AI topics explode via abrupt phase transitions, early‑warning signature identified
A study of 80,814 papers from ACL, CVPR, ICLR, ICML and NeurIPS (2017‑2025) shows major AI topics surge suddenly across venues instead of growing steadily. The authors propose a four‑criterion early‑warning signature that already flags emerging areas such as multimodal LLMs and agentic AI for 2026‑2028.