NeurIPS 2026

NeurIPS, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, is the worlds most influential venue for machine learning and computational neuroscience research. Founded in 1987 as a small interdisciplinary workshop, NeurIPS has grown into a 16,000-attendee phenomenon where landmark papers like Transformers, GANs, and AlexNet were first unveiled. The 2026 edition marks the 40th annual gathering and represents a major geographic milestone: the main conference moves to Sydney, Australia for the first time, with official satellite events running simultaneously in Atlanta and Paris.

The technical program runs December 6-12, 2026 at the International Convention Centre Sydney. Expect six days of oral presentations, thousands of posters, dozens of tutorials, an EXPO featuring frontier labs and chipmakers, an art gallery, the famed creative track, and more than fifty themed workshops on the final weekends. Acceptance rates hover around 25 percent across more than 15,000 submissions, so accepted papers represent the cutting edge of generative modeling, reinforcement learning, AI safety, multimodal systems, and theoretical ML.

The attendee mix skews academic, with PhD students and faculty from MIT, Stanford, CMU, DeepMind, FAIR, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Research dominating the hallway tracks. Industry recruiting is intense, sponsor booths are highly competitive, and the conference doubles as the unofficial annual reunion of the global ML research community. For anyone serious about understanding where machine learning is heading, NeurIPS remains essential.