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

1,253 papers, page 5 of 26

201. NeurIPS 2026Neural Garbage Collection: Learning to Forget while Learning to Reason
202. NeurIPS 2026Neural Spectral Capacity: An Architectural Quantity from Network Specification Alone
203. NeurIPS 2026Neurosymbolic Learning for Inference-Time Argumentation
204. NeurIPS 2026Never Stop Learning: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models
205. NeurIPS 2026Nexus: Same Pretraining Loss, Better Downstream Generalization via Common Minima
206. NeurIPS 2026NPCBench: A Clinical Apprenticeship Benchmark for Guideline-Constrained Care-Pathway Reasoning in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma
207. NeurIPS 2026OmniSimulator: Aligning Small Language Models for Authentic Heterogeneous Behavior Modeling
208. NeurIPS 2026OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning
209. NeurIPS 2026On the Primacy Bias in RLVR Training
210. NeurIPS 2026On the Token Value Inequality in Efficient Reasoning
211. NeurIPS 2026One-Layer Transformers Provably Learn In-Context K-Nearest Neighbor Prediction with Chain-of-Thought
212. NeurIPS 2026OneSearch-V2: The Latent Reasoning Enhanced Self-distillation Generative Search Framework
213. NeurIPS 2026OpenCoF: Learning to Reason Through Video Generation
214. NeurIPS 2026OpenMedReason: Scientific Reasoning Supervision for Medical Vision–Language Models
215. NeurIPS 2026Operads for compositional reasoning in LLMs
216. NeurIPS 2026OS-Pruner: Pruning Chains-of-Thought of Reasoning Models via Optimal Stopping
217. NeurIPS 2026Outcome-Based RL Provably Leads Transformers to Reason, but Only With the Right Data
218. NeurIPS 2026PAC Reasoning: Controlling the Performance Loss for Efficient Reasoning
219. NeurIPS 2026Pause and Reflect: Conformal Aggregation for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
220. NeurIPS 2026Personal Visual Memory from Explicit and Implicit Evidence
221. NeurIPS 2026PerturbReason: A Knowledge-Grounded Benchmark and Framework for Cell-State–Conditioned Mechanistic Reasoning of Perturbation Effects
222. NeurIPS 2026Phases of Muon: When Muon Eclipses SignSGD
223. NeurIPS 2026Plausibility Is Not Prediction: Contrastive Evidence for LLM-Based Cellular Perturbation Reasoning
224. NeurIPS 2026Point-to-Manifold Geometry: Flexibly Overcoming the Curse of Dimensionality in Neural Computational Units
225. NeurIPS 2026Position: Robust Reasoning Requires Internal Time, Not Scale Alone
226. NeurIPS 2026PotARCin: Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Skill Acquisition in Abstract Reasoning Tasks
227. NeurIPS 2026Predicting and improving test-time scaling laws via reward tail-guided search
228. NeurIPS 2026Primal Generation, Dual Judgment: Self-Training from Test-Time Scaling
229. NeurIPS 2026PRISM-Bench: A Benchmark of Puzzle-Based Visual Tasks with CoT Error Detection
230. NeurIPS 2026Probabilistic Recursive Reasoning
231. NeurIPS 2026Probabilistic Tiny Recursive Model
232. NeurIPS 2026Probing the Trajectories of Reasoning Traces in Large Language Models
233. NeurIPS 2026Provable Test-Time Scaling for Beam Search in LLM Reasoning
234. NeurIPS 2026Quantized Reasoning Models Think They Need to Think Longer, but They Do Not
235. NeurIPS 2026Random Attention Pattern Learning Enables Emergent Capabilities
236. NeurIPS 2026Reading Between the Dots: Decoding Hidden Computation across Filler Tokens
237. NeurIPS 2026Reading the Unreadable: Text-Aware Image Super-Resolution Needs Reasoning
238. NeurIPS 2026Reason to Play: Behavioral and Brain Alignment Between Frontier LRMs and Human Game Learners
239. NeurIPS 2026Reasoning over Coupled Receptive Fields: Eliminating Subgraph Redundancy at Scale
240. NeurIPS 2026Reasoning Pathologies in Large Language Models: A Diagnostic Perspective
241. NeurIPS 2026Reasoning with Sampling: Cutting at Decision Points
242. NeurIPS 2026Reasoning-Aware IRT: Explainable Evaluation of Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning Models
243. NeurIPS 2026Reasoning-Trace Collapse: Evaluating the Loss of Explicit Reasoning During Fine-Tuning
244. NeurIPS 2026ReasoningShield: Safety Moderation over Reasoning Traces of Large Reasoning Models
245. NeurIPS 2026Rebellious Student: Reversing Teacher Signals for Reasoning Exploration with Self-Distilled RLVR
246. NeurIPS 2026RECAP: Looking Once Is Not Enough for Vision-Language Reasoning
247. NeurIPS 2026RefineAny3D: Depth Refinement as Semantic Alignment for Monocular 3D Detection
248. NeurIPS 2026ReflectMT: Internalizing Reflection for Efficient and High-Quality Machine Translation
249. NeurIPS 2026Relaxation-Aligned State Control for Test-Time Scaling in Generative Combinatorial Optimization
250. NeurIPS 2026Relaxed On-Policy Distillation: Selective Credit Allocation for Scaling Reasoning Efficiently

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.