Princeton University at ICML 2026

The Forty-Third International Conference on Machine Learning, or ICML 2026, will be held July 6-11 in Seoul, South Korea. Below is a roundup of work from Princeton researchers that will be showcased at the conference.

Oral Presentation:

Motion Attribution for Video Generation

Authors: Xindi Wu, Despoina Paschalidou, Jun Gao, Antonio Torralba, Laura Leal-Taixé, Olga Russakovsky, Sanja Fidler, Jonathan Lorraine

Links: Paper, Project Website

Oral Presentation:

On Computation and Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Raj Ghugare, Michał Bortkiewicz, Alicja Ziarko, Benjamin Eysenbach

Links: Paper

Oral Presentation:

Position: There are futures that benchmark-driven AI cannot see

Authors: Sobhan Lotfi, Ava Iranmanesh, Lachin Naghashyar, Ali Shirali, Fateme Haredasht, Sanmi Koyejo, Phil Torr, Yong Suk Lee, Fazl Barez, Joel Lehman, Peter Norvig, Arvind Narayanan

Links: Paper

Spotlight Poster:

AlgoVeri: An Aligned Benchmark for Verified Code Generation on Classical Algorithms

Authors: Haoyu Zhao, Ziran Yang, Jiawei Li, Deyuan Mike He, Zenan Li, Chi Jin, Venugopal Veeravalli, Aarti Gupta, Sanjeev Arora

Links: Paper, Project Page

Spotlight Poster:

Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems

Authors: Jiaru Zou, Xiyuan Yang, Ruizhong Qiu, Gaotang Li, Katherine Tieu, Pan Lu, Ke Shen, Hanghang Tong, Yejin Choi, Jingrui He, James Zou, Mengdi Wang, Ling Yang

Links: Paper, Project Page

Spotlight Poster:

Rapid Poison: Practical Poisoning Attacks Against the Rapid Response Framework

Authors: David Huang, Jaewon Chang, Avidan Shah, Prateek Mittal, Chawin Sitawarin

Links: Paper

Adaptively Robust Resettable Streaming

Authors: Edith Cohen, Elena Gribelyuk, Jelani Nelson, Uri Stemmer

Links: Paper

Position: Agent Should Invoke External Tools ONLY When Epistemically Necessary

Authors: Hongru Wang, Cheng Qian, Manling Li, Jiahao Qiu, Boyang XUE, Mengdi Wang, Heng Ji, Amos Storkey, Kam-Fai Wong

Links: Paper

AutoTool: Dynamic Tool Selection and Integration for Agentic Reasoning

Authors: Jiaru Zou, Ling Yang, Yunzhe Qi, Sirui Chen, Mengting Ai, Ke Shen, Jingrui He, Mengdi Wang

Links: Paper, Project Page

Batched First-Order Methods for Parallel LP Solving in MIP

Authors: Nicolas Blin, Stefano Gualandi, Christopher Maes, Andrea Lodi, Bartolomeo Stellato

Links: Paper

Position: The Case for Theory-Level Autoformalization

Authors: Marcus Min, Mike He, Zhaoyu Li, Zixuan Yi, Sharad Malik, Aarti Gupta, Xujie Si, Osbert Bastani

Links: Project Page

CodeClash: Benchmarking Goal-Oriented Software Engineering

Authors: John Yang, Kilian Lieret, Joyce Yang, Carlos Jimenez, Muhtasham Oblokulov, Aryan Siddiqui, Ofir Press, Ludwig Schmidt, Diyi Yang

Links: Paper

Conformal Prediction for Early Stopping in Mixed Integer Optimization

Authors: Stefan Clarke, Bartolomeo Stellato

Links: Paper

Consistent Zero-Shot Imitation with Contrastive Goal Inference

Authors: Kathryn Wantlin, Chongyi Zheng, Benjamin Eysenbach

Links: Paper

Coupled Training with Privileged Features and Unlabeled Data

Authors: Jiahao Shi, Omar Hagrass, Jason Klusowski

Links: Paper

DevEvol: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Continuous Software Evolution

Authors: Gangda Deng, Zhaoling Chen, Zhongming Yu, Haoyang Fan, Yuhong Liu, Yuxin Yang, Dhruv Parikh, Rajgopal Kannan, Le Cong, Mengdi Wang, Qian Zhang, Viktor Prasanna, Robert Tang, Xingyao Wang

Links: Paper

Position: Digital Agents Require Unified Agent-Native Environments

Authors: Yiran Wu, Jiale Liu, Jieyu Zhang, Yaolun Zhang, Shilong Liu, Chi Wang, Mengdi Wang, Huazheng Wang, Qingyun Wu

Links: Paper

f-Divergence Regularized RLHF: Two Tales of Sampling and Unified Analyses

Authors: Di Wu, Chengshuai Shi, Jing Yang, Cong Shen

Links: Paper

Finding the Minimal Parameter Budget for Implicit Reasoning: A Data Complexity Driven Scaling Law for Language Models

Authors: Xinyi Wang, Shawn Tan, Shenbo Xu, Mingyu Jin, William Wang, Rameswar Panda, Yikang Shen

Links: Paper

FLARE-AI: Flaw Reporting for AI

Authors: Shayne Longpre, Elaine Zhu, Carson Ezell, Avijit Ghosh, Sean McGregor, Kevin Paeth, Kevin Klyman, Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani, Ruth Elisabeth Appel, Gregory Strom, Lauren McIlvenny, Mark Jaycox, Peter Slattery, Nathan Butters, Arvind Narayanan, Percy Liang, Alex Pentland

Links: Paper

FrontierCS: Evolving Challenges for Evolving Intelligence

Authors: Qiuyang Mang, Wenhao Chai, Zhifei Li, Huanzhi Mao, Shang Zhou, Alexander Du, Hanchen Li, Shu Liu, Edwin Chen, Yichuan Wang, Xieting Chu, Zerui Cheng, Yuan Xu, Tian Xia, Zirui Wang, Tianneng Shi, Jianzhu Yao, Yilong Zhao, Qizheng Zhang, Charlie Ruan, Zeyu Shen, Kaiyuan Liu, Zhaoyang Hong, Alex Gu, Ziyi Zhang, Runyuan He, Dong Xing, Zerui Li, Zirong Zeng, Yige Jiang, Lufeng Cheng, Ziyi Zhao, Youran Sun, Suyang Zhong, Junpeng Wang, Donglin Li, Wenyuan Huang, Jialiang Gu, Wesley Zheng, Wangmeiyu Zhang, Ruyi Ji, Xuechang Tu, Zihan Zheng, Zhaozi Wang, Zexing Chen, Jingbang Chen, Jialu Zhang, Aleksandra Korolova, Peter Henderson, Pramod Viswanath, Vijay Ganesh, Saining Xie, Zhuang Liu, Dawn Song, Sewon Min, Ion Stoica, Joseph E Gonzalez, Jingbo Shang, Alvin Cheung

Links: Paper, Project Page

GASS: Geometry-Aware Spherical Sampling for Disentangled Diversity Enhancement in Text-to-Image Generation

Authors: Ye Zhu, Kaleb Newman, Johannes Lutzeyer, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Michal Drozdzal, Olga Russakovsky

Links: Paper

Generalization Bounds for Discrete Diffusion: Statistical Advantage of Masking

Authors: Zixuan Zhang, Hengyu Fu, Zhuoran Yang, Mengdi Wang, Tuo Zhao, Minshuo Chen

Links: Paper

The Geometry of Representational Failures in Vision Language Models

Authors: Daniele Savietto, Declan Campbell, André Panisson, Marco Nurisso, Giovanni Petri, Jonathan Cohen, Alan Perotti

Links: Paper

Greedy Coordinate Diffusion: Effective and Semantically Coherent Adversarial Attacks via Diffusion Guidance

Authors: Bohdan Turbal, Blossom Metevier, Max Springer, Aleksandra Korolova

Links: Paper

Hyperparameter Transfer with Mixture-of-Expert Layers

Authors: Tianze Jiang, Blake Bordelon, Cengiz Pehlevan, Boris Hanin

Links: Paper

A Hypertoroidal Covering for Perfect Color Equivariance

Authors: Yulong Yang, Zhikun Xu, Yaojun Li, Christine Allen-Blanchette

Links: Paper

LatentChem: From Textual CoT to Latent Thinking in Chemical Reasoning

Authors: Xinwu Ye, Yicheng Mao, Jia Zhang, Yimeng (Yoyo) Liu, Hao Li, Fang Wu, Zhiwei Li, Yuxuan Liao, Zehong Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Zhenfei Yin, Li Yuan, Phil Torr, Huan Sun, Xiangxiang Zeng, Mengdi Wang, Le Cong, Shenghua Gao, Robert Tang

Links: Paper, Project Page

Learning to Perceive the World Through Control: Empowerment-Based Representation Learning

Authors: Mahsa Bastankhah, Sophie Broderick, Benjamin Eysenbach

Links: Paper

Less Is More: Fast and Accurate Reasoning with Cross-Head Unified Sparse Attention

Authors: Lijie Yang, Zhihao Zhang, Arti Jain, Shijie Cao, Baihong Yuan, Yiwei Chen, Zhihao Jia, Ravi Netravali

Links: Paper, Project Page

Lower Bounds for Frank-Wolfe on Strongly Convex Sets

Authors: Jannis Halbey, Daniel Deza, Max Zimmer, Christophe Roux, Bartolomeo Stellato, Sebastian Pokutta

Links: Paper

MEMO: Memory-Augmented Model Context Optimization for Robust Multi-Turn Multi-Agent LLM Games

Authors: Yunfei Xie, Kevin Wang, Bobby Cheng, Jianzhu Yao, Zhizhou Sha, Alexander Duffy, Yihan Xi, Hongyuan Mei, Cheston Tan, Chen Wei, Pramod Viswanath, Zhangyang “Atlas” Wang

Links: Paper

On Path to Multimodal Historical Reasoning: HistBench and HistAgent

Authors: Jiahao Qiu, Fulian Xiao, Yimin Wang, Yuchen Mao, Yijia Chen, Xinzhe Juan, Siran Wang, Xuan Qi, Tongcheng Zhang, Zixin Yao, Jiacheng Guo, Yifu Lu, Charles Argon, Jundi Cui, Daixin Chen, Junran Zhou, Shuyao Zhou, Zhanpeng Zhou, Ling Yang, Shilong Liu, Hongru Wang, Kaixuan Huang, Xun Jiang, Xi Gao, Mengdi Wang

Links: Paper

Opportunistic Expert Activation: Batch-Aware Expert Routing for Faster Decode Without Retraining

Authors: Costin-Andrei Oncescu, Qingyang Wu, Wai Tong Chung, Tsai-chuan Wu, Bryan Gopal, Junxiong Wang, Tri Dao, Ben Athiwaratkun

Links: Paper

Position: Multiplicity is an Inevitable and Inherent Challenge in Multimodal Learning

Authors: Sanghyuk Chun, Olga Russakovsky

Links: Paper

The Power of Power Law: Asymmetry Enables Compositional Reasoning

Authors: Zixuan Wang, Xingyu Dang, Jason Lee, Kaifeng Lyu

Links: Paper

Prioritize the Process, Not Just the Outcome: Rewarding Latent Thought Trajectories Improves Reasoning in Looped Language Models

Authors: Jonathan Williams, Esin Tureci, Olga Russakovsky

Links: Paper, Project Page

Retaining by Doing: The Role of On-Policy Data in Mitigating Forgetting

Authors: Howard Chen, Noam Razin, Karthik Narasimhan, Danqi Chen

Links: Paper

Rethinking Thinking Tokens: LLMs as Improvement Operators

Authors: Lovish Madaan, Aniket Didolkar, Suchin Gururangan, John Quan, Ruan Silva, Russ Salakhutdinov, Manzil Zaheer, Sanjeev Arora, Anirudh Goyal

Links: Paper