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

1,021 papers, page 13 of 21

601. ICML 2026Online Compatible Reward Identification from Preference Feedback
602. ICML 2026Online Robust Reinforcement Learning with General Function Approximation
603. ICML 2026Online Rubrics Elicitation from Pairwise Comparisons
604. ICML 2026Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning
605. ICML 2026Open-o3-Video: Grounded Video Reasoning with Explicit Spatio-Temporal Evidence
606. ICML 2026Ophiuchus: Incentivizing Tool-augmented ''Think with Images'' for Joint Medical Segmentation, Understanding and Reasoning
607. ICML 2026Opt-Miner: Empowering Information-Seeking Agent with Tree-Guided Data Synthesis for Optimization Modeling
608. ICML 2026Optimal Regret for Policy Optimization in Contextual Bandits
609. ICML 2026Optimal Transport for LLM Reward Modeling from Noisy Feedback
610. ICML 2026Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward
611. ICML 2026Optimizing Visual Generative Models via Distribution-wise Rewards
612. ICML 2026Orchestrating Spatial Semantics via a Zone-Graph Paradigm for Intricate Indoor Scene Generation
613. ICML 2026ORLoopBench: Solver-in-the-Loop Benchmarks for Self-Correction and Behavioral Rationality in Operations Research
614. ICML 2026Outcome Rewards Do Not Guarantee Verifiable or Causally Important Reasoning
615. ICML 2026PAC-Bayesian Reinforcement Learning Trains Generalizable Policies
616. ICML 2026PACE: Parameter Change for Unsupervised Environment Design
617. ICML 2026PADD: Path-Aligned Decompression Distillation for Non-Router Teacher to Guide MoE Student Learning
618. ICML 2026PAMD: Structured Adaptive Distances for Bisimulation Representations in Visual Reinforcement Learning
619. ICML 2026Partial Identification of Policy Values under Network Interference
620. ICML 2026Particles Don’t Care About Z: Towards Scaling Entropy Estimation of Unnormalized Densities
621. ICML 2026Path-Coupled Bellman Flows for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
622. ICML 2026Path-dependent Discrete Amortized Inference
623. ICML 2026PAWS: Preference Learning with Advantage-Weighted Segments
624. ICML 2026Perceptual Flow Network for Visually Grounded Reasoning
625. ICML 2026Performative Policy Gradient: Optimality in Performative Reinforcement Learning
626. ICML 2026Pessimistic Verification for Open-Ended Math Questions
627. ICML 2026Phase-Aware Mixture of Experts for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
628. ICML 2026PISCES: Annotation-free Text-to-Video Post-Training via Optimal Transport-Aligned Rewards
629. ICML 2026PLaID++: A Preference Aligned Language Model for Targeted Inorganic Materials Design
630. ICML 2026Plan in Sandbox, Navigate in Open Worlds: Learning Physics-Grounded Abstracted Experience for Embodied Navigation
631. ICML 2026Plan Then Action: High-Level Planning Guidance Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning
632. ICML 2026Plug-and-Play Benchmarking of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Large-Scale Flow Control
633. ICML 2026PMSPO: Progressive Matching and Semantic-Aware Policy Optimization for Camouflaged Object Detection
634. ICML 2026POLIA: Policy Optimization with Visual-Object-Level Intrinsic Advantage for Multimodal Reasoning
635. ICML 2026Policy Search via Bayesian Optimization with Temporal Difference Gaussian Processes
636. ICML 2026Policy-Driven World Model Adaptation for Robust Offline Model-based Reinforcement Learning
637. ICML 2026PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent
638. ICML 2026PoMtVRS: Preference-Optimized Multi-Task Vehicle Routing Solver with Preference Gating
639. ICML 2026Population-Free Pareto Tracking for Sample-Efficient Multi-Policy MORL
640. ICML 2026PortraitRL: Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Portrait Pose Transfer with Multi-Objective Reward Modeling
641. ICML 2026Positive–Unlabeled Reinforcement Learning Distillation for On-Premise Small Models
642. ICML 2026Post-Training Language Models for Crosslingual Consistency
643. ICML 2026PosterAgent: Agentic Poster Generation via Stage-Aware Reinforcement Learning
644. ICML 2026Posterior Behavioral Cloning: Pretraining BC Policies for Efficient RL Finetuning
645. ICML 2026Posterior Sampling Reinforcement Learning with Gaussian Processes for Continuous Control: Sublinear Regret Bounds for Unbounded State Spaces
646. ICML 2026PowerFlow: Unlocking the Dual Nature of LLMs via Principled Distribution Matching
647. ICML 2026Preference-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Pluralistic Image Inpainting
648. ICML 2026Preserving Plasticity in Continual Learning via Dynamical Isometry
649. ICML 2026PretrainZero: Reinforcement Active Learning on Pretraining Data
650. ICML 2026Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

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.