GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Constraint Matters: Multi-Modal Representation for Reducing Mixed-Integer Linear programming
Authors: jiajun Li; Yixuan Li; Ran Hou; Yu Ding; Shisi Guan; Jiahui Duan; Xiongwei Han; Tao Zhong; Vincent Chau; Weiwei Wu; Zhiyuan Liu; Wanyuan Wang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Model reduction, which aims to learn a simpler model of the original mixed integer linear programming (MILP), can solve large-scale MILP problems much faster. Most existing model reduction methods are based on variable reduction, which predicts a solution value for a subset of variables. From a dual perspective, constraint reduction that transforms a subset of inequality constraints into equalities can also reduce the complexity of MILP, but has been largely ignored. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel constraint-based model reduction approach for MILPs. Constraint-based MILP reduction has two challenges: 1) which inequality constraints are critical such that reducing them can accelerate MILP solving while preserving feasibility, and 2) how to predict these critical constraints efficiently. To identify critical constraints, we label the tight-constraints at the optimal solution as potential critical constraints and design an information theory-guided heuristic rule to select a subset of critical tight-constraints. Theoretical analyses indicate that our heuristic mechanism effectively identify the constraints most instrumental in reducing the solution space and uncertainty. To learn the critical tight-constraints, we propose a multi-modal representation that integrates information from both instance-level and abstract-level MILP formulations. The experimental results show that, compared to the state-of-the-art MILP solvers, our method improves the quality of the solution by over 50\% and reduces the computation time by 17.47\%.
Sparse Attention Adaptation for Long Reasoning
Authors: Yizhao Gao; Shuming Guo; Shijie Cao; Yuqing Xia; Yu Cheng; Lei Wang; Lingxiao Ma; Yutao Sun; Tianzhu Ye; Li Dong; Hayden Kwok-Hay So; Yu Hua; Ting Cao; Fan Yang; Mao Yang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We introduce SeerAttention-R, a sparse attention framework specifically tailored for the long decoding of reasoning models.
Extended from SeerAttention, SeerAttention-R retains the design of learning attention sparsity through a self-distilled gating mechanism, while removing query pooling to accommodate auto-regressive decoding. 
With a lightweight plug-in gating, SeerAttention-R is flexible and can be easily integrated into existing pretrained model without modifying the original parameters. 
We demonstrate that SeerAttention-R, trained on just 0.4B tokens, maintains near-lossless reasoning accuracy with 4K token budget in AIME benchmark under large sparse attention block sizes (64/128).
Using TileLang, we develop a highly optimized sparse decoding kernel that achieves near-theoretical speedups of up to 9x over FlashAttention-3 on H100 GPU at 90\% sparsity.
Small Transformers Don’t Need LayerNorm at Inference Time: Scaling LayerNorm Removal to GPT-2 XL and Implications for Mechanistic Interpretability
Authors: Luca Baroni; Galvin Khara; Joachim Schaeffer; Marat Subkhankulov; Stefan Heimersheim
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Layer-wise normalization (LN) is an essential component of virtually all transformer-based large language models. While its effects on training stability are well documented, its role at inference time is poorly understood. Additionally, LN layers hinder mechanistic interpretability by introducing additional nonlinearities and increasing the interconnectedness of individual model components. Here, we show that all LN layers can be removed via fine-tuning from every GPT-2 model with only a small increase in validation loss (e.g. +0.03 cross-entropy loss for GPT-2 XL). Thus, LN is not essential at inference to maintain comparable performance in these models. We find that the amount of fine-tuning data needed for LN removal grows sublinearly with model parameters, suggesting scaling to larger models is feasible. We release a suite of LN-free GPT-2 models on Hugging Face. Furthermore, we test interpretability techniques on LN-free models. Direct logit attribution now gives the exact direct effect of individual components, while the accuracy of attribution patching does not significantly improve. We also confirm that GPT-2's  "confidence neurons" are inactive in the LN-free models. Our work clarifies the role of LN layers in language modeling, showing that GPT-2-class models can function without LN layers. We hope that our LN-free analogs of the GPT-2 family of models will enable more precise interpretability research and improve our understanding of language models.
Critical attention scaling in long-context transformers
Authors: Shi Chen; Zhengjiang Lin; Yury Polyanskiy; Philippe Rigollet
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: As large language models scale to longer contexts, attention layers suffer from a fundamental pathology: attention scores collapse toward uniformity as context length $n$ increases, causing tokens to cluster excessively, a phenomenon known as rank-collapse. While $\text{\emph{attention scaling}}$ effectively addresses this deficiency by rescaling attention scores with a polylogarithmic factor $\beta_n$, theoretical justification for this approach remains lacking.

We analyze a simplified yet tractable model that magnifies the effect of attention scaling. In this model, attention exhibits a phase transition governed by the scaling factor $\beta_n$: insufficient scaling collapses all tokens to a single direction, while excessive scaling reduces attention to identity, thereby eliminating meaningful interactions between tokens.
Our main result identifies the critical scaling $\beta_n \asymp \log n$ and provides a rigorous justification for attention scaling in YaRN and Qwen, clarifying why logarithmic scaling maintains sparse, content-adaptive attention at large context lengths.
Compositional Diffusion with Guided search for Long-Horizon Planning
Authors: Utkarsh Aashu Mishra; David He; Yongxin Chen; Danfei Xu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: Generative models have emerged as powerful tools for planning, with compositional approaches offering particular promise for modeling long-horizon task distributions by composing together local, modular generative models. This compositional paradigm spans diverse domains, from multi-step manipulation planning to panoramic image synthesis to long video generation. However, compositional generative models face a critical challenge: when local distributions are multimodal, existing composition methods average incompatible modes, producing plans that are neither locally feasible nor globally coherent. We propose Compositional Diffusion with Guided Search (CDGS), which addresses this \emph{mode averaging} problem by embedding search directly within the diffusion denoising process. Our method explores diverse combinations of local modes through population-based sampling, prunes infeasible candidates using likelihood-based filtering, and enforces global consistency through iterative resampling between overlapping segments. CDGS matches oracle performance on seven robot manipulation tasks, outperforming baselines that lack compositionality or require long-horizon training data. The approach generalizes across domains, enabling coherent text-guided panoramic images and long videos through effective local-to-global message passing. More details: https://cdgsearch.github.io/
CodeQuant: Unified Clustering and Quantization for Enhanced Outlier Smoothing in Low-Precision Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Xiangyang Yin; Xingyu Liu; Tianhua Xia; BO BAO; Vithursan Thangarasa; Valavan Manohararajah; Eric Sather; Sai Qian Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Outliers have emerged as a fundamental bottleneck in preserving accuracy for low-precision large models, particularly within Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures that are increasingly central to large-scale language modeling. Under post-training quantization (PTQ), these outliers induce substantial quantization errors, leading to severe accuracy degradation. While recent rotation-based smoothing techniques alleviate the problem by redistributing outlier magnitudes, residual errors remain and continue to impede reliable low-precision deployment.

In this work, we tackle this challenge by introducing CodeQuant, a unified quantization-and-clustering scheme that contains smoothing activation outliers via learnable rotation and absorbing weight outliers into fine-tuned cluster centroids for MoE. This design reduces the influence of extreme values by fitting them within cluster centroids, thereby lowering quantization error while maintaining expressive capacity. Coupled with a dedicated kernel design for GPU and CPU, CodeQuant achieves up to $4.15\times$ speedup while delivering significantly higher accuracy than state-of-the-art quantization approaches across diverse MoE models. Our results highlight CodeQuant as a promising direction for efficient and accurate deployment of MoE-based large language models under low-precision constraints. Our code is available at https://github.com/SAI-Lab-NYU/CodeQuant.
Test-Time Matching: Unlocking Compositional Reasoning in Multimodal Models
Authors: Yinglun Zhu; Jiancheng Zhang; Fuzhi Tang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Frontier AI models have achieved remarkable progress, yet recent studies suggest they struggle with compositional reasoning, often performing at or below random chance on established benchmarks. We revisit this problem and show that widely used evaluation metrics systematically underestimate model capability. To correct this artifact, we introduce a group matching score that more faithfully evaluates model capability. Moreover, correctness under the new metric can be translated into correctness under existing metrics via a simple overfitting step. This adjustment enables SigLIP-B16 to surpass all previous results and GPT-4.1 to yield the first result surpassing estimated human performance on Winoground. Building on this insight, we propose Test-Time Matching (TTM), an iterative, self-improving algorithm that further bootstraps model performance without any external supervision. TTM delivers additional, non-trivial improvements: for example, TTM enables SigLIP-B16 to surpass GPT-4.1 on MMVP-VLM, establishing a new state of the art. TTM also extends beyond contrastive vision-language models, yielding clear gains on a generative multimodal model across benchmarks. Importantly, TTM remains broadly effective even on benchmarks without metric-induced effects or group structures, achieving relative gains up to 85.7% on challenging datasets such as WhatsUp. Across 16 dataset variants spanning diverse setups, our experiments demonstrate that TTM consistently improves model performance and advances the frontier of compositional reasoning.
Structure-Aware Graph Hypernetworks for Neural Program Synthesis
Authors: Wenhao Li; Yudong Xu; Elias Boutros Khalil; Scott Sanner
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: We study the neural program synthesis of $\textit{parameterized}$ function families through the lens of meta-learning with hypernetworks. Given a user intent $U$, a meta-learner $M_{\phi}$ produces a full weight set $\hat{\theta}=M_{\phi}(U)$ for a target neural network with fixed architecture $S$, and the instantiated network $m_{S,\hat{\theta}}(X)\to Y$ realizes the behavior intended for $U$. Classical hypernetworks typically $\textit{ignore the target network’s structure}$ and emit a flat list of weights; as a consequence, they fail to account for $\textit{neuron-permutation symmetry}$—many distinct parameterizations of $S$ implement the same function—so equivalent solutions are treated as different targets, fragmenting supervision and hurting out-of-distribution generalization. To address this, we propose $\textit{Meta-GNN}$, a hypernetwork that constructs a $\textit{neural graph}$ from the target architecture $S$ and applies $\textbf{structure-aware}$ message passing with parameter-tied encoders and decoders. This design reduces the search space during learning by collapsing equivalent classes of target networks, without loss of expressivity. Empirically, across modular arithmetic ($\textit{AddMod}$-$p$), array operations ($\textit{SumFirst}$-$n$), and inverse-rule tasks from 1D-ARC, $\textit{Meta-GNN}$ substantially improves learning and $\textbf{out-of-distribution generalization}$ compared to classic hypernetworks and direct $(U,X)\to Y$ baselines. Mechanistic analyses reveal $\textit{what is learned}$: on $\textit{AddMod}$-$p$ the synthesized Transformers recover the canonical clock representation and admit a compact closed-form map $U\mapsto\theta$. These results demonstrate that structure-aware Meta-GNNs enable reliable generalization to $\textit{unseen program parameterizations}$, providing a critical advance for the nascent field of neural program synthesis.
Hallucination-aware Intermediate Representation Edit in Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Wei Suo; Hanzu Zhang; Lijun Zhang; Ji Ma; PENG WANG; Yanning Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models have demonstrated exceptional performance in multimodal reasoning and complex scene understanding. However, these models still face significant hallucination issues, where outputs contradict visual facts. Recent research on hallucination mitigation has focused on retraining methods and Contrastive Decoding (CD) methods. While both methods perform well, retraining methods require substantial training resources, and CD methods introduce dual inference overhead. These factors hinder their practical applicability. To address the above issue, we propose a framework for dynamically detecting hallucination representations and performing hallucination-eliminating edits on these representations. With minimal additional computational cost, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on existing benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting its efficient and robust hallucination elimination capability and its powerful controllability over hallucinations. Code is available at https://github.com/ASGO-MM/HIRE.
Visual symbolic mechanisms: Emergent symbol processing in Vision Language Models
Authors: Rim Assouel; Declan Iain Campbell; Yoshua Bengio; Taylor Whittington Webb
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Oral)

Abstract: To accurately process a visual scene, observers must bind features together to represent individual objects. This capacity is necessary, for instance, to distinguish an image containing a red square and a blue circle from an image containing a blue square and a red circle. Recent work has found that language models solve this ‘binding problem’ via a set of symbol-like, content-independent indices, but it is unclear whether similar mechanisms are employed by Vision Language Models (VLM). This question is especially relevant, given the persistent failures of VLMs on tasks that require binding. Here, we identify a previously unknown set of emergent symbolic mechanisms that support binding specifically in VLMs, via a content-independent, spatial indexing scheme. Moreover, we find that binding errors, when they occur, can be traced directly to failures in these mechanisms. Taken together, these results shed light on the mechanisms that support symbol-like processing in VLMs, and suggest possible avenues for reducing the number of binding failures exhibited by these models.
Transformers Trained via Gradient Descent Can Provably Learn a Class of Teacher Models
Authors: Chenyang Zhang; Qingyue Zhao; Quanquan Gu; Yuan Cao
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Transformers have achieved great success across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundations underlying their success remain largely unexplored. To demystify the strong capacities of transformers applied to versatile scenarios and tasks, we theoretically investigate utilizing transformers as students to learn from a class of teacher models. Specifically, the teacher models covered in our analysis include convolution layers with average pooling, graph convolution layers, and various classic statistical learning models, including a variant of sparse token selection models [Sanford et al., 2023, Wang et al., 2024] and group-sparse linear predictors [Zhang et al., 2025]. 
When learning from this class of teacher models, we prove that one-layer transformers with simplified "position-only'' attention can successfully recover all parameter blocks of the teacher models, thus achieving the optimal population loss. Building upon the efficient mimicry of trained transformers towards teacher models, we further demonstrate that they can generalize well to a broad class of out-of-distribution data under mild assumptions. The key in our analysis is to identify a fundamental bilinear structure shared by various learning tasks, which enables us to establish unified learning guarantees for these tasks when treating them as teachers for transformers.
Detecting Temporal Misalignment Attacks in Multimodal Fusion for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Md Hasan Shahriar; Md Mohaimin Al Barat; Harshavardhan Sundar; Ning Zhang; Naren Ramakrishnan; Thomas Hou; Wenjing Lou
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Multimodal fusion (MMF) is crucial for autonomous driving perception, combining camera and LiDAR streams for reliable scene understanding. However, its reliance on precise temporal synchronization introduces a vulnerability: adversaries can exploit network-induced delays to subtly misalign sensor streams, degrading MMF performance. To address this, we propose AION, a lightweight, plug-in defense tailored for the autonomous driving scenario. AION integrates continuity-aware contrastive learning to learn smooth multimodal representations and a DTW-based detection mechanism to trace temporal alignment paths and generate misalignment scores. 
AION demonstrates strong and consistent robustness against a wide range of temporal misalignment attacks on KITTI and nuScenes, achieving high average AUROC for camera-only (0.9493) and LiDAR-only (0.9495) attacks, while sustaining robust performance under joint cross-modal attacks (0.9195 on most attacks) with low false-positive rates across fusion backbones. Code is available at: https://github.com/shahriar0651/AION.
Scalable Spatio-Temporal SE(3) Diffusion for Long-Horizon Protein Dynamics
Authors: Nima Shoghi; Yuxuan Liu; Yuning Shen; Rob Brekelmans; Pan Li; Quanquan Gu
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations remain the gold standard for studying protein dynamics, but their computational cost limits access to biologically relevant timescales. Recent generative models have shown promise in accelerating simulations, yet they struggle with long-horizon generation due to architectural constraints, error accumulation, and inadequate modeling of spatiotemporal dynamics. We present STAR-MD (Spatio-Temporal Autoregressive Rollout for Molecular Dynamics), a scalable SE(3)-equivariant diffusion model that generates physically plausible protein trajectories over microsecond timescales. Our key innovation is a causal diffusion transformer with joint spatiotemporal attention that efficiently captures complex space-time dependencies while avoiding the memory bottlenecks of existing methods. On the standard ATLAS benchmark, STAR-MD achieves state-of-the-art performance across all metrics--substantially improving conformational coverage, structural validity, and dynamic fidelity compared to previous methods. STAR-MD successfully extrapolates to generate stable microsecond-scale trajectories where baseline methods fail catastrophically, maintaining high structural quality throughout the extended rollout. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals severe limitations in current models for long-horizon generation, while demonstrating that STAR-MD's joint spatiotemporal modeling enables robust dynamics simulation at biologically relevant timescales, paving the way for accelerated exploration of protein function. Project page: https://bytedance-seed.github.io/ConfRover/starmd
WebArbiter: A Generative Reasoning Process Reward Model for Web Agents
Authors: Yao Zhang; Shijie Tang; Zeyu Li; Zhen Han; Volker Tresp
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Web agents hold great potential for automating complex computer tasks, yet their interactions involve long-horizon, sequential decision-making with irreversible actions. In such settings, outcome-based supervision is sparse and delayed, often rewarding incorrect trajectories and failing to support inference-time scaling. This motivates the use of Process Reward Models (WebPRMs) for web navigation, but existing approaches remain limited: scalar WebPRMs collapse progress into coarse, weakly grounded signals, while checklist-based WebPRMs rely on brittle template matching that fails under layout or semantic changes and often mislabels superficially correct actions as successful, providing little insight or interpretability. To address these challenges, we introduce WebArbiter, a reasoning-first, principle-inducing WebPRM that formulates reward modeling as text generation, producing structured justifications that conclude with a preference verdict and identify the action most conducive to task completion under the current context. Training follows a two-stage pipeline: reasoning distillation equips the model with coherent principle-guided reasoning, and reinforcement learning corrects teacher biases by directly aligning verdicts with correctness, enabling stronger generalization. To support systematic evaluation, we release WebPRMBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning four diverse web environments with rich tasks and high-quality preference annotations. On WebPRMBench, WebArbiter-7B outperforms the strongest baseline, GPT-5, by 9.1 points. In reward-guided trajectory search on WebArena-Lite, it surpasses the best prior WebPRM by up to 6.4 points, underscoring its robustness and practical value in complex web tasks.
Dual-IPO: Dual-Iterative Preference Optimization for Text-to-Video Generation
Authors: Xiaomeng Yang; Mengping Yang; GONG JIA; Luozheng Qin; Zhiyu Tan; Hao Li
Venue: ICLR 2026 (ICLR 2026 Poster)

Abstract: Recent advances in video generation have enabled thrilling experiences in producing realistic videos driven by scalable diffusion transformers. However, they usually fail to produce satisfactory outputs that are aligned to users' authentic demands and preferences. In this work, we introduce Dual-Iterative Optimization (Dual-IPO), an iterative paradigm that sequentially optimizes both the reward model and the video generation model for improved synthesis quality and human preference alignment. For the reward model, our framework ensures reliable and robust reward signals via CoT-guided reasoning, voting-based self-consistency, and preference certainty estimation. Given this, we optimize video foundation models with guidance of signals from reward model's feedback, thus improving the synthesis quality in subject consistency, motion smoothness and aesthetic quality, etc. The reward model and video generation model complement each other and are progressively improved in the multi-round iteration, without requiring tediously manual preference annotations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed Dual-IPO can effectively and consistently improve the video generation quality of base model with various architectures and sizes, even help a model with only 2B parameters surpass a 5B one. Moreover, our analysis experiments and ablation studies identify the rational of our systematic design and the efficacy of each component.