Monte Carlo Tree Search papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• Monte Carlo Tree Search went from 115 papers in 2023 to 278 in 2026, roughly 2.4x in three years.
• NeurIPS publishes the most Monte Carlo Tree Search work: 302 papers from 2023 to 2026, 39% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with AI Agents: papers tagged with both rose from 1 in 2023 to 26 in 2026.
• Among the 5 topics under Games and Planning, it ranks #3 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, Classical Planning, is up 3.3x versus 2.4x here.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026A Regularization-Based Approach to Public Belief State Search for Adversarial Games
• ICML 2026$\alpha$-PFN: Fast Entropy Search via In-Context Learning
• ICLR 2026Better Learning-Augmented Spanning Tree Algorithms via Metric Forest Completion
• CVPR 2026DRS-GUI Dynamic Region Search for Training-Free GUI Grounding
• NeurIPS 2025A Single-Swap Local Search Algorithm for k-Means of Lines
• ICML 2025Accelerating Large Language Model Reasoning via Speculative Search
• ICLR 2025Analysis of Linear Mode Connectivity via Permutation-Based Weight Matching: With Insights into Other Permutation Search Methods
• CVPR 2025DyFo: A Training-Free Dynamic Focus Visual Search for Enhancing LMMs in Fine-Grained Visual Understanding
• NeurIPS 2024Speculative Monte-Carlo Tree Search
• ICML 2024Accelerated Speculative Sampling Based on Tree Monte Carlo
• ICLR 2024Chain of Log-Concave Markov Chains
• CVPR 2024Hierarchical Correlation Clustering and Tree Preserving Embedding
• NeurIPS 2023Accelerating Monte Carlo Tree Search with Probability Tree State Abstraction
• ICML 2023A new near-linear time algorithm for k-nearest neighbor search using a compressed cover tree
• ICLR 2023A GNN-Guided Predict-and-Search Framework for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming
• CVPR 2023Bridging Search Region Interaction With Template for RGB-T Tracking
• NeurIPS 2026A Revisit of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Efficiency on Bayesian Neural Networks
• ICML 2026A Bi-metric Framework for Efficient Nearest Neighbor Search
• ICLR 2026Dr.LLM: Dynamic Layer Routing in LLMs
• CVPR 2026UAST Unified Active Search and Tracking for Arbitrary Targets with

All Monte Carlo Tree Search papers

236 papers, page 3 of 5

101. ICML 2025Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion for System 2 Planning
102. ICML 2025Monte Carlo Tree Search for Comprehensive Exploration in LLM-Based Automatic Heuristic Design
103. ICML 2025Monte-Carlo Tree Search with Uncertainty Propagation via Optimal Transport
104. ICML 2025Near-Optimal Decision Trees in a SPLIT Second
105. ICML 2025Nested Expectations with Kernel Quadrature
106. ICML 2025NETS: A Non-equilibrium Transport Sampler
107. ICML 2025Neural Event-Triggered Control with Optimal Scheduling
108. ICML 2025Neural Genetic Search in Discrete Spaces
109. ICML 2025Neural Guided Diffusion Bridges
110. ICML 2025Non-asymptotic Error Bounds in $\mathcal{W}_2$-Distance with Sqrt(d) Dimension Dependence and First Order Convergence for Langevin Monte Carlo beyond Log-Concavity
111. ICML 2025On the Power of Learning-Augmented Search Trees
112. ICML 2025Online Robust Reinforcement Learning Through Monte-Carlo Planning
113. ICML 2025Optimal Decision Tree Pruning Revisited: Algorithms and Complexity
114. ICML 2025Pareto-Optimality, Smoothness, and Stochasticity in Learning-Augmented One-Max-Search
115. ICML 2025Policy Gradient with Tree Expansion
116. ICML 2025Power Mean Estimation in Stochastic Continuous Monte-Carlo Tree Search
117. ICML 2025Progressive Tempering Sampler with Diffusion
118. ICML 2025Protriever: End-to-End Differentiable Protein Homology Search for Fitness Prediction
119. ICML 2025QLASS: Boosting Language Agent Inference via Q-Guided Stepwise Search
120. ICML 2025Re-ranking Reasoning Context with Tree Search Makes Large Vision-Language Models Stronger
121. ICML 2025Revisiting Non-Acyclic GFlowNets in Discrete Environments
122. ICML 2025Runtime Analysis of Evolutionary NAS for Multiclass Classification
123. ICML 2025RZ-NAS: Enhancing LLM-guided Neural Architecture Search via Reflective Zero-Cost Strategy
124. ICML 2025Sampling Binary Data by Denoising through Score Functions
125. ICML 2025Sampling from Binary Quadratic Distributions via Stochastic Localization
126. ICML 2025Secant Line Search for Frank-Wolfe Algorithms
127. ICML 2025Solving Linear-Gaussian Bayesian Inverse Problems with Decoupled Diffusion Sequential Monte Carlo
128. ICML 2025Sort Before You Prune: Improved Worst-Case Guarantees of the DiskANN Family of Graphs
129. ICML 2025Subgoal-Guided Policy Heuristic Search with Learned Subgoals
130. ICML 2025The Polynomial Stein Discrepancy for Assessing Moment Convergence
131. ICML 2025Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance with Nonlinear Projection
132. ICML 2025Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance: A Geometric Perspective
133. ICML 2025Trust-Region Twisted Policy Improvement
134. ICML 2025Tuning Sequential Monte Carlo Samplers via Greedy Incremental Divergence Minimization
135. ICML 2025UltraTWD: Optimizing Ultrametric Trees for Tree-Wasserstein Distance
136. ICML 2025Variational Phylogenetic Inference with Products over Bipartitions
137. NeurIPS 2025A Single-Swap Local Search Algorithm for k-Means of Lines
138. NeurIPS 2025A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skilled SAILOR: Robust Imitation via Learning to Search
139. NeurIPS 2025Adaptive Distraction: Probing LLM Contextual Robustness with Automated Tree Search
140. NeurIPS 2025AI Research Agents for Machine Learning: Search, Exploration, and Generalization in MLE-bench
141. NeurIPS 2025AutoDiscovery: Open-ended Scientific Discovery via Bayesian Surprise
142. NeurIPS 2025Better Estimation of the Kullback--Leibler Divergence Between Language Models
143. NeurIPS 2025Bridging Arbitrary and Tree Metrics via Differentiable Gromov Hyperbolicity
144. NeurIPS 2025Bringing SAM to new heights: leveraging elevation data for tree crown segmentation from drone imagery
145. NeurIPS 2025ComfyMind: Toward General-Purpose Generation via Tree-Based Planning and Reactive Feedback
146. NeurIPS 2025Compositional Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion for Extendable Planning
147. NeurIPS 2025Constrained Sampling for Language Models Should Be Easy: An MCMC Perspective
148. NeurIPS 2025Deep Tree Tensor Networks
149. NeurIPS 2025Differentiable Decision Tree via "ReLU+Argmin" Reformulation
150. NeurIPS 2025Diffusion Tree Sampling: Scalable inference‑time alignment of diffusion models

FAQ

How many Monte Carlo Tree Search papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?

773 in total: 115 in 2023, 144 in 2024, 236 in 2025, 278 in 2026.

How many Monte Carlo Tree Search papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 99 Monte Carlo Tree Search papers, versus 100 the year before.

How many Monte Carlo Tree Search papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 60 Monte Carlo Tree Search papers, versus 49 the year before.

How many Monte Carlo Tree Search papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 105 Monte Carlo Tree Search papers, versus 75 the year before.

How many Monte Carlo Tree Search papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 14 Monte Carlo Tree Search papers, versus 12 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most Monte Carlo Tree Search papers?

NeurIPS, with 302 papers from 2023 to 2026.