ML Conference Trends: NeurIPS & ICLR, 2023–2026

ML Conference Trends tracks how the topics of accepted papers shifted at NeurIPS 2023–2026 and ICLR 2024–2026, from LLMs and agents down to agent memory, harnesses and self-improvement. Its second tab has every NeurIPS 2026 paper in one sentence.

A few things it shows, as shares of NeurIPS accepted papers from 2023 to 2026:

• LLM papers went from 10% to 38% (ICLR 2026 is at 47%).
• LLM agents went from 1.0% to 9.0%.
• RL for LLM post-training grew fastest, from 0.5% to 5.2%, while RL without LLMs fell from 10.1% to 5.7%.
• Agent memory and harness papers barely existed in 2023 and passed 1.5% each in 2026.

Code and prompts: github.com/wenyaxie023/ml-conference-trends.