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

27 papers, page 1 of 1

1. ICML 2025A Causal World Model Underlying Next Token Prediction: Exploring GPT in a Controlled Environment
2. ICML 2025Accurate and Efficient World Modeling with Masked Latent Transformers
3. ICML 2025AdaWorld: Learning Adaptable World Models with Latent Actions
4. ICML 2025Continual Reinforcement Learning by Planning with Online World Models
5. ICML 2025DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planning
6. ICML 2025Empowering World Models with Reflection for Embodied Video Prediction
7. ICML 2025FOUNDER: Grounding Foundation Models in World Models for Open-Ended Embodied Decision Making
8. ICML 2025General agents need world models
9. ICML 2025Graph World Model
10. ICML 2025How Far Is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspective
11. ICML 2025Improving Transformer World Models for Data-Efficient RL
12. ICML 2025Multi-Stage Manipulation with Demonstration-Augmented Reward, Policy, and World Model Learning
13. ICML 2025Neurosymbolic World Models for Sequential Decision Making
14. ICML 2025Novelty Detection in Reinforcement Learning with World Models
15. ICML 2025PIGDreamer: Privileged Information Guided World Models for Safe Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning
16. ICML 2025PISA Experiments: Exploring Physics Post-Training for Video Diffusion Models by Watching Stuff Drop
17. ICML 2025PlaySlot: Learning Inverse Latent Dynamics for Controllable Object-Centric Video Prediction and Planning
18. ICML 2025Reward-free World Models for Online Imitation Learning
19. ICML 2025Scaling Laws for Pre-training Agents and World Models
20. ICML 2025SENSEI: Semantic Exploration Guided by Foundation Models to Learn Versatile World Models
21. ICML 2025SOLD: Slot Object-Centric Latent Dynamics Models for Relational Manipulation Learning from Pixels
22. ICML 2025Time-Aware World Model for Adaptive Prediction and Control
23. ICML 2025Trajectory World Models for Heterogeneous Environments
24. ICML 2025Video-Enhanced Offline Reinforcement Learning: A Model-Based Approach
25. ICML 2025What Has a Foundation Model Found? Inductive Bias Reveals World Models
26. ICML 2025When do neural networks learn world models?
27. ICML 2025World Model Implanting for Test-time Adaptation of Embodied Agents

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.