How I Built a Tool to Organize AI Conference Papers by Topic (and Why It Matters)

I maintain paperlist.ai, an open tool for browsing AI conference papers organized by research topic.

How many ICLR papers are about RAG? What about agents or multimodal models? If you have ever tried to answer these questions by browsing a conference website, you know the pain. Thousands of papers, no topic grouping, and a PDF list that takes hours to skim.

I built , but the key insight is: organizing information is often more valuable than generating new content. An LLM can summarize a paper. But telling you which papers to read — that is a curation problem, not a generation problem.

What I Learned

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  Curation scales better than content generation: The bottleneck for researchers is not "I need more papers" but "I need to find relevant papers fast."


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  Community feedback drives topic selection: The most popular topics on paperlist.ai came from user requests, not my guesses.


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  Open tools win: Keeping it free and open means more researchers use it and more people contribute topic suggestions.

Try It

If you are catching up on ICLR 2026 papers, check out paperlist.ai. RAG-related papers are already organized, with more topics coming.

What tools do you use to stay on top of AI research? Would love to hear in the comments.