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Phil Torr

15 accepted papers

2026

Base Models Know How to Reason, Thinking Models Learn When

ICML 2026spotlight

Why do thinking language models outperform their base counterparts, and what exactly do they learn during training? We introduce constructive model diffing, a framework for understanding fine-tuned models by explicitly constructing the base-to-fine-tuned difference from interpretable components to p…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Causal Fine-Tuning under Latent Confounded Shift

ICML 2026poster

Adapting to latent confounded shift remains a core challenge in modern AI. This setting is driven by hidden variables that induce spurious correlations between inputs and outputs during training, leading models to rely on non-causal shortcuts. For example, a model may learn to treat metadata (e.g., …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

CausalGame: Benchmarking Causal Thinking of LLM Agents in Games

ICML 2026oral

Recently, it has received growing attention in building AI Scientist agents with Large Language Models (LLMs). Since scientific discovery fundamentally relies on uncovering causal relationships from observations, the capability of causal thinking that distinguish causation from correlation and hidde…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Distinguishable Deletion: Unifying Knowledge Erasure and Refusal for Large Language Model Unlearning

ICML 2026poster

Mitigating sensitive and harmful outputs is fundamental to ensuring safe deployment of LLMs. Existing approaches typically follow two paradigms: Knowledge Deletion (KD), which erases undesirable information during training, and Distinguishable Refusal (DR), which steers models away from using sensit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

It's a TRAP! Task-Redirecting Agent Persuasion Benchmark for Web Agents

ICML 2026poster

Web-based agents powered by large language models are increasingly used for tasks such as email management or professional networking. Their reliance on dynamic web content, however, makes them vulnerable to prompt injection attacks: adversarial instructions hidden in interface elements that persuad…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LatentChem: From Textual CoT to Latent Thinking in Chemical Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Current chemical large language models (LLMs) predominantly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to solve complex reasoning problems. However, forcing nonverbal tacit chemical logic into discrete natural language imposes a fundamental ``modality mismatch,'' creating an artificial bottleneck for r…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LongCoT: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

As language models are increasingly deployed for complex autonomous tasks, their ability to reason accurately over longer horizons becomes critical. An essential component of this ability is planning and managing a long, complex chain-of-thought (CoT). We introduce LongCoT, a scalable benchmark of 2…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

OpenIKLR: Bridging the Reasoning Gap in Open-World Scenarios via Iterative Premise Completion

ICML 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks but struggle with complex logical reasoning, particularly in real-world settings. Existing research is largely confined to the closed-world assumption, which posits that all premises requ…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

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

ICML 2026oral

Breakthroughs often come from ideas we could not have predicted in advance. In biology, this is called exaptation: traits evolved for one function become decisive for another. Scientific progress works similarly, but only if ideas survive periods when they appear uncompetitive by current metrics. Th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Rubric Curriculum RL: Exploiting the Generation-Verification Gap in Creative Writing

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) on foundation models has led to significant improvements in math and code generation. Extending these gains to open-ended domains remains challenging: ground-truth verification is unavailable, human annotation is expensive, and learnt reward mode…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Safe Autoregressive Image Generation with Iterative Self-Improving Codebooks

ICML 2026poster

Unlike diffusion-based models that operate in continuous latent spaces, autoregressive unified multimodal models produce images by sequentially predicting discretized visual tokens. These tokens are derived from a codebook that maps embeddings to quantized visual patterns. The language-like architec…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Vision-DeepResearch: Incentivizing DeepResearch Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a broad range of vision tasks. However, constrained by the capacity of their internal world knowledge, prior work has proposed augmenting MLLMs by ``reasoning-then-tool-call'' for visual and textual search engines to ob…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

h1: Bootstrapping LLMs to Reason over Longer Horizons via Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026spotlight

Large language models excel at short-horizon reasoning tasks, but performance drops as reasoning horizon lengths increase. Existing approaches to combat this rely on inference-time scaffolding or step-level supervision, neither of which scales easily. In this work, we introduce a scalable method to …

Cited by 10SourceScholar