Where is research attention moving according to arXiv papers? We mapped 10,000 of the most-read papers on alphaXiv, weighted by readership, to see how interest shifted from 2025 to 2026. Here’s what we found: 1) Traditional RL post-training is getting less attention. As the focus moves beyond math and reasoning to longer agent tasks, compute demands put this research out of reach for many teams 2) Harnesses, agent systems, memory and distillation are gaining reading share, offering other…