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

115 papers, page 1 of 3

1. NeurIPS 2026AC/DC on a Budget -- Alternating Sparse Phases
2. NeurIPS 2026Adversarial Corpus Selection to Attack Subgraph Matching based Graph Retrieval
3. NeurIPS 2026Beyond RAG for Agent Memory: Retrieval by Decoupling and Aggregation
4. NeurIPS 2026Beyond Semantic Similarity: Rethinking Retrieval for Agentic Search via Direct Corpus Interaction
5. NeurIPS 2026Beyond Spatial and Temporal Priors: A Generalizable Approach for Dense Correspondence Matching
6. NeurIPS 2026Can Language Models Actually Retrieve In-Context? Drowning in Documents at Million Token Scale
7. NeurIPS 2026Causal-VLM: Dense Causal Captioning in Videos
8. NeurIPS 2026Chain of Dual Structures in Transformer Attention
9. NeurIPS 2026Constraint Retrieval Is Not Constraint Enforcement in Large Language Models
10. NeurIPS 2026Contrastive Retrieval Heads for Improved Attention-Based Reranking
11. NeurIPS 2026CyberDualEval: Measuring Dual-Use Cyber Risks in Frontier Language Models
12. NeurIPS 2026Dense Cross-Tokenizer Distillation via Semantic Optimal Local Alignment
13. NeurIPS 2026Dual-Rate Diffusion: Accelerating diffusion models with an interleaved heavy-light network
14. NeurIPS 2026FlashSSM-3D: A Distilled State Space Model for Lightning-Fast Dense 3D Reconstruction
15. NeurIPS 2026Group of Skills: Group-Structured Skill Retrieval for Agent Skill Libraries
16. NeurIPS 2026Half-Truths Break Similarity-Based Retrieval
17. NeurIPS 2026How Much Evidence Should Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning Use Under Distribution Shift?
18. NeurIPS 2026Hyperparameter Transfer for Dense Associative Memories
19. NeurIPS 2026Is Dimensionality a Barrier for Retrieval Models?
20. NeurIPS 2026Latent Abstraction for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
21. NeurIPS 2026LeanSearch v2: Global Premise Retrieval for Lean 4 Theorem Proving
22. NeurIPS 2026Learning Semantic Consistency for Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception
23. NeurIPS 2026Logit-Contribution Scoring Identifies Non-Literal Retrieval Heads
24. NeurIPS 2026LogSTOP: Temporal Scores over Prediction Sequences for Matching and Retrieval
25. NeurIPS 2026Memory Retrieval for Changing Preferences
26. NeurIPS 2026MLAIRE: Multilingual Language-Aware Information Retrieval Evaluation Protocol
27. NeurIPS 2026Neural Networks With Dense Weights Are Not Universal Approximators
28. NeurIPS 2026On objective mismatch in molecular retrieval from tandem mass spectrometry
29. NeurIPS 2026Optimistic Dual Averaging Unifies Modern Optimizers
30. NeurIPS 2026PANDA: Prior-guided Attentional Dual-path Architecture
31. NeurIPS 2026Phase Kernel Lifts Capacity of Dense Associative Memory
32. NeurIPS 2026PixelDense: Dense Prediction as Representation Alignment for Pixel Diffusion
33. NeurIPS 2026Point Clustering Encoders
34. NeurIPS 2026Precision As You Need: Stochastic Computing Is a Dense Adaptive Quantizer
35. NeurIPS 2026Process-conditioned Pretraining with Topographic Spatial Retrieval for Large EEG Models
36. NeurIPS 2026ProSearch: Benchmarking Multi-Constraint Protocol Retrieval in Experimental Science
37. NeurIPS 2026QB-Highlights: Quality-Guided Budgeted Highlight Detection in Videos with Dense Query-Relevant Moments
38. NeurIPS 2026RAGBoost: Robust Tabular Learning via Retrieval-Augmented and Ancillary-Guided Gradient Boosting
39. NeurIPS 2026Retrieval Over Training: Similarity search-based Model Selection for Time Series Anomaly Detection
40. NeurIPS 2026Retrieval-Centric Deep Learning in Growing Nonparametric Neural Networks
41. NeurIPS 2026Sinkhorn Based Associative Memory Retrieval Using Spherical Hellinger Kantorovich Dynamics
42. NeurIPS 2026TIGER-FG: Text-Guided Implicit Fine-Grained Grounding for E-commerce Retrieval
43. NeurIPS 2026Track4D: Representing Dense 3D Tracking for Video Diffusion Models
44. NeurIPS 2026TrackCraft3R: Repurposing Video Diffusion Transformers for Dense 3D Tracking
45. NeurIPS 2026TRIM: A Theory of Retrieval with Incremental Memory -- Defect, Benefit, and Critical Horizon
46. NeurIPS 2026VecDBLens: A Modular Framework for Diagnosing Vector Databases Retrieval Pipelines
47. NeurIPS 2026VidVec: Unlocking Video MLLM Embeddings for Video-Text Retrieval
48. NeurIPS 2026When Does Graph Retrieval Become Answer-Supporting Evidence? A Diagnostic Audit of GraphRAG
49. NeurIPS 2026When to Trust Memory: Retrieval-Guided Probabilistic Spatiotemporal Forecasting under Distribution Shift
50. NeurIPS 2026Where Root Cause Analysis Fails: A Retrieval-Reranking Decomposition

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.