ICLR 2026: 12 papers on making AI systems reliable, efficient, and secure

A 7B agent that beats GPT-4o. Lossless weight compression that speeds up inference by 177%. An arena where 23 teams battled across 103,000 adversarial rounds. This year at ICLR, Lambda is presenting twelve papers and two workshops with over 20 collaborators across academia and industry. This work covers agents, LLMs, physical AI, and multimodal efficiency, addressing some recurring themes: long-horizon agentic planning under sparse rewards, alignment with safety constraints, structured world modeling, and inference-time efficiency.