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 5 of 6

201. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion Path Samplers via Sequential Monte Carlo
202. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion Tree Search for Inference Time Adaptation of Material Foundation Models
203. NeurIPS 2026Discovering Mechanistic Models of Neural Activity: System Identification in an in Silico Zebrafish
204. NeurIPS 2026Distributionally Robust Algorithmic Recourse for Tree Ensembles
205. NeurIPS 2026Ensembling Language Models with Sequential Monte Carlo
206. NeurIPS 2026Escaping Reasoning Basins: Basin-Aware Search for Inference-Time LLM Reasoning
207. NeurIPS 2026ESS-Flow: training-free guidance as Bayesian inference in source space
208. NeurIPS 2026Estimating the expected output of wide random MLPs more efficiently than sampling
209. NeurIPS 2026Exploring Starts Are Not Enough: Counterexamples and a Fix for Monte Carlo Exploring Starts
210. NeurIPS 2026Extracting Search Trees from LLM Reasoning Traces Reveals Myopic Planning
211. NeurIPS 2026Fast Accurate Quantum Monte Carlo without Metropolis Adjustment
212. NeurIPS 2026Ferrogen: Generative Pipeline for Guided Search of Novel Ferroelectric Material for Logic and Memory
213. NeurIPS 2026Finetuning with Sampling: Make SFT Generalize, Not Forget
214. NeurIPS 2026FML-bench: A Controlled Study of AI Research Agent Strategies from the Perspective of Search Dynamics
215. NeurIPS 2026From Ideas to Code: Tree-structured Policy Optimization for Automated Algorithm Design with LLMs
216. NeurIPS 2026Geometry-Aware Score-Repellent Monte Carlo
217. NeurIPS 2026Graph-Based Stochastic-Power-UCT: Monte-Carlo Graph Search with Power Mean Estimation
218. NeurIPS 2026Heuresis: Evaluating Search Strategies for Autonomous Machine Learning Research Agents
219. NeurIPS 2026Hierarchical Semantic Tree Anchoring for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning
220. NeurIPS 2026HierFlow: Hierarchical Coupled Dual-Space Search for Automatic Agentic Workflow Generation
221. NeurIPS 2026InterLV-Search: Benchmarking Interleaved Multimodal Agentic Search
222. NeurIPS 2026KNN Implementation Details Can Dramatically Change Performance: An Example from Cover Trees
223. NeurIPS 2026Learning to Search, Searching to Learn: A Closed-Loop Framework for Large-Scale Vehicle Routing
224. NeurIPS 2026Likelihood-free inference of phylogenetic tree posterior distributions
225. NeurIPS 2026LogT: Logically Think with Images for Visual Search
226. NeurIPS 2026MC^2: Monte Carlo Correction for Fast Elliptic PDE Solving
227. NeurIPS 2026MCGI: Manifold-Consistent Graph Indexing for Billion-Scale Disk-Resident Vector Search
228. NeurIPS 2026Minimax Rates and Spectral Distillation for Tree Ensembles
229. NeurIPS 2026Multilevel and Sequential Monte Carlo for Training-Free Diffusion Guidance
230. NeurIPS 2026Multistage Defer Trees for Hybrid Interpretability: If at First You Can't Succeed, Tree Again
231. NeurIPS 2026On Worst-Case Guarantees for Graph-Based Nearest-Neighbor Search
232. NeurIPS 2026OneSearch-V2: The Latent Reasoning Enhanced Self-distillation Generative Search Framework
233. NeurIPS 2026OpenSearch-VL: An Open Recipe for Frontier Multimodal Search Agents
234. NeurIPS 2026Order-Marginalized Scoring for Masked Diffusion Models
235. NeurIPS 2026Ordinary Least Squares as an Attention Mechanism
236. NeurIPS 2026PACEvolve++: Improving Test-time Learning for Evolutionary Search Agents
237. NeurIPS 2026PE-SHAP: Causally Interpretable Path-Wise Shapley Explanations
238. NeurIPS 2026PiCA: Pivot-Based Credit Assignment For Search Agentic Reinforcement Learning
239. NeurIPS 2026QUEST: Q-Learning for Uncertainty-Guided Efficient Search Teams
240. NeurIPS 2026Random-Projection Tree Stein Variational Gradient Descent
241. NeurIPS 2026Recovering the Apresjan Hierarchy Using Linkage-Based Clustering
242. NeurIPS 2026Regularized Large Neighborhood Search
243. NeurIPS 2026Resolving Time-Frequency Ridge Crossings via Frequency-Rate Lifting
244. NeurIPS 2026Retriever-Free Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning via Corpus-Traversing MCTS
245. NeurIPS 2026Robust Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search for Any Dataset
246. NeurIPS 2026Runtime Analysis of Cartesian Genetic Programming on MAX: A Proven Exponential Speedup
247. NeurIPS 2026ScaleBITS: Scalable Bitwidth Search for Hardware-Aligned Mixed-Precision LLMs
248. NeurIPS 2026SCOUT: Planning under Occlusion via Object-Centric World Model Rollouts
249. NeurIPS 2026SD-Search: Hindsight Self-Distillation for Search-Augmented Reasoning
250. NeurIPS 2026Search at the Cost of Sampling: Nearly-Instant Latent Space Bayesian Optimization

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.