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

278 papers, page 4 of 6

151. ICML 2026Probabilistic Bisection Algorithm Provably Achieves Exponential Convergence
152. ICML 2026Proximal-IMH: Proximal Posterior Proposals for Independent Metropolis–Hastings with Approximate Operators
153. ICML 2026Recursive Monte-Carlo Tree Search
154. ICML 2026RefChess: Training-Free Contextual Search for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation
155. ICML 2026Reflective Hamiltonian Monte Carlo: Mixing Analysis and Application to Sampling on Stiefel Manifold
156. ICML 2026Reinforced Sequential Monte Carlo for Amortised Sampling
157. ICML 2026RL4RLA: Teaching ML to Discover Randomized Linear Algebra Algorithms Through Curriculum Design and Graph-Based Search
158. ICML 2026SCHUR-A*: Layer-wise Optimal Expert Pruning for MoEs via Schur-Complement Guided A* Search
159. ICML 2026Score-Repellent Monte Carlo: Toward Efficient Non-Markovian Sampler with Constant Memory in General State Spaces
160. ICML 2026Search or Accelerate: Confidence-Switched Position Beam Search for Diffusion Language Models
161. ICML 2026Search Space Synthesis for Parametric Functions
162. ICML 2026Self-Prophetic Decoding to Unlock Visual Search in LVLMs
163. ICML 2026Simple Approximation and Derivative Free Inference-Time Scaling for Diffusion Models via Sequential Monte Carlo on Path Measures
164. ICML 2026Sonar-TS: Search-Then-Verify Natural Language Querying for Time Series Databases
165. ICML 2026Stationary MMD Points
166. ICML 2026Structure-Induced Information for Rerooting Levin Tree Search
167. ICML 2026Structured Progressive Knowledge Activation for LLM-Driven Neural Architecture Search
168. ICML 2026SURGE: Approximation and Training Free Particle Filter for Diffusion Surrogate
169. ICML 2026SVL: Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning as Survival Learning
170. ICML 2026Test-Time Graph Search for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
171. ICML 2026TFTF: Training-Free Targeted Flow for Conditional Sampling
172. ICML 2026The (Marginal) Value of a Search Ad: An Online Causal Framework for Repeated Second-price Auctions
173. ICML 2026The Surprising Difficulty of Search in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
174. ICML 2026The Trojan Knowledge: Bypassing Commercial LLM Guardrails via Harmless Prompt Weaving and Adaptive Tree Search
175. ICML 2026Thinned Mean Field Langevin Dynamics
176. ICML 2026Tree-Structured Orthonormal Decomposition of the Aitchison Simplex
177. ICML 2026Twice Sequential Monte Carlo for Tree Search
178. ICML 2026UnMaskFork: Test-Time Scaling for Masked Diffusion via Deterministic Action Branching
179. ICML 2026Variance Driven Exploration: A Provable and Efficient Methodology for Pure Exploration in Highly Stochastic Environments
180. NeurIPS 2026A Control-Theoretic Approximation to Predictive Coding Dynamics
181. NeurIPS 2026A Regularization-Based Approach to Public Belief State Search for Adversarial Games
182. NeurIPS 2026A Revisit of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Efficiency on Bayesian Neural Networks
183. NeurIPS 2026AdaTree: Serving-Aware Adaptive Tree Construction for Speculative Decoding
184. NeurIPS 2026Agentic Neural Architecture Search
185. NeurIPS 2026An Efficient Algorithm for Thresholding Monte Carlo Tree Search
186. NeurIPS 2026Beyond Expected Values: Risk-Sensitive Planning with Distributional Monte-Carlo Tree Search
187. NeurIPS 2026Beyond Imputation: Mask-Adaptive Conformal Prediction via Tree Embeddings on General Missing Data Mechanisms
188. NeurIPS 2026Breadcrumbing Search Agents: Per-Turn Scheming Over Long-Horizon Trajectories
189. NeurIPS 2026Breaking the $\sqrt{d}$ Communication Barrier in Federated Sampling with Adaptive Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
190. NeurIPS 2026BridgeTwist: Twisting Schrödinger Bridges for Training-Free Conditional Sampling
191. NeurIPS 2026Calibrated Safe Policy Improvement for Continuous Offline Reinforcement Learning
192. NeurIPS 2026CARD: Internalizing Expert Critique into Reinforcement Learning for Deep Search
193. NeurIPS 2026Cluster with Auctions for Vector Search
194. NeurIPS 2026COCOTree: A Dataset and Benchmark for Open Tree-Structured Visual Decomposition
195. NeurIPS 2026Conditioning Gaussian Processes on Almost Anything
196. NeurIPS 2026Contour Monte Carlo: Sampling via Energy Level Sets
197. NeurIPS 2026Corrected Integrated Laplace Approximation for Bayesian Inference in Latent Gaussian Models
198. NeurIPS 2026DASS: A Solver-Agnostic Dynamic Auxiliary Search Strategy for Symbolic Regression
199. NeurIPS 2026Decoupling Exploration and Policy Optimization: Uncertainty Guided Tree Search for Hard Exploration
200. NeurIPS 2026Differentiable Systematic Resampling for Variational Sequential Monte Carlo

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.