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 9 of 16

401. ICML 2025RZ-NAS: Enhancing LLM-guided Neural Architecture Search via Reflective Zero-Cost Strategy
402. ICML 2025Sampling Binary Data by Denoising through Score Functions
403. ICML 2025Sampling from Binary Quadratic Distributions via Stochastic Localization
404. ICML 2025Secant Line Search for Frank-Wolfe Algorithms
405. ICML 2025Solving Linear-Gaussian Bayesian Inverse Problems with Decoupled Diffusion Sequential Monte Carlo
406. ICML 2025Sort Before You Prune: Improved Worst-Case Guarantees of the DiskANN Family of Graphs
407. ICML 2025Subgoal-Guided Policy Heuristic Search with Learned Subgoals
408. ICML 2025The Polynomial Stein Discrepancy for Assessing Moment Convergence
409. ICML 2025Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance with Nonlinear Projection
410. ICML 2025Tree-Sliced Wasserstein Distance: A Geometric Perspective
411. ICML 2025Trust-Region Twisted Policy Improvement
412. ICML 2025Tuning Sequential Monte Carlo Samplers via Greedy Incremental Divergence Minimization
413. ICML 2025UltraTWD: Optimizing Ultrametric Trees for Tree-Wasserstein Distance
414. ICML 2025Variational Phylogenetic Inference with Products over Bipartitions
415. NeurIPS 2025A Single-Swap Local Search Algorithm for k-Means of Lines
416. NeurIPS 2025A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skilled SAILOR: Robust Imitation via Learning to Search
417. NeurIPS 2025Adaptive Distraction: Probing LLM Contextual Robustness with Automated Tree Search
418. NeurIPS 2025AI Research Agents for Machine Learning: Search, Exploration, and Generalization in MLE-bench
419. NeurIPS 2025AutoDiscovery: Open-ended Scientific Discovery via Bayesian Surprise
420. NeurIPS 2025Better Estimation of the Kullback--Leibler Divergence Between Language Models
421. NeurIPS 2025Bridging Arbitrary and Tree Metrics via Differentiable Gromov Hyperbolicity
422. NeurIPS 2025Bringing SAM to new heights: leveraging elevation data for tree crown segmentation from drone imagery
423. NeurIPS 2025ComfyMind: Toward General-Purpose Generation via Tree-Based Planning and Reactive Feedback
424. NeurIPS 2025Compositional Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion for Extendable Planning
425. NeurIPS 2025Constrained Sampling for Language Models Should Be Easy: An MCMC Perspective
426. NeurIPS 2025Deep Tree Tensor Networks
427. NeurIPS 2025Differentiable Decision Tree via "ReLU+Argmin" Reformulation
428. NeurIPS 2025Diffusion Tree Sampling: Scalable inference‑time alignment of diffusion models
429. NeurIPS 2025Discovering Data Structures: Nearest Neighbor Search and Beyond
430. NeurIPS 2025Discretization-free Multicalibration through Loss Minimization over Tree Ensembles
431. NeurIPS 2025Diversifying Parallel Ergodic Search: A Signature Kernel Evolution Strategy
432. NeurIPS 2025Dynamic Algorithm for Explainable $k$-medians Clustering under $\ell_p$ Norm
433. NeurIPS 2025Empowering Decision Trees via Shape Function Branching
434. NeurIPS 2025EvoLM: In Search of Lost Language Model Training Dynamics
435. NeurIPS 2025Explainably Safe Reinforcement Learning
436. NeurIPS 2025Fast attention mechanisms: a tale of parallelism
437. NeurIPS 2025Fast Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion: 100× Speedup via Parallel and Sparse Planning
438. NeurIPS 2025Faster Generic Identification in Tree-Shaped Structural Causal Models
439. NeurIPS 2025FEAT: Free energy Estimators with Adaptive Transport
440. NeurIPS 2025Feedback-Aware MCTS for Goal-Oriented Information Seeking
441. NeurIPS 2025Feel-Good Thompson Sampling for Contextual Bandits: a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Showdown
442. NeurIPS 2025Graph-based Symbolic Regression with Invariance and Constraint Encoding
443. NeurIPS 2025Improving Decision Trees through the Lens of Parameterized Local Search
444. NeurIPS 2025Improving Monte Carlo Tree Search for Symbolic Regression
445. NeurIPS 2025In Search of Adam’s Secret Sauce
446. NeurIPS 2025Jet-Nemotron: Efficient Language Model with Post Neural Architecture Search
447. NeurIPS 2025KeeA*: Epistemic Exploratory A* Search via Knowledge Calibration
448. NeurIPS 2025LaRes: Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning with LLM-based Adaptive Reward Search
449. NeurIPS 2025Learning Latent Variable Models via Jarzynski-adjusted Langevin Algorithm
450. NeurIPS 2025Learning to Better Search with Language Models via Guided Reinforced Self-Training

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.