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

Sebastian Raschka's curated list of notable LLM research papers from July–December 2025, organized into categories including reasoning models (training and inference-time strategies), reinforcement learning for LLMs, inference-time scaling, architectures, efficient training, diffusion-based language models, and multimodal systems. Published alongside his annual "State of LLMs 2025" review. A dense reference document useful for practitioners tracking the research frontier across all major LLM topic areas in the second half of 2025.