Reinforcement Learning papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• Reinforcement Learning went from 1,070 papers in 2023 to 2,985 in 2026, roughly 2.8x in three years.
• NeurIPS publishes the most Reinforcement Learning work: 2,494 papers from 2023 to 2026, 36% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with Reasoning Models: papers tagged with both rose from 9 in 2023 to 437 in 2026.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026\texttt{FEROM}: Frontier Endogenous Reveal-Order Marginal Policy Optimization for Masked Diffusion LMs
• ICML 2026$\text{DT}^\text{2}$: Decision-Targeted Digital Twins
• ICLR 2026$\nabla$-Reasoner: LLM Reasoning via Test-Time Gradient Descent in Textual Space
• CVPR 2026A Causal Marriage between VLM and IRM from Understanding to
• NeurIPS 2025$\texttt{G1}$: Teaching LLMs to Reason on Graphs with Reinforcement Learning
• ICML 2025A Computationally Efficient Algorithm for Infinite-Horizon Average-Reward Linear MDPs
• ICLR 2025$\phi$-Update: A Class of Policy Update Methods with Policy Convergence Guarantee
• CVPR 2025All-Optical Nonlinear Diffractive Deep Network for Ultrafast Image Denoising
• NeurIPS 2024A Critical Evaluation of AI Feedback for Aligning Large Language Models
• ICML 2024${\rm E}(3)$-Equivariant Actor-Critic Methods for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
• ICLR 2024A Black-box Approach for Non-stationary Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
• CVPR 2024DMR: Decomposed Multi-Modality Representations for Frames and Events Fusion in Visual Reinforcement Learning
• NeurIPS 2023“Why Not Looking backward?” A Robust Two-Step Method to Automatically Terminate Bayesian Optimization
• ICML 2023A Connection between One-Step RL and Critic Regularization in Reinforcement Learning
• ICLR 2023$O(T^{-1})$ Convergence of Optimistic-Follow-the-Regularized-Leader in Two-Player Zero-Sum Markov Games
• CVPR 2023"Seeing" Electric Network Frequency From Events
• NeurIPS 2026$\varphi$TD: Distributional Reinforcement Learning using Characteristic Functions
• ICML 2026$\textit{S}$-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization
• ICLR 2026$AutoDrive\text{-}P^3$: Unified Chain of Perception–Prediction–Planning Thought via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
• CVPR 2026AdaptVision Efficient Vision-Language Models via Adaptive Visual Acquisition

All Reinforcement Learning papers

911 papers, page 11 of 19

501. ICLR 2026Nudging the Boundaries of LLM Reasoning
502. ICLR 2026Object-Centric World Models from Few-Shot Annotations for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
503. ICLR 2026Occupancy Reward Shaping: Improving Credit Assignment for Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
504. ICLR 2026Octax: Accelerated CHIP-8 Arcade Environments for Reinforcement Learning in JAX
505. ICLR 2026Off-Policy Safe Reinforcement Learning with Cost-Constrained Optimistic Exploration
506. ICLR 2026Offline Preference-Based Value Optimization
507. ICLR 2026Offline Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Feature Fusion
508. ICLR 2026On Entropy Control in LLM-RL Algorithms
509. ICLR 2026On Predictability of Reinforcement Learning Dynamics for Large Language Models
510. ICLR 2026On the Computational Limits of AI4S-RL : A Unified $\varepsilon$-$N$ Analysis
511. ICLR 2026On the Design of KL-Regularized Policy Gradient Algorithms for LLM Reasoning
512. ICLR 2026On the Direction of RLVR Updates for LLM Reasoning: Identification and Exploitation
513. ICLR 2026On The Fragility of Benchmark Contamination Detection in Reasoning Models
514. ICLR 2026On the Generalization of SFT: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective with Reward Rectification
515. ICLR 2026On the Tension Between Optimality and Adversarial Robustness in Policy Optimization
516. ICLR 2026On-Policy RL Meets Off-Policy Experts: Harmonizing Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning via Dynamic Weighting
517. ICLR 2026One Life to Learn: Inferring Symbolic World Models for Stochastic Environments from Unguided Exploration
518. ICLR 2026One Model for All Tasks: Leveraging Efficient World Models in Multi-Task Planning
519. ICLR 2026One-Step Flow Q-Learning: Addressing the Diffusion Policy Bottleneck in Offline Reinforcement Learning
520. ICLR 2026OpenApps: Simulating Environment Variations to Measure UI Agent Reliability
521. ICLR 2026Operator Theory-Driven Autoformulation of MDPs for Control of Queueing Systems
522. ICLR 2026OPPO: Accelerating PPO-based RLHF via Pipeline Overlap
523. ICLR 2026Opponent Shaping in LLM Agents
524. ICLR 2026OPRIDE: Efficient Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning via In-Dataset Exploration
525. ICLR 2026Optimal Robust Subsidy Policies for Irrational Agent in Principal-Agent MDPs
526. ICLR 2026Optimal Sparsity of Mixture-of-Experts Language Models for Reasoning Tasks
527. ICLR 2026Optimistic Task Inference for Behavior Foundation Models
528. ICLR 2026OSIRIS: Bridging Analog Circuit Design and Machine Learning with Scalable Dataset Generation
529. ICLR 2026Overthinking Reduction with Decoupled Rewards and Curriculum Data Scheduling
530. ICLR 2026P-GenRM: Personalized Generative Reward Model with Test-time User-based Scaling
531. ICLR 2026PAMDP: Interact to Persona Alignment via a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process
532. ICLR 2026Parallel Multimodal Diffusion Language Models for Thinking-Aware Editing and Generation
533. ICLR 2026Parallel-R1: Towards Parallel Thinking via Reinforcement Learning
534. ICLR 2026Parameter-Efficient Reinforcement Learning using Prefix Optimization
535. ICLR 2026ParaS2S: Benchmarking and Aligning Spoken Language Models for Paralinguistic-aware Speech-to-Speech Interaction
536. ICLR 2026Partially Equivariant Reinforcement Learning in Symmetry-Breaking Environments
537. ICLR 2026Patching Gaps In LLM Reasoning With Interventional Training
538. ICLR 2026Path Channels and Plan Extension Kernels: a Mechanistic Description of Planning in a Sokoban RNN
539. ICLR 2026PathChat-SegR1: Reasoning Segmentation in Pathology via SO-GRPO
540. ICLR 2026PCPO: Proportionate Credit Policy Optimization for Preference Alignment of Image Generation Models
541. ICLR 2026Peak-Return Greedy Slicing: Subtrajectory Selection for Transformer-based Offline RL
542. ICLR 2026Peng's Q($\lambda$) for Conservative Value Estimation in Offline Reinforcement Learning
543. ICLR 2026Perception-Aware Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning
544. ICLR 2026Perception-R1: Advancing Multimodal Reasoning Capabilities of MLLMs via Visual Perception Reward
545. ICLR 2026Persona Features Control Emergent Misalignment
546. ICLR 2026Plan-R1: Safe and Feasible Trajectory Planning as Language Modeling
547. ICLR 2026Planning with an Embodied Learnable Memory
548. ICLR 2026Play to Generalize: Learning to Reason Through Game Play
549. ICLR 2026PLoP: Precise LoRA Placement for Efficient Finetuning of Large Models
550. ICLR 2026PoLi-RL: A Point-to-List Reinforcement Learning Framework for Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity

FAQ

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

6,885 in total: 1,070 in 2023, 1,190 in 2024, 1,640 in 2025, 2,985 in 2026.

How many Reinforcement Learning papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 760 Reinforcement Learning papers, versus 784 the year before.

How many Reinforcement Learning papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 911 Reinforcement Learning papers, versus 379 the year before.

How many Reinforcement Learning papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 1,021 Reinforcement Learning papers, versus 405 the year before.

How many Reinforcement Learning papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 293 Reinforcement Learning papers, versus 72 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most Reinforcement Learning papers?

NeurIPS, with 2,494 papers from 2023 to 2026.