AI research areas
A map of 60 research areas and 10 applications. Explore the methods, meet the organizations working on them, and compare publication activity.
By Dave Savostyanov. 2025 data · Sources: 26 Sep 2026
Browse by field
Largest first by combined 2025 paper counts. Papers can appear in more than one area; applications are listed separately.
AI safety and human interaction
Evaluating AI systems, understanding their behavior, protecting them and studying how people work with them.
8 areasMachine learning foundations
The methods behind learning: generalization, representations, optimization, causality, uncertainty and data.
6 areasAI agents and decision-making
Systems that act, use tools and make sequential decisions, from coding agents to reinforcement learning and planning.
6 areasComputer vision
Understanding images, video, documents, people and three-dimensional scenes.
4 areasTabular, time-series and graph ML
Learning from tables, time series and graphs, including forecasting and the detection of unusual observations.
4 areasNatural language processing
Working with language across translation, knowledge extraction, dialogue and text understanding.
3 areasRobotics and physical AI
Learning to act in the physical world through robot policies, navigation and autonomous driving.
3 areasSearch and recommender systems
Finding and ranking information, recommending relevant content and allocating advertising opportunities.
4 areasLLMs and multimodal AI
How language and multimodal models are built: pre-training, post-training, reasoning and model architecture.
6 areasAI infrastructure and systems
Training and running models efficiently, from distributed software and inference to chips and on-device deployment.
5 areasGenerative AI and world models
Creating images, video, 3D scenes and motion, and learning models of interactive environments.
4 areasSpeech and audio AI
Recognizing and generating speech, working with music and understanding the wider acoustic environment.
10 areasAI applications and AI for science
Where AI research is applied: biology, healthcare, physical sciences, finance, industry and more. This is a separate lens on the research areas, with overlapping figures.
Compare the research landscape
Size reflects the selected measure. The areas overlap, so their values cannot be added together.
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Fields and colors
2025 figures. Papers are OpenAlex query matches; author ranges and investment allocations are scenarios. Author counts marked “observed” cover the full query result. Areas overlap and cannot be added together. About the data.