Dense Retrieval papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• Dense Retrieval went from 60 papers in 2023 to 162 in 2026, roughly 2.7x in three years.
• CVPR publishes the most Dense Retrieval work: 147 papers from 2023 to 2026, 37% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with Retrieval Memory: papers tagged with both rose from 1 in 2023 to 21 in 2026.
• Among the 5 topics under Information Retrieval, it ranks #1 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, Cross-Encoder Reranking, is up 3.0x versus 2.7x here.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026Half-Truths Break Similarity-Based Retrieval
• ICML 2026Deep Discriminative Structure Proxy Hashing for Cross-modal Retrieval
• ICLR 2026A Dense Subset Index for Collective Query Coverage
• CVPR 2026Beyond Caption-Based Queries in Video Moment Retrieval
• NeurIPS 2025Dense Associative Memory with Epanechnikov Energy
• ICML 2025Nonparametric Modern Hopfield Models
• ICLR 2025Contextual Document Embeddings
• CVPR 2025Adapting Dense Matching for Homography Estimation with Grid-based Acceleration
• NeurIPS 2024CARE: a Benchmark Suite for the Classification and Retrieval of Enzymes
• ICML 2024Compute Better Spent: Replacing Dense Layers with Structured Matrices
• ICLR 2024Adaptive Retrieval and Scalable Indexing for k-NN Search with Cross-Encoders
• CVPR 2024Dense Optical Tracking: Connecting the Dots
• NeurIPS 2023Bypassing spike sorting: Density-based decoding using spike localization from dense multielectrode probes
• ICML 2023Everyone's Preference Changes Differently: A Weighted Multi-Interest Model For Retrieval
• ICLR 2023Automating Nearest Neighbor Search Configuration with Constrained Optimization
• CVPR 2023Are Binary Annotations Sufficient? Video Moment Retrieval via Hierarchical Uncertainty-Based Active Learning
• NeurIPS 2026Hyperparameter Transfer for Dense Associative Memories
• ICML 2026Dense associative memory for Gaussian distributions
• ICLR 2026Beyond Instance-Level Alignment: Dual-Level Optimal Transport for Audio-Text Retrieval
• CVPR 2026Beyond Tie Points Satellite Image Block Adjustment based on Dense

All Dense Retrieval papers

401 papers, page 2 of 9

51. ICLR 2026A Biologically Plausible Dense Associative Memory with Exponential Capacity
52. ICLR 2026A Dense Subset Index for Collective Query Coverage
53. ICLR 2026Avey-B
54. ICLR 2026Beyond Instance-Level Alignment: Dual-Level Optimal Transport for Audio-Text Retrieval
55. ICLR 2026Beyond Sequential Reranking: Reranker-Guided Search Improves Reasoning Intensive Retrieval
56. ICLR 2026Dynamical properties of dense associative memory
57. ICLR 2026Efficient Discriminative Joint Encoders for Large Scale Vision-Language Reranking
58. ICLR 2026Evoking User Memory: Personalizing LLM via Recollection-Familiarity Adaptive Retrieval
59. ICLR 2026Fast Escape, Slow Convergence: Learning Dynamics of Phase Retrieval under Power-Law Data
60. ICLR 2026Fast Proteome-Scale Protein Interaction Retrieval via Residue-Level Factorization
61. ICLR 2026Frustratingly Simple Retrieval Improves Challenging, Reasoning-Intensive Benchmarks
62. ICLR 2026Grasp Any Region: Prompting MLLM to Understand the Dense World
63. ICLR 2026Guided Query Refinement: Multimodal Hybrid Retrieval with Test-Time Optimization
64. ICLR 2026Hybrid Reinforcement: when reward is sparse, better to be dense
65. ICLR 2026Knowledge Externalization: Reversible Unlearning and Modular Retrieval in Multimodal Large Language Models
66. ICLR 2026LightRetriever: A LLM-based Text Retrieval Architecture with Extremely Faster Query Inference
67. ICLR 2026LouisKV: Efficient KV Cache Retrieval for Long Input-Output Sequences
68. ICLR 2026MILCO: Learned Sparse Retrieval Across Languages via a Multilingual Connector
69. ICLR 2026Mixture-of-Experts Can Surpass Dense LLMs Under Strictly Equal Resource
70. ICLR 2026On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval
71. ICLR 2026Pisces: Cryptography-based Private Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Dual-Path Retrieval
72. ICLR 2026RAEE: A Robust Retrieval-Augmented Early Exit Framework for Efficient Inference
73. ICLR 2026Revela: Dense Retriever Learning via Language Modeling
74. ICLR 2026Seq vs Seq: An Open Suite of Paired Encoders and Decoders
75. ICLR 2026SPRINT: Sparse-Dense Residual Fusion for Efficient Diffusion Transformers
76. ICLR 2026Tools are under-documented: Simple Document Expansion Boosts Tool Retrieval
77. ICML 2026``Someone Hid It!'': Query-Agnostic Black-Box Attacks on LLM-Based Retrieval
78. ICML 2026$\mathbb{R}^{2k}$ is Theoretically Large Enough for Embedding-based Top-$k$ Retrieval
79. ICML 2026AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendation
80. ICML 2026Beyond Global Alignment: Fine-Grained Motion-Language Retrieval via Pyramidal Shapley-Taylor Learning
81. ICML 2026Beyond Hamming: Query-Aware Decoding of Binary Cosine Sketches
82. ICML 2026Coverage, Not Averages: Semantic Stratification for Trustworthy Retrieval Evaluation
83. ICML 2026Deep Discriminative Structure Proxy Hashing for Cross-modal Retrieval
84. ICML 2026Dense associative memory for Gaussian distributions
85. ICML 2026DenseMLLM: Standard Multimodal LLMs for Dense Prediction
86. ICML 2026Dual Quaternion SE(3) Synchronization with Recovery Guarantees
87. ICML 2026Efficient, Property-Aligned Fan-Out Retrieval via RL-Compiled Diffusion
88. ICML 2026ElicitR: Unlocking Latent Reasoning in Dense Retrievers via Generative Regularization
89. ICML 2026Full-Batch Gradient Descent Outperforms One-Pass SGD: Sample Complexity Separation in Single-Index Learning
90. ICML 2026Geometric Entropy and Retrieval Phase Transitions in Continuous Thermal Dense Associative Memory
91. ICML 2026GRAPE: Let GRPO Supervise Query Rewriting by Ranking for Retrieval
92. ICML 2026Hierarchical Retrieval at Scale: Bridging Interpretability and Efficiency
93. ICML 2026HOBIT: Hardness Optimized Batch Sampling for InfoNCE Training
94. ICML 2026HypRAG: Hyperbolic Dense Retrieval for Retrieval Augmented Generation
95. ICML 2026Improving Topic Modeling by Distilling Soft Labels from Language Models
96. ICML 2026Language Model Networks: Supervision-Efficient Learning through Dense Communication
97. ICML 2026Learning with Admissibility: Robust Fuzzy Hashing for Cross-Modal Retrieval with Noisy Labels
98. ICML 2026mmBERT: A Modern Multilingual Encoder with Annealed Language Learning
99. ICML 2026Neural Thickets: Diverse Task Experts Are Dense Around Pretrained Weights
100. ICML 2026No More K-means: Single-Stage Sparse Coding for Efficient Multi-Vector Retrieval

FAQ

How many Dense Retrieval papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?

401 in total: 60 in 2023, 92 in 2024, 87 in 2025, 162 in 2026.

How many Dense Retrieval papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 51 Dense Retrieval papers, versus 35 the year before.

How many Dense Retrieval papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 26 Dense Retrieval papers, versus 12 the year before.

How many Dense Retrieval papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 35 Dense Retrieval papers, versus 10 the year before.

How many Dense Retrieval papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 50 Dense Retrieval papers, versus 30 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most Dense Retrieval papers?

CVPR, with 147 papers from 2023 to 2026.