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

425 papers, page 3 of 9

101. ICML 2026Benchmarking World-Model Learning with Environment-Level Queries
102. ICML 2026Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining
103. ICML 2026Beyond Pixel Histories: World Models with Persistent 3D State
104. ICML 2026Boosting World Models Learning via Latent-Space Value Alignment
105. ICML 2026Building Social World Model with Large Language Models
106. ICML 2026Causal-JEPA: Learning World Models through Object-Level Latent Masking
107. ICML 2026Co-Evolving Latent Action World Models
108. ICML 2026CoIRL-AD: Collaborative-Competitive Imitation-Reinforcement Learning in Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving
109. ICML 2026Compositional Planning with Jumpy World Models
110. ICML 2026Cross-Embodiment Robot Foundation World Models with Latent Actions
111. ICML 2026DDP-WM: Disentangled Dynamics Prediction for Efficient World Models
112. ICML 2026DeepSight: Long-Horizon World Modeling via Latent States Prediction for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
113. ICML 2026DiLA: Disentangled Latent Action World Models
114. ICML 2026DreamDojo: A Generalist Robot World Model from Large-Scale Human Videos
115. ICML 2026DriveWorld-VLA: Unified Latent-Space World Modeling with Vision–Language–Action for Autonomous Driving
116. ICML 2026DynaVieW: Schema-Guided World Modeling for Understanding Hierarchical Visual Dynamics
117. ICML 2026EmWorld: Emotion World Model with Latent State Evolution for Scenario-Incremental Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition
118. ICML 2026Evaluating Newtonian Mechanics in Video Generative Models with Real Physical Systems
119. ICML 2026Factored Latent Action World Models
120. ICML 2026FAST-AR: Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion and World Models with Temporal Cache Compression and Sparse Attention
121. ICML 2026Flow Equivariant World Models: Structured Memory for Dynamic Environments
122. ICML 2026From Kepler to Newton: Inductive Biases Guide Learned World Models in Transformers
123. ICML 2026Future Dynamic 3D Reconstruction: A 3D World Model with Disentangled Ego-Motion
124. ICML 2026Generative Visual Code Mobile World Models
125. ICML 2026Identifiable Token Correspondence for World Models
126. ICML 2026Infinite-World: Scaling Interactive World Models to 1000-Frame Horizons via Pose-Free Hierarchical Memory
127. ICML 2026Interpreting Physics in Video World Models
128. ICML 2026iWorld-Bench: A Benchmark for Interactive World Models with a Unified Action Generation Framework
129. ICML 2026Learning Disentangled Multi-Agent World Model for Decentralized Control
130. ICML 2026Learning Latent Action World Models in the Wild
131. ICML 2026Learning Multi-Timescale Abstractions for Hierarchical Combinatorial Planning
132. ICML 2026Learning Reward–Cost Balance in Safe RL via Score-Based World Models
133. ICML 2026Learning Task-Sufficient World Models by Synergizing Agentic Exploration and Structured Modeling
134. ICML 2026LithoDreamer: A Physics-Informed World Model for Multi-Stage Computational Lithography
135. ICML 2026LIVE: Long-horizon Interactive Video World Modeling
136. ICML 2026MetaOthello: A Controlled Study of Multiple World Models in Transformers
137. ICML 2026Mind Dreamer: Untethering Imagination via Active Causal Intervention on Latent Manifolds
138. ICML 2026Multi-view Consistent Latent Action Learning for World Modeling and Control
139. ICML 2026MVISTA-4D: View-Consistent 4D World Model with Test-Time Action Inference for Robotic Manipulation
140. ICML 2026Olaf-World: Orienting Latent Actions for Video World Modeling
141. ICML 2026ORBIT: A Prognostic World Model for Ocular Reasoning Based on Imagined Trajectories
142. ICML 2026Parallel Stochastic Gradient-Based Planning for World Models
143. ICML 2026PathWise: Planning through World Model for Automated Heuristic Design via Self-Evolving LLMs
144. ICML 2026Physics from Video: Identifiability of Time-Invariant Second-Order ODEs under Minimal Trajectory Conditions
145. ICML 2026Policy-Driven World Model Adaptation for Robust Offline Model-based Reinforcement Learning
146. ICML 2026RoboFlow4D: A Lightweight Flow World Model Toward Real-Time Flow-Guided Robotic Manipulation
147. ICML 2026SC$^{2}$-WM: A Self-Correcting World Model with Closed-Loop Feedback for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments
148. ICML 2026Scaling Real-World Robot Policy Evaluation via Discrete Diffusion World Model
149. ICML 2026Self-supervised Hierarchical Visual Reasoning with World Model
150. ICML 2026Structure Abstraction and Generalization in a Hippocampal-Entorhinal Inspired World Model

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.