AI research trends | The Latest in AI

Growing fastest

Papers in the last four complete weeks, compared with the four weeks before.

Robotic Manipulation

+148%

337 papers, up from 136

Vision-Language-Action Models

+110%

221 papers, up from 105

Robot Imitation Learning

×4

143 papers, up from 35

Reinforcement Learning

+74%

212 papers, up from 122

VLMs for Robotics

×3

134 papers, up from 44

On-Policy Distillation

+143%

141 papers, up from 58

AI Agent Benchmarks

+61%

209 papers, up from 130

Time Series Forecasting

+101%

139 papers, up from 69

LLM Inference Acceleration

+66%

168 papers, up from 101

Flow Matching

+140%

115 papers, up from 48

Robotic Control

+143%

114 papers, up from 47

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

×3

93 papers, up from 30

Robotics

+109%

119 papers, up from 57

Policy Learning

×3

92 papers, up from 30

Robot Policy Learning

×4

81 papers, up from 23

Robot Navigation

+144%

95 papers, up from 39

Twelve weeks of growth

Running total of papers in the largest topics. A steeper line means faster growth. Hover a topic to pick out its line.

Robotic Manipulation600 LLM Evaluation750 Vision-Language-Action Models421 Reinforcement Learning450 AI Agent Benchmarks490 LLM Inference Acceleration361 LLM Agent Evaluation414

View as table

Week of	Robotic Manipulation	LLM Evaluation	Vision-Language-Action Models	Reinforcement Learning	AI Agent Benchmarks	LLM Inference Acceleration	LLM Agent Evaluation
Jul 13	33	40	27	31	25	16	29
Jul 20	58	90	34	65	56	32	52
Jul 27	92	146	59	91	109	64	85
Aug 3	127	242	95	116	151	92	123
Aug 10	161	289	123	147	186	114	152
Aug 17	189	348	142	183	205	128	178
Aug 24	223	414	173	203	250	157	210
Aug 31	263	473	200	238	281	193	247
Sep 7	302	520	225	273	309	217	286
Sep 14	396	575	282	307	342	249	311
Sep 21	487	661	330	365	392	291	353
Sep 28	600	750	421	450	490	361	414

Recent papers in growing topics

The newest papers from the topics growing fastest.

Robotic Manipulation337 papers · ×2.5

Vision-Language-Action Models221 papers · ×2.1

Robot Imitation Learning143 papers · ×4

Reinforcement Learning212 papers · +74%

Share of all papers

How each topic’s share of new papers has changed. This separates real growth from a rise in publishing overall.

Slowing down

Topics with the biggest drop in papers compared with the four weeks before.

Oncology

-62%

11 papers, down from 29

Anomaly Detection

-23%

61 papers, down from 79

Recommender Systems

-25%

50 papers, down from 67

KG Completion

-89%

2 papers, down from 18

Medical Image Segmentation

-15%

83 papers, down from 98

KG Construction

-48%

15 papers, down from 29

Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

-45%

17 papers, down from 31

Software Engineering

-41%

19 papers, down from 32

New terms

Phrases turning up in more and more papers. New ideas often appear here before there are enough papers to form a topic.

jev28new candidate10new gpt-6-astra9new posterior9new rendering9new generative robot policies9new lessons8new linear representation hypothesis8new self-supervised pretraining8new gait8new controller8new grasps8new state space models16×16 specification12×12 humanoid loco-manipulation12×12 continual adaptation12×12 distribution matching distillation12×12 key11×11

Topics meeting

Unrelated topics that share more papers than they used to. New subfields often start this way.

Speculative DecodingLLM Inference Acceleration

32 shared papers, up from 16

RL for Language Model ReasoningLLM Reasoning

19 shared papers, up from 5

World Models for RoboticsRobotic Manipulation

22 shared papers, up from 9

Agentic RLRL for LLM Agents

14 shared papers, up from 4

Robotic ManipulationWorld Action Models

19 shared papers, up from 9

Robot SafetySafety Filtering

9 shared papers, up from 0

Reinforcement LearningRobotic RL

13 shared papers, up from 4

LLM Inference AccelerationSparse Attention

14 shared papers, up from 5

Robot Policy LearningPolicy Learning

10 shared papers, up from 1

Diffusion Model UnlearningMachine Unlearning

10 shared papers, up from 1

Growing, with few followers

Topics picking up papers that hardly anyone follows yet.

Topic changes

Topics are regrouped as papers arrive, so new ones appear and others merge or split. Anything you follow carries over.

No changes yet

New topics, merges and splits will be listed here.

40 topics were also renamed to describe their papers better.