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 1 of 7

1. NeurIPS 2026A Control-Theoretic Approximation to Predictive Coding Dynamics
2. NeurIPS 2026A Regularization-Based Approach to Public Belief State Search for Adversarial Games
3. NeurIPS 2026A Revisit of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Efficiency on Bayesian Neural Networks
4. NeurIPS 2026AdaTree: Serving-Aware Adaptive Tree Construction for Speculative Decoding
5. NeurIPS 2026Agentic Neural Architecture Search
6. NeurIPS 2026An Efficient Algorithm for Thresholding Monte Carlo Tree Search
7. NeurIPS 2026Beyond Expected Values: Risk-Sensitive Planning with Distributional Monte-Carlo Tree Search
8. NeurIPS 2026Beyond Imputation: Mask-Adaptive Conformal Prediction via Tree Embeddings on General Missing Data Mechanisms
9. NeurIPS 2026Breadcrumbing Search Agents: Per-Turn Scheming Over Long-Horizon Trajectories
10. NeurIPS 2026Breaking the $\sqrt{d}$ Communication Barrier in Federated Sampling with Adaptive Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
11. NeurIPS 2026BridgeTwist: Twisting Schrödinger Bridges for Training-Free Conditional Sampling
12. NeurIPS 2026Calibrated Safe Policy Improvement for Continuous Offline Reinforcement Learning
13. NeurIPS 2026CARD: Internalizing Expert Critique into Reinforcement Learning for Deep Search
14. NeurIPS 2026Cluster with Auctions for Vector Search
15. NeurIPS 2026COCOTree: A Dataset and Benchmark for Open Tree-Structured Visual Decomposition
16. NeurIPS 2026Conditioning Gaussian Processes on Almost Anything
17. NeurIPS 2026Contour Monte Carlo: Sampling via Energy Level Sets
18. NeurIPS 2026Corrected Integrated Laplace Approximation for Bayesian Inference in Latent Gaussian Models
19. NeurIPS 2026DASS: A Solver-Agnostic Dynamic Auxiliary Search Strategy for Symbolic Regression
20. NeurIPS 2026Decoupling Exploration and Policy Optimization: Uncertainty Guided Tree Search for Hard Exploration
21. NeurIPS 2026Differentiable Systematic Resampling for Variational Sequential Monte Carlo
22. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion Path Samplers via Sequential Monte Carlo
23. NeurIPS 2026Diffusion Tree Search for Inference Time Adaptation of Material Foundation Models
24. NeurIPS 2026Discovering Mechanistic Models of Neural Activity: System Identification in an in Silico Zebrafish
25. NeurIPS 2026Distributionally Robust Algorithmic Recourse for Tree Ensembles
26. NeurIPS 2026Ensembling Language Models with Sequential Monte Carlo
27. NeurIPS 2026Escaping Reasoning Basins: Basin-Aware Search for Inference-Time LLM Reasoning
28. NeurIPS 2026ESS-Flow: training-free guidance as Bayesian inference in source space
29. NeurIPS 2026Estimating the expected output of wide random MLPs more efficiently than sampling
30. NeurIPS 2026Exploring Starts Are Not Enough: Counterexamples and a Fix for Monte Carlo Exploring Starts
31. NeurIPS 2026Extracting Search Trees from LLM Reasoning Traces Reveals Myopic Planning
32. NeurIPS 2026Fast Accurate Quantum Monte Carlo without Metropolis Adjustment
33. NeurIPS 2026Ferrogen: Generative Pipeline for Guided Search of Novel Ferroelectric Material for Logic and Memory
34. NeurIPS 2026Finetuning with Sampling: Make SFT Generalize, Not Forget
35. NeurIPS 2026FML-bench: A Controlled Study of AI Research Agent Strategies from the Perspective of Search Dynamics
36. NeurIPS 2026From Ideas to Code: Tree-structured Policy Optimization for Automated Algorithm Design with LLMs
37. NeurIPS 2026Geometry-Aware Score-Repellent Monte Carlo
38. NeurIPS 2026Graph-Based Stochastic-Power-UCT: Monte-Carlo Graph Search with Power Mean Estimation
39. NeurIPS 2026Heuresis: Evaluating Search Strategies for Autonomous Machine Learning Research Agents
40. NeurIPS 2026Hierarchical Semantic Tree Anchoring for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning
41. NeurIPS 2026HierFlow: Hierarchical Coupled Dual-Space Search for Automatic Agentic Workflow Generation
42. NeurIPS 2026InterLV-Search: Benchmarking Interleaved Multimodal Agentic Search
43. NeurIPS 2026KNN Implementation Details Can Dramatically Change Performance: An Example from Cover Trees
44. NeurIPS 2026Learning to Search, Searching to Learn: A Closed-Loop Framework for Large-Scale Vehicle Routing
45. NeurIPS 2026Likelihood-free inference of phylogenetic tree posterior distributions
46. NeurIPS 2026LogT: Logically Think with Images for Visual Search
47. NeurIPS 2026MC^2: Monte Carlo Correction for Fast Elliptic PDE Solving
48. NeurIPS 2026MCGI: Manifold-Consistent Graph Indexing for Billion-Scale Disk-Resident Vector Search
49. NeurIPS 2026Minimax Rates and Spectral Distillation for Tree Ensembles
50. NeurIPS 2026Multilevel and Sequential Monte Carlo for Training-Free Diffusion Guidance

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.