Reinforcement Learning papers, 2023–2026
Policy optimization, offline RL, and decision learning from interaction
Scope: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR, 2023–2026. 6,885 papers are tagged with this topic.
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.
Papers per venue
Counts by year and venue
| Year | NeurIPS | ICLR | ICML | CVPR | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 484 | 233 | 297 | 56 | 1,070 |
| 2024 | 466 | 304 | 356 | 64 | 1,190 |
| 2025 | 784 | 379 | 405 | 72 | 1,640 |
| 2026 | 760 | 911 | 1,021 | 293 | 2,985 |
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
2,494 papers, page 11 of 50
- NeurIPS 2026Q-MMR: Off-Policy Evaluation via Recursive Reweighting and Moment Matching
- NeurIPS 2026Q-Probe: Scaling Image Quality Assessment to High Resolution via Context-Aware Agentic Probing
- NeurIPS 2026QMaxCal: Path-Space Regularization for Open Quantum Control via Girsanov's Theorem
- NeurIPS 2026Quantile Geometry Regularization for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Quantile-Coupled Flow Matching for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Quest: Training Frontier Deep Research Agents with Fully Synthetic Tasks
- NeurIPS 2026Quotient-Categorical Representations for Bellman-Compatible Average-Reward Distributional Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026RAHF: Reward-Amplified Human Feedback for Closed-Loop Policy Fine-Tuning
- NeurIPS 2026Rationale-Guided Policy Optimization: Learning to Reason with Adaptive Rationale Scaffolding
- NeurIPS 2026Read It Back: Pretrained MLLMs Are Zero-shot Reward Models for Text-to-Image Generation
- NeurIPS 2026Reason to Play: Behavioral and Brain Alignment Between Frontier LRMs and Human Game Learners
- NeurIPS 2026Reasoning as Compression: Unifying Budget Forcing via the Conditional Information Bottleneck
- NeurIPS 2026Reasoning Warm-up: Scaling Label-free RL via Verifiable Surrogate Rewards
- NeurIPS 2026Reasoning with Sampling: Cutting at Decision Points
- NeurIPS 2026RECAP: Looking Once Is Not Enough for Vision-Language Reasoning
- NeurIPS 2026ReCon: Toward Balanced Learning under Inter-Context and Context-Memory Conflicts
- NeurIPS 2026Reconciling Operational Energy Trilemma: A Heterogeneous Risk-Constrained MDP Framework with Residual Policy Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Reconciling Safety and Performance via Dual-Expert Offline Imitation Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Rectified Policy Rollouts with Hierarchical Expert Guidance for Neural Combinatorial Optimization
- NeurIPS 2026ReflectDrive-2: Reinforcement-Learning-Aligned Self-Editing for Discrete Diffusion Driving
- NeurIPS 2026Reflective Prompted Policy Optimization: Trajectory-Grounded Revision and Salience Bias
- NeurIPS 2026ReflectMT: Internalizing Reflection for Efficient and High-Quality Machine Translation
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcement Learning Agents Are Swimmers
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcement learning enhanced flow matching for reference-based tumor generation on unpaired CT images
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcement Learning for Code Optimization
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion LLMs with Entropy-Guided Step Selection and Stepwise Advantages
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcement Learning for Exponential Utility: Algorithms and Convergence in Discounted MDPs
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcement Learning for View-Adaptive Distillation in 3D Gaussian Compression
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Step Lookahead Information Via Adaptive Batching
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Physics: Post-training LLMs for PDE Solver Generation
- NeurIPS 2026Reinforcing Multimodal Reasoning Against Visual Degradation
- NeurIPS 2026Replay-buffer engineering for noise-robust quantum circuit optimization
- NeurIPS 2026Representation Learning Enables Scalable Multitask Deep Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Residual Expertise Is Not Decision Value
- NeurIPS 2026Rethinking "RL Generalizes, SFT Memorizes": The Role of SFT Data
- NeurIPS 2026Rethinking Learning from Label Proportions via Moment Matching
- NeurIPS 2026Rethinking Post-Training Recipes for Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting
- NeurIPS 2026Rethinking Ratio-Based Trust Regions for Policy Optimization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026RevengeBench: Reverse Engineering Code-Space Policies from Behavioral Experiments
- NeurIPS 2026Reverse to Advance: Teleoperation-Cost Effective Hard Policy Learning from Reversed Easy Tasks
- NeurIPS 2026REVERSE: Reinforcing Evidence Verification and Search for Agentic Image Geolocation
- NeurIPS 2026Revisiting Value Iteration: Unified Analysis of Discounted and Average-Reward Cases
- NeurIPS 2026Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Reward Inflation: A Healthy Stimulus for Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Reward Is Not a Universal Interface for Generative Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Reward Shaping to Improve Language Model Query Generation
- NeurIPS 2026Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
- NeurIPS 2026Reward-Estimated Hypergradient for Bilevel Reinforcement Learning with Black-Box Follower
- NeurIPS 2026RewardFlow: Topology-Aware Reward Propagation on State Graphs for Agentic RL with LLMs
- NeurIPS 2026Rich Insights from Cheap Signals: Efficient Evaluations via Tensor Factorization
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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.