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

64 papers, page 1 of 2

1. ICLR 2026A Biologically Plausible Dense Associative Memory with Exponential Capacity
2. ICLR 2026A Dense Subset Index for Collective Query Coverage
3. ICLR 2026Avey-B
4. ICLR 2026Beyond Instance-Level Alignment: Dual-Level Optimal Transport for Audio-Text Retrieval
5. ICLR 2026Beyond Sequential Reranking: Reranker-Guided Search Improves Reasoning Intensive Retrieval
6. ICLR 2026Dynamical properties of dense associative memory
7. ICLR 2026Efficient Discriminative Joint Encoders for Large Scale Vision-Language Reranking
8. ICLR 2026Evoking User Memory: Personalizing LLM via Recollection-Familiarity Adaptive Retrieval
9. ICLR 2026Fast Escape, Slow Convergence: Learning Dynamics of Phase Retrieval under Power-Law Data
10. ICLR 2026Fast Proteome-Scale Protein Interaction Retrieval via Residue-Level Factorization
11. ICLR 2026Frustratingly Simple Retrieval Improves Challenging, Reasoning-Intensive Benchmarks
12. ICLR 2026Grasp Any Region: Prompting MLLM to Understand the Dense World
13. ICLR 2026Guided Query Refinement: Multimodal Hybrid Retrieval with Test-Time Optimization
14. ICLR 2026Hybrid Reinforcement: when reward is sparse, better to be dense
15. ICLR 2026Knowledge Externalization: Reversible Unlearning and Modular Retrieval in Multimodal Large Language Models
16. ICLR 2026LightRetriever: A LLM-based Text Retrieval Architecture with Extremely Faster Query Inference
17. ICLR 2026LouisKV: Efficient KV Cache Retrieval for Long Input-Output Sequences
18. ICLR 2026MILCO: Learned Sparse Retrieval Across Languages via a Multilingual Connector
19. ICLR 2026Mixture-of-Experts Can Surpass Dense LLMs Under Strictly Equal Resource
20. ICLR 2026On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval
21. ICLR 2026Pisces: Cryptography-based Private Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Dual-Path Retrieval
22. ICLR 2026RAEE: A Robust Retrieval-Augmented Early Exit Framework for Efficient Inference
23. ICLR 2026Revela: Dense Retriever Learning via Language Modeling
24. ICLR 2026Seq vs Seq: An Open Suite of Paired Encoders and Decoders
25. ICLR 2026SPRINT: Sparse-Dense Residual Fusion for Efficient Diffusion Transformers
26. ICLR 2026Tools are under-documented: Simple Document Expansion Boosts Tool Retrieval
27. ICLR 2025Beyond Content Relevance: Evaluating Instruction Following in Retrieval Models
28. ICLR 2025Contextual Document Embeddings
29. ICLR 2025CR2PQ: Continuous Relative Rotary Positional Query for Dense Visual Representation Learning
30. ICLR 2025Grounding by Trying: LLMs with Reinforcement Learning-Enhanced Retrieval
31. ICLR 2025Making Transformer Decoders Better Differentiable Indexers
32. ICLR 2025Memory Efficient Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions
33. ICLR 2025MLLM as Retriever: Interactively Learning Multimodal Retrieval for Embodied Agents
34. ICLR 2025NUDGE: Lightweight Non-Parametric Fine-Tuning of Embeddings for Retrieval
35. ICLR 2025ReNovo: Retrieval-Based \emph{De Novo} Mass Spectrometry Peptide Sequencing
36. ICLR 2025Retrieval Head Mechanistically Explains Long-Context Factuality
37. ICLR 2025The Journey Matters: Average Parameter Count over Pre-training Unifies Sparse and Dense Scaling Laws
38. ICLR 2025Youku Dense Caption: A Large-scale Chinese Video Dense Caption Dataset and Benchmarks
39. ICLR 2024A Fast and Provable Algorithm for Sparse Phase Retrieval
40. ICLR 2024Adaptive Retrieval and Scalable Indexing for k-NN Search with Cross-Encoders
41. ICLR 2024BTR: Binary Token Representations for Efficient Retrieval Augmented Language Models
42. ICLR 2024Diffusion Model for Dense Matching
43. ICLR 2024Dual-Encoders for Extreme Multi-label Classification
44. ICLR 2024Learning to Act from Actionless Videos through Dense Correspondences
45. ICLR 2024Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context
46. ICLR 2024Mind Your Augmentation: The Key to Decoupling Dense Self-Supervised Learning
47. ICLR 2024Neural Architecture Retrieval
48. ICLR 2024RA-DIT: Retrieval-Augmented Dual Instruction Tuning
49. ICLR 2024RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval
50. ICLR 2024Retrieval meets Long Context Large Language Models

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.