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 6 of 6

251. NeurIPS 2026SEEK-VAU: Towards Evidence-Faithful Video Anomaly Understanding via Agentic Search
252. NeurIPS 2026Semantic Search over 9 Million Mathematical Theorems
253. NeurIPS 2026SGEvolve: Semantic Gradient Guidance for LLM-Driven Evolutionary Search
254. NeurIPS 2026SMART: Scalable Multi-Agent Role-conditioned Teaming via LLM-free Tree Search
255. NeurIPS 2026Smoothed Score Queries and the Complexity of Sampling
256. NeurIPS 2026SpecBlock: Block-Iterative Speculative Decoding with Dynamic Tree Drafting
257. NeurIPS 2026SpecForge: Agent-Oriented Code Documentation Optimization via Multi-Frontier Tree Search
258. NeurIPS 2026Stabilizing RL+Search for Imperfect-Information Extensive-Form Games
259. NeurIPS 2026StepCAD: Mesh-to-CAD Code Generation via LLM Policy and Geometry-Guided Search
260. NeurIPS 2026Stochastic Optimization with Random Search
261. NeurIPS 2026Test Time Search Requires Training for Diversity
262. NeurIPS 2026The Query Complexity of Local Search in Rounds on General Graphs
263. NeurIPS 2026Transformers Provably Learn Graph Search: Training Dynamics and the Exponential Power of Depth
264. NeurIPS 2026Tree Rotary Positional Encoding for Extreme Length Extrapolation from Scratch
265. NeurIPS 2026Tree Search With Predictions
266. NeurIPS 2026Tree Training: Efficient LLM Training on Tree-Structured Trajectories
267. NeurIPS 2026Tree-Ensemble Repair through Constrained Optimization
268. NeurIPS 2026Tree-Guided Identify Then Exploit: A Unified Framework of Pure Exploration and Regret Minimization for Dueling Bandits
269. NeurIPS 2026Tree-Sliced Orlicz Integral Probability Metric
270. NeurIPS 2026Tree-Structured Synergy of Large Language Models and Bayesian Optimization for Efficient CASH
271. NeurIPS 2026TreeWalker: Partial Evaluation for Grouped Tree-Ensemble Inference
272. NeurIPS 2026Trust the Direction, Search the Step: Zero-and-First-Order Methods for LLM Fine-Tuning
273. NeurIPS 2026TUBE: Tangent Upper Bound on Evidence for Discrete Diffusion Language Models
274. NeurIPS 2026Two-Fidelity Best-Action Identification for Stochastic Minimax Tree
275. NeurIPS 2026Understanding Randomization in Greedy Model Search
276. NeurIPS 2026Variance Reduction for Expectations with Diffusion Teachers
277. NeurIPS 2026Variational Inference via Entropic Transport Descent
278. NeurIPS 2026VisInteract: Towards Dynamic Interactive Text-to-Visualization under Imperfect Queries

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.