I embedded the title and abstract of every NeurIPS 2026 paper (and every 2025 paper) with Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B, grouped them into 150 topics and 20 areas, and put them on one map with DataMapPlot. Both years are measured on the same topics, so you can see what grew and what shrank.

A few things that came out:

- LLM agent papers went from 2.9% of the conference in 2025 to 6.8% in 2026 (170 to 620 papers).

- 38% of abstracts now mention a benchmark, up from 32%.

- Graph neural networks fell from 2.5% to 1.4% of papers.

- Two out of three papers are presented in Sydney, the rest in Atlanta and Paris.

You can search every paper, colour the map by change, city or status, and click through to the paper.…