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 18 of 19

851. ICLR 2026Unlocking Long-Horizon Agentic Search with Large-Scale End-to-End RL
852. ICLR 2026Unlocking the Essence of Beauty: Advanced Aesthetic Reasoning with Relative-Absolute Policy Optimization
853. ICLR 2026Unlocking the Power of Multi-Agent LLM for Reasoning: From Lazy Agents to Deliberation
854. ICLR 2026Unraveling the Complexity of Memory in RL Agents: an Approach for Classification and Evaluation
855. ICLR 2026Unsupervised Learning of Efficient Exploration: Pre-training Adaptive Policies via Self-Imposed Goals
856. ICLR 2026Unveiling the Cognitive Compass: Theory-of-Mind–Guided Multimodal Emotion Reasoning
857. ICLR 2026Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Reasoning
858. ICLR 2026UrbanVerse: Scaling Urban Simulation by Watching City-Tour Videos
859. ICLR 2026Use the Online Network If You Can: Towards Fast and Stable Reinforcement Learning
860. ICLR 2026Using Reinforcement Learning to Train Large Language Models to Explain Human Decisions
861. ICLR 2026Value Flows
862. ICLR 2026Value Gradient Flow: Behavior-Regularized RL without Regularization
863. ICLR 2026Value Matching: Scalable and Gradient-Free Reward-Guided Flow Adaptation
864. ICLR 2026Variance-Dependent Regret Lower Bounds for Contextual Bandits
865. ICLR 2026Variational Reasoning for Language Models
866. ICLR 2026VerifyBench: Benchmarking Reference-based Reward Systems for Large Language Models
867. ICLR 2026VeriRole: Verifiable Role-Awareness through Hint-Guided Reinforcement Learning
868. ICLR 2026VidBridge-R1: Bridging QA and Captioning for RL-based Video Understanding Models with Intermediate Proxy Tasks
869. ICLR 2026Video-KTR: Reinforcing Video Reasoning via Key Token Attribution
870. ICLR 2026Video-STAR: Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition with Tools
871. ICLR 2026VideoZoomer: Reinforcement-Learned Temporal Focusing for Long Video Reasoning
872. ICLR 2026ViPER: Empowering the Self-Evolution of Visual Perception Abilities in Vision-Language Models
873. ICLR 2026Virne: A Comprehensive Benchmark for RL-based Network Resource Allocation in NFV
874. ICLR 2026Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models
875. ICLR 2026Vision-Zero: Scalable VLM Self-Improvement via Strategic Gamified Self-Play
876. ICLR 2026VisionReasoner: Unified Reasoning-Integrated Visual Perception via Reinforcement Learning
877. ICLR 2026Visual Jigsaw Post-Training Improves MLLMs
878. ICLR 2026Visual Planning: Let's Think Only with Images
879. ICLR 2026VITA: Zero-Shot Value Functions via Test-Time Adaptation of Vision–Language Models
880. ICLR 2026VowelPrompt: Hearing Speech Emotions from Text via Vowel-level Prosodic Augmentation
881. ICLR 2026VTool-R1: VLMs Learn to Think with Images via Reinforcement Learning on Multimodal Tool Use
882. ICLR 2026WARC-Bench: Web Archive based Benchmark for GUI Subtask Executions
883. ICLR 2026Wavelet Predictive Representations for Non-Stationary Reinforcement Learning
884. ICLR 2026wd1: Weighted Policy Optimization for Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models
885. ICLR 2026We-Math 2.0: A Versatile MathBook System for Incentivizing Visual Mathematical Reasoning
886. ICLR 2026WebArbiter: A Generative Reasoning Process Reward Model for Web Agents
887. ICLR 2026WebFactory: Automated Compression of Foundational Language Intelligence into Grounded Web Agents
888. ICLR 2026WebGen-Agent: Enhancing Interactive Website Generation with Multi-Level Feedback and Step-Level Reinforcement Learning
889. ICLR 2026WebSailor-V2: Bridging the Chasm to Proprietary Agents via Synthetic Data and Scalable Reinforcement Learning
890. ICLR 2026Webscale-RL: Automated Data Pipeline for Scaling RL Data to Pretraining Levels
891. ICLR 2026WebSeer: Training Deeper Search Agents through Reinforcement Learning with Self-Reflection
892. ICLR 2026WebWatcher: Breaking New Frontiers of Vision-Language Deep Research Agent
893. ICLR 2026What Generative Search Engines Like and How to Optimize Web Content Cooperatively
894. ICLR 2026What Matters for Batch Online Reinforcement Learning in Robotics?
895. ICLR 2026Whatever Remains Must Be True: Filtering Drives Reasoning in LLMs, Shaping Diversity
896. ICLR 2026When a Robot is More Capable than a Human: Learning from Constrained Demonstrators
897. ICLR 2026When Data is the Algorithm: A Systematic Study and Curation of Preference Optimization Datasets
898. ICLR 2026When Greedy Wins: Emergent Exploitation Bias in Meta-Bandit LLM Training
899. ICLR 2026When Is Diversity Rewarded in Cooperative Multi-Agent Learning?
900. ICLR 2026When More is Less: Understanding Chain-of-Thought Length in LLMs

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.