ICML 2026

What this countdown tracks

The clock above counts down to ICML 2026, the International Conference on Machine Learning, scheduled for July 6-11, 2026 at COEX in Seoul, South Korea. Tutorials open July 6 at 09:00 KST, with the main programme running through July 11.

About this event

ICML is one of the three most important calendar moments in machine-learning research, alongside NeurIPS and ICLR. Run by the International Machine Learning Society, it draws 10,000+ in-person attendees for six days of tutorials, oral and poster sessions, workshops, and the Test-of-Time and Outstanding Paper awards. The 2026 edition is the conference's first time in Seoul, building on the strong APAC AI research ecosystem.

ICML 2026 arrives with the field continuing to push on agents, reasoning, scalable oversight, mechanistic interpretability, post-training methods, and the foundations of evaluation. Submissions have steadily grown past 12,000 papers, making acceptance roughly 25%.

What to expect

The opening day is tutorials, followed by four days of main-track papers (orals and posters), invited talks, and award announcements. The final day is workshops on specialised topics (agents, alignment, interpretability, theory, vision-language). Major frontier-AI labs are heavily represented; ICML has historically been a strong venue for theory and methods work alongside empirical scaling research.

Expect heavy programming on reasoning, RL post-training, evaluations, and the interface between empirical and theoretical work.

Past editions

• ICML 2025 (Vancouver) highlighted scalable oversight, mechanistic interpretability, and reasoning RL methods with major submissions from Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, and Meta FAIR.
• ICML 2024 (Vienna) featured strong programming on agent evaluations and the science of fine-tuning.
• ICML 2023 (Honolulu) marked the inflection toward generative AI as the dominant research focus.
• ICML has been held annually since 1980.

How to watch

Plenary talks and selected oral sessions stream to registered virtual attendees via icml.cc. Most papers and workshops require registration. Tutorials begin at 09:00 KST on July 6, 2026, which is July 5 at 17:00 PT, 20:00 ET, July 6 at 01:00 BST, 02:00 CEST, and 05:30 IST. Recordings publish for registered attendees afterward.

Related countdowns

ICML sits in the AI research calendar alongside NeurIPS 2026 and ICLR 2026, and connects to the industry-AI cycle that includes SIGGRAPH 2026 and Apple WWDC 2026.

FAQ

When does ICML 2026 start? Monday, July 6, 2026 at 09:00 KST with tutorials, running through July 11. Where is ICML 2026? COEX in Seoul, South Korea. How can I watch ICML 2026? Plenary talks and selected sessions stream to registered virtual attendees via icml.cc; full access requires registration. What is the focus of ICML 2026? Reasoning, RL post-training, evaluations, scalable oversight, interpretability, and learning theory.