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

Sebastian Raschka, who runs the Ahead of AI newsletter, has quietly become one of the better curators of machine learning research for people who don't have time to read everything. This week he dropped a second batch of his bookmarked papers, covering July through December 2025, as a thank-you to paid subscribers.

He's upfront that he hasn't read most of these papers cover to cover. He skims abstracts, sorts them into buckets, and keeps the list around because he ends up referencing it later when he's actually working on something. That's a useful admission, honestly, because it reframes the list as a working index rather than a set of endorsements.

The categories give a decent snapshot of where LLM research attention went in the second half of 2025: training reasoning models, inference-time reasoning strategies, evaluation and interpretability work, other reinforcement learning approaches for LLMs, additional inference-time scaling tricks, model releases and technical reports, architecture papers, efficient training methods, diffusion-based language models, multimodal and vision-language systems, and pre-training datasets. Reasoning gets split into three sub-categories on its own, which tells you where the field's energy has concentrated.

Raschka mentions this list was originally meant to be folded into his bigger year-end piece, State of LLMs 2025: Progress, Problems, and Predictions, published the same day. He cut it loose into its own post so neither piece would balloon into an unreadable wall of text, which is a small editorial decision but a sensible one.