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

250 papers, page 4 of 5

151. ICML 2026TaskLoom: Weaving Knowledge Across Tasks in World Models
152. ICML 2026TimeSpot: Benchmarking Geo-Temporal Understanding in Vision–Language Models in Real-World Settings
153. ICML 2026Towards Practical World Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models
154. ICML 2026Uncertainty-Guided Exploration and Stable Planning for Sparse-Reward Manipulation from Limited Demonstrations
155. ICML 2026VectorWorld: Efficient Streaming World Model via Diffusion Flow on Vector Graphs
156. ICML 2026VJEPA: Variational Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures as Probabilistic World Models
157. ICML 2026VLAW: Iterative Co-Improvement of Vision-Language-Action Policy and World Model
158. ICML 2026WebWorld: A Large-Scale World Model for Web Agent Training
159. ICML 2026WestWorld: A Knowledge-Encoded Scalable Trajectory World Model for Diverse Robotic Systems
160. ICML 2026What You Think is What You See: Driving Exploration in VLM Agents via Visual-Linguistic Curiosity
161. ICML 2026World Guidance: World Modeling in Condition Space for Action Generation
162. ICML 2026World Models in Pieces: Structural Certification of General Agents
163. ICML 2026WorldCache: Accelerating World Models for Free via Heterogeneous Token Caching
164. ICML 2026WorldCompass: Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon World Models
165. ICML 2026WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling
166. NeurIPS 2026A Hierarchical World Model for Driving
167. NeurIPS 2026A World Model of Radiologist Reading for Medical Image Representation Learning
168. NeurIPS 2026Active Learning for Gaussian Process Regression Under Self-Induced Boltzmann Weights
169. NeurIPS 2026ActO: Extracting Action Representations from MLLM Embeddings for Video World Models
170. NeurIPS 2026AdaWM: Few-Shot Adaptation of World Models to Unseen Dynamical Regimes
171. NeurIPS 2026Addressable Memory for Video World Models
172. NeurIPS 2026AEON: Unifying Video and 3D World Models
173. NeurIPS 2026Agent2World: Learning to Generate Symbolic World Models via Adaptive Multi-Agent Feedback
174. NeurIPS 2026AmbiguousWorld: Benchmarking and Resolving Ambiguous Instructions in Video World Models
175. NeurIPS 2026AnchorWorld: Embodied Egocentric World Simulation with View-based Evolution Customization
176. NeurIPS 2026Audible World Models: Spatially Aware Sound Generation for 3D Worlds
177. NeurIPS 2026Autoregressive Diffusion World Models for Off-Policy Evaluation of LLM Agents
178. NeurIPS 2026Axiomatic World Modeling for Physics Reasoning
179. NeurIPS 2026Baba in Wonderland: Online Self-Supervised Dynamics Discovery for Executable World Models
180. NeurIPS 2026Beyond Prediction: Steering VLM Agents with Retrospective World Modeling
181. NeurIPS 2026Bridging Scene Generation and Planning: Driving with World Model via Unifying Vision and Motion Representation
182. NeurIPS 2026Code2World: A GUI World Model via Renderable Code Generation
183. NeurIPS 2026Counterfactual Debugging the World Model Transfer Gap
184. NeurIPS 2026CounterStrike-1K: A Multi-Perspective Dataset of Professional Gameplay for World Modeling
185. NeurIPS 2026CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving
186. NeurIPS 2026Decomposed Graded Verifier for Generative World Modeling
187. NeurIPS 2026Do Enterprise Systems Need Learned World Models? The Importance of Context to Infer Dynamics
188. NeurIPS 2026Drift-Resistant Navigation World Model with Anchored Epipolar Guidance
189. NeurIPS 2026DRILL: Training World Models to Improve Policies, Not Predict Pixels
190. NeurIPS 2026DriveDreamer-Policy: A Geometry-Grounded World-Action Model for Unified Generation and Planning
191. NeurIPS 2026DriveFuture: Future-Aware Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving
192. NeurIPS 2026ECHO: Terminal Agents Learn World Models for Free
193. NeurIPS 2026EO-WM: A Physically Informed World Model for Probabilistic Earth Observation Forecasting
194. NeurIPS 2026EpicWorldModel: Exploration-driven Planning with Latent World Models
195. NeurIPS 2026Feedback World Model Enables Precise Guidance of Diffusion Policy
196. NeurIPS 2026From Anti-Forgetting to Fast Adaptation: Continual Reinforcement Learning with World Models
197. NeurIPS 2026From Zero to Hero: Training-Free Custom Concept Spawning in World Models
198. NeurIPS 2026HAI: Hierarchical Anchored Interaction for Multi-View Bimanual World Models
199. NeurIPS 2026HalluWorld: A Controlled Benchmark for Hallucination via Reference World Models
200. NeurIPS 2026HaM-World: Soft-Hamiltonian World Models with Selective Memory for Planning

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.