Sim-to-Real papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• Sim-to-Real went from 159 papers in 2023 to 204 in 2026, roughly 1.3x in three years.
• CVPR publishes the most Sim-to-Real work: 223 papers from 2023 to 2026, 35% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with Multimodal LLMs: papers tagged with both rose from 2 in 2023 to 27 in 2026.
• Among the 5 topics under Robotics and Embodied AI, it ranks #3 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, Humanoid Control, is up 3.8x versus 1.3x here.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026AET-Bench: Pixel-Accurate Atomic Tomography Is Not Atom-Accurate
• ICML 2026RTInfer: Real-Time Inference of Multiple DNNs on Edge GPUs
• ICLR 2026Manipulation as in Simulation: Enabling Accurate Geometry Perception in Robots
• CVPR 2026AnthroTAP Learning Point Tracking with Real-World Motion
• NeurIPS 2025Algorithms and SQ Lower Bounds for Robustly Learning Real-valued Multi-Index Models
• ICML 2025HyperIV: Real-time Implied Volatility Smoothing
• ICLR 2025Do Contemporary Causal Inference Models Capture Real-World Heterogeneity? Findings from a Large-Scale Benchmark
• CVPR 2025Analyzing the Synthetic-to-Real Domain Gap in 3D Hand Pose Estimation
• NeurIPS 2024EgoSim: An Egocentric Multi-view Simulator and Real Dataset for Body-worn Cameras during Motion and Activity
• ICML 2024A Global Geometric Analysis of Maximal Coding Rate Reduction
• ICLR 2024Extending Power of Nature from Binary to Real-Valued Graph Learning in Real World
• CVPR 2024Density-guided Translator Boosts Synthetic-to-Real Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds
• NeurIPS 2023[Re] Pure Noise to the Rescue of Insufficient Data
• ICML 2023Adversarially Robust PAC Learnability of Real-Valued Functions
• ICLR 2023Provable Sim-to-real Transfer in Continuous Domain with Partial Observations
• CVPR 2023Cloud-Device Collaborative Adaptation to Continual Changing Environments in the Real-World
• NeurIPS 2026Coarse-to-Real: Generative Rendering for Populated Dynamic Scenes
• ICML 2026Server-Proximal Aggregation for Federated Domain-Incremental Learning under Partial Participation: Task-Uniform Convergence and Backward Transfer
• ICLR 2026PatchRefiner V2: Fast and Lightweight Real-Domain High-Resolution Metric Depth Estimation
• CVPR 2026BiProLoRA Bilevel Prompt LoRA for Real Scene Recovery

All Sim-to-Real papers

203 papers, page 4 of 5

151. NeurIPS 2026Gaeta-Lie Neural SDEs: Symmetry-Regularized Learning of Stochastic Dynamics
152. NeurIPS 2026GenZ: Hybrid statistical–foundational models for knowledge discovery from real-valued multidimensional targets
153. NeurIPS 2026GitInject: Real-World Prompt Injection Attacks in AI-Powered CI/CD Pipelines
154. NeurIPS 2026Harnessing Data Asymmetry in Manifold Learning
155. NeurIPS 2026Inference-Time Refinement Closes the Synthetic-Real Gap in Tabular Diffusion
156. NeurIPS 2026Information Discernment in Large Language Models
157. NeurIPS 2026INVITA-WheatFieldState: A Real-World Benchmark for Crop-State Estimation in Wheat Field Trials
158. NeurIPS 2026Is Agentic AI Ready for Real-World Hardware Engineering? A Deep Dive with Phoenix-bench
159. NeurIPS 2026JARVIS-Bench: Benchmarking Personal Intelligence Agents on Long-Horizon Real-User Daily Traces
160. NeurIPS 2026Layer Free-Riding in Forward-Forward Networks: Real, Repairable, but Not Accuracy-Dominant
161. NeurIPS 2026Learning Planning Budgets in Real-Time RL
162. NeurIPS 2026Learning Rate Transfer in Normalized Transformers
163. NeurIPS 2026Learning to target with network interference
164. NeurIPS 2026Local Gaussian Processes on Compact Lie Groups
165. NeurIPS 2026MatCurvs: Article Real-Coordinate Curve Extraction for Agent-Ready Materials Reasoning
166. NeurIPS 2026MCP-Atlas: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Tool-Use Competency with Real MCP Servers
167. NeurIPS 2026MDPBench: A Benchmark for Multilingual Document Parsing in Real-World Scenarios
168. NeurIPS 2026Measuring and Mitigating the Distributional Gap Between Real and Simulated User Behaviors
169. NeurIPS 2026No-Regret Caching with Delayed Hits
170. NeurIPS 2026NPUsper: Eliminating Redundant Computation for Real-Time Whisper on Mobile NPUs
171. NeurIPS 2026OpenClawBench: Benchmarking Process-side Anomalies in Real-world Agent Execution Trajectories
172. NeurIPS 2026Optimal Real-Data Allocation for Synthetic-Data-Augmented Inference
173. NeurIPS 2026Origami as a Real-Image Benchmark for Procedural State-Transition Reasoning
174. NeurIPS 2026Phantom Transfer: Data Poisoning can Survive Data-Level Defences
175. NeurIPS 2026PhysDNet: Physics-Driven Gradient Amplification for Real-Time Image Dehazing
176. NeurIPS 2026Precision-Pyramid: Towards real-time neural decoding for fault-tolerant quantum computing
177. NeurIPS 2026ProCARE: Real-World Study Automation via Profile-Grounded Evidence Contracts
178. NeurIPS 2026RAD-TFM: Robust and Domain-Adapted Tabular Foundation Models
179. NeurIPS 2026Real In, Real Out: What If We Only Use Real Data for Scene Text Editing?
180. NeurIPS 2026Real-World Dual-Pixel Raindrop Removal: A New Benchmark and Degradation-Adaptive RWKV Baseline
181. NeurIPS 2026RESCAST-100K: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-Domain Residential Load and Indoor Temperature Forecasting
182. NeurIPS 2026Robust Domain Generalization under Divergent Marginal and Conditional Distributions
183. NeurIPS 2026SaaS-Bench: Can Computer-Use Agents Leverage Real-World SaaS to Solve Professional Workflows?
184. NeurIPS 2026Same Function, Different Mechanism: Implementation-Local Geometry Beyond Accuracy
185. NeurIPS 2026Shared Truth: Emergent Truth Properties in Large Language Models via Heterogeneous Injection-based Transfer
186. NeurIPS 2026SkillOrchestra: Learning to Route Agents via Skill Transfer
187. NeurIPS 2026SOL-ExecBench: Speed-of-Light Benchmarking for Real-World GPU Kernels Against Hardware Limits
188. NeurIPS 2026Spectrally Parameterized Neural Inverse Reconstruction
189. NeurIPS 2026Stable Max Coverage Under a Cardinality Constraint
190. NeurIPS 2026Structure, Subspace and System: Push the Real Limit of Extremely Low-Bit Quantization for MoE-LLMs
191. NeurIPS 2026TerminalWorld: Benchmarking Agents on Real-World Terminal Tasks
192. NeurIPS 2026TF-PRVR: Training-Free Partially Relevant Video Retrieval for Real-World Generalization
193. NeurIPS 2026The AI Observatory: A Public Measure of Real-World AI Use
194. NeurIPS 2026The Mirage of Optimizing Training Policies: Monotonic Inference Policies as the Real Objective for LLM Reinforcement Learning
195. NeurIPS 2026The Stability of Data Exchange in Competitive Markets
196. NeurIPS 2026Thinking in Boxes: 3D Editing in Real Images Made Easy
197. NeurIPS 2026Too Aligned to be Real: Detecting AI-Generated Images via Cross-modal Alignment Shift
198. NeurIPS 2026Towards Real-Time Full-Waveform LiDAR Transformers via Intensity-Guided Token Reduction and Physics-Aware Augmentation
199. NeurIPS 2026Tracing Psychometric Inference in Large Language Models
200. NeurIPS 2026Train on the Sphere, Deploy on the Hill: Closed-Form-Anchored Surrogates for Real-Terrain Boundary-Integral Equations

FAQ

How many Sim-to-Real papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?

629 in total: 159 in 2023, 148 in 2024, 118 in 2025, 204 in 2026.

How many Sim-to-Real papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 75 Sim-to-Real papers, versus 33 the year before.

How many Sim-to-Real papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 33 Sim-to-Real papers, versus 16 the year before.

How many Sim-to-Real papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 33 Sim-to-Real papers, versus 18 the year before.

How many Sim-to-Real papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 63 Sim-to-Real papers, versus 51 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most Sim-to-Real papers?

CVPR, with 223 papers from 2023 to 2026.