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 5 of 9

201. NeurIPS 2026Hybrid Neural World Models for Physical Dynamics
202. NeurIPS 2026ICAT: Incident-Case–Grounded Adaptive Testing for Physical-Risk Prediction in Embodied World Models
203. NeurIPS 2026Imagine, Don't Narrate: The Generative Bottleneck in World Models of Interaction Dynamics
204. NeurIPS 2026Imperfect World Models are Exploitable
205. NeurIPS 2026Joint Learning of Hierarchical Neural Options and Abstract World Model
206. NeurIPS 2026K-PWM: Control-Oriented Structured World Models under Partial Observation
207. NeurIPS 2026Language-Conditioned World Modeling for Visual Navigation
208. NeurIPS 2026Latent Video Prediction for World Modeling: An Evaluation Uncovering Intriguing Favorable Evidence
209. NeurIPS 2026LatentUM: Unleashing the Potential of Interleaved Cross-Modal Reasoning via a Latent-Space Unified Model
210. NeurIPS 2026Learning Agentic World Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving
211. NeurIPS 2026Learning POMDP World Models from Observations with Language-Model Priors
212. NeurIPS 2026Learning Task-Centric World Models from Visual Foundations
213. NeurIPS 2026Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action
214. NeurIPS 2026LEIA: Learned Environment for Interactive Architected Materials
215. NeurIPS 2026LongScape: Advancing Long-Horizon Embodied World Models with Context-Aware MoE
216. NeurIPS 2026LoopNav: Benchmarking Spatial Consistency in World Models
217. NeurIPS 2026MapShift: Controlled Post-Intervention Evaluation for Embodied World Models
218. NeurIPS 2026Masked Visual Actions for Unified World Modeling
219. NeurIPS 2026Medical LLMs as Medical World Models: Unified Policy-Dynamics Learning with Test-Time Search
220. NeurIPS 2026MIRAGE: Mobile Agents with Implicit Reasoning and Generative World Models
221. NeurIPS 2026Next Forcing: Causal World Modeling with Multi-Chunk Prediction
222. NeurIPS 2026Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models
223. NeurIPS 2026ODEWorld: A Continuous Predictive Architecture via Physical-Time Flow
224. NeurIPS 2026PanoWorld: Geometry-Consistent Panoramic Video World Modeling
225. NeurIPS 2026Perception for Action in Latent World Models
226. NeurIPS 2026Plan4D: Generative Plannable 4D Worlds
227. NeurIPS 2026Predicting What Changes: Causal Delta World Models for Risk-Aware LLM Agent Planning
228. NeurIPS 2026Predictive but Not Plannable: RC-aux for Latent World Models
229. NeurIPS 2026Q-ARVD: Quantizing Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models
230. NeurIPS 2026Reconstruction or Semantics? What Makes a Latent Space Useful for Robotic World Models
231. NeurIPS 2026ReGen: Agentic Video World Modeling with Synergized Reasoning and Generation
232. NeurIPS 2026RoboAlign-R1: Distilled Multimodal Reward Alignment for Robot Video World Models
233. NeurIPS 2026SCOUT: Planning under Occlusion via Object-Centric World Model Rollouts
234. NeurIPS 2026Solaris: Building a Multiplayer Video World Model in Minecraft
235. NeurIPS 2026Sparse Planning in Visual World Models via Cost Gradients
236. NeurIPS 2026StarWM: Self-Supervised Trained Attention Routing for Robust World Models
237. NeurIPS 2026Stealthy World Model Manipulation via Data Poisoning
238. NeurIPS 2026SurgVista: Long-Horizon Surgical World Modeling with Plausible Instrument-Tissue Dynamics
239. NeurIPS 2026TabPrep: Closing the Feature Engineering Gap in Tabular Benchmarks
240. NeurIPS 2026Think Before You Generate: Active Panoramic Exploration for Text-to-3D Scenes
241. NeurIPS 2026ThinkJEPA: Empowering Latent World Models with Large Vision-Language Reasoning Model
242. NeurIPS 2026Toward Embodied World Agents via Embodied-Planning Dataset and Interactive World Models
243. NeurIPS 2026Towards Financial World Modeling
244. NeurIPS 2026Trajectory Evaluation via Rollout-Free World Model for End-to-end Autonomous Driving
245. NeurIPS 2026Trimming the Long-Tail of Visual World Modeling Evaluation
246. NeurIPS 2026When does LeJEPA learn a World Model?
247. NeurIPS 2026World Action Verifier: Self-Improving World Models via Forward-Inverse Asymmetry
248. NeurIPS 2026World Models as Adversaries: Multi-Agent Self-Play Fine-Tuning for Robust Motion Planning
249. NeurIPS 2026WorldAct: Activating Monolithic 3D Worlds into Interactive-Ready Object-Centric Scenes
250. NeurIPS 2026WorldPrism: 3D Consistency for Video World Models via Bidirectional Cross-Space Verification

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.