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

773 papers, page 7 of 16

301. ICLR 2025Fast Summation of Radial Kernels via QMC Slicing
302. ICLR 2025Fast unsupervised ground metric learning with tree-Wasserstein distance
303. ICLR 2025From Isolated Conversations to Hierarchical Schemas: Dynamic Tree Memory Representation for LLMs
304. ICLR 2025Human-Aligned Chess With a Bit of Search
305. ICLR 2025Implicit Search via Discrete Diffusion: A Study on Chess
306. ICLR 2025In Search of Forgotten Domain Generalization
307. ICLR 2025KinFormer: Generalizable Dynamical Symbolic Regression for Catalytic Organic Reaction Kinetics
308. ICLR 2025Langevin Soft Actor-Critic: Efficient Exploration through Uncertainty-Driven Critic Learning
309. ICLR 2025Learning Evolving Tools for Large Language Models
310. ICLR 2025Learning to Select Nodes in Branch and Bound with Sufficient Tree Representation
311. ICLR 2025Learning-Augmented Search Data Structures
312. ICLR 2025Linear Mode Connectivity in Differentiable Tree Ensembles
313. ICLR 2025Linear Transformer Topological Masking with Graph Random Features
314. ICLR 2025Monte Carlo Planning with Large Language Model for Text-Based Game Agents
315. ICLR 2025Outlier Synthesis via Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for Out-of-Distribution Detection
316. ICLR 2025Pacmann: Efficient Private Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search
317. ICLR 2025Parameter Expanded Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo
318. ICLR 2025Procedural Synthesis of Synthesizable Molecules
319. ICLR 2025Provable Benefit of Annealed Langevin Monte Carlo for Non-log-concave Sampling
320. ICLR 2025Qinco2: Vector Compression and Search with Improved Implicit Neural Codebooks
321. ICLR 2025Rethinking Reward Model Evaluation: Are We Barking up the Wrong Tree?
322. ICLR 2025RuAG: Learned-rule-augmented Generation for Large Language Models
323. ICLR 2025Scalable Decision-Making in Stochastic Environments through Learned Temporal Abstraction
324. ICLR 2025Sequential Controlled Langevin Diffusions
325. ICLR 2025SFS: Smarter Code Space Search improves LLM Inference Scaling
326. ICLR 2025SPaR: Self-Play with Tree-Search Refinement to Improve Instruction-Following in Large Language Models
327. ICLR 2025Spherical Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance
328. ICLR 2025Step-by-Step Reasoning for Math Problems via Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo
329. ICLR 2025Strategist: Self-improvement of LLM Decision Making via Bi-Level Tree Search
330. ICLR 2025Strength Estimation and Human-Like Strength Adjustment in Games
331. ICLR 2025SWE-Search: Enhancing Software Agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search and Iterative Refinement
332. ICLR 2025Syntactic and Semantic Control of Large Language Models via Sequential Monte Carlo
333. ICLR 2025Synthesizing Programmatic Reinforcement Learning Policies with Large Language Model Guided Search
334. ICLR 2025Test-time Alignment of Diffusion Models without Reward Over-optimization
335. ICLR 2025Tree of Attributes Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models
336. ICLR 2025Unify ML4TSP: Drawing Methodological Principles for TSP and Beyond from Streamlined Design Space of Learning and Search
337. ICLR 2025Unsupervised Model Tree Heritage Recovery
338. ICLR 2025Variance-Reducing Couplings for Random Features
339. ICLR 2025Variational Search Distributions
340. ICML 2025A General Framework for Inference-time Scaling and Steering of Diffusion Models
341. ICML 2025A Mixture-Based Framework for Guiding Diffusion Models
342. ICML 2025A Physics-Augmented Deep Learning Framework for Classifying Single Molecule Force Spectroscopy Data
343. ICML 2025A Sharper Global Convergence Analysis for Average Reward Reinforcement Learning via an Actor-Critic Approach
344. ICML 2025A Unified Framework for Entropy Search and Expected Improvement in Bayesian Optimization
345. ICML 2025Accelerating Large Language Model Reasoning via Speculative Search
346. ICML 2025Adjoint Sampling: Highly Scalable Diffusion Samplers via Adjoint Matching
347. ICML 2025Alpha-SQL: Zero-Shot Text-to-SQL using Monte Carlo Tree Search
348. ICML 2025Armijo Line-search Can Make (Stochastic) Gradient Descent Provably Faster
349. ICML 2025AutoAL: Automated Active Learning with Differentiable Query Strategy Search
350. ICML 2025AutoStep: Locally adaptive involutive MCMC

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.