前沿论文精选

Cristian Daniel Paduraru, Antonio Barbalau, Radu Filipescu, Andrei Liviu Nicolicioiu, Elena Burceanu

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Current methods for detecting spurious correlations rely on data splits or error patterns, leaving many harmful shortcuts invisible when counterexamples are absent. We introduce BEE (Bridging Explainability and Embeddings), a framework that shifts the focus from model predictions to the weight space and embedding geometry underlying decisions. By analyzing how fine-tuning perturbs pretrained representations, BEE uncovers spurious correlations that remain hidden from conventional evaluation pipelines. We use linear probing as a transparent diagnostic lens, revealing spurious features that not only persist after full fine-tuning but also transfer across diverse state-of-the-art models. Code/project link: https://github.com/bit-ml/bee

Hanlin Gu, Hong Xi Tae, Lixin Fan, Chee Seng Chan

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. This paper addresses the critical challenge of unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning (VFL), a setting that has received far less attention than its horizontal counterpart. Specifically, we propose the first method tailored to *label unlearning* in VFL, where labels play a dual role as both essential inputs and sensitive information. To this end, we employ a representation-level manifold mixup mechanism to generate synthetic embeddings for both unlearned and retained samples. This is to provide richer signals for the subsequent gradient-based label forgetting and recovery steps. These augmented embeddings are then subjected to gradient-based label forgetting, effectively removing the associated label information from the model. Code/project link: https://github.com/bryanhx/Towards-Privacy-Guaranteed-Label-Unlearning-in-Vertical-Federated-Learning

Sijie Ren, Meng Yan, Zhen Zhang, Xu Yinghui, Xinwei Sun

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. This paper aims to develop a lower prediction bound (LPB) for survival time across different treatments in the general right-censored setting. Although previous methods have utilized conformal prediction to construct the LPB, their resulting prediction sets provide only probably approximately correct (PAC)–type miscoverage guarantees rather than exact ones. To address this problem, we propose a new calibration procedure under the potential outcome framework. Under the strong ignorability assumption, we propose a reweighting scheme that can transform the problem into a weighted conformal inference problem, allowing an LPB to be obtained via quantile regression with an exact miscoverage guarantee.

Andrea Zerio, Maya Bechler-Speicher, Maor Huri, Marie Vibeke Vestergaard, Tine Jess, Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Samir Bhatt, Aleksejs Sazonovs

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Real-world temporal data often consists of multiple signal types recorded at irregular, asynchronous intervals. For instance, in the medical domain, different types of blood tests can be measured at different times and frequencies, resulting in fragmented and unevenly scattered temporal data. Similar issues of irregular sampling occur in other domains, such as the monitoring of large systems using event log files. Effectively learning from such data requires handling sets of temporal sparse and heterogeneous signals. In this work, we propose Super Mixing Additive Networks (SuperMAN), a novel and interpretable-by-design framework for learning directly from such heterogeneous signals, by modeling them as sets of implicit graphs.

Beomgu Kang, Hyunseok Seo

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Subsampling significantly reduces the number of measurements, thereby streamlining data processing and transfer overhead, and shortening acquisition time across diverse real-world applications. The recently introduced Active Deep Probabilistic Subsampling (A-DPS) approach jointly optimizes both the subsampling pattern and the downstream task model, enabling instance- and subject-specific sampling trajectories and effective adaptation to new data at inference time. However, this approach does not fully leverage valuable dataset priors and relies on top-1 sampling, which can impede the optimization process. Herein, we enhance A-DPS by integrating a deterministic (fixed) prior-informed sampling pattern derived from the training dataset, along with group-based sampling via top-k sampling, to achieve more robust optimization—method we call Prior-aware and context-guided Group-based Active DPS (PGA-DPS).

Minghao Han, Dingkang Yang, Linhao Qu, Zizhi Chen, Gang Li, Han Wang, Jiacong Wang, Lihua Zhang

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in multimodal learning within computational pathology. Existing models primarily rely on vision and language modalities; however, language alone lacks molecular specificity and offers limited pathological supervision, leading to representational bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose STAMP, a Spatial Transcriptomics-Augmented Multimodal Pathology representation learning framework that integrates spatially-resolved gene expression profiles to enable molecule-guided joint embedding of pathology images and transcriptomic data. Our study shows that self-supervised, gene-guided training provides a robust and task-agnostic signal for learning pathology image representations. Code/project link: https://github.com/Hanminghao/STAMP

Conghao Xiong, Zhengrui Guo, Zhe Xu, Yifei Zhang, Raymond Kai-yu Tong, Si Yong Yeo, Hao Chen, Joseph JY Sung, Irwin King

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Few-shot Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification is severely hampered by overfitting. We argue that this is not merely a data-scarcity issue but a fundamentally geometric problem. Grounded in the manifold hypothesis, our analysis shows that features from pathology foundation models exhibit a low-dimensional manifold geometry that is easily perturbed by downstream models. This insight reveals a key potential issue in downstream multiple instance learning models: linear layers are geometry-agnostic and, as we show empirically, can distort the manifold geometry of the features. To address this, we propose the Manifold Residual (MR) block, a plug-and-play module that is explicitly geometry-aware. Code/project link: https://github.com/BearCleverProud/MR-Block

Xinhao Zhong, Yimin Zhou, Zhiqi Zhang, Junhao Li, Sun Yi, Bin Chen, Shu-Tao Xia, Xuan Wang, Ke Xu

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has brought new opportunities for text-to-image generation, but also heightened safety concerns. Existing concept erasure techniques, primarily designed for diffusion models, fail to generalize to VARs due to their next-scale token prediction paradigm. In this paper, we first propose a novel VAR Erasure framework **VARE** that enables stable concept erasure in VAR models by leveraging auxiliary visual tokens to reduce fine-tuning intensity. Building upon this, we introduce **S-VARE**, a novel and effective concept erasure method designed for VAR, which incorporates a filtered cross entropy loss to precisely identify and minimally adjust unsafe visual tokens, along with a preservation loss to maintain semantic fidelity, addressing the issues such as language drift and reduced diversity introduce by na\"ive fine-tuning.

Emil Javurek, Valentyn Melnychuk, Jonas Schweisthal, Konstantin Hess, Dennis Frauen, Stefan Feuerriegel

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Predicting individualized potential outcomes in sequential decision-making is central for optimizing therapeutic decisions in personalized medicine (e.g., which dosing sequence to give to a cancer patient). However, predicting potential out- comes over long horizons is notoriously difficult. Existing methods that break the curse of the horizon typically lack strong theoretical guarantees such as orthogonality and quasi-oracle efficiency. In this paper, we revisit the problem of predicting individualized potential outcomes in sequential decision-making (i.e., estimating Q-functions in Markov decision processes with observational data) through a causal inference lens.

Sam Gijsen, Marc-Andre Schulz, Kerstin Ritter

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The development of foundation models for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) time series holds significant promise for predicting phenotypes related to disease and cognition. Current models, however, are often trained using a mask-and-reconstruct objective on small brain regions. This focus on low-level information leads to representations that are sensitive to noise and temporal fluctuations, necessitating extensive fine-tuning for downstream tasks. We introduce Brain-Semantoks, a self-supervised framework designed specifically to learn abstract representations of brain dynamics. Its architecture is built on two core innovations: a semantic tokenizer that aggregates noisy regional signals into robust tokens representing functional networks, and a self-distillation objective that enforces representational stability across time.

Bob Junyi Zou, Lu Tian

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Hybrid neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) integrate mechanistic models with neural ODEs, offering strong inductive bias and flexibility, and are particularly advantageous in data-scarce healthcare settings. However, excessive latent states and interactions from mechanistic models can lead to training inefficiency and over-fitting, limiting practical effectiveness of hybrid neural ODEs. In response, we propose a new hybrid pipeline for automatic state selection and structure optimization in mechanistic neural ODEs, combining domain-informed graph modifications with data-driven regularization to sparsify the model for improving predictive performance and stability while retaining mechanistic plausibility. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show improved predictive performance and robustness with desired sparsity, establishing an effective solution for hybrid model reduction in healthcare applications.

TIANYI LIU, Xi Yang, Wei Wang, Anh Nguyen, Haochuan Jiang, Kaizhu Huang

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Brain tumor segmentation in multi-modal MRIs poses significant challenges when one or more modalities are missing. Recent approaches commonly employ parallel fusion strategies; however, these methods often risk losing crucial shared information across modalities, which can degrade segmentation performance. In this paper, we advocate leveraging sequential information bottleneck fusion to effectively preserve shared information across modalities. From an information-theoretic perspective, sequential fusion not only produces more robust fused representations in missing-data scenarios but also achieves a tighter generalization upper bound compared to parallel fusion approaches.

Mark C. Eid, Ana Namburete, Joao F. Henriques

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Ultrasound imaging is widely used due to its safety, affordability, and real-time capabilities, but its 2D interpretation is highly operator-dependent, leading to variability and increased cognitive demand. We present $\textbf{UltraGauss}$: an ultrasound-specific Gaussian Splatting framework that serves as an efficient approximation to acoustic image formation. Unlike projection-based splatting, UltraGauss renders by $\textit{probe-plane intersection}$ with in-plane aggregation, aligning with plane-based echo sampling while remaining fast and memory-efficient. A stable parameterisation and compute-aware GPU rasterisation make this method practical at scale. Code/project link: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/UltraGauss/

Konstantin Hess, Dennis Frauen, Mihaela van der Schaar, Stefan Feuerriegel

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) in time-varying settings is particularly challenging, as the probability of observing certain treatment sequences decreases exponentially with longer prediction horizons. Thus, the observed data contain little support for many plausible treatment sequences, which creates severe overlap problems. Existing meta-learners for the time-varying setting typically assume adequate treatment overlap, and thus suffer from exploding estimation variance when the overlap is low. To address this problem, we introduce a novel overlap-weighted orthogonal WO meta-learner for estimating HTEs that targets regions in the observed data with high probability of receiving the interventional treatment sequences.

Ziquan Zhu, Hanruo Zhu, Si-Yuan Lu, Xiang Li, Yanda Meng, Yunxiao Zhang, Gaojie Jin, Lu Yin, Lijie Hu, Di Wang, Lu Liu, Tianjin Huang

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Adapters have become a widely adopted strategy for efficient fine-tuning of foundation models, particularly in resource-constrained settings. However, their performance under extreme data scarcity—common in medical imaging due to high annotation costs, privacy regulations, and fragmented datasets—remains underexplored. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of adapter-based fine-tuning for vision foundation models in low-data medical imaging scenarios. We find that, contrary to their promise, conventional Adapters can degrade performance under severe data constraints, performing even worse than simple linear probing when trained on less than 1\% of the corresponding training data.

Yiliang Chen, Zhixi Li, Cheng Xu, Alex Qinyang Liu, Ruize Cui, Xuemiao Xu, Jeremy Yuen-Chun Teoh, Shengfeng He, Jing Qin

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Surgical triplet detection is a critical task in surgical video analysis, with significant implications for performance assessment and training novice surgeons. However, existing datasets like CholecT50 lack precise spatial bounding box annotations, rendering triplet classification at the image level insufficient for practical applications. The inclusion of bounding box annotations is essential to make this task meaningful, as they provide the spatial context necessary for accurate analysis and improved model generalizability. To address these shortcomings, we introduce ProstaTD, a large-scale, multi-institutional dataset for surgical triplet detection, developed from the technically demanding domain of robot-assisted prostatectomy.

Haohui Jia, Zheng Chen, Lingwei Zhu, Rikuto Kotoge, Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Yasuko Matsubara, Jimeng Sun, Yasushi Sakurai, Takashi Matsubara

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Modeling neural population dynamics is crucial for foundational neuroscientific research and various clinical applications. Conventional latent variable methods typically model continuous brain dynamics through discretizing time with recurrent architecture, which necessarily results in compounded cumulative prediction errors and failure of capturing instantaneous, nonlinear characteristics of EEGs. We propose ODEBrain, a Neural ODE latent dynamic forecasting framework to overcome these challenges by integrating spatio-temporal-frequency features into spectral graph nodes, followed by a Neural ODE modeling the continuous latent dynamics. Our design ensures that the latent representations can capture stochastic variations of complex brain states at any given time point.

Wangduo Xie, Matthew B. Blaschko

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Computed Tomography (CT) plays a vital role in inspecting the internal structures of industrial objects. Furthermore, achieving high-quality CT reconstruction from sparse views is essential for reducing production costs. While classic implicit neural networks have shown promising results for sparse reconstruction, they are unable to leverage shape priors of objects. Motivated by the observation that numerous industrial objects exhibit rectangular structures, we propose a novel \textbf{N}eural \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{B}inning (\textbf{NAB}) method that effectively integrates rectangular priors into the reconstruction process. Code/project link: https://github.com/Wangduo-Xie/NAB_CT_reconstruction

Konstantin Hess, Dennis Frauen, Valentyn Melnychuk, Stefan Feuerriegel

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Estimating potential outcomes for treatments over time based on observational data is important for personalized decision-making in medicine. However, many existing methods for this task fail to properly adjust for time-varying confounding and thus yield biased estimates. There are only a few neural methods with proper adjustments, but these have inherent limitations (e.g., division by propensity scores that are often close to zero), which result in poor performance. As a remedy, we introduce the iterative G-computation network (IGC-Net). Our IGC-Net is a novel, neural end-to-end model which adjusts for time-varying confounding in order to estimate conditional average potential outcomes (CAPOs) over time.

Yehan Zhang, Huaidong Zhang, Xuandi Luo, Shengfeng He

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Healthcare insurance fraud detection presents unique machine learning challenges: labeled data are scarce due to delayed verification processes, and fraudulent behaviors evolve rapidly, often manifesting in complex, graph-structured interactions. Existing methods struggle in such settings. Pretraining routines typically overlook structural anomalies under limited supervision, while online models often fail to adapt to changing fraud patterns without labeled updates. To address these issues, we propose the Continual Fiedler Vector Graph model (ConFVG), a fraud detection framework designed for label-scarce and non-stationary environments.

Beomjun Bark, Yun Kwan Kim

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Accurate detection of clinically meaningful events in healthcare time-series data is crucial for reliable downstream analysis and decision support. However, most existing methods struggle to jointly localize event boundaries and classify event types; even detection transformer (DETR)-based approaches show limited performance when confronted with extremely sparse events typical of clinical recordings. To address these challenges, we propose a coarse-to-fine detection framework combining a global context explorer, a local detail inspector, and an adaptive gating module (AGM) that fuses multiple label perspectives. The AGM uses transformed labels—encoding event presence and temporal position—to improve learning on sparse events.

Ruike Cao, Shaojie Bai, Fugen Yao, Liang Dong, Jian Xu, Li Xiao

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Effective information seeking in multi-turn medical dialogues is critical for accurate diagnosis, especially when dealing with incomplete information. Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) for these interactive scenarios is challenging due to the uncertainty inherent in user-agent interactions, which we formulate as a Hierarchical Markov Decision Process (H-MDP). While conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) struggle with long-horizon credit assignment and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) suffers from unstable value estimation in this context, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware Adaptive Tree Policy Optimization (ATPO) algorithm. Our method adaptively allocates the rollout budget to states with high uncertainty, quantified by a composite metric of Bellman error and action-value variance.

Kun Cheng, Yukun Zhang, William Henry Nailon, Tonggang Zhao

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Deep neural networks for medical image segmentation often produce overconfident predictions, posing clinical risks due to miscalibrated uncertainty estimates. In this work, we rethink model calibration from a frequency-domain perspective and identify two critical factors causing miscalibration: spectral bias, where models overemphasize low-frequency components, and confidence saturation, which suppresses overall power spectral density in confidence maps. To address these challenges, we propose a novel frequency-aware calibration framework integrating spectral entropy regularization and power spectral smoothing. The spectral entropy term promotes a balanced frequency spectrum and enhances overall spectral power, enabling better modeling of high-frequency boundary and low-frequency structural uncertainty.

Matt Y. Cheung, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Guha Balakrishnan

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. In clinical applications, the utility of segmentation models is often based on the accuracy of derived downstream metrics such as organ size, rather than by the pixel-level accuracy of the segmentation masks themselves. Thus, uncertainty quantification for such metrics is crucial for decision-making. Conformal prediction (CP) is a popular framework to derive such principled uncertainty guarantees, but applying CP naively to the final scalar metric is inefficient because it treats the complex, non-linear segmentation-to-metric pipeline as a black box. We introduce COMPASS, a practical framework that generates efficient, metric-based CP intervals for image segmentation models by leveraging the inductive biases of their underlying deep neural networks.

Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Xihao Piao, Zheng Chen, Jimeng Sun

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Foundation models are reshaping EEG analysis, yet an important problem of EEG tokenization remains a challenge. This paper presents TFM-Tokenizer, a novel tokenization framework that learns a vocabulary of time-frequency motifs from *single-channel* EEG signals and encodes them into discrete tokens. We propose a dual-path architecture with time–frequency masking to capture robust motif representations, and it is model-agnostic, supporting both lightweight transformers and existing foundation models for downstream tasks. Our study demonstrates three key benefits: *Accuracy:* Experiments on four diverse EEG benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance gains across both single- and multi-dataset pretraining settings, achieving up to $11\%$ improvement in Cohen’s Kappa over strong baselines. Code/project link: https://github.com/Jathurshan0330/TFM-Tokenizer

Xinyao Wu, Zhe Xu, Raymond Kai-yu Tong

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Class-incremental learning (CIL) in medical image-guided diagnosis requires models to preserve knowledge of historical disease classes while adapting to emerging categories. Pre-trained models (PTMs) with well-generalized features provide a strong foundation, yet most PTM-based CIL strategies, such as prompt tuning, task-specific adapters and model mixtures, rely on increasingly complex designs. While effective in general-domain benchmarks, these methods falter in medical imaging, where low intra-class variability and high inter-domain shifts (from scanners, protocols and institutions) make CIL particularly prone to representation collapse and domain misalignment. Under such conditions, we find that lightweight representation calibration strategies, often dismissed in general-domain CIL for their modest gains, can be remarkably effective for adapting PTMs in medical settings.

Shailesh Sridhar, Anton Xue, Eric Wong

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Popular explanation methods often produce unreliable feature importance scores due to missingness bias, a systematic distortion that arises when models are probed with ablated, out-of-distribution inputs. Existing solutions treat this as a deep representational flaw that requires expensive retraining or architectural modifications. In this work, we challenge this assumption and show that missingness bias can be effectively treated as a superficial artifact of the model's output space. We introduce MCal, a lightweight post-hoc method that corrects this bias by fine-tuning a simple linear head on the outputs of a frozen base model.

David Bani-Harouni, Chantal Pellegrini, Ege Özsoy, Nassir Navab, Matthias Keicher

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Clinical decision-making is a dynamic, interactive, and cyclic process where doctors have to repeatedly decide on which clinical action to perform and consider newly uncovered information for diagnosis and treatment. Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to support clinicians in this process, however, most applications of LLMs in clinical decision support suffer from one of two limitations: Either they assume the unrealistic scenario of immediate availability of all patient information and do not model the interactive and iterative investigation process, or they restrict themselves to the limited "out-of-the-box" capabilities of large pre-trained models without performing task-specific training. In contrast to this, we propose to model clinical decision-making for diagnosis with a hypothesis-driven uncertainty-aware language agent, LA-CDM, that converges towards a diagnosis via repeatedly requesting and interpreting relevant tests. Using a hybrid training paradigm combining supervised and reinforcement learning, we train LA-CDM with three objectives targeting critical aspects of clinical decision-making: accurate hypothesis generation, hypothesis uncertainty estimation, and efficient decision-making. Code/project link: https://github.com/dharouni/LA-CDM

Wentao Gu, Yuquan Li, XINYANG JIANG, Zilong Wang, Dongsheng Li, Zehui Li, Zijian Dong, Cairong Zhao

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of dementia worldwide. Accurate diagnosis requires integrating diverse patient data modalities. With the rapid advancement of foundation models in neurobiology and medicine, integrating foundation models from various modalities has emerged as a promising yet underexplored direction for multi-modal AD diagnosis. A central challenge is enabling effective interaction among these models without disrupting the robust, modality-specific representations learned from large-scale pretraining. To address this, we propose a novel multi-modal framework for AD diagnosis that enables joint interaction among uni-modal foundation models through modality-anchored interaction.

Joshua Strong, Pramit Saha, Yasin Ibrahim, Cheng Ouyang, Alison Noble

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Learning to Defer (L2D) improves AI reliability in decision-critical environments by training AI to either make its own prediction or defer the decision to a human expert. A key challenge is adapting to unseen experts at test time, whose competence can differ from the training population. Current methods for this task, however, can falter when unseen experts are out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to the training population. We identify a core architectural flaw as the cause: they learn identity-conditioned policies by processing class-indexed signals in fixed coordinates, creating shortcuts that violate the problem's inherent permutation symmetry.

Ruirui Wang, Yanke Li, Manuel Günther, Diego Paez-Granados

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Healthcare data, such as Intensive Care Unit (ICU) records, comprise heterogeneous multivariate time series sampled at irregular intervals with pervasive missingness. However, clinical applications demand predictive models that are both accurate and interpretable. We present our Graph Attention-based Relational Learning for Intensive Care (GARLIC) model, a novel neural network architecture that imputes missing data through a learnable exponential-decay encoder, captures inter-sensor dependencies via time-lagged summary graphs, and fuses global patterns with cross-dimensional sequential attention. All attention weights and graph edges are learned end-to-end to serve as built-in observation-, signal-, and edge-level explanations.

Zehui Zhan, Yaojun Hu, Jiajing Zhang, Wanchen Lian, Wanqing Wu, Jintai Chen

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Conventional multi-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) systems capture cardiac signals from a fixed set of anatomical viewpoints defined by lead placement. However, cer- tain cardiac conditions (e.g., Brugada syndrome) require additional, non-standard viewpoints to reveal diagnostically critical patterns that may be absent in standard leads. To systematically overcome this limitation, Nef-Net was recently introduced to reconstruct a continuous electrocardiac field, enabling virtual observation of ECG signals from arbitrary views (termed Electrocardio Panorama). Despite its promise, Nef-Net operates under idealized assumptions and faces in-the-wild challenges, such as long-duration ECG modeling, robustness to device-specific signal artifacts, and suboptimal lead placement calibration. Code/project link: https://github.com/HKUSTGZ-ML4Health-Lab/NEFNET-v2

Shangqian Wu, Siyuan Shen, Yahan Li, Zhijian Huang, Ziyu Fan, Yuanpeng Zhang, YI WANG, Lei Deng

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Diffusion models have recently demonstrated significant robustness in medical image segmentation, effectively accommodating variations across different imaging styles. However, their applications remain limited due to: (i) current successes being primarily confined to 2D segmentation tasks—we observe that diffusion models tend to collapse at the early stage when applied to 3D medical tasks; and (ii) the inherently isolated iteration along timesteps during training and inference. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel framework named Cross-Timestep, which incorporates two key innovations: an Adaptive Priori Decoding Strategy (APDS) and a trans-temporal memory LSTM (tLSTM) mechanism. (i) The APDS provides prior guidance during the diffusion process by employing a Priori Decoder(PD) that focuses solely on the conditional branch, successfully stabilizing the reverse diffusion process.

Seunghoon Lee, Seongjae Kang, Inhyuk Park, Gitaek Kwon, Jihyeon Baek, Doohyun Park

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. We propose a frequency-oriented perspective on retinal representation learning by analyzing masked autoencoders (MAE) through the lens of spatial frequency. Our analysis shows that MAE favors low-frequency content while under-encoding diagnostically critical high-frequency structures in retinal images. Because retinal pathology often manifests in high-frequency detail, this bias limits diagnostic performance and motivates frequency-balanced representations. Within a mutual-information (MI) formulation of MAE, we introduce the Frequency-Balanced Retinal Masked Autoencoder (RetMAE), which augments the reconstruction objective with a MI regularizer that suppresses low-frequency redundancy and accentuates clinically salient high-frequency information.

Zijian Wang, Xiaofei Zhang, Xin Zhang, Yukun Liu, Qiong Zhang

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Federated learning (FL) is increasingly adopted in domains like healthcare, where data privacy is paramount. A fundamental challenge in these systems is statistical heterogeneity—the fact that data distributions vary significantly across clients (e.g., different hospitals may treat distinct patient demographics). While current FL algorithms focus on aggregating model updates from these heterogeneous clients, the potential of the central server remains under-explored. This paper is motivated by a healthcare scenario: could a central server not only coordinate model training but also guide a new patient to the hospital best equipped for their specific condition?

M A Al-Masud, Juan Lopez Alcaraz, Nils Strodthoff

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is a long-standing diagnostic tool. Yet machine learning for ECG interpretation remains fragmented, often limited to narrow tasks or datasets. FMs promise broader adaptability, but fundamental questions remain: Which architectures generalize best? How do models scale with limited labels? What explains performance differences across model families? We benchmarked eight ECG FMs on 26 clinically relevant tasks using 12 public datasets comprising 1,650 regression and classification targets. Models were evaluated under fine-tuning and frozen settings, with scaling analyses across dataset sizes.

Hiba Ahsan, Byron C Wallace

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. LLMs are increasingly being used in healthcare. This promises to free physicians from drudgery, enabling better care to be delivered at scale. But the use of LLMs in this space also brings risks; for example, such models may worsen existing biases. How can we spot when LLMs are (spuriously) relying on patient race to inform predictions? In this work we assess the degree to which Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can reveal (and control) associations the model has made between race and stigmatizing concepts. We first identify SAE latents in gemma-2 models which appear to correlate with Black individuals.

Wang Bill Zhu, Tian-qi Chen, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Ching Ying Lin, Jade Law, Mazen Jizzini, Jorge J. Nieva, Ruishan Liu, Robin Jia

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Cancer patients are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) for medical information, making it critical to assess how well these models handle complex, personalized questions. However, current medical benchmarks focus on medical exams or consumer-searched questions and do not evaluate LLMs on real patient questions with patient details. In this paper, we first have three hematology-oncology physicians evaluate cancer-related questions drawn from real patients. While LLM responses are generally accurate, the models frequently fail to recognize or address false presuppositions} in the questions, posing risks to safe medical decision-making.

Chenda Duan, Yipeng Zhang, Sotaro Kanai, Yuanyi Ding, Atsuro Daida, Pengyue Yu, Tiancheng Zheng, Naoto Kuroda, Shaun A. Hussain, Eishi Asano, Hiroki Nariai, vwani Roychowdhury

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Epilepsy affects over 50 million people worldwide, and one-third of patients suffer drug-resistant seizures where surgery offers the best chance of seizure freedom. Accurate localization of the epileptogenic zone (EZ) relies on intracranial EEG (iEEG). Clinical workflows, however, remain constrained by labor-intensive manual review. At the same time, existing data-driven approaches are typically developed on single-center datasets that are inconsistent in format and metadata, lack standardized benchmarks, and rarely release pathological event annotations, creating barriers to reproducibility, cross-center validation, and clinical relevance. Code/project link: https://omni-ieeg.github.io/omni-ieeg/; https://github.com/Omni-iEEG/Omni-iEEG

Max Lamparth, Declan Grabb, Amy Franks, Scott Gershan, Kaitlyn N Kunstman, Aaron Lulla, Monika Drummond Roots, Manu Sharma, Aryan Shrivastava, Nina Vasan, Colleen Waickman

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Current medical language model (LM) benchmarks often over-simplify the complexities of day-to-day clinical practice tasks and instead rely on evaluating LMs on multiple-choice board exam questions. In psychiatry especially, these challenges are worsened by fairness and bias issues, since models can be swayed by patient demographics even when those factors should not influence clinical decisions. Thus, we present an expert-created and annotated dataset spanning five critical domains of decision-making in mental healthcare: treatment, diagnosis, documentation, monitoring, and triage. This U.S. centric dataset — created without any LM assistance — is designed to capture the nuanced clinical reasoning and daily ambiguities mental health practitioners encounter, reflecting the inherent complexities of care delivery that are missing from existing datasets.

Muhammad Ahmed Chaudhry, Suhana Bedi, Pola Lydia Lagari, Brian T Layden, William Galanter, Ayis Pyrros, Sanmi Koyejo

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Body composition analysis through CT and MRI imaging provides critical insights for cardio-metabolic health assessment but remains limited by accessibility barriers including radiation exposure, high costs, and infrastructure requirements. We present AbdCTBench, a large-scale dataset containing 23,506 CT-derived abdominal surface meshes from 18,719 patients, paired with 87 comorbidity labels, 31 specific diagnosis codes, and 16 CT-derived biomarkers. Our key insight is that external surface geometry is predictive of internal tissue composition, enabling accessible health screening through consumer devices. We establish comprehensive benchmarks across seven computer vision architectures (ResNet-18/34/50, DenseNet-121, EfficientNet-B0, ViT-Small, Swin Transformer-Base), demonstrating that models can learn robust surface-to-biomarker representations directly from 2D mesh projections. Code/project link: https://abdctbenchrepo.github.io/AbdCTBench/

Kai Chen, Taihang Zhen, Hewei Wang, Kailai Liu, Xinfeng Li, Jing Huo, Tianpei Yang, Jinfeng Xu, Wei Dong, Yang Gao

评估医疗 LLM 多智能体系统在攻击场景下的安全风险，比较多种多智能体拓扑，并提出检测与纠正机制以缓解恶意智能体造成的医疗安全问题。

Max Lamparth, Declan Grabb, Amy Franks, Scott Gershan, Kaitlyn N Kunstman, Aaron Lulla, Monika Drummond Roots, Manu Sharma, Aryan Shrivastava, Nina Vasan, Colleen Waickman

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