World Models papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• World Models went from 23 papers in 2023 to 250 in 2026, roughly 11x in three years.
• NeurIPS publishes the most World Models work: 159 papers from 2023 to 2026, 37% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with Multimodal LLMs: papers tagged with both rose from 1 in 2023 to 34 in 2026.
• Among the 4 topics under Trending Systems, it ranks #4 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, AI Agents, is up 12x versus 11x here.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026A Hierarchical World Model for Driving
• ICML 2026A Deep Learning Model of Mental Rotation Informed by Interactive VR Experiments
• ICLR 2026Astra: General Interactive World Model with Autoregressive Denoising
• CVPR 2026Active Intelligence in Video Avatars via Closed-loop World Modeling
• NeurIPS 2025COME: Adding Scene-Centric Forecasting Control to Occupancy World Model
• ICML 2025A Causal World Model Underlying Next Token Prediction: Exploring GPT in a Controlled Environment
• ICLR 2025AdaWM: Adaptive World Model based Planning for Autonomous Driving
• CVPR 2025DIO: Decomposable Implicit 4D Occupancy-Flow World Model
• NeurIPS 2024A Data-Centric Perspective on Evaluating Machine Learning Models for Tabular Data
• ICML 20243D-VLA: A 3D Vision-Language-Action Generative World Model
• ICLR 2024Copilot4D: Learning Unsupervised World Models for Autonomous Driving via Discrete Diffusion
• CVPR 2024DriveWorld: 4D Pre-trained Scene Understanding via World Models for Autonomous Driving
• NeurIPS 2023Action Inference by Maximising Evidence: Zero-Shot Imitation from Observation with World Models
• ICML 2023Do Embodied Agents Dream of Pixelated Sheep: Embodied Decision Making using Language Guided World Modelling
• ICLR 2023Dynamic Update-to-Data Ratio: Minimizing World Model Overfitting
• NeurIPS 2026A World Model of Radiologist Reading for Medical Image Representation Learning
• ICML 2026Behavior-Invariant Task Representation Learning with Transformer-based World Models for Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning
• ICLR 2026Building spatial world models from sparse transitional episodic memories
• CVPR 2026Chain of World World Model Thinking in Latent Motion
• NeurIPS 2025DMWM: Dual-Mind World Model with Long-Term Imagination

All World Models papers

106 papers, page 2 of 3

51. ICML 2025Novelty Detection in Reinforcement Learning with World Models
52. ICML 2025PIGDreamer: Privileged Information Guided World Models for Safe Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning
53. ICML 2025PISA Experiments: Exploring Physics Post-Training for Video Diffusion Models by Watching Stuff Drop
54. ICML 2025PlaySlot: Learning Inverse Latent Dynamics for Controllable Object-Centric Video Prediction and Planning
55. ICML 2025Reward-free World Models for Online Imitation Learning
56. ICML 2025Scaling Laws for Pre-training Agents and World Models
57. ICML 2025SENSEI: Semantic Exploration Guided by Foundation Models to Learn Versatile World Models
58. ICML 2025SOLD: Slot Object-Centric Latent Dynamics Models for Relational Manipulation Learning from Pixels
59. ICML 2025Time-Aware World Model for Adaptive Prediction and Control
60. ICML 2025Trajectory World Models for Heterogeneous Environments
61. ICML 2025Video-Enhanced Offline Reinforcement Learning: A Model-Based Approach
62. ICML 2025What Has a Foundation Model Found? Inductive Bias Reveals World Models
63. ICML 2025When do neural networks learn world models?
64. ICML 2025World Model Implanting for Test-time Adaptation of Embodied Agents
65. NeurIPS 2025Agents Robust to Distribution Shifts Learn Causal World Models Even Under Mediation
66. NeurIPS 2025Bootstrap Off-policy with World Model
67. NeurIPS 2025COME: Adding Scene-Centric Forecasting Control to Occupancy World Model
68. NeurIPS 2025DMWM: Dual-Mind World Model with Long-Term Imagination
69. NeurIPS 2025DyMoDreamer: World Modeling with Dynamic Modulation
70. NeurIPS 2025Dyn-O: Building Structured World Models with Object-Centric Representations
71. NeurIPS 2025Dynamics-Aligned Latent Imagination in Contextual World Models for Zero-Shot Generalization
72. NeurIPS 2025DynamicVerse: A Physically-Aware Multimodal Framework for 4D World Modeling
73. NeurIPS 2025EDELINE: Enhancing Memory in Diffusion-based World Models via Linear-Time Sequence Modeling
74. NeurIPS 2025From Forecasting to Planning: Policy World Model for Collaborative State-Action Prediction
75. NeurIPS 2025Image as a World: Generating Interactive World from Single Image via Panoramic Video Generation
76. NeurIPS 2025Learning 3D Persistent Embodied World Models
77. NeurIPS 2025Learning and Planning Multi-Agent Tasks via an MoE-based World Model
78. NeurIPS 2025Learning Interactive World Model for Object-Centric Reinforcement Learning
79. NeurIPS 2025Learning World Models for Interactive Video Generation
80. NeurIPS 2025Leveraging Conditional Dependence for Efficient World Model Denoising
81. NeurIPS 2025Martian World Model: Controllable Video Synthesis with Physically Accurate 3D Reconstructions
82. NeurIPS 2025MindJourney: Test-Time Scaling with World Models for Spatial Reasoning
83. NeurIPS 2025OSVI-WM: One-Shot Visual Imitation for Unseen Tasks using World-Model-Guided Trajectory Generation
84. NeurIPS 2025Overcoming Challenges of Long-Horizon Prediction in Driving World Models
85. NeurIPS 2025PlayerOne: Egocentric World Simulator
86. NeurIPS 2025PoE-World: Compositional World Modeling with Products of Programmatic Experts
87. NeurIPS 2025Program Synthesis via Test-Time Transduction
88. NeurIPS 2025Raw2Drive: Reinforcement Learning with Aligned World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (in CARLA v2)
89. NeurIPS 2025Revisiting Multi-Agent World Modeling from a Diffusion-Inspired Perspective
90. NeurIPS 2025RLVR-World: Training World Models with Reinforcement Learning
91. NeurIPS 2025RoboScape: Physics-informed Embodied World Model
92. NeurIPS 2025SAMPO: Scale-wise Autoregression with Motion Prompt for Generative World Models
93. NeurIPS 2025seq-JEPA: Autoregressive Predictive Learning of Invariant-Equivariant World Models
94. NeurIPS 2025Social World Model-Augmented Mechanism Design Policy Learning
95. NeurIPS 2025SPARTAN: A Sparse Transformer World Model Attending to What Matters
96. NeurIPS 2025StateSpaceDiffuser: Bringing Long Context to Diffusion World Models
97. NeurIPS 2025Text-to-Decision Agent: Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning from Natural Language Supervision
98. NeurIPS 2025Towards foundational LiDAR world models with efficient latent flow matching
99. NeurIPS 2025VAGEN: Reinforcing World Model Reasoning for Multi-Turn VLM Agents
100. NeurIPS 2025Vector Quantization in the Brain: Grid-like Codes in World Models

FAQ

How many World Models papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?

425 in total: 23 in 2023, 46 in 2024, 106 in 2025, 250 in 2026.

How many World Models papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 85 World Models papers, versus 42 the year before.

How many World Models papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 56 World Models papers, versus 24 the year before.

How many World Models papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 69 World Models papers, versus 27 the year before.

How many World Models papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 40 World Models papers, versus 13 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most World Models papers?

NeurIPS, with 159 papers from 2023 to 2026.