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

199 papers, page 1 of 4

1. NeurIPS 2026AET-Bench: Pixel-Accurate Atomic Tomography Is Not Atom-Accurate
2. NeurIPS 2026Are Agents Ready to Teach? A Multi-Stage Benchmark for Real-World Teaching Workflows
3. NeurIPS 2026Auditing AI peer reviewers: a dose-response and false-positive benchmark on real scientific papers
4. NeurIPS 2026BehaviorBench: Modeling Real-World User Decisions from Behavioral Traces
5. NeurIPS 2026Beyond Real or Fake: A Dual-Channel Authenticity and Reasoning Protocol for Photographic Assessment
6. NeurIPS 2026Bypassing PC1 Makes SAEs More Reproducible
7. NeurIPS 2026Can Entry-Wise Clipping Give Spectral Control of Stochastic Gradients?
8. NeurIPS 2026Cheap Talk, Real Stakes: Commitment and Exploitation in Human-LLM Strategic Interaction
9. NeurIPS 2026Closed Loop Dynamic Driving Data Mixture for Real-Synthetic Co-Training
10. NeurIPS 2026Coarse-to-Real: Generative Rendering for Populated Dynamic Scenes
11. NeurIPS 2026Continual Learning Bench: Evaluating Frontier AI Systems in Real-World Stateful Environments
12. NeurIPS 2026DeEscalWild: A Real-World Benchmark for Automated De-Escalation Training with SLMs
13. NeurIPS 2026Distributionally Robust Domain Randomization with Learned Risk-Sensitive Dynamics Samplers
14. NeurIPS 2026DoFP-Aligned Lookup Tables for Real-Time Polarization Demosaicking
15. NeurIPS 2026Dynamics-Informed Adaptive Offline RL for Real-Time Tokamak Plasma Control
16. NeurIPS 2026Emergent Misalignment as Data-Mediated Transfer
17. NeurIPS 2026Evaluating Synthetic ECG Pretraining: When Can Patient-Free Simulators Substitute for Real ECG Data?
18. NeurIPS 2026ExploitGym: Can AI Agents Turn Security Vulnerabilities into Real Attacks?
19. NeurIPS 2026ExtrapAir: Air Quality Inference at Unmonitored Locations via Weather-Bridged Spatial Attention
20. NeurIPS 2026FashionChameleon: Towards Real-Time and Interactive Human-Garment Video Customization
21. NeurIPS 2026FASTER: Rethinking Real-Time Flow VLAs
22. NeurIPS 2026FlashPlanner: Real-Time Goal-Conditioned Flow-Matching Planning for Autonomous Driving with Online RL Fine-Tuning
23. NeurIPS 2026Gaeta-Lie Neural SDEs: Symmetry-Regularized Learning of Stochastic Dynamics
24. NeurIPS 2026GenZ: Hybrid statistical–foundational models for knowledge discovery from real-valued multidimensional targets
25. NeurIPS 2026GitInject: Real-World Prompt Injection Attacks in AI-Powered CI/CD Pipelines
26. NeurIPS 2026Harnessing Data Asymmetry in Manifold Learning
27. NeurIPS 2026Inference-Time Refinement Closes the Synthetic-Real Gap in Tabular Diffusion
28. NeurIPS 2026Information Discernment in Large Language Models
29. NeurIPS 2026INVITA-WheatFieldState: A Real-World Benchmark for Crop-State Estimation in Wheat Field Trials
30. NeurIPS 2026Is Agentic AI Ready for Real-World Hardware Engineering? A Deep Dive with Phoenix-bench
31. NeurIPS 2026JARVIS-Bench: Benchmarking Personal Intelligence Agents on Long-Horizon Real-User Daily Traces
32. NeurIPS 2026Layer Free-Riding in Forward-Forward Networks: Real, Repairable, but Not Accuracy-Dominant
33. NeurIPS 2026Learning Planning Budgets in Real-Time RL
34. NeurIPS 2026Learning Rate Transfer in Normalized Transformers
35. NeurIPS 2026Learning to target with network interference
36. NeurIPS 2026Local Gaussian Processes on Compact Lie Groups
37. NeurIPS 2026MatCurvs: Article Real-Coordinate Curve Extraction for Agent-Ready Materials Reasoning
38. NeurIPS 2026MCP-Atlas: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Tool-Use Competency with Real MCP Servers
39. NeurIPS 2026MDPBench: A Benchmark for Multilingual Document Parsing in Real-World Scenarios
40. NeurIPS 2026Measuring and Mitigating the Distributional Gap Between Real and Simulated User Behaviors
41. NeurIPS 2026No-Regret Caching with Delayed Hits
42. NeurIPS 2026NPUsper: Eliminating Redundant Computation for Real-Time Whisper on Mobile NPUs
43. NeurIPS 2026OpenClawBench: Benchmarking Process-side Anomalies in Real-world Agent Execution Trajectories
44. NeurIPS 2026Optimal Real-Data Allocation for Synthetic-Data-Augmented Inference
45. NeurIPS 2026Origami as a Real-Image Benchmark for Procedural State-Transition Reasoning
46. NeurIPS 2026Phantom Transfer: Data Poisoning can Survive Data-Level Defences
47. NeurIPS 2026PhysDNet: Physics-Driven Gradient Amplification for Real-Time Image Dehazing
48. NeurIPS 2026Precision-Pyramid: Towards real-time neural decoding for fault-tolerant quantum computing
49. NeurIPS 2026ProCARE: Real-World Study Automation via Profile-Grounded Evidence Contracts
50. NeurIPS 2026RAD-TFM: Robust and Domain-Adapted Tabular Foundation Models

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.