NeurIPS 2026

What this countdown tracks

The clock above counts down to NeurIPS 2026, the flagship machine-learning research conference, scheduled for December 6-12, 2026 at ICC Sydney in Australia. Tutorials open the conference on December 6 at 09:00 AEDT, with the main programme running through December 12.

About this event

NeurIPS (the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) is the most prestigious calendar moment in machine-learning research. It draws 15,000+ in-person attendees and a massive virtual audience for a week of tutorials, main-track papers, oral presentations, posters, workshops, and competitions. The 2026 edition is the conference's first time in Australia, mirroring the broader globalisation of the AI research community.

NeurIPS 2026 arrives with the field deeply focused on agentic systems, reasoning RL, post-training methods, alignment, mechanistic interpretability, and the science of large-scale evaluation. Submissions have grown past 25,000 in recent years, making the venue the single best snapshot of the year's research frontier.

What to expect

The opening day is tutorials, followed by five days of paper sessions (orals and posters), invited talks from senior researchers, the Test-of-Time award lecture, and 80+ workshops on specialised topics across the final two days. Major frontier-AI labs (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Microsoft Research) typically have heavy paper acceptance and recruiting presence.

Expect heavy workshop programming on agents, reasoning, evaluations, interpretability, and post-training, plus competitions on retrieval, math, and embodied tasks.

Past editions

• NeurIPS 2025 (San Diego) showcased breakthroughs in test-time compute, reasoning RL, and frontier-model interpretability with record paper submissions exceeding 25,000.
• NeurIPS 2024 (Vancouver) highlighted scaling laws revisited, sparse Mixture-of-Experts, and emerging-capabilities benchmarks.
• NeurIPS 2023 (New Orleans) marked the post-ChatGPT inflection in research direction.
• NeurIPS has been held annually since 1987.

How to watch

Plenary talks, invited keynotes, and selected oral sessions stream to registered virtual attendees via neurips.cc. Most papers and workshops require registration. Tutorials begin at 09:00 AEDT on December 6, 2026, which is December 5 at 14:00 PT, 17:00 ET, 22:00 GMT, December 6 at 04:30 IST, and 08:00 JST. Recordings publish for registered attendees afterward.

Related countdowns

NeurIPS sits in the AI research calendar alongside ICML 2026 and ICLR 2026, and connects to industry-AI events including NVIDIA GTC 2026 and OpenAI DevDay 2026.

FAQ

When does NeurIPS 2026 start? Sunday, December 6, 2026 at 09:00 AEDT with tutorials, running through December 12. Where is NeurIPS 2026? ICC Sydney in Sydney, Australia. How can I watch NeurIPS 2026? Plenary talks and selected sessions stream to registered virtual attendees via neurips.cc; full access requires registration. What is the focus of NeurIPS 2026? Agents, reasoning RL, post-training, alignment, interpretability, and the broader frontier-AI research agenda.