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
244 papers, page 5 of 5
- ICLR 2026Sign-SGD via Parameter-Free Optimization
- ICLR 2026Single-Loop Byzantine-Resilient Federated Bilevel Optimization
- ICLR 2026Sobolev Gradient Ascent for Optimal Transport: Barycenter Optimization and Convergence Analysis
- ICLR 2026Soft Quality-Diversity Optimization
- ICLR 2026Solving the 2-norm k-hyperplane clustering problem via multi-norm formulations
- ICLR 2026Special Unitary Parameterized Estimators of Rotation
- ICLR 2026Statistical Advantage of Softmax Attention: Insights from Single-Location Regression
- ICLR 2026StepORLM: A Self-Evolving Framework With Generative Process Supervision For Operations Research Language Models
- ICLR 2026Stop Guessing: Choosing the Optimization-Consistent Uncertainty Measurement for Evidential Deep Learning
- ICLR 2026Strong Correlations Induce Cause Only Predictions in Transformer Training
- ICLR 2026Strongly Convex Sets in Riemannian Manifolds
- ICLR 2026Sublinear Time Quantum Algorithm for Attention Approximation
- ICLR 2026Submodular Function Minimization with Dueling Oracle
- ICLR 2026SupCLAP: Controlling Optimization Trajectory Drift in Audio-Text Contrastive Learning with Support Vector Regularization
- ICLR 2026SVD Provably Denoises Nearest Neighbor Data
- ICLR 2026T-TAMER: Provably Taming Trade-offs in ML Serving
- ICLR 2026Task-free Adaptive Meta Black-box Optimization
- ICLR 2026The Effect of Attention Head Count on Transformer Approximation
- ICLR 2026The Polar Express: Optimal Matrix Sign Methods and their Application to the Muon Algorithm
- ICLR 2026The Potential of Second-Order Optimization for LLMs: A Study with Full Gauss-Newton
- ICLR 2026The Power of Small Initialization in Noisy Low-Tubal-Rank Tensor Recovery
- ICLR 2026Thompson Sampling via Fine-Tuning of LLMs
- ICLR 2026Three Forward, One Backward: Memory-Efficient Full-Rank Fine-Tuning of Large Models via Extra Forward Passes
- ICLR 2026Tighter Performance Theory of FedExProx
- ICLR 2026Towards a Sharp Analysis of Learning Offline $f$-Divergence-Regularized Contextual Bandits
- ICLR 2026Towards Dynamic Interleaving Optimizers
- ICLR 2026Towards Efficient Constraint Handling in Neural Solvers for Routing Problems
- ICLR 2026Towards Efficient Optimizer Design for LLM via Structured Fisher Approximation with a Low-Rank Extension
- ICLR 2026Towards Safe and Optimal Online Bidding: A Modular Look-ahead Lyapunov Framework
- ICLR 2026Towards Understanding The Calibration Benefits of Sharpness-Aware Minimization
- ICLR 2026Tractability via Low Dimensionality: The Parameterized Complexity of Training Quantized Neural Networks
- ICLR 2026Training Dynamics Impact Post-Training Quantization Robustness
- ICLR 2026Tuning the burn-in phase in training recurrent neural networks improves their performance
- ICLR 2026TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate
- ICLR 2026Two (narrow) heads are better than (an arbitrarily wide) one
- ICLR 2026Two-Layer Convolutional Autoencoders Trained on Normal Data Provably Detect Unseen Anomalies
- ICLR 2026Unbiased Gradient Estimation for Event Binning via Functional Backpropagation
- ICLR 2026Understanding and improving Shampoo and SOAP via Kullback-Leibler Minimization
- ICLR 2026Unified Analyses for Hierarchical Federated Learning: Topology Selection under Data Heterogeneity
- ICLR 2026Unlocking the Potential of Weighting Methods in Federated Learning Through Communication Compression
- ICLR 2026Vision-Zero: Scalable VLM Self-Improvement via Strategic Gamified Self-Play
- ICLR 2026ViTSP: A Vision Language Models Guided Framework for Large-Scale Traveling Salesman Problems
- ICLR 2026Why Less is More (Sometimes): A Theory of Data Curation
- ICLR 2026WILD-Diffusion: A WDRO Inspired Training Method for Diffusion Models under Limited Data
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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.