Reasoning Models papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• Reasoning Models went from 470 papers in 2023 to 1,799 in 2026, roughly 3.8x in three years.
• NeurIPS publishes the most Reasoning Models work: 1,253 papers from 2023 to 2026, 36% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with Reinforcement Learning: papers tagged with both rose from 9 in 2023 to 437 in 2026.
• Among the 4 topics under Trending Systems, it ranks #3 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, AI Agents, is up 12x versus 3.8x here.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026A Mechanistic Analysis of Looped Reasoning Language Models
• ICML 2026A Formal Comparison Between Chain of Thought and Latent Thought
• ICLR 2026A Simple "Motivation" Can Enhance Reinforcement Finetuning of Large Reasoning Models
• CVPR 2026Asking like Socrates Socrates helps VLMs understand remote sensing images
• NeurIPS 2025A Frustratingly Simple Yet Highly Effective Attack Baseline: Over 90% Success Rate Against the Strong Black-box Models of GPT-4.5/4o/o1
• ICML 2025A Reasoning-Based Approach to Cryptic Crossword Clue Solving
• ICLR 2025A Formal Framework for Understanding Length Generalization in Transformers
• CVPR 2025Argus: Vision-Centric Reasoning with Grounded Chain-of-Thought
• NeurIPS 2024Are Large Language Models Good Statisticians?
• ICML 2024Algorithm of Thoughts: Enhancing Exploration of Ideas in Large Language Models
• ICLR 2024Amortizing intractable inference in large language models
• CVPR 2024Generate Subgoal Images before Act: Unlocking the Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Model for Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts
• NeurIPS 2023A benchmark of categorical encoders for binary classification
• ICML 2023Can We Scale Transformers to Predict Parameters of Diverse ImageNet Models?
• ICLR 2023Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models
• CVPR 2023ActMAD: Activation Matching To Align Distributions for Test-Time-Training
• NeurIPS 2026A Solvable Model of Chain-of-Thought in In-Context Learning
• ICML 2026A Narrowing Geometry in Contaminated Reasoning
• ICLR 2026A State-Transition Framework for Efficient LLM Reasoning
• CVPR 2026Beyond Weak Supervision MLLMs-Guided Graded Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Camouflaged

All Reasoning Models papers

652 papers, page 13 of 14

601. ICLR 2026Uni-CoT: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Vision
602. ICLR 2026UniSS: Unified Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation with Your Voice
603. ICLR 2026Unleashing Perception-Time Scaling to Multimodal Reasoning Models
604. ICLR 2026Unleashing Scientific Reasoning for Bio-experimental Protocol Generation via Structured Component-based Reward Mechanism
605. ICLR 2026Unlocking the Essence of Beauty: Advanced Aesthetic Reasoning with Relative-Absolute Policy Optimization
606. ICLR 2026Unlocking the Value of Text: Event-Driven Reasoning and Multi-Level Alignment for Time Series Forecasting
607. ICLR 2026Unveiling the Cognitive Compass: Theory-of-Mind–Guided Multimodal Emotion Reasoning
608. ICLR 2026Using cognitive models to reveal value trade-offs in language models
609. ICLR 2026USTBench: Benchmarking and Dissecting Spatiotemporal Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs as Urban Agents
610. ICLR 2026Variation in Verification: Understanding Verification Dynamics in Large Language Models
611. ICLR 2026Variational Reasoning for Language Models
612. ICLR 2026VeriCoT: Neuro-symbolic Chain-of-Thought Validation via Logical Consistency Checks
613. ICLR 2026VerifyBench: Benchmarking Reference-based Reward Systems for Large Language Models
614. ICLR 2026Verifying Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Its Computational Graph
615. ICLR 2026Veritas: Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Pattern-Aware Reasoning
616. ICLR 2026VFScale: Intrinsic Reasoning through Verifier-Free Test-time Scalable Diffusion Model
617. ICLR 2026VGR: Visual Grounded Reasoning
618. ICLR 2026VidBridge-R1: Bridging QA and Captioning for RL-based Video Understanding Models with Intermediate Proxy Tasks
619. ICLR 2026Video-KTR: Reinforcing Video Reasoning via Key Token Attribution
620. ICLR 2026VideoAnchor: Reinforcing Subspace-Structured Visual Cues for Coherent Visual-Spatial Reasoning
621. ICLR 2026VideoJudge: Bootstrapping Enables Scalable Supervision of MLLM-as-a-Judge for Video Understanding
622. ICLR 2026VideoMind: A Chain-of-LoRA Agent for Temporal-Grounded Video Reasoning
623. ICLR 2026VideoReasonBench: Can MLLMs Perform Vision-Centric Complex Video Reasoning?
624. ICLR 2026VidGuard-R1: AI-Generated Video Detection and Explanation via Reasoning MLLMs and RL
625. ICLR 2026VisioMath: Benchmarking Figure-based Mathematical Reasoning in LMMs
626. ICLR 2026Vision Language Models are Biased
627. ICLR 2026Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models
628. ICLR 2026VisionReasoner: Unified Reasoning-Integrated Visual Perception via Reinforcement Learning
629. ICLR 2026Visual symbolic mechanisms: Emergent symbol processing in Vision Language Models
630. ICLR 2026VisuLogic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Reasoning in Multi-modal Large Language Models
631. ICLR 2026VLM-SubtleBench: How Far Are VLMs from Human-Level Subtle Comparative Reasoning?
632. ICLR 2026VoG: Enhancing LLM Reasoning through Stepwise Verification on Knowledge Graphs
633. ICLR 2026WALT: Web Agents that Learn Tools
634. ICLR 2026WavefrontDiffusion: Dynamic Decoding Schedule for Improved Reasoning
635. ICLR 2026wd1: Weighted Policy Optimization for Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models
636. ICLR 2026We-Math 2.0: A Versatile MathBook System for Incentivizing Visual Mathematical Reasoning
637. ICLR 2026Web-CogReasoner: Towards Knowledge-Induced Cognitive Reasoning for Web Agents
638. ICLR 2026What "Not" to Detect: Negation-Aware VLMs via Structured Reasoning and Token Merging
639. ICLR 2026What Layers When: Learning to Skip Compute in LLMs with Residual Gates
640. ICLR 2026Whatever Remains Must Be True: Filtering Drives Reasoning in LLMs, Shaping Diversity
641. ICLR 2026When and Where to Reset Matters for Long-Term Test-Time Adaptation
642. ICLR 2026When More is Less: Understanding Chain-of-Thought Length in LLMs
643. ICLR 2026When Reasoning Meets Compression: Understanding the Effects of LLMs Compression on Large Reasoning Models
644. ICLR 2026When Silence Is Golden: Can LLMs Learn to Abstain in Temporal QA and Beyond?
645. ICLR 2026When Thinking Backfires: Mechanistic Insights into Reason-induced Misalignment
646. ICLR 2026When to Retrain after Drift: A Data-Only Test of Post-Drift Data Size Sufficiency
647. ICLR 2026Where Did This Sentence Come From? Tracing Provenance in LLM Reasoning Distillation
648. ICLR 2026XModBench: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Capabilities and Consistency in Omni-Language Models
649. ICLR 2026Your Models Have Thought Enough: Training Large Reasoning Models to Stop Overthinking
650. ICLR 2026Zebra-CoT: A Dataset for Interleaved Vision-Language Reasoning

FAQ

How many Reasoning Models papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?

3,512 in total: 470 in 2023, 311 in 2024, 932 in 2025, 1,799 in 2026.

How many Reasoning Models papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 361 Reasoning Models papers, versus 500 the year before.

How many Reasoning Models papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 652 Reasoning Models papers, versus 203 the year before.

How many Reasoning Models papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 582 Reasoning Models papers, versus 159 the year before.

How many Reasoning Models papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 204 Reasoning Models papers, versus 70 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most Reasoning Models papers?

NeurIPS, with 1,253 papers from 2023 to 2026.