The 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) kicked off on Monday at COEX Convention and Exhibition Center, Seoul, South Korea and will run until July 11. The conference opened with an expo and tutorial day on July 6.
The main conference is scheduled for July 7-9, followed by workshops on July 10-11. Widely known as one of the world’s three premier machine learning conferences, alongside conference on Neural Information Processing Systems ( NeurIPS) and International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), the ICML brings together researchers from academia and industry to present advances in artificial intelligence.
This year’s conference received a total of 23,918 paper submissions, more than double of ICML 2025. Out of these 6,352 papers were accepted, resulting in an overall acceptance rate of 26.6%.
Among the accepted papers, 536 were selected for spotlight presentations, representing the top 2.2% of all submissions. Furthermore, 168 papers were chosen for oral presentations, the conference’s most selective category, placing them among the top 0.7% of all submissions. All oral presentations were selected from the spotlight papers.
Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of machine learning research. ICML follows a double double-blind review process, in which reviewers do not know the identities of the author and authors do not know the identities of the reviewers during the evaluation process.
Research papers are limited to eight pages of main text, while references, appendices and the impact statement are not subject to page limits.
Meanwhile the ICML has also introduced a new two-track policy governing the use of large language models (LLMs) in the peer review process. Under the new framework reviewers and authors can choose between two review policies. The first is Policy A, the conservative option. According to this policy use of LLMs in any stage of reviewing is strictly prohibited (except for inadvertent use in tools that are not traditionally LLM-based, like web search/retrieval and spelling/grammar checkers).
The second is Policy B, the permissive option, which allows reviewers to use privacy-complaint to help understand submitted papers, review related literature and polish the language of the reviews. However reviewers are prohibited from asking LLMs to identify a paper’s strength and weakness , suggest key points for the review, suggest an outline for the review, write the full review, or suggest questions for authors.
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