Theory · optimization papers, 2023–2026

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.

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

123 papers, page 1 of 3

1. CVPR 2023Deep Hashing With Minimal-Distance-Separated Hash Centers
2. CVPR 2023Elastic Aggregation for Federated Optimization
3. CVPR 2023NVTC: Nonlinear Vector Transform Coding
4. CVPR 2023Optimization-Inspired Cross-Attention Transformer for Compressive Sensing
5. CVPR 2023Visual-Language Prompt Tuning With Knowledge-Guided Context Optimization
6. ICLR 2023A Theory of Dynamic Benchmarks
7. ICLR 2023Accelerated Single-Call Methods for Constrained Min-Max Optimization
8. ICLR 2023Achieving Sub-linear Regret in Infinite Horizon Average Reward Constrained MDP with Linear Function Approximation
9. ICLR 2023Adaptive Optimization in the $\infty$-Width Limit
10. ICLR 2023Alternating Differentiation for Optimization Layers
11. ICLR 2023Approximate Vanishing Ideal Computations at Scale
12. ICLR 2023Behavior Proximal Policy Optimization
13. ICLR 2023Behind the Scenes of Gradient Descent: A Trajectory Analysis via Basis Function Decomposition
14. ICLR 2023Bispectral Neural Networks
15. ICLR 2023Breaking Correlation Shift via Conditional Invariant Regularizer
16. ICLR 2023Computational Language Acquisition with Theory of Mind
17. ICLR 2023D4FT: A Deep Learning Approach to Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory
18. ICLR 2023Depth Separation with Multilayer Mean-Field Networks
19. ICLR 2023Discovering Evolution Strategies via Meta-Black-Box Optimization
20. ICLR 2023Disentanglement with Biological Constraints: A Theory of Functional Cell Types
21. ICLR 2023Efficiently Computing Nash Equilibria in Adversarial Team Markov Games
22. ICLR 2023Eva: Practical Second-order Optimization with Kronecker-vectorized Approximation
23. ICLR 2023Excess Risk of Two-Layer ReLU Neural Networks in Teacher-Student Settings and its Superiority to Kernel Methods
24. ICLR 2023Faster federated optimization under second-order similarity
25. ICLR 2023Finding Actual Descent Directions for Adversarial Training
26. ICLR 2023Fisher-Legendre (FishLeg) optimization of deep neural networks
27. ICLR 2023Git Re-Basin: Merging Models modulo Permutation Symmetries
28. ICLR 2023Globally Optimal Training of Neural Networks with Threshold Activation Functions
29. ICLR 2023Heterogeneous Neuronal and Synaptic Dynamics for Spike-Efficient Unsupervised Learning: Theory and Design Principles
30. ICLR 2023Humanly Certifying Superhuman Classifiers
31. ICLR 2023Hyperparameter Optimization through Neural Network Partitioning
32. ICLR 2023Learning in temporally structured environments
33. ICLR 2023Learning Probabilistic Topological Representations Using Discrete Morse Theory
34. ICLR 2023Learning ReLU networks to high uniform accuracy is intractable
35. ICLR 2023Max-Margin Works while Large Margin Fails: Generalization without Uniform Convergence
36. ICLR 2023Optimizing Spca-based Continual Learning: A Theoretical Approach
37. ICLR 2023Over-parameterized Model Optimization with Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz Condition
38. ICLR 2023Pitfalls of Gaussians as a noise distribution in NCE
39. ICLR 2023Plateau in Monotonic Linear Interpolation --- A "Biased" View of Loss Landscape for Deep Networks
40. ICLR 2023Predictor-corrector algorithms for stochastic optimization under gradual distribution shift
41. ICLR 2023Projective Proximal Gradient Descent for Nonconvex Nonsmooth Optimization: Fast Convergence Without Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) Property
42. ICLR 2023Provable Memorization Capacity of Transformers
43. ICLR 2023RandProx: Primal-Dual Optimization Algorithms with Randomized Proximal Updates
44. ICLR 2023Robust Scheduling with GFlowNets
45. ICLR 2023SGDA with shuffling: faster convergence for nonconvex-PŁ minimax optimization
46. ICLR 2023Strong inductive biases provably prevent harmless interpolation
47. ICLR 2023The Power of Regularization in Solving Extensive-Form Games
48. ICLR 2023Towards convergence to Nash equilibria in two-team zero-sum games
49. ICLR 2023Transformers Learn Shortcuts to Automata
50. ICLR 2023Why (and When) does Local SGD Generalize Better than SGD?

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.