Raschka Lists 2026 LLM Research Papers from January Through May, Heavy on Reasoning and Efficiency

Sebastian Raschka has published a curated list of LLM research papers he bookmarked from January through May 2026, not a complete survey of the field.

The list is weighted toward reasoning models, reinforcement learning, and efficient inference, with added interest in agent harnesses, long context, and diffusion language models.

He highlights Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Super, a 120B-A12B hybrid model alternating attention and Mamba-2 layers, as a must-read, and notes a 4B Nano variant and the 550B-A55B Nemotron 3 Ultra released two days earlier.