LLM Research Papers: The 2026 List (January to May)

Sebastian Raschka compiled a curated list of LLM research papers from January to May 2026. The list focuses on reasoning models, reinforcement learning, efficient inference, agent harnesses, tool use, long context, diffusion language models, and serving infrastructure. The papers are organized by title, abstract, and topic framing. Raschka admits he only read a subset of the papers in detail. The list aims to help with finding relevant research for projects and articles.