Theory · optimization papers, 2023–2026
Theory area: optimization
Scope: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR, 2023–2026. 1,871 papers are tagged with this topic.
Key findings
- Theory · optimization went from 123 papers in 2023 to 584 in 2026, roughly 4.7x in three years.
- NeurIPS publishes the most Theory · optimization work: 778 papers from 2023 to 2026, 42% of the four-venue total.
- The fastest-growing overlap is with Low-Rank Adaptation: papers tagged with both rose from 0 in 2023 to 31 in 2026.
- Among the 5 topics under Theory and Statistics, it ranks #1 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, Theory · learning theory, is up 5.6x versus 4.7x here.
Papers per venue
Counts by year and venue
| Year | NeurIPS | ICLR | ICML | CVPR | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 37 | 46 | 35 | 5 | 123 |
| 2024 | 304 | 123 | 67 | 0 | 494 |
| 2025 | 318 | 196 | 147 | 9 | 670 |
| 2026 | 119 | 244 | 214 | 7 | 584 |
Representative papers
Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up
- NeurIPS 2026A Mechanistic Investigation of Theory of Mind in a Large Language Model
- ICML 2026A Direct Second-Order Method for Solving Two-Player Zero-Sum Games
- ICLR 2026A Convergence Analysis of Adaptive Optimizers under Floating-point Quantization
- CVPR 2026TriSim Tri-Dimensional Similarity Modeling with Extreme Value Theory for False-Negative
- NeurIPS 20253BASiL: An Algorithmic Framework for Sparse plus Low-Rank Compression of LLMs
- ICML 2025Active Learning of Deep Neural Networks via Gradient-Free Cutting Planes
- ICLR 2025A Coefficient Makes SVRG Effective
- CVPR 2025Dynamic Stereotype Theory Induced Micro-expression Recognition with Oriented Deformation
- NeurIPS 2024A Combinatorial Algorithm for the Semi-Discrete Optimal Transport Problem
- ICML 2024A Statistical Theory of Regularization-Based Continual Learning
- ICLR 2024A Discretization Framework for Robust Contextual Stochastic Optimization
- NeurIPS 2023[Re] Bandit Theory and Thompson Sampling-guided Directed Evolution for Sequence Optimization
- ICML 2023Averaged Method of Multipliers for Bi-Level Optimization without Lower-Level Strong Convexity
- ICLR 2023Adaptive Optimization in the $\infty$-Width Limit
- CVPR 2023Deep Hashing With Minimal-Distance-Separated Hash Centers
- NeurIPS 2026Avoiding Obfuscation with Prover-Estimator Debate
- ICML 2026A General Framework for Dynamic Consistent Submodular Maximization
- ICLR 2026A Memory-Efficient Hierarchical Algorithm for Large-scale Optimal Transport Problems
- CVPR 2026FedAdamom Adaptive Momentum for Improved Generalization in Federated Optimization
- NeurIPS 2025A Beyond-Worst-Case Analysis of Greedy k-means++
All Theory · optimization papers
670 papers, page 14 of 14
- NeurIPS 2025Transformers Provably Learn Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Length Generalization
- NeurIPS 2025TSENOR: Highly-Efficient Algorithm for Finding Transposable N:M Sparse Masks
- NeurIPS 2025Two Heads are Better than One: Simulating Large Transformers with Small Ones
- NeurIPS 2025UFO-RL: Uncertainty-Focused Optimization for Efficient Reinforcement Learning Data Selection
- NeurIPS 2025Unbalanced Optimal Total Variation Transport: A Theoretical Approach to Spatial Resource Allocation Problems
- NeurIPS 2025Uncoupled and Convergent Learning in Monotone Games under Bandit Feedback
- NeurIPS 2025Understanding Data Influence in Reinforcement Finetuning
- NeurIPS 2025Understanding outer learning rates in Local SGD
- NeurIPS 2025Understanding Softmax Attention Layers:\\ Exact Mean-Field Analysis on a Toy Problem
- NeurIPS 2025Uniform Wrappers: Bridging Concave to Quadratizable Functions in Online Optimization
- NeurIPS 2025UniteFormer: Unifying Node and Edge Modalities in Transformers for Vehicle Routing Problems
- NeurIPS 2025Unlocking Dataset Distillation with Diffusion Models
- NeurIPS 2025Unveiling m-Sharpness Through the Structure of Stochastic Gradient Noise
- NeurIPS 2025What Data Enables Optimal Decisions? An Exact Characterization for Linear Optimization
- NeurIPS 2025What Expressivity Theory Misses: Message Passing Complexity for GNNs
- NeurIPS 2025What Makes a Reward Model a Good Teacher? An Optimization Perspective
- NeurIPS 2025When Does Curriculum Learning Help? A Theoretical Perspective
- NeurIPS 2025When majority rules, minority loses: bias amplification of gradient descent
- NeurIPS 2025Which Algorithms Have Tight Generalization Bounds?
- NeurIPS 2025Zeroth-Order Optimization Finds Flat Minima
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FAQ
- How many Theory · optimization papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?
- 1,871 in total: 123 in 2023, 494 in 2024, 670 in 2025, 584 in 2026.
- How many Theory · optimization papers are at NeurIPS 2026?
- NeurIPS 2026 has 119 Theory · optimization papers, versus 318 the year before.
- How many Theory · optimization papers are at ICLR 2026?
- ICLR 2026 has 244 Theory · optimization papers, versus 196 the year before.
- How many Theory · optimization papers are at ICML 2026?
- ICML 2026 has 214 Theory · optimization papers, versus 147 the year before.
- How many Theory · optimization papers are at CVPR 2026?
- CVPR 2026 has 7 Theory · optimization papers, versus 9 the year before.
- Which conference publishes the most Theory · optimization papers?
- NeurIPS, with 778 papers from 2023 to 2026.