2026
Shen, Xu; Wang, Song; Tan, Zhen; Yao, Laura; Zhao, Xinyu; Xu, Kaidi; Wang, Xin; Chen, Tianlong
FaithCoT-Bench: Benchmarking Instance-Level Faithfulness of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyi,
title = {FaithCoT-Bench: Benchmarking Instance-Level Faithfulness of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning},
author = {Xu Shen and Song Wang and Zhen Tan and Laura Yao and Xinyu Zhao and Kaidi Xu and Xin Wang and Tianlong Chen
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04040},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-29},
urldate = {2026-01-29},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve problem-solving and provide seemingly transparent explanations. However, growing evidence shows that CoT often fail to faithfully represent the underlying reasoning process, raising concerns about their reliability in high-risk applications. Although prior studies have focused on mechanism-level analyses showing that CoTs can be unfaithful, they leave open the practical challenge of deciding whether a specific trajectory is faithful to the internal reasoning of the model. To address this gap, we introduce FaithCoT-Bench, a unified benchmark for instance-level CoT unfaithfulness detection. Our framework establishes a rigorous task formulation that formulates unfaithfulness detection as a discriminative decision problem, and provides FINE-CoT (Faithfulness instance evaluation for Chain-of-Thought), an expert-annotated collection of over 1,000 trajectories generated by four representative LLMs across four domains, including more than 300 unfaithful instances with fine-grained causes and step-level evidence. We further conduct a systematic evaluation of eleven representative detection methods spanning counterfactual, logit-based, and LLM-as-judge paradigms, deriving empirical insights that clarify the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches and reveal the increased challenges of detection in knowledge-intensive domains and with more advanced models. To the best of our knowledge, FaithCoT-Bench establishes the first comprehensive benchmark for instance-level CoT faithfulness,},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Feng, Sicheng; TUO, Kaiwen; Wang, Song; Kong, Lingdong; Zhu, Jianke; Wang, Huan
RewardMap: Tackling Sparse Rewards in Fine-grained Visual Reasoning via Multi-Stage Reinforcement Learning Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyj,
title = {RewardMap: Tackling Sparse Rewards in Fine-grained Visual Reasoning via Multi-Stage Reinforcement Learning},
author = {Sicheng Feng and Kaiwen TUO and Song Wang and Lingdong Kong and Jianke Zhu and Huan Wang
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02240, https://fscdc.github.io/RewardMap/},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-29},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Distilling robust reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, computationally efficient student models remains an unresolved challenge. Despite recent advances, distilled models frequently suffer from superficial pattern memorization and subpar generalization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel distillation framework that moves beyond simple mimicry to instill a deeper conceptual understanding. Our framework features two key innovations. underline{textit{First}}, to address pattern memorization, Explanatory Inversion (EI) generates targeted ``explanatory probes'' that compel the student to articulate the underlying logic behind an answer, rather than just memorizing it. underline{textit{Second}}, to improve generalization, Explanatory GRPO (texttt{EXGRPO}) uses a reinforcement learning algorithm with a novel Dialogue Structure Utility Bonus, which explicitly rewards the student for maintaining a coherent reasoning process across these probes. Extensive evaluations on 12 datasets demonstrate significant improvements. Using Gemma-7b as the student model, our method yields an average textbf{20.39%} increase over zero-shot performance and a textbf{6.02%} improvement over the state-of-the-art distillation baselines. Moreover, models distilled with our method show remarkable training efficiency (e.g., surpassing vanilla fine-tuning with textbf{10-25%} training data) and strong generalization to out-of-distribution tasks.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Tan, Zhen; Zhao, Chengshuai; Wang, Song; Li, Jundong; Chen, Tianlong; huan liu,
Probing to Refine: Reinforcement Distillation of LLM Reasoners via Explanatory Inversion Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyk,
title = {Probing to Refine: Reinforcement Distillation of LLM Reasoners via Explanatory Inversion},
author = {Zhen Tan and Chengshuai Zhao and Song Wang and Jundong Li and Tianlong Chen and huan liu
},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=rkIw2GqYEt},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Distilling robust reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, computationally efficient student models remains an unresolved challenge. Despite recent advances, distilled models frequently suffer from superficial pattern memorization and subpar generalization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel distillation framework that moves beyond simple mimicry to instill a deeper conceptual understanding. Our framework features two key innovations. underline{textit{First}}, to address pattern memorization, Explanatory Inversion (EI) generates targeted ``explanatory probes'' that compel the student to articulate the underlying logic behind an answer, rather than just memorizing it. underline{textit{Second}}, to improve generalization, Explanatory GRPO (texttt{EXGRPO}) uses a reinforcement learning algorithm with a novel Dialogue Structure Utility Bonus, which explicitly rewards the student for maintaining a coherent reasoning process across these probes. Extensive evaluations on 12 datasets demonstrate significant improvements. Using Gemma-7b as the student model, our method yields an average textbf{20.39%} increase over zero-shot performance and a textbf{6.02%} improvement over the state-of-the-art distillation baselines. Moreover, models distilled with our method show remarkable training efficiency (e.g., surpassing vanilla fine-tuning with textbf{10-25%} training data) and strong generalization to out-of-distribution tasks.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Yu, Hanxun; Li, Wentong; Qu, Xuan; Wang, Song; Chen, Junbo; Zhu, Jianke
VisionTrim: Unified Vision Token Compression for Training-Free MLLM Acceleration Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026., 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyl,
title = {VisionTrim: Unified Vision Token Compression for Training-Free MLLM Acceleration},
author = {Hanxun Yu and Wentong Li and Xuan Qu and Song Wang and Junbo Chen and Jianke Zhu
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22674},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.},
abstract = {Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) suffer from high computational costs due to excessive visual tokens, particularly in high-resolution and video-based scenarios. Existing token reduction methods typically focus on isolated pipeline components and often neglect textual alignment, leading to performance degradation. In this paper, we propose VisionTrim, a unified framework for training-free MLLM acceleration, integrating two effective plug-and-play modules: 1) the Dominant Vision Token Selection (DVTS) module, which preserves essential visual tokens via global-local view, and 2) the Text-Guided Vision Complement (TGVC) module, which facilitates context-aware token merging guided by textual cues. Extensive experiments across diverse image and video multimodal benchmarks demonstrate the performance superiority of our VisionTrim, advancing practical MLLM deployment in real-world applications. Our full implementation will be publicly available.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Zou, Yuanhao; Jin, Shengji; Deng, Andong; Zhao, Youpeng; Wang, Jun; Chen, Chen
A.I.R.: Enabling Adaptive, Iterative, and Reasoning-based Frame Selection For Video Question Answering Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeym,
title = {A.I.R.: Enabling Adaptive, Iterative, and Reasoning-based Frame Selection For Video Question Answering},
author = {Yuanhao Zou and Shengji Jin and Andong Deng and Youpeng Zhao and Jun Wang and Chen Chen
},
url = {https://ucf-air.github.io/},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Effectively applying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to Video Question Answering (VideoQA) hinges on selecting a concise yet comprehensive set of frames, as processing entire videos is computationally infeasible. However, current frame selection methods face a critical trade-off: approaches relying on lightweight similarity models, such as CLIP, often fail to capture the nuances of complex queries, resulting in inaccurate similarity scores that cannot reflect the authentic query-frame relevance, which further undermines frame selection. Meanwhile, methods that leverage a VLM for deeper analysis achieve higher accuracy but incur prohibitive computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose A.I.R., a training-free approach for Adaptive, Iterative, and Reasoning-based frame selection. We leverage a powerful VLM to perform deep, semantic analysis on complex queries, and this analysis is deployed within a cost-effective iterative loop that processes only a small batch of the most high-potential frames at a time. Extensive experiments on various VideoQA benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing frame selection methods, significantly boosts the performance of the foundation VLM, and achieves substantial gains in computational efficiency over other VLM-based techniques.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Kowsher, Md; Prottasha, Nusrat; Xu, Shiyun; Mohanto, Shetu; GARIBAY, OZLEM; Yousefi, Niloofar; Chen, Chen
FlowNIB: An Information Bottleneck Analysis of Bidirectional vs. Unidirectional Language Models Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyn,
title = {FlowNIB: An Information Bottleneck Analysis of Bidirectional vs. Unidirectional Language Models},
author = {Md Kowsher and Nusrat Prottasha and Shiyun Xu and Shetu Mohanto and OZLEM GARIBAY and Niloofar Yousefi and Chen Chen
},
url = {https://github.com/Kowsher/BidiVsUniLM},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Bidirectional language models (LMs) consistently show stronger context understanding than unidirectional models, yet the theoretical reason remains unclear. We present a simple information bottleneck (IB) perspective: bidirectional representations preserve more mutual information (MI) about both the input and the target, yielding richer features for downstream tasks. We adopt a layer–wise view and hypothesize that, at comparable capacity, bidirectional layers retain more useful signal than unidirectional ones. To test this claim empirically, we present Flow Neural Information Bottleneck (FlowNIB), a lightweight, post-hoc framework capable of estimating comparable mutual information values for individual layers in LMs, quantifying how much mutual information each layer carries for a dataset. FlowNIB takes three inputs—(i) the original LM’s inputs/dataset, (ii) ground–truth labels, and (iii) layer activations—simultaneously estimates the mutual information for both the input–layer and layer–label pairs. Empirically, bidirectional LM layers exhibit higher mutual information than similar—and even larger—unidirectional LMs. As a result, bidirectional LMs outperform unidirectional LMs across extensive experiments on NLU benchmarks (e.g., GLUE), commonsense reasoning, and regression tasks, demonstrating superior context understanding.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Li, Ming; Wu, Jie; Cui, Jiaxing; Li, Xiaojie; Wang, Rui; Chen, Chen
ViPO: Visual Preference Optimization at Scale Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyp,
title = {ViPO: Visual Preference Optimization at Scale},
author = {Ming Li and Jie Wu and Jiaxing Cui and Xiaojie Li and Rui Wang and Chen Chen
},
url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=x5zP3k64Nl},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {While preference optimization is crucial for improving visual generative models, how
to effectively scale this paradigm for visual generation remains largely unexplored.
Current open-source preference datasets typically contain substantial conflicting
preference patterns, where winners excel in some dimensions but underperform in
others. Naively optimizing on such noisy datasets fails to learn meaningful preferences,
fundamentally hindering effective scaling. To enhance the robustness of preference
algorithms against noise, we propose Poly-DPO, which extends the DPO objective
with an additional polynomial term that dynamically adjusts model confidence during
training based on dataset characteristics, enabling effective learning across diverse
data distributions from noisy to trivially simple patterns. Beyond biased patterns,
existing datasets suffer from low resolution, limited prompt diversity, and imbalanced
distributions. To facilitate large-scale visual preference optimization by tackling key
data bottlenecks, we construct ViPO, a massive-scale preference dataset with 1M
image pairs (1024px) across five categories and 300K video pairs (720p+) across three
categories. Leveraging state-of-the-art generative models and diverse prompts ensures
consistent, reliable preference signals with balanced distributions. Remarkably, when
applying Poly-DPO to our high-quality dataset, the optimal configuration converges
to standard DPO. This convergence validates both our dataset quality and Poly-DPO’s
adaptive nature: sophisticated optimization becomes unnecessary with sufficient data
quality, yet remains valuable for imperfect datasets. We comprehensively validate our
approach across various visual generation models. On noisy datasets like Pick-a-Pic V2,
Poly-DPO achieves 6.87 and 2.32 gains over Diffusion-DPO on GenEval for SD1.5 and
SDXL, respectively. For our high-quality ViPO dataset, models achieve performance
far exceeding those trained on existing open-source preference datasets. These results
confirm that addressing both algorithmic adaptability and data quality is essential for
scaling visual preference optimization. All models and datasets will be released.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
to effectively scale this paradigm for visual generation remains largely unexplored.
Current open-source preference datasets typically contain substantial conflicting
preference patterns, where winners excel in some dimensions but underperform in
others. Naively optimizing on such noisy datasets fails to learn meaningful preferences,
fundamentally hindering effective scaling. To enhance the robustness of preference
algorithms against noise, we propose Poly-DPO, which extends the DPO objective
with an additional polynomial term that dynamically adjusts model confidence during
training based on dataset characteristics, enabling effective learning across diverse
data distributions from noisy to trivially simple patterns. Beyond biased patterns,
existing datasets suffer from low resolution, limited prompt diversity, and imbalanced
distributions. To facilitate large-scale visual preference optimization by tackling key
data bottlenecks, we construct ViPO, a massive-scale preference dataset with 1M
image pairs (1024px) across five categories and 300K video pairs (720p+) across three
categories. Leveraging state-of-the-art generative models and diverse prompts ensures
consistent, reliable preference signals with balanced distributions. Remarkably, when
applying Poly-DPO to our high-quality dataset, the optimal configuration converges
to standard DPO. This convergence validates both our dataset quality and Poly-DPO’s
adaptive nature: sophisticated optimization becomes unnecessary with sufficient data
quality, yet remains valuable for imperfect datasets. We comprehensively validate our
approach across various visual generation models. On noisy datasets like Pick-a-Pic V2,
Poly-DPO achieves 6.87 and 2.32 gains over Diffusion-DPO on GenEval for SD1.5 and
SDXL, respectively. For our high-quality ViPO dataset, models achieve performance
far exceeding those trained on existing open-source preference datasets. These results
confirm that addressing both algorithmic adaptability and data quality is essential for
scaling visual preference optimization. All models and datasets will be released.
Liu, Jialin; Ding, Lisang; Yin, Wotao; Osher, Stanley J
Implicit Models: Expressive Power Scales with Test-Time Compute Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyq,
title = {Implicit Models: Expressive Power Scales with Test-Time Compute},
author = {Jialin Liu and Lisang Ding and Wotao Yin and Stanley J Osher
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03638},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Implicit models, an emerging model class, compute outputs by iterating a single parameter block to a fixed point. This architecture realizes an infinite-depth, weight-tied network that trains with constant memory, significantly reducing memory needs for the same level of performance compared to explicit models. While it is empirically known that these compact models can often match or even exceed the accuracy of larger explicit networks by allocating more test-time compute, the underlying reasons are not yet well understood. We study this gap through a non-parametric analysis of expressive power. We provide a strict mathematical characterization, showing that a simple and regular implicit operator can, through iteration, progressively express more complex mappings. We prove that for a broad class of implicit models, this process allows the model's expressive power to grow with test-time compute, ultimately matching a much richer function class. The theory is validated across four domains: imaging, scientific computing, operations research, and LLM reasoning, demonstrating that as test-time iterations increase, the complexity of the learned mapping rises, while the solution quality simultaneously improves and stabilizes},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Lin, Wu; Lowe, Scott C; Dangel, Felix; Eschenhagen, Runa; Xu, Zikun; Grosse, Roger
Understanding and improving Shampoo and SOAP via Kullback-Leibler Minimization Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyr,
title = {Understanding and improving Shampoo and SOAP via Kullback-Leibler Minimization},
author = {Wu Lin and Scott C Lowe and Felix Dangel and Runa Eschenhagen and Zikun Xu and Roger Grosse
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03378},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Shampoo and its efficient, Adam-stabilized variant SOAP, employ structured second-moment estimation and have received growing attention for their effectiveness. In practice, Shampoo requires step-size grafting with Adam to achieve competitive performance. SOAP mitigates this by applying Adam in Shampoo's eigenbasis and further reducing per-iteration runtime. However, reliance on Adam introduces additional memory overhead in both methods. Prior theoretical interpretations have primarily examined their estimation schemes using the Frobenius norm. Motivated by the natural correspondence between the second moment and a covariance matrix, we reinterpret the estimation procedures in Shampoo and SOAP as instances of covariance estimation through the lens of Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence minimization. This perspective reveals a previously overlooked theoretical limitation and motivates principled improvements to their design. Building on the KL perspective, we propose practical estimation schemes---KL-Shampoo and KL-SOAP---that match or exceed the performance of Shampoo and SOAP for pre-training a range of neural network models while maintaining SOAP-level per-iteration runtime. Notably, KL-Shampoo does not rely on Adam to achieve superior performance, thereby avoiding the associated memory overhead. Surprisingly, KL-Shampoo consistently outperforms the other methods in our experiments.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Fang, Pengjun; He, Yingqing; Xing, Yazhou; Chen, Qifeng; Lim, Ser-Nam; Yang, Harry
AC-Foley: Reference-Audio-Guided Video-to-Audio Synthesis with Acoustic Transfer Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeys,
title = {AC-Foley: Reference-Audio-Guided Video-to-Audio Synthesis with Acoustic Transfer},
author = {Pengjun Fang and Yingqing He and Yazhou Xing and Qifeng Chen and Ser-Nam Lim and Harry Yang
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15597},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Existing video-to-audio (V2A) generation methods predominantly rely on text prompts alongside visual information to synthesize audio. However, two critical bottlenecks persist: semantic granularity gaps in training data (e.g., conflating acoustically distinct sounds like different dog barks under coarse labels), and textual ambiguity in describing microacoustic features (e.g., "metallic clang" failing to distinguish impact transients and resonance decay). These bottlenecks make it difficult to perform fine-grained sound synthesis using text-controlled modes. To address these limitations, we propose AC-Foley, an audio-conditioned V2A model that directly leverages reference audio to achieve precise and fine-grained control over generated sounds. This approach enables: fine-grained sound synthesis (e.g., footsteps with distinct timbres on wood, marble, or gravel), timbre transfer (e.g., transforming a violin’s melody into the bright, piercing tone of a suona), zero-shot generation of sounds (e.g., creating unique weapon sound effects without training on firearm datasets) and better audio quality. By directly conditioning on audio signals, our approach bypasses the semantic ambiguities of text descriptions while enabling precise manipulation of acoustic attributes. Empirically, AC-Foley achieves state-of-the-art performance for Foley generation when conditioned on reference audio, while remaining competitive with SOTA video-to-audio methods even without audio conditioning.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Cui, Xuanming; Cheng, Jianpeng; Chen, Hong-You; Shukla, Satya Narayan; Awasthi, Abhijeet; Pan, Xichen; Ahuja, Chaitanya; Mishra, Shlok; Tian, Taipeng; Guo, Qi; Lim, Ser-Nam; Singh, Aashu; Fan, Xiangjun
Think Then Embed: Generative Context Improves Multimodal Embedding Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyt,
title = {Think Then Embed: Generative Context Improves Multimodal Embedding},
author = {Xuanming Cui and Jianpeng Cheng and Hong-You Chen and Satya Narayan Shukla and Abhijeet Awasthi and Xichen Pan and Chaitanya Ahuja and Shlok Mishra and Taipeng Tian and Qi Guo and Ser-Nam Lim and Aashu Singh and Xiangjun Fan},
url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05014},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {There is a growing interest in Universal Multimodal Embeddings (UME), where models are required to generate task-specific representations. While recent studies show that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform well on such tasks, they treat MLLMs solely as encoders, overlooking their generative capacity. However, such an encoding paradigm becomes less effective as instructions become more complex and require compositional reasoning. Inspired by the proven effectiveness of chain-of-thought reasoning, we propose a general Think-Then-Embed (TTE) framework for UME, composed of a reasoner and an embedder. The reasoner MLLM first generates reasoning traces that explain complex queries, followed by an embedder that produces representations conditioned on both the original query and the intermediate reasoning. This explicit reasoning step enables more nuanced understanding of complex multimodal instructions. Our contributions are threefold. First, by leveraging a powerful MLLM reasoner, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the MMEB-V2 benchmark, surpassing proprietary models trained on massive in-house datasets. Second, to reduce the dependency on large MLLM reasoners, we finetune a smaller MLLM reasoner using high-quality embedding-centric reasoning traces, achieving the best performance among open-source models with a 7% absolute gain over recently proposed models. Third, we investigate strategies for integrating the reasoner and embedder into a unified model for improved efficiency without sacrificing performance.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Bao, Wenrui; Chen, Zhiben; Xu, Dan; Shang, Yuzhang
Learning to Parallel: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models via Adaptive Parallel Decoding Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyu,
title = {Learning to Parallel: Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models via Adaptive Parallel Decoding},
author = {Wenrui Bao and Zhiben Chen and Dan Xu and Yuzhang Shang},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25188},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Autoregressive decoding in large language models (LLMs) requires sequential steps for O(n) tokens, fundamentally limiting inference throughput. Recent diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) enable parallel token generation through iterative denoising. However, current parallel decoding strategies rely on fixed, input-agnostic heuristics (e.g., confidence thresholds), which fail to adapt to input-specific characteristics, resulting in suboptimal speed-quality trade-offs across diverse NLP tasks. In this work, we explore a more flexible and dynamic approach to parallel decoding. We propose **Learning to Parallel Decode (Learn2PD)**, a framework that trains a lightweight and adaptive filter model to predict, for each token position, whether the current prediction matches the final output. This learned filter approximates an oracle parallel decoding strategy that unmasks tokens only when correctly predicted. Importantly, the filter model is learned in a post-training manner, requiring only a small amount of computation to optimize it (minute-level GPU time). Additionally, we introduce **End-of-Text Prediction (EoTP)** to detect decoding completion at the end of sequence, avoiding redundant decoding of padding tokens. Experiments on the LLaDA benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves up to **22.58×** speedup without any performance drop, and up to **57.51×** when combined with KV-Cache.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Wang, Haoxuan; Zhang, Gengyu; Yan, Yan; Shang, Yuzhang; Kompella, Ramana; Liu, Gaowen
Real-Time Robot Execution with Masked Action Chunking Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations , 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyv,
title = {Real-Time Robot Execution with Masked Action Chunking},
author = {Haoxuan Wang and Gengyu Zhang and Yan Yan and Yuzhang Shang and Ramana Kompella and Gaowen Liu
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20130},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations
},
abstract = {Real-time execution is essential for cyber-physical systems such as robots. These systems operate in dynamic real-world environments where even small delays can undermine responsiveness and compromise performance. Asynchronous inference has recently emerged as a system-level paradigm for real-time robot manipulation, enabling the next action chunk to be predicted while the current one is being executed. While this approach achieves real-time responsiveness, naive integration often results in execution failure. Previous methods attributed this failure to inter-chunk discontinuity and developed test-time algorithms to smooth chunk boundaries. In contrast, we identify another critical yet overlooked factor: intra-chunk inconsistency, where the robot’s executed action chunk partially misaligns with its current perception. To address this, we propose REMAC, which learns corrective adjustments on the pretrained policy through masked action chunking, enabling the policy to remain resilient under mismatches between intended actions and actual execution during asynchronous inference. In addition, we introduce a prefix-preserved sampling procedure to reinforce inter-chunk continuity. Overall, our method delivers more reliable policies without incurring additional latency. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our method enables faster task execution, maintains robustness across varying delays, and consistently achieves higher completion rates.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Essoullami, Mostapha; Bergou, El Houcine; Dutta, Aritra
LEGACY: A Lightweight Dynamic Gradient Compression Strategy for Distributed Deep Learning Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyw,
title = {LEGACY: A Lightweight Dynamic Gradient Compression Strategy for Distributed Deep Learning},
author = {Mostapha Essoullami and El Houcine Bergou and Aritra Dutta
},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=DsBYEO3B8O},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Distributed learning has achieved remarkable success in training deep neural networks (DNNs) on large datasets, but the communication bottleneck limits its scalability. Various compression techniques have been proposed to alleviate this limitation; however, they either use fixed parameters throughout training or rely on complex and computationally intensive methods to adapt compression parameters. Instead of the hard-to-tune hyperparameters required by adaptive compressors, this paper investigates the impact of two fundamental factors in DNN training—the layer size of the networks and their training phases—to design a simple yet efficient dynamic scheduler for any compressor, guiding the selection of compression parameters. We present a Lightweight Efficient GrAdient Compression strategyY or LEGACY, which, in theory, can work with any compression technique to produce a simple dynamic counterpart. We benchmark LEGACY on distributed and federated training, involving seven different DNN architectures, ranging from ResNet, Transformer-XL, to GPT-2, across large and challenging datasets, including ImageNet, WikiText-103, and OpenWebText. On ImageNet-1K, with an equivalent average data volume, LEGACY's dynamic compression strategies improve the Top-1 accuracy of ResNet-50 by 7-11% compared to uniform Top-0.1% compression, while on WikiText-103, the layer-based dynamic strategy reduces the perplexity of Transformer-XL by ~26% relative to the same baseline. In addition, we evaluate LEGACY under constrained and federated settings, and demonstrate that it...},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Li, Yan; Wang, Zhenyi; Li, Guanghao; Xue, Wei; Guo, Yike; Luo, Wenhan
Pixel-Perfect Puppetry: Precision-Guided Enhancement for Face Image and Video Editing Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations , 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyx,
title = {Pixel-Perfect Puppetry: Precision-Guided Enhancement for Face Image and Video Editing},
author = {Yan Li and Zhenyi Wang and Guanghao Li and Wei Xue and Yike Guo and Wenhan Luo
},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=8mHZWTeF3z},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations
},
abstract = {Preserving identity while precisely manipulating attributes is a central challenge in face editing for both images and videos. Existing methods often introduce visual artifacts or fail to maintain temporal consistency. We present FlowGuide, a unified framework that achieves fine-grained control over face editing in diffusion models. Our approach is founded on the local linearity of the UNet bottleneck’s latent space, which allows us to treat semantic attributes as corresponding to specific linear subspaces, providing a mathematically sound basis for disentanglement. FlowGuide first identifies a set of orthogonal basis vectors that span these semantic subspaces for both the original content and the target edit, a representation that efficiently captures the most salient features of each. We then introduce a novel guidance mechanism that quantifies the geometric alignment between these bases to dynamically steer the denoising trajectory at each step. This approach offers superior control by ensuring edits are confined to the desired attribute’s semantic axis while preserving orthogonal components related to identity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowGuide achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing high-quality edits with superior identity preservation and temporal coherence.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Singh, Utsav; Chakraborty, Souradip; Suttle, Wesley; Sadler, Brian; Asher, Derrik; Sahu, Anit Kumar; Shah, Mubarak; Namboodiri, Vinay Purushothaman; Bedi, Amrit
Direct Preference Optimization for Primitive-Enabled Hierarchical RL: A Bilevel Approach Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026., 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyy,
title = {Direct Preference Optimization for Primitive-Enabled Hierarchical RL: A Bilevel Approach},
author = {Utsav Singh and Souradip Chakraborty and Wesley Suttle and Brian Sadler and Derrik Asher and Anit Kumar Sahu and Mubarak Shah and Vinay Purushothaman Namboodiri and Amrit Bedi
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/html/2411.00361v3},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.},
journal = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.},
abstract = {Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) enables agents to solve complex, long-horizon tasks by decomposing them into manageable sub-tasks. However, HRL methods face two fundamental challenges: (i) non-stationarity caused by the evolving lower-level policy during training, which destabilizes higher-level learning, and (ii) the generation of infeasible subgoals that lower-level policies cannot achieve. To address these challenges, we introduce DIPPER, a novel HRL framework that formulates goal-conditioned HRL as a bi-level optimization problem and leverages direct preference optimization (DPO) to train the higher-level policy. By learning from preference comparisons over subgoal sequences rather than rewards that depend on the evolving lower-level policy, DIPPER mitigates the impact of non-stationarity on higher-level learning. To address infeasible subgoals, DIPPER incorporates lower-level value function regularization that encourages the higher-level policy to propose achievable subgoals. We introduce two novel metrics to quantitatively verify that DIPPER mitigates non-stationarity and infeasible subgoal generation issues in HRL. Empirical evaluation on challenging robotic navigation and manipulation benchmarks shows that DIPPER achieves upto 40% improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on challenging sparse-reward scenarios, highlighting the potential of preference-based learning for addressing longstanding HRL limitations.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Lee, Jihoon; Moon, Hoyeon; Zhai, Kevin; Chithanar, Arun; Sahu, Anit Kumar; Kar, Soummya; Lee, Chul; Chakraborty, Souradip; Bedi, Amrit
TEST-TIME SCALING IN DIFFUSION LLMS VIA HIDDEN SEMI-AUTOREGRESSIVE EXPERTS Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. , 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyz,
title = {TEST-TIME SCALING IN DIFFUSION LLMS VIA HIDDEN SEMI-AUTOREGRESSIVE EXPERTS},
author = {Jihoon Lee and Hoyeon Moon and Kevin Zhai and Arun Chithanar and Anit Kumar Sahu and Soummya Kar and Chul Lee and Souradip Chakraborty and Amrit Bedi
},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=L5y7in91vd},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
},
abstract = {Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) are trained to model extreme flexibility/dependence in the data-distribution; however, how to best utilize this at inference time remains an open problem. In this work, we uncover an interesting property of these models: dLLMs {trained on textual data} implicitly learn a mixture of semi-autoregressive experts, where different generation orders reveal different specialized behaviors. We show that committing to any single, fixed inference time schedule, a common practice, collapses performance by failing to leverage this latent ensemble. To address this, we introduce HEX (Hidden semi-autoregressive EXperts for test-time scaling), a training-free inference method that ensembles across heterogeneous block schedules. By doing a majority vote over diverse block-sized generation paths, HEX robustly avoids failure modes associated with any single fixed schedule. On reasoning benchmarks such as GSM8K, it boosts accuracy by up to 3.56× (from 24.72% to 88.10%), outperforming top-K margin inference and specialized fine-tuned methods like GRPO, without additional training. HEX even yields significant gains on MATH benchmark from 16.40% to 40.00%, scientific reasoning on ARC-C from 54.18% to 87.80%, and TruthfulQA from 28.36% to 57.46%. Our results establish test-time scaling as a powerful principle for dLLMs, showing that the sequence in which masking is done can play a significant role in test-time scaling/inferencing of dLLMs.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Zhang, Yu; Yang, Bin; KHAN, ARIJIT; Akcora, Cuneyt
ATEX-CF: Attack-Informed Counterfactual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026., 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokey_27,
title = {ATEX-CF: Attack-Informed Counterfactual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks},
author = {Yu Zhang and Bin Yang and ARIJIT KHAN and Cuneyt Akcora
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06240},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.},
abstract = {Counterfactual explanations offer an intuitive way to interpret graph neural networks (GNNs) by identifying minimal changes that alter a model’s prediction, thereby answering “what must differ for a different outcome?”. In this work, we propose a novel framework, ATEX-CF that unifies adversarial attack techniques with counterfactual explanation generation—a connection made feasible by theirshared goal of flipping a node’s prediction, yet differing in perturbation strategy:adversarial attacks often rely on edge additions, while counterfactual methods typically use deletions. Unlike traditional approaches that treat explanation and attack separately, our method efficiently integrates both edge additions and deletions, grounded in theory, leveraging adversarial insights to explore impactful counterfactuals. In addition, by jointly optimizing fidelity, sparsity, and plausibility under a constrained perturbation budget, our method produces instance-level explanations that are both informative and realistic. Experiments on synthetic and real-world node classification benchmarks demonstrate that ATEX-CF generates faithful, concise, and plausible explanations, highlighting the effectiveness of integrating adversarial insights into counterfactual reasoning for GNNs.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Uddin, Md Joshem; Tola, Astrit; Akcora, Cuneyt; Coskunuzer, Baris
TopoFormer: Topology Meets Attention for Graph Learning Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. , 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokey_28,
title = {TopoFormer: Topology Meets Attention for Graph Learning},
author = {Md Joshem Uddin and Astrit Tola and Cuneyt Akcora and Baris Coskunuzer
},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=xanpQt9YZh},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
},
abstract = {We introduce TopoFormer, a lightweight and scalable framework for graph representation learning that encodes topological structure into attention-friendly sequences. At the core of our method is Topo-Scan, a novel module that decomposes a graph into a short, ordered sequence of topological tokens by slicing over node or edge filtrations. These sequences capture multi-scale structural patterns, from local motifs to global organization, and are processed by a Transformer to produce expressive graph-level embeddings. Unlike traditional persistent homology pipelines, Topo-Scan is parallelizable, avoids costly diagram computations, and integrates seamlessly with standard deep learning architectures. We provide theoretical guarantees on the stability of our topological encodings and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across graph classification and molecular property prediction benchmarks. Our results show that TopoFormer matches or exceeds strong GNN and topology-based baselines while offering predictable and efficient compute. This work opens a new path for parallelizable and unifying approaches to graph representation learning that integrate topological inductive biases into attention frameworks.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Fioresi, Joseph; Dave, Ishan Rajendrakumar; Shah, Mubarak
Privacy Beyond Pixels: Latent Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Video Understanding Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. , 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokey_29,
title = {Privacy Beyond Pixels: Latent Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Video Understanding},
author = {Joseph Fioresi and Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave and Mubarak Shah
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08666},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
},
abstract = {We introduce a novel formulation of visual privacy preservation for video foundation models that operates entirely in the latent space. While spatio-temporal features learned by foundation models have deepened general understanding of video content, sharing or storing these extracted visual features for downstream tasks inadvertently reveals sensitive personal information like skin color, gender, or clothing. Current privacy preservation methods focus on input-pixel level anonymization, which requires retraining the entire utility video model and results in task-specific anonymization, making them unsuitable for recent video foundational models. To address these challenges, we introduce a lightweight Anonymizing Adapter Module (AAM) that removes private information from video features while retaining general task utility. AAM can be applied in a plug and play fashion to frozen video encoders, minimizing the computational burden of finetuning and re-extracting features. Our framework employs three newly designed training objectives: (1) a clip-level self-supervised privacy objective to reduce mutual information between static clips, (2) a co-training objective to retain utility across seen tasks, and (3) a latent consistency loss for generalization on unseen tasks. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a significant 35% reduction in privacy leakage while maintaining near-baseline utility performance across various downstream tasks: Action Recognition (Kinetics400, UCF101, HMDB51), Temporal Action Detection (THUMOS14), and Anomaly Detection (UCF-Crime). We also provide an....},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Ashraf, Tajamul; Saqib, Amal; Gani, Hanan; AlMahri, Muhra; Li, Yuhao; Ahsan, Noor; Nawaz, Umair; Lahoud, Jean; Cholakkal, Hisham; Shah, Mubarak; Torr, Philip; Khan, Fahad; Anwer, Rao; Khan, Salman
Agent-X: Evaluating Deep Multimodal Reasoning in Vision-Centric Agentic Tasks Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. , 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokey_30,
title = {Agent-X: Evaluating Deep Multimodal Reasoning in Vision-Centric Agentic Tasks},
author = {Tajamul Ashraf and Amal Saqib and Hanan Gani and Muhra AlMahri and Yuhao Li and Noor Ahsan and Umair Nawaz and Jean Lahoud and Hisham Cholakkal and Mubarak Shah and Philip Torr and Fahad Khan and Rao Anwer and Salman Khan},
url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Vjruxvp1Xd},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
},
abstract = {Deep reasoning is fundamental for solving complex tasks, especially in vision-centric scenarios that demand sequential, multimodal understanding. However, existing benchmarks typically evaluate agents with fully synthetic, single-turn queries, limited visual modalities, and lack a framework to assess reasoning quality over multiple steps as required in real-world settings. To address this, we introduce Agent-X, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating vision-centric agents’ multistep and deep reasoning capabilities in real-world, multimodal settings. AgentX features 828 agentic tasks with authentic visual contexts, including images, multi-image comparisons, videos, and instructional text. These tasks span six major agentic environments: general visual reasoning, web browsing, security and surveillance, autonomous driving, sports, and math reasoning. Our benchmark requires agents to integrate tool use with explicit, stepwise decision-making in these diverse settings. In addition, we propose a fine-grained, step-level evaluation framework that assesses the correctness and logical coherence of each reasoning step and the effectiveness of tool usage throughout the task. Our results reveal that even the best-performing models, including GPT, Gemini, and Qwen families, struggle to solve multi-step vision tasks, achieving less than 50% full-chain success. These findings highlight key bottlenecks in current LMM reasoning and tool-use capabilities and identify future research directions in vision-centric agentic reasoning models},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Farhat, Zain Ulabedeen; Ghosh, Debamita; Atia, George; Wang, Yue
Sample-Efficient Distributionally Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Online Interaction Conference
Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. , 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokey_31,
title = {Sample-Efficient Distributionally Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Online Interaction},
author = {Zain Ulabedeen Farhat and Debamita Ghosh and George Atia and Yue Wang
},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=hIBMCDOwMI},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
},
abstract = {Well-trained multi-agent systems can fail when deployed in real-world environments due to model mismatches between the training and deployment environments, caused by environment uncertainties including noise or adversarial attacks. Distributionally Robust Markov Games (DRMGs) enhance system resilience by optimizing for worst-case performance over a defined set of environmental uncertainties. However, current methods are limited by their dependence on simulators or large offline datasets, which are often unavailable. This paper pioneers the study of online learning in DRMGs, where agents learn directly from environmental interactions without prior data. We introduce the Multiplayer Optimistic Robust Nash Value Iteration (MORNAVI) algorithm and provide the first provable guarantees for this setting. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that the algorithm achieves low regret and efficiently finds the optimal robust policy for uncertainty sets measured by Total Variation divergence and Kullback-Leibler divergence. These results establish a new, practical path toward developing truly robust multi-agent systems.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Liu, Xinxin; Li, Ming; Lyu, Zonglin; Shang, Yuzhang; Chen, Chen
Learning from Noisy Preferences: A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach to Direct Preference Optimization Conference
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokeyo,
title = {Learning from Noisy Preferences: A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach to Direct Preference Optimization},
author = {Xinxin Liu and Ming Li and Zonglin Lyu and Yuzhang Shang and Chen Chen},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=rRc04jyoAk},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-01-26},
urldate = {2026-01-26},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
abstract = {Human visual preferences are inherently multi-dimensional, encompassing aspects of aesthetics, detail fidelity, and semantic alignment. However, existing open-source preference datasets provide only single, holistic annotations, resulting in severe label noise—images that excel in some dimensions (e.g., compositional) but are deficient in others (e.g., details) are simply marked as winner" orloser". We theoretically demonstrate that this compression of multi-dimensional preferences into binary labels generates conflicting gradient signals that misguide the optimization process in Diffusion Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). To address this label noise from conflicting multi-dimensional preferences, we propose Semi-DPO, a semi-supervised learning approach. We treat pairs with consistent preferences across all dimensions as clean labeled data, while those with conflicting signals are considered noisy unlabeled data. Our method first trains a model on a clean, consensus-filtered data subset. This model then acts as its own implicit classifier to generate pseudo-labels for the larger, noisy set, which are used to iteratively refine the model's alignment. This approach effectively mitigates label noise and enhances image generation quality, achieving better alignment with multi-dimensional human preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that Semi-DPO significantly improves alignment with multi-dimensional human preferences, achieving state-of-the-art performance without requiring additional human annotation or the need to train a dedicated reward models.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
2025
Fioresi, Joseph; Dave, Ishan Rajendrakumar; Shah, Mubarak
ALBAR: Adversarial Learning approach to mitigate Biases in Action Recognition Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Fioresi2025,
title = {ALBAR: Adversarial Learning approach to mitigate Biases in Action Recognition},
author = {Joseph Fioresi and Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=9KiE3t6CsL&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DICLR.cc%2F2025%2FConference%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/7609_ALBAR_Adversarial_Learnin.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Bias in machine learning models can lead to unfair decision making, and while it has been well-studied in the image and text domains, it remains underexplored in action recognition. Action recognition models often suffer from background bias (i.e., inferring actions based on background cues) and foreground bias (i.e., relying on subject appearance), which can be detrimental to real-life applications such as autonomous vehicles or assisted living monitoring. While prior approaches have mainly focused on mitigating background bias using specialized augmentations, we thoroughly study both biases. We propose approachname, a novel adversarial training method that mitigates foreground and background biases without requiring specialized knowledge of the bias attributes. Our framework applies an adversarial cross-entropy loss to the sampled static clip (where all the frames are the same) and aims to make its class probabilities uniform using a proposed textit{entropy maximization} loss. Additionally, we introduce a textit{gradient penalty} loss for regularization against the debiasing process. We evaluate our method on established background and foreground bias protocols, setting a new state-of-the-art and strongly improving combined debiasing performance by over textbf{12%} on HMDB51. Furthermore, we identify an issue of background leakage in the existing UCF101 protocol for bias evaluation which provides a shortcut to predict actions and does not provide an accurate measure of the debiasing capability of a model. We address this issue by proposing more fine-grained segmentation boundaries for the actor, where our method also outperforms existing approaches.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Cui, Yuning; Zamir, Syed Waqas; Khan, Salman; Knoll, Alois; Shah, Mubarak; Khan, Fahad Shahbaz
AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Cui2025,
title = {AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation},
author = {Yuning Cui and Syed Waqas Zamir and Salman Khan and Alois Knoll and Mubarak Shah and Fahad Shahbaz Khan},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=M5t0WvjfCg&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DICLR.cc%2F2025%2FConference%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/8311_AdaIR_Adaptive_All_in_One.pdf.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {In the image acquisition process, various forms of degradation, including noise, blur, haze, and rain, are frequently introduced. These degradations typically arise from the inherent limitations of cameras or unfavorable ambient conditions. To recover clean images from their degraded versions, numerous specialized restoration methods have been developed, each targeting a specific type of degradation. Recently, all-in-one algorithms have garnered significant attention by addressing different types of degradations within a single model without requiring the prior information of the input degradation type. However, most methods purely operate in the spatial domain and do not delve into the distinct frequency variations inherent to different degradation types. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive all-in-one image restoration network based on frequency mining and modulation. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different degradation types impact the image content on different frequency subbands, thereby requiring different treatments for each restoration task. Specifically, we first mine low- and high-frequency information from the input features, guided by the adaptively decoupled spectra of the degraded image. The extracted features are then modulated by a bidirectional operator to facilitate interactions between different frequency components. Finally, the modulated features are merged into the original input for a progressively guided restoration. With this approach, the model achieves adaptive reconstruction by accentuating the informative frequency subbands according to different input degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method, named AdaIR, achieves state-of-the-art performance on different image restoration tasks, including image denoising, dehazing, deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our code and models will be made publicly available.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Chhipa, Prakash Chandra; Vashishtha, Gautam; Jithamanyu, Settur; Saini, Rajkumar; Shah, Mubarak; Liwicki, Marcus
ASTrA: Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Chhipa2025,
title = {ASTrA: Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks},
author = {Prakash Chandra Chhipa and Gautam Vashishtha and Settur Jithamanyu and Rajkumar Saini and Mubarak Shah and Marcus Liwicki},
url = {https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/ASTrA
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/7338_ASTrA_Adversarial_Self_su.pdf.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Existing self-supervised adversarial training (self-AT) methods rely on handcrafted adversarial attack strategies for PGD attacks, which fail to adapt to the evolving learning dynamics of the model and do not account for instancespecific characteristics of images. This results in sub-optimal adversarial robustness and limits the alignment between clean and adversarial data distributions. To address this, we propose ASTrA (Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks), a novel framework introducing a learnable, self-supervised attack strategy network that autonomously discovers optimal attack parameters through exploration-exploitation in a single training episode. ASTrA leverages a reward mechanism based on contrastive loss, optimized with REINFORCE, enabling adaptive attack strategies without labeled data or additional hyperparameters. We further introduce a mixed contrastive objective to align the distribution of clean and adversarial examples in representation space. ASTrA achieves state-of-the-art results on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and STL10 while integrating seamlessly as a plug-and-play module for other self-AT methods. ASTrAshows scalability to larger datasets, demonstrates strong semi-supervised performance, and is resilient to robust overfitting, backed by explainability analysis on optimal attack strategies. Project page for source code and other details at https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/ASTrA.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Chen, Chen; Liu, Daochang; Shah, Mubarak; Xu, Chang
Exploring Local Memorization in Diffusion Models via Bright Ending Attention Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Chen2025,
title = {Exploring Local Memorization in Diffusion Models via Bright Ending Attention},
author = {Chen Chen and Daochang Liu and Mubarak Shah and Chang Xu},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=p4cLtzk4oe&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DICLR.cc%2F2025%2FConference%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/9283_Exploring_Local_Memorizat.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {In this paper, we identify and leverage a novel `bright ending' (BE) anomaly in diffusion models prone to memorizing training images to address a new task: locating localized memorization regions within these models. BE refers to a distinct cross-attention pattern observed in text-to-image generations using diffusion models. Specifically, memorized image patches exhibit significantly greater attention to the end token during the final inference step compared to non-memorized patches. This attention map effectively highlights regions where the generated image replicates training data. Furthermore, driven by our observation that local memorization significantly underperforms in existing tasks of measuring, detecting, and mitigating memorization in diffusion models compared to global memorization, we propose a simple yet effective method to integrate BE and the results of the new localization task into these existing frameworks. This integration effectively improves their performances by narrowing the performance gap caused by local memorization. Our results not only demonstrate the successful execution of the new localization task but also establish new state-of-the-art performance across all existing tasks, underscoring the significance of the BE phenomenon.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Kang, Weitai; Qu, Mengxue; Kini, Jyoti; Wei, Yunchao; Shah, Mubarak; Yan, Yan
Intent3D: 3D Object Detection in RGB-D Scans Based on Human Intention Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Kang2025,
title = {Intent3D: 3D Object Detection in RGB-D Scans Based on Human Intention},
author = {Weitai Kang and Mengxue Qu and Jyoti Kini and Yunchao Wei and Mubarak Shah and Yan Yan},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=5GgjiRzYp3&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DICLR.cc%2F2025%2FConference%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/3450_Intent3D_3D_Object_Detect.pdf.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {In real-life scenarios, humans seek out objects in the 3D world to fulfill their daily needs or intentions. This inspires us to introduce 3D intention grounding, a new task in 3D object detection employing RGB-D, based on human intention, such as “I want something to support my back.” Closely related, 3D visual grounding focuses on understanding human reference. To achieve detection based on human intention, it relies on humans to observe the scene, reason out the target that aligns with their intention (“pillow” in this case), and finally provide a reference to the AI system, such as “A pillow on the couch”. Instead, 3D intention grounding challenges AI agents to automatically observe, reason and detect the desired target solely based on human intention. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the new Intent3D dataset, consisting of 44,990 intention texts associated with 209 f ine-grained classes from 1,042 scenes of the ScanNet [Dai et al., 2017] dataset. We also establish several baselines based on different language-based 3D object detection models on our benchmark. Finally, we propose IntentNet, our unique approach, designed to tackle this intention-based detection problem. It focuses on three key aspects: intention understanding, reasoning to identify object candidates, and cascaded adaptive learning that leverages the intrinsic priority logic of different losses for multiple objective optimization.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Monsefi, Amin Karimi; Zhou, Mengxi; Monsefi, Nastaran Karimi; Lim, Ser-Nam; Chao, Wei-Lun; Ramnath, Rajiv
Frequency-Guided Masking for Enhanced Vision Self-Supervised Learning Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Monsefi2025,
title = {Frequency-Guided Masking for Enhanced Vision Self-Supervised Learning},
author = {Amin Karimi Monsefi and Mengxi Zhou and Nastaran Karimi Monsefi and Ser-Nam Lim and Wei-Lun Chao and Rajiv Ramnath},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10362
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10362},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {We present a novel frequency-based Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) approach that significantly enhances its efficacy for pre-training. Prior work in this direction masks out pre-defined frequencies in the input image and employs a reconstruction loss to pre-train the model. While achieving promising results, such an implementation has two fundamental limitations as identified in our paper. First, using pre-defined frequencies overlooks the variability of image frequency responses. Second, pre-trained with frequency-filtered images, the resulting model needs relatively more data to adapt to naturally looking images during fine-tuning. To address these drawbacks, we propose FOurier transform compression with seLf-Knowledge distillation (FOLK), integrating two dedicated ideas. First, inspired by image compression, we adaptively select the masked-out frequencies based on image frequency responses, creating more suitable SSL tasks for pre-training. Second, we employ a two-branch framework empowered by knowledge distillation, enabling the model to take both the filtered and original images as input, largely reducing the burden of downstream tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FOLK in achieving competitive performance to many state-of-the-art SSL methods across various downstream tasks, including image classification, few-shot learning, and semantic segmentation.
},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Huang, Jiani; Li, Ziyang; Nail, Mayur; Lim, Ser-Nam
LASER: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Learning Spatio-Temporal Scene Graphs with Weak Supervision Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Huang2025,
title = {LASER: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Learning Spatio-Temporal Scene Graphs with Weak Supervision},
author = {Jiani Huang and Ziyang Li and Mayur Nail and Ser-Nam Lim},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07647
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.07647},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {We propose LASER, a neuro-symbolic approach to learn semantic video representations that capture rich spatial and temporal properties in video data by leveraging high-level logic specifications. In particular, we formulate the problem in terms of alignment between raw videos and spatio-temporal logic specifications. The alignment algorithm leverages a differentiable symbolic reasoner and a combination of contrastive, temporal, and semantics losses. It effectively and efficiently trains low-level perception models to extract a fine-grained video representation in the form of a spatio-temporal scene graph that conforms to the desired high-level specification. To practically reduce the manual effort of obtaining ground truth labels, we derive logic specifications from captions by employing a large language model with a generic prompting template. In doing so, we explore a novel methodology that weakly supervises the learning of spatio-temporal scene graphs with widely accessible video-caption data. We evaluate our method on three datasets with rich spatial and temporal specifications: 20BN-Something-Something, MUGEN, and OpenPVSG. We demonstrate that our method learns better fine-grained video semantics than existing baselines.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Tang, Feilong; Huang, Zile; Liu, Chengzhi; Sun, Qiang; Yang, Harry; Lim, Ser-Nam
Intervening Anchor Token: Decoding Strategy in Alleviating Hallucinations for MLLMs Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Tang2025,
title = {Intervening Anchor Token: Decoding Strategy in Alleviating Hallucinations for MLLMs},
author = {Feilong Tang and Zile Huang and Chengzhi Liu and Qiang Sun and Harry Yang and Ser-Nam Lim},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=zGb4WgCW5i
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=zGb4WgCW5i},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a powerful mechanism for interpreting visual information. However, they often suffer from hallucinations, which impede the real-world usage of these models. Existing methods attempt to alleviate this issue by designing special decoding strategies that penalize the summary tokens. However, these methods lack analysis of the relationship between hallucination and summarization mechanism of LLMs. Interestingly, we find that penalizing summary tokens is not necessary: merely intervening the query-key parameters variance, without costing extra inference time, still alleviates hallucinations. Specifically, we explore the causes of hallucinations by analyzing localized self-attention patterns called ``anchor" tokens and define the attention localization degree of the model as token propagation probabilities. Our analysis reveals that over-propagation of anchor tokens occurs when the distribution of eigenvalues of the query and key matrices has a non-zero mean and a polarized variance, leading to excessive dependence on anchor tokens while neglecting vision information and describes the image content with hallucination. Based on the observation, we propose a versatile plug-and-play decoding strategy, Dynamic Token Propagation Mechanism (TAME), to alleviate excessive propagation by dynamically intervening the eigenspectrum variance of the attention weight, thereby alleviating hallucinations without relying on complex decoding strategies. Extensive experiments reveal a correlation between the eigenspectrum and hallucinations across various MLLMs, and show that TAME reduces the percentage of hallucinated objects.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Zhang, Chi; Farhat, Zain Ulabedeen; Atia, George K.; Wang, Yue
Model-Free Offline Reinforcement Learning with Enhanced Robustness Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Zhang2025,
title = {Model-Free Offline Reinforcement Learning with Enhanced Robustness},
author = {Chi Zhang and Zain Ulabedeen Farhat and George K. Atia and Yue Wang},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=QyVLJ7EnAC
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=QyVLJ7EnAC},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has gained considerable attention for its ability to learn policies from pre-collected data without real-time interaction, which makes it particularly useful for high-risk applications. However, due to its reliance on offline datasets, existing works inevitably introduce assumptions to ensure effective learning, which, however, often lead to a trade-off between robustness to model mismatch and scalability to large environments. In this paper, we enhance both aspects with a novel double-pessimism principle, which conservatively estimates performance and accounts for both limited data and potential model mismatches, two major reasons for the previous trade-off. We then propose a universal, model-free algorithm to learn an optimal policy that is robust to potential environment mismatches, which enhances robustness in a scalable manner. Furthermore, we provide a sample complexity analysis of our algorithm when the mismatch is modeled by the
-norm, which also theoretically demonstrates the efficiency of our method. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness in a more scalable manner than existing methods.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
-norm, which also theoretically demonstrates the efficiency of our method. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness in a more scalable manner than existing methods.
Pathak, Priyank; Marjit, Shyam; Vyas, Shruti; Rawat, Yogesh Singh
LR0.FM: Low-Resolution Zero-Shot Classification Benchmark for Foundation Models Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Pathak2025,
title = {LR0.FM: Low-Resolution Zero-Shot Classification Benchmark for Foundation Models},
author = {Priyank Pathak and Shyam Marjit and Shruti Vyas and Yogesh Singh Rawat},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03950
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03950
https://github.com/shyammarjit/LR0.FM},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Visual-language foundation Models (FMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization across diverse tasks, largely attributed to extensive pre-training on largescale datasets. However, their robustness on low-resolution/pixelated (LR) images, a common challenge in real-world scenarios, remains underexplored. We introduce this http URL, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating the impact of low resolution on the zero-shot classification performance of 10 FM(s) across 66 backbones and 15 datasets. We propose a novel metric, Weighted Aggregated Robustness, to address the limitations of existing metrics and better evaluate model performance across resolutions and datasets. Our key findings show that: (i) model size positively correlates with robustness to resolution degradation, (ii) pre-training dataset quality is more important than its size, and (iii) fine-tuned and higher resolution models are less robust against LR. Our analysis further reveals that the model makes semantically reasonable predictions at LR, and the lack of fine-grained details in input adversely impacts the model's initial layers more than the deeper layers. We use these insights and introduce a simple strategy, LR-TK0, to enhance the robustness of models without compromising their pre-trained weights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LR-TK0 for robustness against low-resolution across several datasets and its generalization capability across backbones and other approaches. },
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Kumar, Akash; Kira, Zsolt; Rawat, Yogesh Singh
Contextual Self-paced Learning for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Kumar2025,
title = {Contextual Self-paced Learning for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding},
author = {Akash Kumar and Zsolt Kira and Yogesh Singh Rawat},
url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=yHj6EunfVQ},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {In this work, we focus on Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (WSTVG). It is a multimodal task aimed at localizing specific subjects spatiotemporally based on textual queries without bounding box supervision. Motivated by recent advancements in multi-modal foundation models for grounding tasks, we f irst explore the potential of state-of-the-art object detection models for WSTVG. Despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, our adaptation reveals significant limitations, including inconsistent temporal predictions, inadequate understanding of complex queries, and challenges in adapting to difficult scenarios. We propose CoSPaL (Contextual Self-Paced Learning), a novel approach which is designed to overcome these limitations. CoSPaL integrates three core components: (1) Tubelet Phrase Grounding (TPG), which introduces spatio-temporal prediction by linking textual queries to tubelets; (2) Contextual Referral Grounding (CRG), which improves comprehension of complex queries by extracting contextual information to refine object identification over time; and (3) Self-Paced Scene Understanding (SPS), a training paradigm that progressively increases task difficulty, enabling the model to adapt to complex scenarios by transitioning from coarse to fine-grained understanding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoSPaL on three benchmark WSTVGdatasets, achieving a 3.9% absolute improvement on VidSTG and a 7.9% improvement on HCSTVG-v1.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Chhipa, Prakash Chandra; Vashishtha, Gautam; Jithamanyu, Settur; Saini, Rajkumar; Shah, Mubarak; Liwicki, Marcus
ASTrA: Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Chhipa2025b,
title = {ASTrA: Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks},
author = {Prakash Chandra Chhipa and Gautam Vashishtha and Settur Jithamanyu and Rajkumar Saini and Mubarak Shah and Marcus Liwicki},
url = {https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/ASTrA
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/7338_ASTrA_Adversarial_Self_su.pdf.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Existing self-supervised adversarial training (self-AT) methods rely on handcrafted adversarial attack strategies for PGD attacks, which fail to adapt to the evolving learning dynamics of the model and do not account for instancespecific characteristics of images. This results in sub-optimal adversarial robustness and limits the alignment between clean and adversarial data distributions. To address this, we propose ASTrA (Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks), a novel framework introducing a learnable, self-supervised attack strategy network that autonomously discovers optimal attack parameters through exploration-exploitation in a single training episode. ASTrA leverages a reward mechanism based on contrastive loss, optimized with REINFORCE, enabling adaptive attack strategies without labeled data or additional hyperparameters. We further introduce a mixed contrastive objective to align the distribution of clean and adversarial examples in representation space. ASTrA achieves state-of-the-art results on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and STL10 while integrating seamlessly as a plug-and-play module for other self-AT methods. ASTrAshows scalability to larger datasets, demonstrates strong semi-supervised performance, and is resilient to robust overfitting, backed by explainability analysis on optimal attack strategies. Project page for source code and other details at https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/ASTrA.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Fioresi, Joseph; Dave, Ishan Rajendrakumar; Shah, Mubarak
ALBAR: Adversarial Learning approach to mitigate Biases in Action Recognition Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Fioresi2025b,
title = {ALBAR: Adversarial Learning approach to mitigate Biases in Action Recognition},
author = {Joseph Fioresi and Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=9KiE3t6CsL&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DICLR.cc%2F2025%2FConference%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/7609_ALBAR_Adversarial_Learnin.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Bias in machine learning models can lead to unfair decision making, and while it has been well-studied in the image and text domains, it remains underexplored in action recognition. Action recognition models often suffer from background bias (i.e., inferring actions based on background cues) and foreground bias (i.e., relying on subject appearance), which can be detrimental to real-life applications such as autonomous vehicles or assisted living monitoring. While prior approaches have mainly focused on mitigating background bias using specialized augmentations, we thoroughly study both biases. We propose approachname, a novel adversarial training method that mitigates foreground and background biases without requiring specialized knowledge of the bias attributes. Our framework applies an adversarial cross-entropy loss to the sampled static clip (where all the frames are the same) and aims to make its class probabilities uniform using a proposed textitentropy maximization loss. Additionally, we introduce a textitgradient penalty loss for regularization against the debiasing process. We evaluate our method on established background and foreground bias protocols, setting a new state-of-the-art and strongly improving combined debiasing performance by over textbf12% on HMDB51. Furthermore, we identify an issue of background leakage in the existing UCF101 protocol for bias evaluation which provides a shortcut to predict actions and does not provide an accurate measure of the debiasing capability of a model. We address this issue by proposing more fine-grained segmentation boundaries for the actor, where our method also outperforms existing approaches.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Cui, Yuning; Zamir, Syed Waqas; Khan, Salman; Knoll, Alois; Shah, Mubarak; Khan, Fahad Shahbaz
AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Cui2025d,
title = {AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation},
author = {Yuning Cui and Syed Waqas Zamir and Salman Khan and Alois Knoll and Mubarak Shah and Fahad Shahbaz Khan},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=M5t0WvjfCg&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DICLR.cc%2F2025%2FConference%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/8311_AdaIR_Adaptive_All_in_One.pdf.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {In the image acquisition process, various forms of degradation, including noise, blur, haze, and rain, are frequently introduced. These degradations typically arise from the inherent limitations of cameras or unfavorable ambient conditions. To recover clean images from their degraded versions, numerous specialized restoration methods have been developed, each targeting a specific type of degradation. Recently, all-in-one algorithms have garnered significant attention by addressing different types of degradations within a single model without requiring the prior information of the input degradation type. However, most methods purely operate in the spatial domain and do not delve into the distinct frequency variations inherent to different degradation types. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive all-in-one image restoration network based on frequency mining and modulation. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different degradation types impact the image content on different frequency subbands, thereby requiring different treatments for each restoration task. Specifically, we first mine low- and high-frequency information from the input features, guided by the adaptively decoupled spectra of the degraded image. The extracted features are then modulated by a bidirectional operator to facilitate interactions between different frequency components. Finally, the modulated features are merged into the original input for a progressively guided restoration. With this approach, the model achieves adaptive reconstruction by accentuating the informative frequency subbands according to different input degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method, named AdaIR, achieves state-of-the-art performance on different image restoration tasks, including image denoising, dehazing, deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our code and models will be made publicly available.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Kumar, Akash; Kira, Zsolt; Rawat, Yogesh
Contextual Self-paced Learning for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Kumar2025b,
title = {Contextual Self-paced Learning for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding},
author = {Akash Kumar and Zsolt Kira and Yogesh Rawat},
url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17053
https://github.com/AKASH2907/copsal-weakly-stvg
https://akash2907.github.io/cospal_webpage/},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {In this work, we focus on Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (WSTVG). It is a multimodal task aimed at localizing specific subjects spatiotemporally based on textual queries without bounding box supervision. Motivated by recent advancements in multi-modal foundation models for grounding tasks, we f irst explore the potential of state-of-the-art object detection models for WSTVG. Despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, our adaptation reveals significant limitations, including inconsistent temporal predictions, inadequate understanding of complex queries, and challenges in adapting to difficult scenarios. We propose CoSPaL (Contextual Self-Paced Learning), a novel approach which is designed to overcome these limitations. CoSPaL integrates three core components: (1) Tubelet Phrase Grounding (TPG), which introduces spatio-temporal prediction by linking textual queries to tubelets; (2) Contextual Referral Grounding (CRG), which improves comprehension of complex queries by extracting contextual information to refine object identification over time; and (3) Self-Paced Scene Understanding (SPS), a training paradigm that progressively increases task difficulty, enabling the model to adapt to complex scenarios by transitioning from coarse to fine-grained understanding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoSPaL on three benchmark WSTVGdatasets, achieving a 3.9% absolute improvement on VidSTG and a 7.9% improvement on HCSTVG-v1.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Alom, Zulfikar; Ngo, Tran Gia Bao; Kantarcioglu, Murat; Akcora, Cuneyt Gurcan
GOttack: Universal Adversarial Attacks on Graph Neural Networks via Graph Orbits Learning Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{nokey_81,
title = {GOttack: Universal Adversarial Attacks on Graph Neural Networks via Graph Orbits Learning},
author = {Zulfikar Alom and Tran Gia Bao Ngo and Murat Kantarcioglu and Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=YbURbViE7l https://openreview.net/pdf?id=YbURbViE7l
https://github.com/cakcora/GOttack},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
publisher = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated superior performance in node classification tasks across diverse applications. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks, where minor perturbations can mislead model predictions, poses significant challenges. This study introduces GOttack, a novel adversarial attack framework that exploits the topological structure of graphs to undermine the integrity of GNN predictions systematically.
By defining a topology-aware method to manipulate graph orbits, our approach generates adversarial modifications that are both subtle and effective, posing a severe test to the robustness of GNNs. We evaluate the efficacy of GOttack across multiple prominent GNN architectures using standard benchmark datasets. Our results show that GOttack outperforms existing state-of-the-art adversarial techniques and completes training in approximately 55% of the time required by the fastest competing model, achieving the highest average misclassification rate in 155 tasks. This work not only sheds light on the susceptibility of GNNs to structured adversarial attacks but also shows that certain topological patterns may play a significant role in the underlying robustness of the GNNs. Our Python implementation is shared at https://github.com/cakcora/GOttack.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
By defining a topology-aware method to manipulate graph orbits, our approach generates adversarial modifications that are both subtle and effective, posing a severe test to the robustness of GNNs. We evaluate the efficacy of GOttack across multiple prominent GNN architectures using standard benchmark datasets. Our results show that GOttack outperforms existing state-of-the-art adversarial techniques and completes training in approximately 55% of the time required by the fastest competing model, achieving the highest average misclassification rate in 155 tasks. This work not only sheds light on the susceptibility of GNNs to structured adversarial attacks but also shows that certain topological patterns may play a significant role in the underlying robustness of the GNNs. Our Python implementation is shared at https://github.com/cakcora/GOttack.
Peng, Qucheng; Planche, Benjamin; Gao, Zhongpai; Zheng, Meng; Choudhuri, Anwesa; Chen, Terrence; Chen, Chen; Wu, Ziyan
3D Vision-Language Gaussian Splatting Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Peng2025,
title = {3D Vision-Language Gaussian Splatting},
author = {Qucheng Peng and Benjamin Planche and Zhongpai Gao and Meng Zheng and Anwesa Choudhuri and Terrence Chen and Chen Chen and Ziyan Wu},
url = {https://iclr.cc/virtual/2025/poster/29604},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-04},
publisher = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Recent advancements in 3D reconstruction methods and vision-language models have propelled the development of multi-modal 3D scene understanding, which has vital applications in robotics, autonomous driving, and virtual/augmented reality. However, current multi-modal scene understanding approaches have naively embedded semantic representations into 3D reconstruction methods without striking a balance between visual and language modalities, which leads to unsatisfying semantic rasterization of translucent or reflective objects, as well as over-fitting on color modality. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a solution that adequately handles the distinct visual and semantic modalities, i.e., a 3D vision-language Gaussian splatting model for scene understanding, to put emphasis on the representation learning of language modality. We propose a novel cross-modal rasterizer, using modality fusion along with a smoothed semantic indicator for enhancing semantic rasterization. We also employ a camera-view blending technique to improve semantic consistency between existing and synthesized views, thereby effectively mitigating over-fitting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, surpassing existing methods by a significant margin.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Lai, Zhengfeng; Saveris, Vasileios; Chen, Chen; Chen, Hong-You; Zhang, Haotian; Zhang, Bowen; Hu, Wenze; Tebar, Juan; Gan, Zhe; Grasch, Peter; Cao, Meng; Yang, Yinfei
Revisit Large-Scale Image-Caption Data in Pre-training Multimodal Foundation Models Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Lai2025,
title = {Revisit Large-Scale Image-Caption Data in Pre-training Multimodal Foundation Models},
author = {Zhengfeng Lai and Vasileios Saveris and Chen Chen and Hong-You Chen and Haotian Zhang and Bowen Zhang and Wenze Hu and Juan Tebar and Zhe Gan and Peter Grasch and Meng Cao and Yinfei Yang},
url = {https://iclr.cc/virtual/2025/poster/29536},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
publisher = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of synthetic captions and their interaction with original web-crawled AltTexts in pre-training is still not well understood. Moreover, different multimodal foundation models may have unique preferences for specific caption formats, but efforts to identify the optimal captions for each model remain limited. In this work, we propose a novel, controllable, and scalable captioning pipeline designed to generate diverse caption formats tailored to various multimodal models. By examining short synthetic captions (SSC) and descriptive synthetic captions (DSC) as case studies, we systematically explore their effects and interactions with AltTexts across models such as CLIP, multimodal LLMs, and diffusion models. Our findings reveal that a hybrid approach that keeps both synthetic captions and AltTexts can outperform the use of synthetic captions alone, improving both alignment and performance, with each model demonstrating preferences for particular caption formats. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into optimizing captioning strategies, thereby advancing the pre-training of multimodal foundation models.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Zhang, Yancheng; Xue, Jiaqi; Zheng, Mengxin; Xie, Mimi; Zhang, Mingzhe; Jiang, Lei; Lou, Qian
CipherPrune: Efficient and Scalable Private Transformer Inference Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Zhang2025bb,
title = {CipherPrune: Efficient and Scalable Private Transformer Inference},
author = {Yancheng Zhang and Jiaqi Xue and Mengxin Zheng and Mimi Xie and Mingzhe Zhang and Lei Jiang and Qian Lou},
url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=mUMvr33FTu
https://github.com/UCF-Lou-Lab-PET/cipher-prune-inference},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
publisher = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Private Transformer inference using cryptographic protocols offers promising solutions for privacy-preserving machine learning; however, it still faces significant runtime overhead (efficiency issues) and challenges in handling long-token inputs (scalability issues). We observe that the Transformer’s operational complexity scales quadratically with the number of input tokens, making it essential to reduce the input token length. Notably, each token varies in importance, and many inputs contain redundant tokens. Additionally, prior private inference methods that rely on high-degree polynomial approximations for non-linear activations are computationally expensive. Therefore, reducing the polynomial degree for less important tokens can significantly accelerate private inference. Building on these observations, we propose CipherPrune, an efficient and scalable private inference framework that includes a secure encrypted token pruning protocol, a polynomial reduction protocol, and corresponding Transformer network optimizations. At the protocol level, encrypted token pruning adaptively removes unimportant tokens from encrypted inputs in a progressive, layer-wise manner. Additionally, encrypted polynomial reduction assigns lower-degree polynomials to less important tokens after pruning, enhancing efficiency without decryption. At the network level, we introduce protocol-aware network optimization via a gradient-based search to maximize pruning thresholds and polynomial reduction conditions while maintaining the desired accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that CipherPrune reduces the execution overhead of private Transformer inference by approximately 6.1× for 128-token inputs and 10.6× for 512-token inputs, compared to previous methods, with only a marginal drop in accuracy. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCF-Lou-Lab-PET/cipher-prune-inference.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Chhipa, Prakash Chandra; Vashishtha, Gautam; Jithamanyu, Settur; Saini, Rajkumar; Shah, Mubarak; Liwicki, Marcus
ASTrA: Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Chhipa2025c,
title = {ASTrA: Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks},
author = {Prakash Chandra Chhipa and Gautam Vashishtha and Settur Jithamanyu and Rajkumar Saini and Mubarak Shah and Marcus Liwicki},
url = {https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/ASTrA
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/7338_ASTrA_Adversarial_Self_su.pdf.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Existing self-supervised adversarial training (self-AT) methods rely on handcrafted adversarial attack strategies for PGD attacks, which fail to adapt to the evolving learning dynamics of the model and do not account for instancespecific characteristics of images. This results in sub-optimal adversarial robustness and limits the alignment between clean and adversarial data distributions. To address this, we propose ASTrA (Adversarial Self-supervised Training with Adaptive-Attacks), a novel framework introducing a learnable, self-supervised attack strategy network that autonomously discovers optimal attack parameters through exploration-exploitation in a single training episode. ASTrA leverages a reward mechanism based on contrastive loss, optimized with REINFORCE, enabling adaptive attack strategies without labeled data or additional hyperparameters. We further introduce a mixed contrastive objective to align the distribution of clean and adversarial examples in representation space. ASTrA achieves state-of-the-art results on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and STL10 while integrating seamlessly as a plug-and-play module for other self-AT methods. ASTrAshows scalability to larger datasets, demonstrates strong semi-supervised performance, and is resilient to robust overfitting, backed by explainability analysis on optimal attack strategies. Project page for source code and other details at https://prakashchhipa.github.io/projects/ASTrA.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Fioresi, Joseph; Dave, Ishan Rajendrakumar; Shah, Mubarak
ALBAR: Adversarial Learning approach to mitigate Biases in Action Recognition Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Fioresi2025c,
title = {ALBAR: Adversarial Learning approach to mitigate Biases in Action Recognition},
author = {Joseph Fioresi and Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=9KiE3t6CsL&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DICLR.cc%2F2025%2FConference%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/7609_ALBAR_Adversarial_Learnin.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Bias in machine learning models can lead to unfair decision making, and while it has been well-studied in the image and text domains, it remains underexplored in action recognition. Action recognition models often suffer from background bias (i.e., inferring actions based on background cues) and foreground bias (i.e., relying on subject appearance), which can be detrimental to real-life applications such as autonomous vehicles or assisted living monitoring. While prior approaches have mainly focused on mitigating background bias using specialized augmentations, we thoroughly study both biases. We propose approachname, a novel adversarial training method that mitigates foreground and background biases without requiring specialized knowledge of the bias attributes. Our framework applies an adversarial cross-entropy loss to the sampled static clip (where all the frames are the same) and aims to make its class probabilities uniform using a proposed textitentropy maximization loss. Additionally, we introduce a textitgradient penalty loss for regularization against the debiasing process. We evaluate our method on established background and foreground bias protocols, setting a new state-of-the-art and strongly improving combined debiasing performance by over textbf12% on HMDB51. Furthermore, we identify an issue of background leakage in the existing UCF101 protocol for bias evaluation which provides a shortcut to predict actions and does not provide an accurate measure of the debiasing capability of a model. We address this issue by proposing more fine-grained segmentation boundaries for the actor, where our method also outperforms existing approaches.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Cui, Yuning; Zamir, Syed Waqas; Khan, Salman; Knoll, Alois; Shah, Mubarak; Khan, Fahad Shahbaz
AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Cui2025f,
title = {AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation},
author = {Yuning Cui and Syed Waqas Zamir and Salman Khan and Alois Knoll and Mubarak Shah and Fahad Shahbaz Khan},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=M5t0WvjfCg&referrer=%5BAuthor%20Console%5D(%2Fgroup%3Fid%3DICLR.cc%2F2025%2FConference%2FAuthors%23your-submissions)
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/8311_AdaIR_Adaptive_All_in_One.pdf.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {In the image acquisition process, various forms of degradation, including noise, blur, haze, and rain, are frequently introduced. These degradations typically arise from the inherent limitations of cameras or unfavorable ambient conditions. To recover clean images from their degraded versions, numerous specialized restoration methods have been developed, each targeting a specific type of degradation. Recently, all-in-one algorithms have garnered significant attention by addressing different types of degradations within a single model without requiring the prior information of the input degradation type. However, most methods purely operate in the spatial domain and do not delve into the distinct frequency variations inherent to different degradation types. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive all-in-one image restoration network based on frequency mining and modulation. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different degradation types impact the image content on different frequency subbands, thereby requiring different treatments for each restoration task. Specifically, we first mine low- and high-frequency information from the input features, guided by the adaptively decoupled spectra of the degraded image. The extracted features are then modulated by a bidirectional operator to facilitate interactions between different frequency components. Finally, the modulated features are merged into the original input for a progressively guided restoration. With this approach, the model achieves adaptive reconstruction by accentuating the informative frequency subbands according to different input degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method, named AdaIR, achieves state-of-the-art performance on different image restoration tasks, including image denoising, dehazing, deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our code and models will be made publicly available.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Kumar, Akash; Kira, Zsolt; Rawat, Yogesh
Contextual Self-paced Learning for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Kumar2025c,
title = {Contextual Self-paced Learning for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding},
author = {Akash Kumar and Zsolt Kira and Yogesh Rawat},
url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17053
https://github.com/AKASH2907/copsal-weakly-stvg
https://akash2907.github.io/cospal_webpage/},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
urldate = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {In this work, we focus on Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (WSTVG). It is a multimodal task aimed at localizing specific subjects spatiotemporally based on textual queries without bounding box supervision. Motivated by recent advancements in multi-modal foundation models for grounding tasks, we f irst explore the potential of state-of-the-art object detection models for WSTVG. Despite their robust zero-shot capabilities, our adaptation reveals significant limitations, including inconsistent temporal predictions, inadequate understanding of complex queries, and challenges in adapting to difficult scenarios. We propose CoSPaL (Contextual Self-Paced Learning), a novel approach which is designed to overcome these limitations. CoSPaL integrates three core components: (1) Tubelet Phrase Grounding (TPG), which introduces spatio-temporal prediction by linking textual queries to tubelets; (2) Contextual Referral Grounding (CRG), which improves comprehension of complex queries by extracting contextual information to refine object identification over time; and (3) Self-Paced Scene Understanding (SPS), a training paradigm that progressively increases task difficulty, enabling the model to adapt to complex scenarios by transitioning from coarse to fine-grained understanding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoSPaL on three benchmark WSTVGdatasets, achieving a 3.9% absolute improvement on VidSTG and a 7.9% improvement on HCSTVG-v1.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Zhang, Chi; Farhat, Zain Ulabedeen; Atia, George K.; Wang, Yue
Model-Free Offline Reinforcement Learning with Enhanced Robustness Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Zhang2025k,
title = {Model-Free Offline Reinforcement Learning with Enhanced Robustness},
author = {Chi Zhang and Zain Ulabedeen Farhat and George K. Atia and Yue Wang},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=QyVLJ7EnAC https://openreview.net/pdf?id=QyVLJ7EnAC},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
booktitle = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has gained considerable attention for its ability to learn policies from pre-collected data without real-time interaction, which makes it particularly useful for high-risk applications. However, due to its reliance on offline datasets, existing works inevitably introduce assumptions to ensure effective learning, which, however, often lead to a trade-off between robustness to model mismatch and scalability to large environments. In this paper, we enhance both aspects with a novel double-pessimism principle, which conservatively estimates performance and accounts for both limited data and potential model mismatches, two major reasons for the previous trade-off. We then propose a universal, model-free algorithm to learn an optimal policy that is robust to potential environment mismatches, which enhances robustness in a scalable manner. Furthermore, we provide a sample complexity analysis of our algorithm when the mismatch is modeled by the
-norm, which also theoretically demonstrates the efficiency of our method. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness in a more scalable manner than existing methods.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
-norm, which also theoretically demonstrates the efficiency of our method. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness in a more scalable manner than existing methods.
Zhang, Yancheng; Xue, Jiaqi; Zheng, Mengxin; Xie, Mimi; Zhang, Mingzhe; Jiang, Lei; Lou, Qian
CipherPrune: Efficient and Scalable Private Transformer Inference Conference
Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Zhang2025bc,
title = {CipherPrune: Efficient and Scalable Private Transformer Inference},
author = {Yancheng Zhang and Jiaqi Xue and Mengxin Zheng and Mimi Xie and Mingzhe Zhang and Lei Jiang and Qian Lou},
url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=mUMvr33FTu
https://github.com/UCF-Lou-Lab-PET/cipher-prune-inference},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-04-24},
publisher = {Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Private Transformer inference using cryptographic protocols offers promising solutions for privacy-preserving machine learning; however, it still faces significant runtime overhead (efficiency issues) and challenges in handling long-token inputs (scalability issues). We observe that the Transformer’s operational complexity scales quadratically with the number of input tokens, making it essential to reduce the input token length. Notably, each token varies in importance, and many inputs contain redundant tokens. Additionally, prior private inference methods that rely on high-degree polynomial approximations for non-linear activations are computationally expensive. Therefore, reducing the polynomial degree for less important tokens can significantly accelerate private inference. Building on these observations, we propose CipherPrune, an efficient and scalable private inference framework that includes a secure encrypted token pruning protocol, a polynomial reduction protocol, and corresponding Transformer network optimizations. At the protocol level, encrypted token pruning adaptively removes unimportant tokens from encrypted inputs in a progressive, layer-wise manner. Additionally, encrypted polynomial reduction assigns lower-degree polynomials to less important tokens after pruning, enhancing efficiency without decryption. At the network level, we introduce protocol-aware network optimization via a gradient-based search to maximize pruning thresholds and polynomial reduction conditions while maintaining the desired accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that CipherPrune reduces the execution overhead of private Transformer inference by approximately 6.1× for 128-token inputs and 10.6× for 512-token inputs, compared to previous methods, with only a marginal drop in accuracy. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCF-Lou-Lab-PET/cipher-prune-inference.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
2024
Chakraborty, Souradip; Bedi, Amrit Singh; Koppel, Alec; Manocha, Dinesh; Wang, Huazheng; Wang, Mengdi; Huang, Furong
PARL: A Unified Framework for Policy Alignment in Reinforcement Learning Conference
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Vienna, Austria, 2024.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Chakraborty2024,
title = {PARL: A Unified Framework for Policy Alignment in Reinforcement Learning},
author = {Souradip Chakraborty and Amrit Singh Bedi and Alec Koppel and Dinesh Manocha and Huazheng Wang and Mengdi Wang and Furong Huang},
url = {https://ai.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2308.02585.pdf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02585},
year = {2024},
date = {2024-05-07},
urldate = {2024-05-07},
publisher = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
address = {Vienna, Austria},
abstract = {We present a novel unified bilevel optimization-based framework, textsf{PARL}, formulated to address the recently highlighted critical issue of policy alignment in reinforcement learning using utility or preference-based feedback. We identify a major gap within current algorithmic designs for solving policy alignment due to a lack of precise characterization of the dependence of the alignment objective on the data generated by policy trajectories. This shortfall contributes to the sub-optimal performance observed in contemporary algorithms. Our framework addressed these concerns by explicitly parameterizing the distribution of the upper alignment objective (reward design) by the lower optimal variable (optimal policy for the designed reward). Interestingly, from an optimization perspective, our formulation leads to a new class of stochastic bilevel problems where the stochasticity at the upper objective depends upon the lower-level variable. To demonstrate the efficacy of our formulation in resolving alignment issues in RL, we devised an algorithm named textsf{A-PARL} to solve PARL problem, establishing sample complexity bounds of order O(1/T). Our empirical results substantiate that the proposed textsf{PARL} can address the alignment concerns in RL by showing significant improvements (up to 63% in terms of required samples) for policy alignment in large-scale environments of the Deepmind control suite and Meta world tasks.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Shrivastava, Gaurav; Lim, Ser-Nam; Shrivastava, Abhinav
Video Decomposition Prior: Editing Videos Layer by Layer Conference
Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023, 2024.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Shrivastava2024,
title = {Video Decomposition Prior: Editing Videos Layer by Layer},
author = {Gaurav Shrivastava and Ser-Nam Lim and Abhinav Shrivastava},
url = {https://ai.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2017_video_decomposition_prior_edit.pdf
https://openreview.net/forum?id=nfMyERXNru},
year = {2024},
date = {2024-05-07},
urldate = {2024-05-07},
publisher = {Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023},
abstract = {In the evolving landscape of video editing methodologies, a majority of deep learning techniques are often reliant on extensive datasets of observed input and ground truth sequence pairs for optimal performance. Such reliance often falters when acquiring data becomes challenging, especially in tasks like video dehazing and relighting, where replicating identical motions and camera angles in both corrupted and ground truth sequences is complicated. Moreover, these conventional methodologies perform best when the test distribution closely mirrors the training distribution. Recognizing these challenges, this paper introduces a novel video decomposition prior `VDP' framework which derives inspiration from professional video editing practices. Our methodology does not mandate task-specific external data corpus collection, instead pivots to utilizing the motion and appearance of the input video. VDP framework decomposes a video sequence into a set of multiple RGB layers and associated opacity levels. These set of layers are then manipulated individually to obtain the desired results. We addresses tasks such as video object segmentation, dehazing, and relighting. Moreover, we introduce a novel logarithmic video decomposition formulation for video relighting tasks, setting a new benchmark over the existing methodologies. We evaluate our approach on standard video datasets like DAVIS, REVIDE, & SDSD and show qualitative results on a diverse array of internet videos.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Shamsi, K.; Poursafaei, F.; Huang, S.; Ngo, B.; Coskunuzer, B.; Akcora, Cuneyt
Graphpulse: Topological representations for temporal graph property prediction Conference
Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023, 2024.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Shamsi2024b,
title = {Graphpulse: Topological representations for temporal graph property prediction},
author = {K. Shamsi and F. Poursafaei and S. Huang and B. Ngo and B. Coskunuzer and Cuneyt Akcora},
url = {https://ai.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2079_graphpulse_topological_represe.pdf
https://openreview.net/forum?id=DZqic2sPTY},
year = {2024},
date = {2024-01-16},
publisher = {Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023},
abstract = {Many real-world networks evolve over time, and predicting the evolution of such networks remains a challenging task. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown empirical success for learning on static graphs, but they lack the ability to effectively learn from nodes and edges with different timestamps. Consequently, the prediction of future properties in temporal graphs remains a relatively under-explored area. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing a principled framework, named GraphPulse. The framework combines two important techniques for the analysis of temporal graphs within a Newtonian framework. First, we employ the Mapper method, a key tool in topological data analysis, to extract essential clustering information from graph nodes. Next, we harness the sequential modeling capabilities of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for temporal reasoning regarding the graph's evolution. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our model enhances the ROC-AUC metric by 10.2% in comparison to the top-performing state-of-the-art method across various temporal networks. We provide the implementation of GraphPulse at <a href="https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Graph_Pulse" target="_blank">https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Graph_Pulse</a>},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
2023
Yang, Taojiannan; Zhu, Yi; Xie, Yusheng; Zhang, Aston; Chen, Chen; Li, Mu
AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Understanding Conference
AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Understanding, Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.
@conference{Yang2023,
title = {AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Understanding},
author = {Taojiannan Yang and Yi Zhu and Yusheng Xie and Aston Zhang and Chen Chen and Mu Li},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-05-01},
urldate = {2023-05-01},
booktitle = {AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Understanding},
publisher = {Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Recent vision transformer based video models mostly follow the ``image pre-training then finetuning" paradigm and have achieved great success on multiple video benchmarks. However, full finetuning such a video model could be computationally expensive and unnecessary, given the pre-trained image transformer models have demonstrated exceptional transferability. In this work, we propose a novel method to Adapt pre-trained Image Models (AIM) for efficient video understanding. By freezing the pre-trained image model and adding a few lightweight Adapters, we introduce spatial adaptation, temporal adaptation and joint adaptation to gradually equip an image model with spatiotemporal reasoning capability. We show that our proposed AIM can achieve competitive or even better performance than prior arts with substantially fewer tunable parameters on four video action recognition benchmarks. Thanks to its simplicity, our method is also generally applicable to different image pre-trained models, which has the potential to leverage more powerful image foundation models in the future.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Yang, Peiyu; Akhtar, Naveed; Wen, Zeyi; Shah, Mubarak; Mian, Ajmal
Re-calibrating Feature Attributions for Model Interpretation Conference
Re-calibrating Feature Attributions for Model Interpretation, Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), notable top 25%, 2023.
Tags: ICLR
@conference{nokey_99,
title = {Re-calibrating Feature Attributions for Model Interpretation},
author = {Peiyu Yang and Naveed Akhtar and Zeyi Wen and Mubarak Shah and Ajmal Mian},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-05-01},
urldate = {2023-05-01},
booktitle = {Re-calibrating Feature Attributions for Model Interpretation},
publisher = {Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), notable top 25%},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Beetham, James; Kardan, Navid; Mian, Ajmal; Shah, Mubarak
Dual Student Networks for Data-Free Model Stealing Conference
Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, 2023.
Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Beetham2023b,
title = {Dual Student Networks for Data-Free Model Stealing},
author = {James Beetham and Navid Kardan and Ajmal Mian and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10058},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-05-01},
booktitle = {Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Yang, Taojiannan; Zhu, Yi; Xie, Yusheng; Zhang, Aston; Chen, Chen; Li, Mu
AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Understanding Conference
AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Understanding, Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.
@conference{Yang2023b,
title = {AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Understanding},
author = {Taojiannan Yang and Yi Zhu and Yusheng Xie and Aston Zhang and Chen Chen and Mu Li},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-05-01},
urldate = {2023-05-01},
booktitle = {AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Understanding},
publisher = {Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Recent vision transformer based video models mostly follow the ``image pre-training then finetuning" paradigm and have achieved great success on multiple video benchmarks. However, full finetuning such a video model could be computationally expensive and unnecessary, given the pre-trained image transformer models have demonstrated exceptional transferability. In this work, we propose a novel method to Adapt pre-trained Image Models (AIM) for efficient video understanding. By freezing the pre-trained image model and adding a few lightweight Adapters, we introduce spatial adaptation, temporal adaptation and joint adaptation to gradually equip an image model with spatiotemporal reasoning capability. We show that our proposed AIM can achieve competitive or even better performance than prior arts with substantially fewer tunable parameters on four video action recognition benchmarks. Thanks to its simplicity, our method is also generally applicable to different image pre-trained models, which has the potential to leverage more powerful image foundation models in the future.},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Yang, Peiyu; Akhtar, Naveed; Wen, Zeyi; Shah, Mubarak; Mian, Ajmal
Re-calibrating Feature Attributions for Model Interpretation Conference
Re-calibrating Feature Attributions for Model Interpretation, Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), notable top 25%, 2023.
Tags: ICLR
@conference{nokey_147,
title = {Re-calibrating Feature Attributions for Model Interpretation},
author = {Peiyu Yang and Naveed Akhtar and Zeyi Wen and Mubarak Shah and Ajmal Mian},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-05-01},
urldate = {2023-05-01},
booktitle = {Re-calibrating Feature Attributions for Model Interpretation},
publisher = {Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), notable top 25%},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Beetham, James; Kardan, Navid; Mian, Ajmal; Shah, Mubarak
Dual Student Networks for Data-Free Model Stealing Conference
Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, 2023.
Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Beetham2023bb,
title = {Dual Student Networks for Data-Free Model Stealing},
author = {James Beetham and Navid Kardan and Ajmal Mian and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10058},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-05-01},
booktitle = {Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
2022
Kardan, Navid; Hill, Mitchell; Shah, Mubarak
Self-Joint Supervised Learning Conference
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Kardan2022,
title = {Self-Joint Supervised Learning},
author = {Navid Kardan and Mitchell Hill and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Self_joint_ICLR-002.pdf
https://github.com/ndkn/Self-joint-Learning},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-01-20},
urldate = {2022-01-20},
publisher = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Supervised learning is a fundamental framework used to train machine learning systems. A supervised learning problem is often formulated using an i.i.d. as-sumption that restricts model attention to a single relevant signal at a time when predicting. This contrasts with the human ability to actively use related samples as reference when making decisions. We hypothesize that the restriction to a single signal for each prediction in the standard i.i.d. framework contributes to well-known drawbacks of supervised learning: making overconfident predictions and vulnerability to overfitting, adversarial attacks, and out-of-distribution data. To address these limitations, we propose a new supervised learning paradigm called self-joint learning that generalizes the standard approach by modeling the joint conditional distribution of two observed samples, where each sample is an im-age and its label. Rather than assuming samples are independent, our models explicitly learn the sample-to-sample relation of conditional independence. Our framework can naturally incorporate auxiliary unlabeled data to further improve the performance. Experiments on benchmark image datasets show our method offers significant improvement over standard supervised learning in terms of ac-curacy, robustness against adversarial attacks, out-of-distribution detection, and overconfidence mitigation. Code: github.com/ndkn/Self-joint-Learning},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Kardan, Navid; Hill, Mitchell; Shah, Mubarak
Self-Joint Supervised Learning Conference
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022.
Abstract | Tags: ICLR | Links:
@conference{Kardan2022b,
title = {Self-Joint Supervised Learning},
author = {Navid Kardan and Mitchell Hill and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Self_joint_ICLR-002.pdf
https://github.com/ndkn/Self-joint-Learning},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-01-20},
urldate = {2022-01-20},
publisher = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
abstract = {Supervised learning is a fundamental framework used to train machine learning systems. A supervised learning problem is often formulated using an i.i.d. as-sumption that restricts model attention to a single relevant signal at a time when predicting. This contrasts with the human ability to actively use related samples as reference when making decisions. We hypothesize that the restriction to a single signal for each prediction in the standard i.i.d. framework contributes to well-known drawbacks of supervised learning: making overconfident predictions and vulnerability to overfitting, adversarial attacks, and out-of-distribution data. To address these limitations, we propose a new supervised learning paradigm called self-joint learning that generalizes the standard approach by modeling the joint conditional distribution of two observed samples, where each sample is an im-age and its label. Rather than assuming samples are independent, our models explicitly learn the sample-to-sample relation of conditional independence. Our framework can naturally incorporate auxiliary unlabeled data to further improve the performance. Experiments on benchmark image datasets show our method offers significant improvement over standard supervised learning in terms of ac-curacy, robustness against adversarial attacks, out-of-distribution detection, and overconfidence mitigation. Code: github.com/ndkn/Self-joint-Learning},
keywords = {ICLR},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
2021
Rizve, Mamshad Nayeem; Duarte, Kevin; Rawat, Yogesh Singh; Shah, Mubarak
In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning Conference
Ninth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2021.
Tags: ICLR, Network Calibration, Pseudo-Labeling, Semi-supervised learning | Links:
@conference{Rizve2021,
title = {In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning},
author = {Mamshad Nayeem Rizve and Kevin Duarte and Yogesh Singh Rawat and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/In-Defense-Of-Pseudo-Labeling.pdf
https://github.com/nayeemrizve/ups
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UPS_ICLR2021_Slides.pdf
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UPS_ICLR2021_Slides.pptx
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UPS_Poster_ICLR2021.png},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-05-04},
urldate = {2021-05-04},
booktitle = {Ninth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
keywords = {ICLR, Network Calibration, Pseudo-Labeling, Semi-supervised learning},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
Rizve, Mamshad Nayeem; Duarte, Kevin; Rawat, Yogesh Singh; Shah, Mubarak
In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning Conference
Ninth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2021.
Tags: ICLR, Network Calibration, Pseudo-Labeling, Semi-supervised learning | Links:
@conference{Rizve2021d,
title = {In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning},
author = {Mamshad Nayeem Rizve and Kevin Duarte and Yogesh Singh Rawat and Mubarak Shah},
url = {https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/In-Defense-Of-Pseudo-Labeling.pdf
https://github.com/nayeemrizve/ups
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UPS_ICLR2021_Slides.pdf
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UPS_ICLR2021_Slides.pptx
https://www.crcv.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UPS_Poster_ICLR2021.png},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-05-04},
urldate = {2021-05-04},
booktitle = {Ninth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
keywords = {ICLR, Network Calibration, Pseudo-Labeling, Semi-supervised learning},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}