LLM Research Papers: The 2025 List (July to December)

LLM Research Papers: The 2025 List (July to December)

In June, I shared a bonus article with my curated and bookmarked research paper lists to the paid subscribers who make this Substack possible.

In a similar vein, as a thank-you to all the kind supporters, I have prepared a list below of the interesting research articles I bookmarked and categorized from July to December 2025.

I skimmed over the abstracts of these papers but only read a very small fraction. However, I still like to keep collecting these organized lists as I often go back to them when working on a given project.

By the way, I was also working on my annual LLM review article, State of LLMs 2025: Progress, Problems, and Predictions, which I published today as well. You can find it here:

Originally, I planned to include this list in the article above. However, the article was already getting quite long, so I decided to share the list here in a separate post instead. I hope you do not mind receiving two emails today. My thinking was that splitting things up would make both articles easier to read, scan, and revisit later without getting lost in an overly long page.

The categories for this research paper list are as follows (you can use the table of contents in the web view of this article to navigate to them directly):

Reasoning Models

1a. Training Reasoning Models

1b. Inference-Time Reasoning Strategies

1c. Evaluating LLMs and/or Understanding Reasoning

Other Reinforcement Learning Methods for LLMs

Other Inference-Time Scaling Methods

Model Releases / Technical Reports

Architectures

Efficient Training

Diffusion-Based Language Models

Multimodal & Vision-Language Models

Data & Pre-training Datasets