preserve color diversity and steerability while ensuring cross-view and cross-time consistency. In particular, the core insight of our method is to colorize only a single key view and then fine-tune a personalized colorizer to propagate its color to novel views and time steps. Through personalization, the colorizer learns a scene-specific deterministic color mapping underlying the reference view, enabling it to consistently project corresponding colors to the content in novel views and video frames via its inherent inductive bias. Once trained, the personalized colorizer can be applied to infer consistent chrominance for all other images, enabling direct reconstruction of colorful 3D scenes with a dedicated Lab color space Gaussian splatting representation. The proposed framework ingeniously recasts complicated 3D colorization as a more tractable single image paradigm, allowing seamless integration of arbitrary image colorization models with enhanced flexibility and controllability. Extensive experiments across diverse static and dynamic 3D colorization benchmarks substantiate that our method can deliver more consistent and chromatically rich renderings with precise user control. Project Page: https://yecongwan.github.io/Color3D/.
Perception-R1: Advancing Multimodal Reasoning Capabilities of MLLMs via Visual Perception Reward
Authors: Tong Xiao; Xin Xu; Zhenya Huang; Hongyu Gao; Quan Liu; Qi Liu; Enhong Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is a challenging task that has attracted increasing attention in the community. Recently, several studies have applied Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to the multimodal domain in order to enhance the reasoning abilities of MLLMs. However, these works largely overlook the enhancement of multimodal perception capabilities in MLLMs, which serve as a core prerequisite and foundational component of complex multimodal reasoning. Through McNemar's test, we find that existing RLVR method fails to effectively enhance the multimodal perception capabilities of MLLMs, thereby limiting their further improvement in multimodal reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose Perception-R1, which introduces a novel visual perception reward that explicitly encourages MLLMs to perceive the visual content accurately, thereby can effectively incentivizing both their multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. Specifically, we first collect textual visual annotations from the CoT trajectories of multimodal problems, which will serve as visual references for reward assignment. During RLVR training, we employ a judging LLM to assess the consistency between the visual annotations and the responses generated by MLLM, and assign the visual perception reward based on these consistency judgments. Extensive experiments on several multimodal math and general benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our Perception-R1, which achieves superior performance on all benchmarks using only 1,442 training data. Our code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/tongxiao2002/Perception-R1.
Buffer Matters: Unleashing the Power of Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Model Reasoning
Authors: Xu Wan; Yansheng Wang; Wenqi Huang; Mingyang Sun
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Traditional on-policy Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) frameworks suffer from experience waste and reward homogeneity, which directly hinders learning efficiency on difficult samples during large language models post-training. In this paper, we introduce Batch Adaptation Policy Optimization (BAPO), an off-policy RLVR framework to improve the data efficiency in large language models post-training. It dynamically selects training batches by re-evaluating historically difficult samples and reusing high-quality ones, while holding a lower bound guarantee for policy improvement. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that BAPO achieves an average 12.5\% improvement over GRPO across mathematics, planning, and visual reasoning tasks. Crucially, BAPO successfully resolves 40.7\% of problems that base models consistently fail to solve.
Text-Aware Image Restoration with Diffusion Models
Authors: Jaewon Min; Jin Hyeon Kim; Paul Hyunbin Cho; Jaeeun Lee; Jihye Park; Park Min Kyu; Sangpil Kim; Hyunhee Park; Seungryong Kim
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: While diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in natural image restoration, they often fail to faithfully recover textual regions, frequently producing plausible yet incorrect text-like patterns, a phenomenon we term text-image hallucination. To address this limitation, we propose Text-Aware Image Restoration (TAIR), a task requiring simultaneous recovery of visual content and textual fidelity. For this purpose, we introduce SA-Text, a large-scale benchmark of 100K high-quality scene images with dense annotations of diverse and complex text instances. We further present a multi-task diffusion framework, TeReDiff, which leverages internal features of diffusion models to jointly train a text-spotting module with the restoration module. This design allows intermediate text predictions from the text-spotting module to condition the diffusion-based restoration process during denoising, thereby enhancing text recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach faithfully restores textual regions, outperforms existing diffusion-based methods, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on TextZoom, an STISR benchmark considered a subtask of TAIR. The code, weights, and dataset will be publicly released.
AdaViewPlanner: Adapting Video Diffusion Models for Viewpoint Planning in 4D Scenes
Authors: Yu Li; Menghan Xia; Gongye Liu; Jianhong Bai; Xintao Wang; Conglang Zhang; Yuxuan Lin; Ruihang Chu; Pengfei Wan; Yujiu Yang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent Text-to-Video (T2V) models have demonstrated powerful capability in visual simulation of real-world geometry and physical laws, indicating its potential as implicit world models. Inspired by this, we explore the feasibility of leveraging the video generation prior for viewpoint planning from given 4D scenes, since videos internally accompany dynamic scenes with natural viewpoints. To this end, we propose a two-stage paradigm to adapt pre-trained T2V models for viewpoint prediction, in a compatible manner. First, we inject the 4D scene representation into the pre-trained T2V model via an adaptive learning branch, where the 4D scene is viewpoint-agnostic and the conditional generated video embeds the viewpoints visually. Then, we formulate viewpoint extraction as a hybrid-condition guided camera extrinsic denoising process. Specifically, a camera extrinsic diffusion branch is further introduced onto the pre-trained T2V model, by taking the generated video and 4D scene as input. Experimental results show the superiority of our proposed method over existing competitors, and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our key technical designs. To some extent, this work proves the potential of video generation models toward 4D interaction in real world.
Repurposing Foundation Model for Generalizable Medical Time Series Classification
Authors: Nan Huang; Haishuai Wang; Zihuai He; Marinka Zitnik; Xiang Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Medical time series (MedTS) classification suffers from poor generalizability
in real-world deployment due to inter- and intra-dataset heterogeneity, such as varying
numbers of channels, signal lengths, task definitions, and patient characteristics.
% implicit patient characteristics, variable channel configurations, time series lengths, and diagnostic tasks.
To address this, we propose FORMED, a novel framework for repurposing a backbone foundation model, pre-trained on generic time series, to enable highly generalizable MedTS classification on unseen datasets.
FORMED combines the backbone with a novel classifier comprising two components: (1) task-specific channel embeddings and label queries, dynamically sized to match any number of channels and target classes, and (2) a shared decoding attention layer, jointly trained across datasets to capture medical domain knowledge through task-agnostic feature-query interactions. After repurposing, FORMED achieves seamless adaptation to unseen MedTS datasets through lightweight label query training (0.1\% of parameters), eliminating the need for full fine-tuning or architectural redesign.
We evaluate FORMED on 5 diverse MedTS datasets, benchmarking against 11 Task-Specific Models (TSM) and 4 Task-Specific Adaptation (TSA) methods. Our results demonstrate FORMED's dominant performance, achieving up to 35\% absolute improvement in F1-score (on ADFTD dataset) over specialized baselines.
By decoupling domain-invariant representation learning from task-specific adaptation, FORMED establishes a scalable and resource-efficient paradigm for foundation model repurposing in healthcare. This approach prioritizes clinical adaptability over rigid task-centric design, offering a practical pathway for real-world implementation.
When Agents “Misremember” Collectively: Exploring the Mandela Effect in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems
Authors: Naen Xu; Hengyu An; Shuo Shi; Jinghuai Zhang; Chunyi Zhou; Changjiang Li; Tianyu Du; Zhihui Fu; Jun Wang; Shouling Ji
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of collaborative multi-agent systems, enabling them to address complex challenges. However, within these multi-agent systems, the susceptibility of agents to collective cognitive biases remains an underexplored issue. A compelling example is the Mandela effect, a phenomenon where groups collectively misremember past events as a result of false details reinforced through social influence and internalized misinformation. This vulnerability limits our understanding of memory bias in multi-agent systems and raises ethical concerns about the potential spread of misinformation. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the Mandela effect in LLM-based multi-agent systems, focusing on its existence, causing factors, and mitigation strategies. We propose ManBench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate agent behaviors across four common task types that are susceptible to the Mandela effect, using five interaction protocols that vary in agent roles and memory timescales. We evaluate agents powered by several LLMs on ManBench to quantify the Mandela effect, and analyze how different factors affect it. Moreover, we propose strategies to mitigate this effect, including prompt-level defenses (e.g., cognitive anchoring and source scrutiny) and model-level alignment-based defense, achieving an average 74.40% reduction in the Mandela effect compared to the baseline. Our findings provide valuable insights for developing more resilient and ethically aligned collaborative multi-agent systems. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/bluedream02/Mandela-Effect.
Model Predictive Adversarial Imitation Learning for Planning from Observation
Authors: Tyler Han; Yanda Bao; Bhaumik Mehta; Gabriel Guo; Sanghun Jung; Anubhav Vishwakarma; Emily Kang; Rosario Scalise; Jason Liren Zhou; Bryan Xu; Byron Boots
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Humans can often perform a new task after observing a few demonstrations by inferring the underlying intent. For robots, recovering the intent of the demonstrator through a learned reward function can enable more efficient, interpretable, and robust imitation through planning. A common paradigm for learning how to plan-from-demonstration involves first solving for a reward via Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) and then deploying it via Model Predictive Control (MPC). In this work, we unify these two procedures by introducing planning-based Adversarial Imitation Learning, which simultaneously learns a reward and improves a planning-based agent through experience while using observation-only demonstrations. We study advantages of planning-based AIL in generalization, interpretability, robustness, and sample efficiency through experiments in simulated control tasks and real-world navigation from few or single observation-only demonstration.
FlashWorld: High-quality 3D Scene Generation within Seconds
Authors: Xinyang Li; Tengfei Wang; Zixiao Gu; Shengchuan Zhang; Chunchao Guo; Liujuan Cao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: We propose FlashWorld, a generative model that produces 3D scenes from a single image or text prompt in seconds, $10 \sim 100\times$ faster than previous works while possessing superior rendering quality.
Our approach shifts from the conventional multi-view-oriented (MV-oriented) paradigm, which generates multi-view images for subsequent 3D reconstruction, to a 3D-oriented approach where the model directly produces 3D Gaussian representations during multi-view generation.
While ensuring 3D consistency, 3D-oriented method typically suffers poor visual quality.
FlashWorld includes a dual-mode pre-training phase followed by a cross-mode post-training phase, effectively integrating the strengths of both paradigms.
Specifically, leveraging the prior from a video diffusion model, we first pre-train a dual-mode multi-view diffusion model, which jointly supports MV-oriented and 3D-oriented generation mode. 
To bridge the quality gap in 3D-oriented generation, we further propose a cross-mode post-training distillation by matching distribution from consistent 3D-oriented mode to high-quality MV-oriented mode. 
This not only enhances visual quality while maintaining 3D consistency, but also reduces the required denoising steps for inference.
Also, we propose a strategy to leverage massive single-view images and text prompts during this process to enhance the model's generalization to out-of-distribution inputs.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of our method.
Our code is released at https://github.com/imlixinyang/FlashWorld.
VFScale: Intrinsic Reasoning through Verifier-Free Test-time Scalable Diffusion Model
Authors: Tao Zhang; Jia-Shu Pan; Ruiqi Feng; Tailin Wu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Inspired by human SYSTEM 2 thinking, LLMs excel at complex reasoning tasks via extended Chain-of-Thought. However, similar test-time scaling for diffusion models to tackle complex reasoning remains largely unexplored. From existing work, two primary challenges emerge in this setting: (i) the dependence on an external verifier indicating a notable gap from intrinsic reasoning of human intelligence without any external feedback, and (ii) the lack of an efficient search algorithm. In this paper, we introduce the Verifier-free Test-time Scalable Diffusion Model (VFScale) to achieve scalable intrinsic reasoning, which equips number-of-sample test-time scaling with the intrinsic energy function of diffusion models as the verifier. Concretely, VFScale comprises two key innovations to address the aforementioned challenges. On the training side,  VFScale consists of a novel MRNCL loss and a KL regularization to improve the energy landscape, ensuring that the learned energy function itself serves as a reliable verifier. On the inference side, VFScale integrates the denoising process with a novel hybrid Monte Carlo Tree Search (hMCTS) to improve search efficiency. On challenging reasoning tasks of Maze and Sudoku, we demonstrate the effectiveness of VFScale's training objective and scalable inference method. In particular, trained with Maze sizes of up to 6×6, our VFScale solves 88\% of Maze problems with much larger sizes of 15×15, while standard diffusion model completely fails. The code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/VFScale.