GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Sign-SGD via Parameter-Free Optimization
Authors: Daniil Medyakov; Stanko Sergey; Gleb Molodtsov; Philip Zmushko; Evseev Grigoriy; Egor Petrov; Aleksandr Beznosikov
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large language models have achieved major advances across domains, yet training them remains extremely resource-intensive. We revisit Sign-SGD, which serves both as a memory-efficient optimizer for single-node training and as a gradient compression mechanism for distributed learning. This paper addresses a central limitation: the effective stepsize cannot be determined a priori because it relies on unknown, problem-specific quantities. We present a parameter-free Sign-SGD that removes manual stepsize selection. We analyze the deterministic single-node case, and extend the method to stochastic single-node training and multi-node settings. We also incorporate the momentum technique into our algorithms and propose a memory-efficient variant that stores only gradient signs instead of full gradients. We evaluate our methods on pre-training LLaMA models (130M and 350M) and fine-tuning a Swin Transformer (28M). Across considered tasks, the proposed methods match the performance of tuned Sign-SGD and AdamW (grid-searched stepsizes with a cosine schedule), while avoiding tuning overhead. Employing parameter-free training yields approximately $1.5\times$ end-to-end speedup compared to runs with grid-searched stepsizes.
Signal Structure-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction
Authors: Weiyi Xue; Fan Lu; Chi Zhang; Tianhang Wang; Sanqing Qu; Zehan Zheng; Boyuan Zheng; Junqiao Zhao; Guang Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting has demonstrated remarkable potential in novel view synthesis. In contrast to small-scale scenes, large-scale scenes inevitably contain sparsely observed regions with excessively sparse initial points. In this case, supervising Gaussians initialized from low-frequency sparse points with high-frequency images often induces uncontrolled densification and redundant primitives, degrading both efficiency and quality. Intuitively, this issue can be mitigated with scheduling strategies, which can be categorized into two paradigms: modulating target signal frequency via densification and modulating sampling frequency via image resolution. However, previous scheduling strategies are primarily hardcoded, failing to perceive the convergence behavior of the scene frequency. To address this, we reframe scene reconstruction problem from the perspective of signal structure recovery, and propose SIG, a novel scheduler that Synchronizes Image supervision with Gaussian frequencies. Specifically, we derive the average sampling frequency and bandwidth of 3D representations, and then regulate the training image resolution and the Gaussian densification process based on scene frequency convergence. Furthermore, we introduce Sphere-Constrained Gaussians, which leverage the spatial prior of initialized point clouds to control Gaussian optimization. Our framework enables frequency-consistent, geometry-aware, and floater-free training, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a substantial margin in both efficiency and rendering quality in large-scale scenes.
FedMC: Federated Manifold Calibration
Authors: Yanbiao Ma; Wei Dai; Gaoyang Jiang; wanyi Chen; Chenyue Zhou; Yiwei Zhang; Fei Luo; Junhao Wang; Andi Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Data heterogeneity in Federated Learning (FL) leads to significant bias in local training. While recent efforts to introduce distributional statistics as priors have shown progress, they universally rely on a flawed global linearity assumption, failing to capture the nonlinear manifold structures prevalent in real-world data. This model-reality mismatch causes the calibration process to generate out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, which fundamentally misleads the model. To address this, we introduce a paradigm shift. We propose Federated Manifold Calibration (FedMC), a novel framework that learns and leverages the local, nonlinear geometry of data. FedMC employs local kernel PCA on the client side to learn fine-grained local geometries, and constructs a global "geometry dictionary" on the server side to aggregate and distribute this knowledge. Clients then utilize this dictionary to perform context-aware, on-manifold calibration. We validate our proposed method by integrating it with a wide range of existing FL algorithms. Experimental results show that by explicitly modeling nonlinear manifolds, FedMC consistently and significantly enhances the performance of these state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks.
ConRep4CO: Contrastive Representation Learning of Combinatorial Optimization Instances across Types
Authors: Ziao Guo; Yang Li; Shiyue Wang; Junchi Yan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Considerable efforts have been devoted to machine learning (ML) for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, especially on graphs. Compared to the active and well-established research for representation learning of text and vision, etc., it remains under-studied for the representation learning of CO problems, especially across different types. In this paper, we try to fill this gap (especially for NP-complete (NPC) problems, as they, in fact, can be reduced to one another). Our so-called ConRep4CO framework, performs contrastive learning by first transforming CO instances in various original forms into the form of Boolean satisfiability (SAT). This scheme is readily doable, especially for NPC problems, including those practical graph decision problems (GDPs) which are inherently related to their NP-hard optimization versions. Specifically, each positive pair of instances for contrasting consists of an instance in its original form and its corresponding transformed SAT form, while the negative samples are other instances not in correspondence. Extensive experiments on seven GDPs (most of which are NPC) show that ConRep4CO significantly improves the representation quality and generalizability to problem scale. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on NP-hard optimization versions of the GDPs, including MVC, MIS, MC and MDS. The results show that introducing ConRep4CO can yield performance improvements of 61.27%, 32.20%, 36.46%, and 45.29% in objective value gaps compared to problem-specific baselines, highlighting the potential of ConRep4CO as a unified pre-training paradigm for CO problems.
Scalable Exploration for High-Dimensional Continuous Control via Value-Guided Flow
Authors: Yunyue Wei; Chenhui Zuo; Yanan Sui
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Controlling high-dimensional biological and robotic systems is challenging due to expansive state–action spaces, where effective exploration is critical. Commonly used exploration strategies in reinforcement learning are largely undirected with sharp degradation as action dimensionality grows. Many existing methods resort to dimensionality reduction, which constrains policy expressiveness and forfeits system flexibility. We introduce Q-guided Flow Exploration (Qflex), a scalable reinforcement learning method that conducts exploration directly in the native high-dimensional action space. During training, Qflex traverses actions from a learnable source distribution along a probability flow induced by the learned value function, aligning exploration with task-relevant gradients rather than isotropic noise. Our proposed method substantially outperforms representative online reinforcement learning baselines across diverse high-dimensional continuous-control benchmarks. Qflex also successfully controls a whole-body human musculoskeletal model to perform agile, complex movements, demonstrating superior scalability and sample efficiency in very high-dimensional settings. Our results indicate that value-guided flows offer a principled and practical route to exploration at scale.
Tucker-FNO: Tensor Tucker-Fourier Neural Operator and its Universal Approximation Theory
Authors: Guancheng Zhou; Zelin Zeng; Yisi Luo; Qi Xie; Deyu Meng
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Fourier neural operator (FNO) has demonstrated substantial potential in learning mappings between function spaces, such as numerical partial differential equations (PDEs). However, FNO may suffer from inefficiencies when applied to large-scale, high-dimensional function spaces due to the computational overhead associated with high-dimensional Fourier and convolution operators. In this work, we introduce the Tucker-FNO, an efficient neural operator that decomposes the high-dimensional FNO into a series of 1-dimensional FNOs through Tucker decomposition, thereby significantly reducing computational complexity while maintaining expressiveness. Especially, by using the theoretical tools of functional decomposition in Sobolev space, we rigorously establish the universal approximation theorem of Tucker-FNO. Experiments on high-dimensional numerical PDEs such as Navier-Stokes, Plasticity, and Burger's equations show that Tucker-FNO achieves substantial improvement in execution time and performance over FNO. Moreover, by virtue of the compact Tucker decomposition, Tucker-FNO generalizes seamlessly to high-dimensional visual signals by learning mappings from the positional encoding space to the signal's implicit neural representations (INRs). Under this operator INR framework, Tucker-FNO gains consistent improvements on continuous signal restoration over traditional INR methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy.
CheckMate! Watermarking Graph Diffusion Models in Polynomial Time
Authors: Roberto Gheda; Abele Mălan; Robert Birke; Maksim Kitsak; Lydia Y. Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Watermarking provides an effective means for data governance. However, conventional post-editing graph watermarking approaches degrade the graph quality and involve NP-hard subroutines. 
Alternatively, recent approaches advocate for embedding watermarking patterns in the noisy latent during data generation from diffusion models, but remain uncharted for graph models due to the hardness of inverting the graph diffusion process.
In this work, we propose CheckWate: the first watermarking framework for graph diffusion models embedding checkerboard watermark and providing polynomial time verification. 
To address NP-completeness due to graph isomorphism, CheckWate embeds the watermark into the latent eigenvalues, which are isomorphism-invariant. 
To detect the watermark through reversing the graph diffusion process, CheckWate leverages the graph eigenvectors to approximately dequantize the discrete graph back to the continuous latent, with theoretical guarantees on the detectability and dequantization error. 
We further introduce a latent sparsification mechanism to enhance the robustness of CheckWate against graph modifications. 
We evaluate CheckWate on four datasets and four graph modification attacks, against three generation time watermark schemes. CheckWate achieves remarkable generation quality while being detectable under strong attacks such as isomorphism, whereas the baselines are unable to detect the watermark. 
Code available at: https://github.com/r-gheda/checkwate.
Causal Discovery in the Wild: A Voting-Theoretic Ensemble Approach
Authors: Vy Vo; Haoxuan Li; Mingming Gong
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Causal discovery is a critical yet persistently challenging task across scientific domains. Despite years of significant algorithmic advances, existing methods still struggle with inconsistent outcomes due to reliance on untestable assumptions, sensitivity to data perturbations, and optimization constraints. To this end, ensemble-based causal discovery has been actively pursued, aiming to aggregate multiple structural predictions for increased stability and uncertainty estimation. However, current aggregation methods are largely heuristic, lacking theoretical guarantees and guidance on how ensemble design choices affect performance. This work is proposed to address there fundamental limitations. We introduce a principled voting-based framework for structural ensembling, establishing conditions under which the aggregated structure recovers the true causal graph. Our analysis yields a theoretically justified weighted voting mechanism that informs optimal choices regarding the number, competency, and diversity of causal discovery experts in the ensemble. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets verify the robustness and effectiveness of our approach, offering a rigorous alternative to existing heuristic ensemble methods.
Unveiling the Mechanism of Continuous Representation Full-Waveform Inversion: A Wave Based Neural Tangent Kernel Framework
Authors: Ruihua Chen; Yisi Luo; Bangyu Wu; Deyu Meng
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Full-waveform inversion (FWI) estimates physical parameters in the wave equation from limited measurements and has been widely applied in geophysical exploration, medical imaging, and non-destructive testing. Conventional FWI methods are limited by their notorious sensitivity to the accuracy of the initial models. Recent progress in continuous representation FWI (CR-FWI) demonstrates that representing parameter models with a coordinate-based neural network, such as implicit neural representation (INR), can mitigate the dependence on initial models. However, its underlying mechanism remains unclear, and INR-based FWI shows slower high-frequency convergence. In this work, we investigate the general CR-FWI framework and develop a unified theoretical understanding by extending the neural tangent kernel (NTK) for FWI to establish a wave-based NTK framework. Unlike standard NTK, our analysis reveals that wave-based NTK is not constant, both at initialization and during training, due to the inherent nonlinearity of FWI. We further show that the eigenvalue decay behavior of the wave-based NTK can explain why CR-FWI alleviates the dependency on initial models and shows slower high-frequency convergence. Building on these insights, we propose several CR-FWI methods with tailored eigenvalue decay properties for FWI, including a novel hybrid representation combining INR and multi-resolution grid (termed IG-FWI) that achieves a more balanced trade-off between robustness and high-frequency convergence rate. Applications in geophysical exploration on Marmousi, 2D SEG/EAGE Salt and Overthrust, 2004 BP model, and the more realistic 2014 Chevron models show the superior performance of our proposed methods compared to conventional FWI and existing INR-based FWI methods.
Turbo-DDCM: Fast and Flexible Zero-Shot Diffusion-Based Image Compression
Authors: Amit Vaisman; Guy Ohayon; Hila Manor; Michael Elad; Tomer Michaeli
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: While zero-shot diffusion-based compression methods have seen significant progress in recent years, they remain notoriously slow and computationally demanding. This paper presents an efficient zero-shot diffusion-based compression method that runs substantially faster than existing methods, while maintaining performance that is on par with the state-of-the-art techniques. Our method builds upon the recently proposed Denoising Diffusion Codebook Models (DDCMs) compression scheme. Specifically, DDCM compresses an image by sequentially choosing the diffusion noise vectors from reproducible random codebooks, guiding the denoiser’s output to reconstruct the target image. We modify this framework with *Turbo-DDCM*, which efficiently combines a large number of noise vectors at each denoising step, thereby significantly reducing the number of required denoising operations. This modification is also coupled with an improved encoding protocol. Furthermore, we introduce two flexible variants of Turbo-DDCM, a priority-aware variant that prioritizes user-specified regions and a distortion-controlled variant that compresses an image based on a target PSNR rather than a target BPP. Comprehensive experiments position Turbo-DDCM as a compelling, practical, and flexible image compression scheme.
Bridging Successor Measure and Online Policy Learning with Flow Matching-Based Representations
Authors: Haosen Shi; Jianda Chen; Sinno Jialin Pan
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: The Successor Measure (SM), a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL), describes discounted future state distributions under a policy, and it has recently been studied using generative modeling techniques. Although SM is a powerful predictive object, it lacks compact representations tailored for online RL. To address this, we introduce Successor Flow Features (SF2), a representation learning framework that bridges SM estimation with policy optimization. SF2 leverages flow-matching generative models to approximate successor measures, while enforcing a structured linear decomposition into a time-invariant embedding and a time-dependent projection. This yields compact, policy-aware state-action features that integrate readily into standard off-policy algorithms like TD3 and SAC. Experiments on DeepMind Control Suite tasks show that SF2 improves sample efficiency and training stability compared to strong successor feature baselines. We attribute these gains to the compact representation induced by flow matching, which reduces compounding errors in long-horizon predictions. The code is available on https://github.com/Shiien/successor-flow-representation-implementation .
Object-Centric Refinement for Enhanced Zero-Shot Segmentation
Authors: Srinivasa Rao Nandam; Sara Atito; Zhenhua Feng; Josef Kittler; Muhammad Awais
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Zero-shot semantic segmentation aims to recognize, pixel-wise, unseen categories without annotated masks, typically by leveraging vision-language models such as CLIP. However, the patch representations obtained by the CLIP's vision encoder lack object-centric structure, making it difficult to localize coherent semantic regions.
This hinders the performance of the segmentation decoder, especially for unseen categories. To mitigate this issue, we propose object-centric zero-shot segmentation (OC-ZSS) that enhances patch representations using object-level information. 
To extract object features for patch refinement, we introduce self-supervision-guided object prompts into the encoder. These prompts attend to coarse object regions using attention masks derived from unsupervised clustering of features from a pretrained self-supervised~(SSL) model. Although these prompts offer a structured initialization of the object-level context, the extracted features remain coarse due to the unsupervised nature of clustering. To further refine the object features and effectively enrich patch representations, we develop a dual-stage Object Refinement Attention (ORA) module that iteratively updates both object and patch features through cross-attention. Last, to make the refinement more robust and sensitive to objects of varying spatial scales, we incorporate a lightweight granular attention mechanism that operates over multiple receptive fields. OC-ZSS achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard zero-shot segmentation benchmarks across inductive, transductive, and cross-domain settings.
A Near-Optimal Best-of-Both-Worlds Algorithm for Federated Bandits
Authors: Zicheng Hu; Zihao Wang; Cheng Chen
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: This paper studies federated multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems in which multiple agents work together to solve a common MAB problem through a communication network. We focus on the heterogeneous setting in which no single agent can identify the globally best arm using only locally biased observations. In this setting, different agents may select the same arm at the same time step, but receive different rewards. We propose a novel algorithm called \textsc{FedFTRL} for this problem and, to our knowledge, it is the first to achieve near-optimal regret guarantees in both stochastic and adversarial environments. Notably, in the adversarial regime, our algorithm achieves $O(T^{\frac{1}{2}})$ regret, a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art regret of $O(T^{\frac{2}{3}})$ \citep{yi2023doubly}. We also provide empirical evaluations comparing our algorithm with baseline methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
TaskCraft: Automated Generation of Agentic Tasks
Authors: Dingfeng Shi; Jingyi Cao; Qianben Chen; Weichen Sun; Weizhen Li; Hongxuan Lu; Fangchen Dong; Tianrui Qin; King Zhu; Minghao Liu; Yuchen Eleanor Jiang; Jian Yang; Ge Zhang; Jiaheng Liu; Changwang Zhang; Jun Wang; Wangchunshu Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Agentic tasks, which require multistep problem solving with tool use and adaptive reasoning, are becoming increasingly central to the advancement of NLP and AI. Although benchmarks such as GAIA and BrowseComp have advanced agent evaluation, their scalability remains limited by the high cost of human annotation. We introduce TaskCraft, the first automated workflow for generating scalable, multitool, and verifiable agentic tasks of difficulty. TaskCraft progressively complexifies atomic tasks through depth-based and width-based extensions, with incremental validation via rejection sampling and LLM-based linguistic analysis, ensuring both scalability and efficiency. The generated tasks enable trajectory sampling within state-of-the-art workflows, supporting end-to-end SFT and RL training. Experimental results on multiple LLMs show that TaskCraft data substantially improves multi-hop reasoning and agentic capabilities. Further scaling with TaskCraft tasks and applying RL training yields additional gains, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four agentic benchmarks. The resulting dataset comprises 41k tool-intensive tasks across varied difficulty levels, including 12.6k tool-interaction trajectories and 5k multihop decompositions.
HFSTI-Net: Hierarchical Frequency-spatial-temporal Interactions for Video Polyp Segmentation
Authors: Yuanqin He; Guilian Chen; Yuhua Zhang; Huisi Wu; Jing Qin
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Automatic video polyp segmentation (VPS) is crucial for preventing and treating colorectal cancer by ensuring accurate identification of polyps in colonoscopy examinations. However, its clinical application is hampered by two key challenges: shape collapse, which compromises structural integrity, and episodic amnesia, which causes instability in challenging video sequences. To address these challenges, we present a novel video segmentation network, \emph{HFSTI-Net}, which integrates global perception with spatiotemporal consistency in spatial, temporal, and frequency domains. Specifically, to address shape collapse under low contrast or visual ambiguity, we design a Hierarchical Frequency-spatial Interaction (HFSI) module that fuses spatial and frequency cues for fine-grained boundary localization. Furthermore,  we propose a recurrent mask-guided propagation (RMP) module that introduces a dual enhancement mechanism based on feature memory and mask alignment, effectively incorporating spatiotemporal information to alleviate inter-frame inconsistencies and ensuring long-term segmentation stability. Extensive experiments on the SUN-SEG and CVC-612 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves real-time inference and outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/Yuanqin-He/HFSTI-Net}.