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

302 papers, page 6 of 7

251. NeurIPS 2024The Poisson Midpoint Method for Langevin Dynamics: Provably Efficient Discretization for Diffusion Models
252. NeurIPS 2024The tree autoencoder model, with application to hierarchical data visualization
253. NeurIPS 2024Thought of Search: Planning with Language Models Through The Lens of Efficiency
254. NeurIPS 2024Toward Self-Improvement of LLMs via Imagination, Searching, and Criticizing
255. NeurIPS 2024TreeVI: Reparameterizable Tree-structured Variational Inference for Instance-level Correlation Capturing
256. NeurIPS 2024Weak-to-Strong Search: Align Large Language Models via Searching over Small Language Models
257. NeurIPS 2024When LLM Meets DRL: Advancing Jailbreaking Efficiency via DRL-guided Search
258. NeurIPS 2024Zeroth-Order Sampling Methods for Non-Log-Concave Distributions: Alleviating Metastability by Denoising Diffusion
259. NeurIPS 2023A Heavy-Tailed Algebra for Probabilistic Programming
260. NeurIPS 2023Accelerating Monte Carlo Tree Search with Probability Tree State Abstraction
261. NeurIPS 2023Adaptive SGD with Polyak stepsize and Line-search: Robust Convergence and Variance Reduction
262. NeurIPS 2023An Efficient and Robust Framework for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with Attribute Constraint
263. NeurIPS 2023ANTN: Bridging Autoregressive Neural Networks and Tensor Networks for Quantum Many-Body Simulation
264. NeurIPS 2023Contextual Stochastic Bilevel Optimization
265. NeurIPS 2023DESSERT: An Efficient Algorithm for Vector Set Search with Vector Set Queries
266. NeurIPS 2023Don't be so Monotone: Relaxing Stochastic Line Search in Over-Parameterized Models
267. NeurIPS 2023EMBERSim: A Large-Scale Databank for Boosting Similarity Search in Malware Analysis
268. NeurIPS 2023Empowering Convolutional Neural Nets with MetaSin Activation
269. NeurIPS 2023Energy-Based Sliced Wasserstein Distance
270. NeurIPS 2023FAST: a Fused and Accurate Shrinkage Tree for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Estimation
271. NeurIPS 2023Fitting trees to $\ell_1$-hyperbolic distances
272. NeurIPS 2023Game Solving with Online Fine-Tuning
273. NeurIPS 2023Generalized Weighted Path Consistency for Mastering Atari Games
274. NeurIPS 2023Hierarchical clustering with dot products recovers hidden tree structure
275. NeurIPS 2023History Filtering in Imperfect Information Games: Algorithms and Complexity
276. NeurIPS 2023Inferring the Future by Imagining the Past
277. NeurIPS 2023Kernel Stein Discrepancy thinning: a theoretical perspective of pathologies and a practical fix with regularization
278. NeurIPS 2023Knowledge Distillation for High Dimensional Search Index
279. NeurIPS 2023LambdaBeam: Neural Program Search with Higher-Order Functions and Lambdas
280. NeurIPS 2023Langevin Quasi-Monte Carlo
281. NeurIPS 2023Learning to Search Feasible and Infeasible Regions of Routing Problems with Flexible Neural k-Opt
282. NeurIPS 2023LightZero: A Unified Benchmark for Monte Carlo Tree Search in General Sequential Decision Scenarios
283. NeurIPS 2023Linear Time Algorithms for k-means with Multi-Swap Local Search
284. NeurIPS 2023Locality Sensitive Hashing in Fourier Frequency Domain For Soft Set Containment Search
285. NeurIPS 2023Monte Carlo Tree Search with Boltzmann Exploration
286. NeurIPS 2023NAS-X: Neural Adaptive Smoothing via Twisting
287. NeurIPS 2023NuTrea: Neural Tree Search for Context-guided Multi-hop KGQA
288. NeurIPS 2023POMDP Planning for Object Search in Partially Unknown Environment
289. NeurIPS 2023Prefix-Tree Decoding for Predicting Mass Spectra from Molecules
290. NeurIPS 2023Quasi-Monte Carlo Graph Random Features
291. NeurIPS 2023Random Cuts are Optimal for Explainable k-Medians
292. NeurIPS 2023SAME: Uncovering GNN Black Box with Structure-aware Shapley-based Multipiece Explanations
293. NeurIPS 2023Sampling from Structured Log-Concave Distributions via a Soft-Threshold Dikin Walk
294. NeurIPS 2023SOAR: Improved Indexing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search
295. NeurIPS 2023Thinker: Learning to Plan and Act
296. NeurIPS 2023Towards Data-Agnostic Pruning At Initialization: What Makes a Good Sparse Mask?
297. NeurIPS 2023Tree-Rings Watermarks: Invisible Fingerprints for Diffusion Images
298. NeurIPS 2023Truncating Trajectories in Monte Carlo Policy Evaluation: an Adaptive Approach
299. NeurIPS 2023Unbiased constrained sampling with Self-Concordant Barrier Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
300. NeurIPS 2023Variational Monte Carlo on a Budget — Fine-tuning pre-trained Neural Wavefunctions

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.