ICLR 2026

What this countdown tracks

The clock above counts down to ICLR 2026, the International Conference on Learning Representations, scheduled for April 23-27, 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference opens April 23 at 09:00 BRT.

About this event

ICLR is the third pillar of the top-tier machine-learning research circuit, alongside NeurIPS and ICML. It is distinctive for its open-review submission process, where reviews and discussion are visible publicly on OpenReview throughout the cycle. ICLR draws 8,000+ in-person attendees for five days of papers, oral talks, and workshops focused on deep learning methods, representation learning, optimisation, and the empirical and theoretical frontiers of foundation models.

The 2026 edition is the conference's first time in Brazil, expanding ICLR's geographic rotation following Singapore in 2025 and Vienna in 2024. The open-review process makes ICLR's accepted-paper list one of the most carefully scrutinised in ML research.

What to expect

The opening day is registration and reception, followed by four days of main-track sessions interleaving orals, posters, invited talks, and workshops. Frontier-AI labs (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Microsoft Research) and leading academic groups (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, CMU, Tsinghua, Oxford, ETH) anchor most of the visible work.

Expect heavy programming on reasoning, long-context architectures, sparse Mixture-of-Experts, post-training alignment, mechanistic interpretability, and theoretical work on generalisation and scaling.

Past editions

• ICLR 2025 (Singapore) featured advances in long-context reasoning, sparse Mixture-of-Experts scaling, and post-training alignment from leading labs.
• ICLR 2024 (Vienna) highlighted state-space models (Mamba) and the rise of post-training as a research focus.
• ICLR 2023 (Kigali) was the first major ML conference held in Africa.
• ICLR has been held annually since 2013.

How to watch

Plenary talks and selected oral sessions stream to registered virtual attendees via iclr.cc. The open-review record on OpenReview makes most papers' content public. The opening day at 09:00 BRT on April 23, 2026 corresponds to 05:00 PT, 08:00 ET, 13:00 BST, 14:00 CEST, 17:30 IST, and 21:00 JST. Recordings publish for registered attendees afterward.

Related countdowns

ICLR sits in the AI research calendar alongside NeurIPS 2026 and ICML 2026, and shares the spring tech window with Google Cloud Next 2026 and NVIDIA GTC 2026.

FAQ

When does ICLR 2026 start? Thursday, April 23, 2026 at 09:00 BRT in Rio de Janeiro, running through April 27. Where is ICLR 2026? Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. How can I watch ICLR 2026? Plenary talks and selected sessions stream to registered virtual attendees via iclr.cc; the OpenReview record makes paper content public. What is the focus of ICLR 2026? Representation learning, reasoning, long-context architectures, post-training alignment, and interpretability.