Rewarded Papers
This is a curated selection of the most prominent awards. For a community-maintained aggregator across more conferences, see FeijiangHan/Top-Conference-Best-Papers.
AAAI
AAAI
2026
Main Technical Track- Model Change for Description Logic Concepts, Ana Ozaki, Jandson S. Ribeiro, Outstanding Paper
- Causal Structure Learning for Dynamical Systems with Theoretical Score Analysis, Nicholas Tagliapietra, Katharina Ensinger, Christoph Zimmer, Osman Mian, Outstanding Paper
- ReconVLA: Reconstructive Vision-Language-Action Model as Effective Robot Perceiver, Wenxuan Song, Ziyang Zhou, Han Zhao, Jiayi Chen, Pengxiang Ding, et al., Outstanding Paper
- LLM2CLIP: Powerful Language Model Unlocks Richer Cross-Modality Representation, Weiquan Huang, Aoqi Wu, Yifan Yang, Xufang Luo, Yuqing Yang, et al., Outstanding Paper
- High-pass Matters: Theoretical Insights and Sheaflet-Based Design for Hypergraph Neural Networks, Ming Li, Yujie Fang, Dongrui Shen, Han Feng, Xiaosheng Zhuang, et al., Outstanding Paper
- PlantTraitNet: An Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Framework for Global-Scale Plant Trait Inference from Citizen Science Data, Ayushi Sharma, Johanna Trost, Daniel Lusk, Johannes Dollinger, et al., Outstanding Paper (AISI)
- Generalizable Slum Detection from Satellite Imagery with Mixture-of-Experts, Sumin Lee, Sungwon Park, Jeasurk Yang, Jihee Kim, Meeyoung Cha, Outstanding Paper (AISI)
2025
- Every Bit Helps: Achieving the Optimal Distortion with a Few Queries, Soroush Ebadian, Nisarg Shah, Outstanding Paper
- Efficient Rectification of Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Inconsistencies by Abductive Reflection, Wen-Chao Hu, Wang-Zhou Dai, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Revelations: A Decidable Class of POMDPs with Omega-Regular Objectives, Marius Belly, Nathanael Fijalkow, et al., Outstanding Paper
- DivShift: Exploring Domain-Specific Distribution Shifts in Large-Scale Biodiversity Datasets, Elena Sierra, Lauren Gillespie, Moises Exposito Alonso, Outstanding Paper
- BindGPT: A Scalable Framework for 3D Molecular Design via Language Modeling and RL, Artem Zholus, Maksim Kuznetsov, et al., Outstanding Paper
2024
- Reliable Conflictive Multi-view Learning, Cai Xu, Jiajun Si, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Proportional Aggregation of Preferences for Sequential Decision Making, Nikhil Chandak, Shashwat Goel, Dominik Peters, Outstanding Paper
2023
- Misspecification in Inverse Reinforcement Learning, Joar Skalse, Alessandro Abate, Outstanding Paper
- Decorate the Newcomers: Visual Domain Prompt for Continual Test Time Adaptation, Yulu Gan, Yan Bai, et al., Outstanding Student Paper
2022
- Certified Symmetry and Dominance Breaking for Combinatorial Optimisation, Bart Bogaerts, Stephan Gocht, et al., Distinguished Paper
- Sampling-Based Robust Control of Autonomous Systems with Non-Gaussian Noise, Thom S. Badings, Alessandro Abate, et al., Distinguished Paper
2021
- Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting, Haoyi Zhou, Shanghang Zhang, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Exploration-Exploitation in Multi-Agent Learning: Catastrophe Theory Meets Game Theory, Stefanos Leonardos, Georgios Piliouras, Outstanding Paper
ACL
ACL
2025
- Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention, Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, et al. (DeepSeek/PKU), Best Paper
- Fairness through Difference Awareness: Measuring Desired Group Discrimination in LLMs, Angelina Wang, Michelle Phan, et al., Best Paper
- Language Models Resist Alignment: Evidence From Data Compression, Jiaming Ji, Kaile Wang, et al., Best Paper
- AfriMed-QA: A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical QA Benchmark, Charles Nimo, Tobi Olatunji, et al., Best Paper
2024
- Mission: Impossible Language Models, Julie Kallini, Isabel Papadimitriou, et al., Best Paper
- Semisupervised Neural Proto-Language Reconstruction, Liang Lu, Peirong Xie, David R. Mortensen, Best Paper
- Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model, Ahmet Ustun, Viraat Aryabumi, et al., Best Paper
- Deciphering Oracle Bone Language with Diffusion Models, Haisu Guan, Huanxin Yang, et al., Best Paper
2023
- Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor “Understanding” Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest, Jack Hessel, Ana Marasovic, et al., Best Paper
2022
- Learned Incremental Representations for Parsing, Nikita Kitaev, Thomas Lu, Dan Klein, Best Paper
2021
- Vocabulary Learning via Optimal Transport for Neural Machine Translation, Jingjing Xu, Hao Zhou, et al., Best Paper
CVPR
CVPR
2026
- Efficiently Reconstructing Dynamic Scenes One D4RT at a Time, Chuhan Zhang, Guillaume Le Moing, Skanda Koppula, Ignacio Rocco, et al., Best Paper
- Native and Compact Structured Latents for 3D Generation, Jianfeng Xiang, Xiaoxue Chen, Sicheng Xu, Ruicheng Wang, et al., Best Student Paper
2025
- VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer, Jianyuan Wang, Minghao Chen, et al., Best Paper
- Neural Inverse Rendering from Propagating Light, Anagh Malik, Benjamin Attal, et al., Best Student Paper
- Navigation World Models, Amir Bar, Gaoyue Zhou, et al., Honorable Mention
- MegaSaM: Accurate, Fast and Robust Structure and Motion from Casual Dynamic Videos, Zhengqi Li, Richard Tucker, et al., Honorable Mention
2024
- Generative Image Dynamics, Zhengqi Li, Richard Tucker, et al., Best Paper
- Rich Human Feedback for Text-to-Image Generation, Youwei Liang, Junfeng He, et al., Best Paper
- Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting, Zehao Yu, Anpei Chen, et al., Best Student Paper
- BioCLIP: A Vision Foundation Model for the Tree of Life, Samuel Stevens, Jiaman Wu, et al., Best Student Paper
2023
- Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving (UniAD), Yihan Hu, Jiazhi Yang, et al., Best Paper
- Visual Programming: Compositional Visual Reasoning without Training, Tanmay Gupta, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Best Paper
2022
- Learning to Solve Hard Minimal Problems, Petr Hruby, Timothy Duff, et al., Best Paper
- EPro-PnP: Generalized End-to-End Probabilistic Perspective-n-Points, Hansheng Chen, Pichao Wang, et al., Best Student Paper
- Dual-Shutter Optical Vibration Sensing, Mark Sheinin, Dorian Chan, et al., Honorable Mention
2021
- GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields, Michael Niemeyer, Andreas Geiger, Best Paper
ECCV
ECCV
2024
- Minimalist Vision with Freeform Pixels, Jeremy Klotz, Shree Nayar, Best Paper
- Rasterized Edge Gradients: Handling Discontinuities Differentially, Stanislav Pidhorskyi, Tomas Simon, et al., Honorable Mention
- Concept Arithmetics for Circumventing Concept Inhibition in Diffusion Models, Vitali Petsiuk, Kate Saenko, Honorable Mention
2022
- On the Versatile Uses of Partial Distance Correlation in Deep Learning, Xingjian Zhen, Zihang Meng, et al., Best Paper
- Pose-NDF: Modelling Human Pose Manifolds with Neural Distance Fields, Garvita Tiwari, Dimitrije Antic, et al., Honorable Mention
EMNLP
EMNLP
2025
- Infini-gram mini: Exact n-gram Search at the Internet Scale with FM-Index, Hao Xu, Jiacheng Liu, et al., Best Paper
- LingGym: How Far Are LLMs from Thinking Like Field Linguists?, Freda Shi, Changbing Yang, et al., Outstanding Paper
2024
- Pretraining Data Detection for Large Language Models: A Divergence-based Calibration Method, Weichao Zhang, et al., Best Paper
- An Image Speaks a Thousand Words, but Can Everyone Listen? On Image Transcreation for Cultural Relevance, Simran Khanuja, et al., Best Paper
- KidLM: Advancing Language Models for Children, Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Davood Rafiei, Best Resource Paper
2023
- Ignore This Title and HackAPrompt: Exposing Systemic Vulnerabilities of LLMs Through a Global Prompt Hacking Competition, Sander V. Schulhoff, et al., Best Paper
2022
- Abstract Visual Reasoning with Tangram Shapes, Anya Ji, Noriyuki Kojima, et al., Best Paper
2021
- Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures, Fangyu Liu, Emanuele Bugliarello, et al., Best Long Paper
ICCV
ICCV
2025
- BrickGPT: Generating Physically Stable and Buildable Brick Structures from Text, Ava Pun, Kangle Deng, et al., Best Paper (Marr Prize)
2023
- Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models (ControlNet), Lvmin Zhang, Anyi Rao, Maneesh Agrawala, Best Paper (Marr Prize)
- Passive Ultra-Wideband Single-Photon Imaging, Mian Wei, Sotiris Nousias, et al., Best Paper (Marr Prize)
- Segment Anything, Alexander Kirillov, Eric Mintun, et al. (Meta), Honorable Mention
- Tracking Everything Everywhere All At Once, Qianqian Wang, Yen-Yu Chang, et al., Honorable Mention
2021
- Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows, Ze Liu, Yutong Lin, et al., Best Paper (Marr Prize)
ICLR
ICLR
2026
- Transformers are Inherently Succinct, Pascal Bergsträßer, Ryan Cotterell, Anthony Widjaja Lin, Outstanding Paper
- LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation, Philippe Laban, Hiroaki Hayashi, Yingbo Zhou, Jennifer Neville, Outstanding Paper
- The Polar Express: Optimal Matrix Sign Methods and their Application to the Muon Algorithm, Noah Amsel, David Persson, Christopher Musco, Robert M. Gower, Honorable Mention
2025
- Safety Alignment Should be Made More Than Just a Few Tokens Deep, Xiangyu Qi, Ashwinee Panda, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuning, Yi Ren, Danica J. Sutherland, Outstanding Paper
- SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos, Nikhila Ravi, Valentin Gabeur, et al. (Meta), Outstanding Paper
- Data Shapley in One Training Run, Jiachen T. Wang, Prateek Mittal, et al., Honorable Mention
2024
- Generalization in Diffusion Models Arises from Geometry-Adaptive Harmonic Representations, Zahra Kadkhodaie, Florentin Guth, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators, Sherry Yang, Yilun Du, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Vision Transformers Need Registers, Timothee Darcet, Maxime Oquab, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling, Nathan C. Frey, Dan Berenberg, et al., Outstanding Paper
2023
- DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion, Ben Poole, Ajay Jain, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Emergence of Maps in the Memories of Blind Navigation Agents, Erik Wijmans, Manolis Savva, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Rethinking the Expressive Power of GNNs via Graph Biconnectivity, Bohang Zhang, Shengjie Luo, et al., Outstanding Paper
2022
- Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces (S4), Albert Gu, Karan Goel, Christopher Re, Outstanding Paper
- Analytic-DPM: An Analytic Estimate of the Optimal Reverse Variance in Diffusion Models, Fan Bao, Chongxuan Li, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Neural Collapse Under MSE Loss, X.Y. Han, Vardan Papyan, David L. Donoho, Outstanding Paper
2021
- Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations, Yang Song, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Learning Mesh-Based Simulation with Graph Networks, Tobias Pfaff, Meire Fortunato, et al., Outstanding Paper
- EigenGame: PCA as a Nash Equilibrium, Ian Gemp, Brian McWilliams, et al., Outstanding Paper
ICML
ICML
2025
- CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators, Shirley Wu, Michel Galley, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Train for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Understanding Token Ordering in Masked Diffusions, Jaeyeon Kim, Kulin Shah, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Roll the Dice & Look Before You Leap: Going Beyond the Creative Limits of Next-Token Prediction, Vaishnavh Nagarajan, Chen Wu, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Score Matching with Missing Data, Josh Givens, Song Liu, Henry Reeve, Outstanding Paper
- Conformal Prediction as Bayesian Quadrature, Jake Snell, Thomas Griffiths, Outstanding Paper
2024
- Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distribution, Aaron Lou, Chenlin Meng, Stefano Ermon, Best Paper
- Considerations for Differentially Private Learning with Large-Scale Public Pretraining, Florian Tramer, Gautam Kamath, Nicholas Carlini, Best Paper
2023
- Learning-Rate-Free Learning by D-Adaptation, Aaron Defazio, Konstantin Mishchenko, Outstanding Paper
- A Watermark for Large Language Models, John Kirchenbauer, Jonas Geiping, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Adapting to Game Trees in Zero-Sum Imperfect Information Games, Come Fiegel, Pierre Menard, et al., Outstanding Paper
2022
- Understanding Dataset Difficulty with V-Usable Information, Kawin Ethayarajh, Yejin Choi, Swabha Swayamdipta, Outstanding Paper
- Monarch: Expressive Structured Matrices for Efficient and Accurate Training, Tri Dao, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Learning Inverse Folding from Millions of Predicted Structures, Chloe Hsu, Robert Verkuil, et al., Outstanding Paper
2021
- Understanding Self-Supervised Learning Dynamics without Contrastive Pairs, Yuandong Tian, Xinlei Chen, Surya Ganguli, Outstanding Paper
- Oops I Took A Gradient: Scalable Sampling for Discrete Distributions, Will Grathwohl, Kevin Swersky, et al., Outstanding Paper
IJCAI
IJCAI
2024
- Online Combinatorial Optimization with Group Fairness Constraints, Negin Golrezaei, Rad Niazadeh, et al., Distinguished Paper
- Online Learning of Capacity-Based Preference Models, Margot Herin, Patrice Perny, Nataliya Sokolovska, Distinguished Paper
2023
- Levin Tree Search with Context Models, Laurent Orseau, Marcus Hutter, Levi H. S. Lelis, Distinguished Paper
- SAT-Based PAC Learning of Description Logic Concepts, Balder ten Cate, Maurice Funk, et al., Distinguished Paper
2022
- Plurality Veto: A Simple Voting Rule Achieving Optimal Metric Distortion, Fatih Kizilkaya, David Kempe, Distinguished Paper
2021
- Learning Generalized Unsolvability Heuristics for Classical Planning, Simon Stahlberg, Guillem Frances, Jendrik Seipp, Distinguished Paper
NeurIPS
NeurIPS
2025
- Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond), Liwei Jiang, Yuanjun Chai, et al., Best Paper
- Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free, Zihan Qiu, Zekun Wang, et al. (Alibaba Qwen), Best Paper
- 1000 Layer Networks for Self-Supervised RL: Scaling Depth Can Enable New Goal-Reaching Capabilities, Michal Bortkiewicz, et al., Best Paper
- Why Diffusion Models Don’t Memorize: The Role of Implicit Dynamical Regularization, Tony Bonnaire, Raphael Urfin, et al., Best Paper
- Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?, Yang Yue, Zhiqi Chen, et al., Best Paper Runner-Up
- Superposition Yields Robust Neural Scaling, Yizhou Liu, Ziming Liu, Jeff Gore, Best Paper Runner-Up
2024
- Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction, Keyu Tian, Yi Jiang, et al., Best Paper
- Stochastic Taylor Derivative Estimator: Efficient Amortization for Arbitrary Differential Operators, Zekun Shi, Zheyuan Hu, et al., Best Paper
- Rho-1: Not All Tokens Are What You Need, Zhenghao Lin, Zhibin Gou, et al., Best Paper Runner-Up
- Guiding a Diffusion Model with a Bad Version of Itself, Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, et al., Best Paper Runner-Up
- The PRISM Alignment Dataset, Hannah Rose Kirk, et al., Best Paper (Datasets & Benchmarks)
2023
- Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?, Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, Sanmi Koyejo, Outstanding Paper
- Privacy Auditing with One (1) Training Run, Thomas Steinke, Milad Nasr, Matthew Jagielski, Outstanding Paper
- Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model, Rafael Rafailov, et al., Outstanding Paper Runner-Up
- Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models, Niklas Muennighoff, et al., Outstanding Paper Runner-Up
- DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models, Boxin Wang, et al., Outstanding Benchmark Paper
2022
- Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models, Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding (Imagen), Chitwan Saharia, et al. (Google Brain), Outstanding Paper
- Is Out-of-distribution Detection Learnable?, Zhen Fang, Yixuan Li, et al., Outstanding Paper
- Gradient Descent: The Ultimate Optimizer, Kartik Chandra, Audrey Xie, et al., Outstanding Paper
2021
- A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry, Sebastien Bubeck, Mark Sellke, Outstanding Paper
- Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice, Rishabh Agarwal, Max Schwarzer, et al., Outstanding Paper
- MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text, Krishna Pillutla, Swabha Swayamdipta, et al., Outstanding Paper
Top-Conference-Best-Papers (GitHub)
Community-maintained list of best-paper award winners (2022-2026) across ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, CVPR, and ECCV.
Interesting new papers
Notable LLM research from outside the awards lists, worth reading even when it never went up for a prize. Sourced from Sebastian Raschka’s LLM Research Papers: 2026 (Part 1).2026
2026
- Deep Delta Learning, January 1, 2026
- MiMo-V2-Flash Technical Report, January 6, 2026
- Ministral 3, January 13, 2026
- Scaling Embeddings Outperforms Scaling Experts in Language Models, January 29, 2026
- LatentLens: Revealing Highly Interpretable Visual Tokens in LLMs, January 30, 2026
- ERNIE 5.0 Technical Report, February 4, 2026
- ViT-5: Vision Transformers for the Mid-2020s, February 8, 2026
- Step 3.5 Flash: Open Frontier-Level Intelligence with 11B Active Parameters, February 11, 2026
- Nanbeige4.1-3B: A Small General Model That Reasons, Aligns, and Acts, February 12, 2026
- Symmetry in Language Statistics Shapes the Geometry of Model Representations, February 16, 2026
- GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering, February 17, 2026
- Arcee Trinity, February 18, 2026
- The Spike, the Sparse and the Sink: Anatomy of Massive Activations and Attention Sinks, March 4, 2026
- Tiny Aya: Bridging Scale and Multilingual Depth, March 12, 2026
- Attention Residuals, March 15, 2026
- Mamba-3: Improved Sequence Modeling Using State Space Principles, March 16, 2026
- Attention to Mamba: A Recipe for Cross-Architecture Distillation, March 31, 2026
- Nemotron 3, April 13, 2026
- ZAYA1-8B Technical Report, May 6, 2026
- Delta Attention Residuals, May 13, 2026
- Gated DeltaNet-2: Decoupling Erase and Write in Linear Attention, May 21, 2026
- The MiniMax-M2 Series: Mini Activations Unleashing Max Real-World Intelligence, May 25, 2026