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 16 of 19

751. ICLR 2026Squeeze the Soaked Sponge: Efficient Off-policy RFT for Large Language Model
752. ICLR 2026SR-Scientist: Scientific Equation Discovery With Agentic AI
753. ICLR 2026SRFT: A Single-Stage Method with Supervised and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Reasoning
754. ICLR 2026SSVPO: Effective Step-Level Credit Assignment for RL Training of Language Models
755. ICLR 2026Stabilizing Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for LLMs via Balanced Policy Optimization with Adaptive Clipping
756. ICLR 2026Stabilizing Policy Gradients for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning in LLM Reasoning
757. ICLR 2026Stackelberg Coupling of Online Representation Learning and Reinforcement Learning
758. ICLR 2026Stackelberg Learning from Human Feedback: Preference Optimization as a Sequential Game
759. ICLR 2026STAIRS-Former: Spatio-Temporal Attention with Interleaved Recursive Structure TransFormer for Offline Mulit-task Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
760. ICLR 2026STAR: Similarity-guided Teacher-Assisted Refinement for Super-Tiny Function Calling Models
761. ICLR 2026Statistical Guarantees for Offline Domain Randomization
762. ICLR 2026StepORLM: A Self-Evolving Framework With Generative Process Supervision For Operations Research Language Models
763. ICLR 2026Stop Unnecessary Reflection: Training LRMs for Efficient Reasoning with Adaptive Reflection and Length Coordinated Penalty
764. ICLR 2026Strict Subgoal Execution: Reliable Long-Horizon Planning in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
765. ICLR 2026Stronger-MAS: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Collaborative LLMs
766. ICLR 2026Structured Reasoning for LLMs: A Unified Framework for Efficiency and Explainability
767. ICLR 2026STVG-R1: Incentivizing Instance-Level Reasoning and Grounding in Videos via Reinforcement Learning
768. ICLR 2026Supervised Reinforcement Learning: From Expert Trajectories to Step-wise Reasoning
769. ICLR 2026Supporting High-Stakes Decision Making Through Interactive Preference Elicitation in the Latent Space
770. ICLR 2026SUSD: Structured Unsupervised Skill Discovery through State Factorization
771. ICLR 2026Swap-guided Preference Learning for Personalized Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
772. ICLR 2026SWE-RM: Execution-free Feedback for Software Engineering Agents
773. ICLR 2026Synergizing Understanding and Generation with Interleaved Analyzing-Drafting Thinking
774. ICLR 2026Synthesizing High-Quality Visual Question Answering from Medical Documents with Generator-Verifier LMMs
775. ICLR 2026Synthesizing Multimodal Verifiable Game Data to Boost VLMs' General Reasoning
776. ICLR 2026Tackling Heavy-Tailed Q-Value Bias in Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning with Laplace-Robust Modeling
777. ICLR 2026Talking Points: Describing and Localizing Pixels
778. ICLR 2026Taming Imperfect Process Verifiers: A Sampling Perspective on Backtracking
779. ICLR 2026Task Tokens: A Flexible Approach to Adapting Behavior Foundation Models
780. ICLR 2026Task-Agnostic Amortized Multi-Objective Optimization
781. ICLR 2026TaTToo: Tool-Grounded Thinking PRM for Test-Time Scaling in Tabular Reasoning
782. ICLR 2026TD-JEPA: Latent-predictive Representations for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning
783. ICLR 2026Temperature as a Meta-Policy: Adaptive Temperature in LLM Reinforcement Learning
784. ICLR 2026TEMPFLOW-GRPO: WHEN TIMING MATTERS FOR GRPO IN FLOW MODELS
785. ICLR 2026Test-Time Alignment for Large Language Models via Textual Model Predictive Control
786. ICLR 2026Text2Grad: Reinforcement Learning from Natural Language Feedback
787. ICLR 2026The Alignment Auditor: A Bayesian Framework for Verifying and Refining LLM Objectives
788. ICLR 2026The Alignment Waltz: Jointly Training Agents to Collaborate for Safety
789. ICLR 2026The Art of Scaling Reinforcement Learning Compute for LLMs
790. ICLR 2026The Choice of Divergence: A Neglected Key to Mitigating Diversity Collapse in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward
791. ICLR 2026The Coverage Principle: How Pre-Training Enables Post-Training
792. ICLR 2026The Markovian Thinker
793. ICLR 2026The Overthinking Predicament: When Reasoning Hurts Ranking
794. ICLR 2026The Rank and Gradient Lost in Non-stationarity: Sample Weight Decay for Mitigating Plasticity Loss in Reinforcement Learning
795. ICLR 2026The Sample Complexity of Online Reinforcement Learning: A Multi-model Perspective
796. ICLR 2026The State of Reinforcement Finetuning for Transformer-based Generative Agents
797. ICLR 2026Thinking-Free Policy Initialization Makes Distilled Reasoning Models More Effective and Efficient Reasoners
798. ICLR 2026Thompson Sampling via Fine-Tuning of LLMs
799. ICLR 2026THOR: Tool-Integrated Hierarchical Optimization via RL for Mathematical Reasoning
800. ICLR 2026Thyme: Think Beyond Images

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.