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 4 of 19

151. ICLR 2026Decision Aggregation under Quantal Response
152. ICLR 2026Decision Pre-Trained Transformer is a Scalable In-Context Reinforcement Learner
153. ICLR 2026Decomposing Extrapolative Problem Solving: Spatial Transfer and Length Scaling with Map Worlds
154. ICLR 2026Deconstructing Positional Information: From Attention Logits to Training Biases
155. ICLR 2026Decoupled Q-Chunking
156. ICLR 2026Deep SPI: Safe Policy Improvement via World Models
157. ICLR 2026DeepCompress: A Dual Reward Strategy for Dynamically Exploring and Compressing Reasoning Chains
158. ICLR 2026DeepEyes: Incentivizing "Thinking with Images" via Reinforcement Learning
159. ICLR 2026DeepEyesV2: Toward Agentic Multimodal Model
160. ICLR 2026DeepMath-103K: A Large-Scale, Challenging, Decontaminated, and Verifiable Mathematical Dataset for Advancing Reasoning
161. ICLR 2026DeepRAG: Thinking to Retrieve Step by Step for Large Language Models
162. ICLR 2026DeepSearch: Overcome the Bottleneck of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards via Monte Carlo Tree Search
163. ICLR 2026Deft Scheduling of Dynamic Cloud Workflows with Varying Deadlines via Mixture-of-Experts
164. ICLR 2026DELTA-Code: How RL Unlocks and Transfers New Programming Algorithms in LLMs
165. ICLR 2026DemoGrasp: Universal Dexterous Grasping from a Single Demonstration
166. ICLR 2026Demystifying Emergent Exploration in Goal-Conditioned RL
167. ICLR 2026DenseGRPO: From Sparse to Dense Reward for Flow Matching Model Alignment
168. ICLR 2026DePO: Demonstration-guided Policy Optimization for Molecular Optimization
169. ICLR 2026Designing Time Series Experiments in A/B Testing with Transformer Reinforcement Learning
170. ICLR 2026Detecting Data Contamination from Reinforcement Learning Post-training for Large Language Models
171. ICLR 2026Dichotomous Diffusion Policy Optimization
172. ICLR 2026Differentiable Model Predictive Control on the GPU
173. ICLR 2026DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation
174. ICLR 2026Diffusion Alignment as Variataional Expectation-Maximization
175. ICLR 2026Diffusion Blend: Inference-Time Multi-Preference Alignment for Diffusion Models
176. ICLR 2026Diffusion Fine-Tuning via Reparameterized Policy Gradient of the Soft Q-Function
177. ICLR 2026DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Process
178. ICLR 2026Direct Preference Optimization for Primitive-Enabled Hierarchical RL: A Bilevel Approach
179. ICLR 2026Discovering Diverse Behaviors via Temporal Contrastive Learning
180. ICLR 2026Discrete Compositional Generation via General Soft Operators and Robust Reinforcement Learning
181. ICLR 2026Discrete Diffusion for Reflective Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving
182. ICLR 2026Discrete Variational Autoencoding via Policy Search
183. ICLR 2026Disentangling Length Bias in Preference Learning via Response-Conditioned Modeling
184. ICLR 2026Displacement-Resistant Extensions of DPO with Nonconvex $f$-Divergences
185. ICLR 2026Distributional value gradients for stochastic environments
186. ICLR 2026Distributionally Robust Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Value Factorization
187. ICLR 2026Distributions as Actions: A Unified Framework for Diverse Action Spaces
188. ICLR 2026DIVA-GRPO: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning through Difficulty-Adaptive Variant Advantage
189. ICLR 2026DiVE-k: DIFFERENTIAL VISUAL REASONING FOR FINE-GRAINED IMAGE RECOGNITION
190. ICLR 2026Diversity-Enhanced Reasoning for Subjective Questions
191. ICLR 2026Diversity-Incentivized Exploration for Versatile Reasoning
192. ICLR 2026Divide, Harmonize, Then Conquer It: Shooting Multi-Commodity Flow Problems with Multimodal Language Models
193. ICLR 2026Do LLM Agents Know How to Ground, Recover, and Assess? Evaluating Epistemic Competence in Information-Seeking Agents
194. ICLR 2026Do Not Let Low-Probability Tokens Over-Dominate in RL for LLMs
195. ICLR 2026Doctor-R1: Mastering Clinical Inquiry with Experiential Agentic Reinforcement Learning
196. ICLR 2026Does “Do Differentiable Simulators Give Better Policy Gradients?” Give Better Policy Gradients?
197. ICLR 2026Don't Just Fine-tune the Agent, Tune the Environment
198. ICLR 2026Don't Settle Too Early: Self-Reflective Remasking for Diffusion Language Models
199. ICLR 2026DOPPLER: Dual-Policy Learning for Device Assignment in Asynchronous Dataflow Graphs
200. ICLR 2026DR-SAC: Distributionally Robust Soft Actor-Critic for Reinforcement Learning under Uncertainty

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.