Foundation Model Adaptation papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• Foundation Model Adaptation went from 159 papers in 2023 to 602 in 2026, roughly 3.8x in three years.
• NeurIPS publishes the most Foundation Model Adaptation work: 531 papers from 2023 to 2026, 36% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with Deep learning · foundation models: papers tagged with both rose from 7 in 2023 to 66 in 2026.
• Among the 5 topics under Meta-Learning and Transfer, it ranks #1 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, Continual Learning, is up 1.7x versus 3.8x here.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026(Mis)generalization of Helpful-Only Fine-Tuning
• ICML 2026Active Learning with Foundation Model Priors: Efficient Learning under Class Imbalance
• ICLR 2026Benchmarking ECG Foundational Models: A Reality Check Across Clinical Tasks
• CVPR 2026CD-Buffer Complementary Dual-Buffer Framework for Test-Time Adaptation in Adverse Weather
• NeurIPS 2025An Investigation of Memorization Risk in Healthcare Foundation Models
• ICML 2025A Bayesian Model Selection Criterion for Selecting Pretraining Checkpoints
• ICLR 2025Better autoregressive regression with LLMs via regression-aware fine-tuning
• CVPR 20255%>100%: Breaking Performance Shackles of Full Fine-Tuning on Visual Recognition Tasks
• NeurIPS 2024Instruction Tuning Large Language Models to Understand Electronic Health Records
• ICML 2024By Tying Embeddings You Are Assuming the Distributional Hypothesis
• ICLR 2024A Hard-to-Beat Baseline for Training-free CLIP-based Adaptation
• CVPR 2024DePT: Decoupled Prompt Tuning
• NeurIPS 2023A Fast and Accurate Estimator for Large Scale Linear Model via Data Averaging
• ICML 2023Are Neurons Actually Collapsed? On the Fine-Grained Structure in Neural Representations
• ICLR 2023A Closer Look at Model Adaptation using Feature Distortion and Simplicity Bias
• CVPR 2023A-La-Carte Prompt Tuning (APT): Combining Distinct Data via Composable Prompting
• NeurIPS 2026A Graph Foundation Model for Unified Clustering
• ICML 2026AdaMeZO: Adam-style Zeroth-Order Optimizer for LLM Fine-tuning Without Maintaining the Moments
• ICLR 2026Bridging Radiology and Pathology Foundation Models via Concept-Based Multimodal Co-Adaptation
• CVPR 2026Fed-ADE Adaptive Learning Rate for Federated Post-adaptation under Distribution Shift

All Foundation Model Adaptation papers

602 papers, page 10 of 13

451. NeurIPS 2026Coarse-to-Fine 3D MRI Reconstruction via Resolution-Agnostic Neural Operators
452. NeurIPS 2026Communication-Efficient Personalized Adaptation via Federated-Local Model Merging
453. NeurIPS 2026Compact SO(3) Equivariant Atomistic Foundation Models via Structural Pruning
454. NeurIPS 2026Compute-Optimal Pretrain--Fine-tune in Ridge Gradient Flow
455. NeurIPS 2026CORA: Per-Slice Coherent Orthogonal Rotation for SVD-based Low-Rank Adaptation
456. NeurIPS 2026CORTEG: Foundation Models Enable Cross-Modality Representation Transfer from Scalp to Intracranial Brain Recordings
457. NeurIPS 2026CrafterDojo: A Suite of Foundation Models for Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents in Crafter
458. NeurIPS 2026DeepVoting: Learning and Improving Voting Rules with Fine-Tuning
459. NeurIPS 2026DEFT: Disentanglement-Enhanced Fine-Tuning for EEG Foundation Models
460. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion fine-tuning with Rewarded Moment Matching Distillation
461. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion Fine-Tuning: Iterative Refinement for Advanced Grounding with Diffusion Large Language Models
462. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion Meta-Prompting and Steering for Generalizable Foundation Model Adaptation
463. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion Tree Search for Inference Time Adaptation of Material Foundation Models
464. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning
465. NeurIPS 2026Disentangling Homophilic and Heterophilic Patterns for Multi-Domain Graph Foundation Models
466. NeurIPS 2026Distillation of Foundation Models for Time-dependent PDEs
467. NeurIPS 2026Do Pathology Foundation Models Encode Disease Progression? A Pseudotime Analysis of Visual Representations
468. NeurIPS 2026Dominant-Layer ZO: A Single Layer Dominates Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of LLMs
469. NeurIPS 2026DRIVE: Fine-tuning via Data Contribution- and Diversity-aware Weighting with Prior Regularization
470. NeurIPS 2026Dual-Pronged LoRA: Achieving Near-Zero Forgetting and High-Performance Adaptation for MLLMs
471. NeurIPS 2026EEG-X: Toward Device-Agnostic and Noise-Robust Foundation Models for EEG
472. NeurIPS 2026Efficient Collaborative LLM Fine-Tuning over Heterogeneous Mobile Devices via Many Backbones to One Side-Network Tuning
473. NeurIPS 2026Efficient LLM Adaptation with Forward-Only Passes
474. NeurIPS 2026Efficiently Aligning Draft Models via Parameter- and Data-Efficient Adaptation
475. NeurIPS 2026Embedding Foundation Model Predictions in Discrete-Choice Models with Structural Guarantees
476. NeurIPS 2026Emergent Biological Capabilities in a Foundation Model for Molecular Interactions
477. NeurIPS 2026Enhancing Gaze Reasoning in Vision Foundation Models for Gaze Following
478. NeurIPS 2026ESSAM: A Novel Competitive Evolution Strategies Approach to Reinforcement Learning for Memory Efficient LLMs Fine-Tuning
479. NeurIPS 2026Estimating and Orthogonalizing Unknown Pre-training Gradients for Continual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models
480. NeurIPS 2026Evaluating Uncertainty Calibration in Probabilistic Time Series Foundation Models
481. NeurIPS 2026Evolution Fine-Tuning: Learning to Discover Across 371 Optimization Tasks
482. NeurIPS 2026Exploiting Fine-Tuning Structures to Improve Adversarial Transferability on Downstream SAM
483. NeurIPS 2026Extending Pretrained 10-Second ECG Foundation Models to Longer Horizons
484. NeurIPS 2026FedLoVA: Value-Only Aggregation for Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
485. NeurIPS 2026FedReCall: Recalling Client-Specific Directions in Federated LoRA Fine-tuning
486. NeurIPS 2026Fine-Grained Benchmark Generation for Comprehensive Evaluation of Foundation Models
487. NeurIPS 2026Fine-Tuning Improves Information Conveyance in Language Models
488. NeurIPS 2026Fine-tuning language encoding models on slow fMRI improves prediction for fast ECoG
489. NeurIPS 2026Fine-Tuning Language Models to Know What They Know
490. NeurIPS 2026FlatClip: Reusing Image Foundation Models for fMRI Representation Learning via Cortical Flatmaps
491. NeurIPS 2026FOCUS: Benchmarking Retinal Model Generalization from Foundation Vision Encoders to Multimodal LLMs
492. NeurIPS 2026FoldAbS: Repurposing the Protein Folding Model as a Foundation Encoder for Antibody Screening
493. NeurIPS 2026Follow the Mean: Reference-Guided Flow Matching
494. NeurIPS 2026Frank-LoRA: Federated Rank-Aware LoRA for Fine-Tuning Large Models
495. NeurIPS 2026From Next-Token to Next-Block: A Principled Adaptation Path for Diffusion LLMs
496. NeurIPS 2026Full Fine-Tuning Is Not the Problem: Why Adam Fails and SGD Succeeds in Few-Shot CLIP Adaptation
497. NeurIPS 2026GAPS: Gradient-Aware Adaptation-Gap Scoring for Time-Series Anomaly Detection with Foundation Models
498. NeurIPS 2026Glob3R: Global Structure-from-Motion with 3D Foundation Models
499. NeurIPS 2026GlucoFM: A Dual-Stream Foundation Model for Continuous Glucose Monitoring
500. NeurIPS 2026Guarding the Life Code: Preserving Membership Privacy in Genomic Foundation Models

FAQ

How many Foundation Model Adaptation papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?

1,492 in total: 159 in 2023, 270 in 2024, 461 in 2025, 602 in 2026.

How many Foundation Model Adaptation papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 182 Foundation Model Adaptation papers, versus 174 the year before.

How many Foundation Model Adaptation papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 187 Foundation Model Adaptation papers, versus 149 the year before.

How many Foundation Model Adaptation papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 142 Foundation Model Adaptation papers, versus 76 the year before.

How many Foundation Model Adaptation papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 91 Foundation Model Adaptation papers, versus 62 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most Foundation Model Adaptation papers?

NeurIPS, with 531 papers from 2023 to 2026.