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AI conferences and workshops: 2026 tracker

Dates, deadlines, and virtual options for the venues that actually move the field.

There are roughly four kinds of AI venue, and conflating them is the first mistake. The Big Three peer-reviewed conferences — NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR — set the academic record. The domain conferences — CVPR for vision, ACL and EMNLP for language, AAAI for the general AI banner — anchor sub-fields and publish the canon for each. The ethics and safety venues — FAccT, AIES, and the growing slate of interpretability workshops — set the conversation about what should and shouldn't be deployed. And the industry summits — AI4, AI Engineer World's Fair, TED AI, the various vendor conferences — sell tickets, build narrative, and occasionally surface real engineering. None of those four kinds is a substitute for any other. This page is a tracker, not a sales sheet. We list the venue, when it happens, where it happens, when the paper deadlines fall, whether virtual attendance is supported, and what the venue is actually for. All dates and deadlines below are pulled from official conference pages as of June 2026. Conference logistics move — registration cutoffs slip, satellite cities get added, deadlines extend by 48 hours twice a year. Check the official URL in the citations before you book a flight or stage a submission. We have one bias to declare. We think the peer-reviewed venues — NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL, EMNLP, COLM, FAccT — are still where the field's load-bearing work lives, even as the industry summit circuit gets louder. The summits are good for hiring, partnerships, and absorbing a snapshot of what shipped in the last six months. They are not where the methods that will matter five years from now get pressure-tested. If you only have time and money for one trip, pick the venue closest to your sub-field, not the one with the biggest expo floor. Everything here is best-effort as of June 2026. If a deadline has already passed, that's noted. If we couldn't confirm a fact certainly, we say so.

How to read this tracker

A few conventions before the index, so the rows below carry the meaning you expect.

  • Dates and deadlines reflect the official conference page as of June 2026. Anywhere on Earth (AoE, UTC-12) is the standard timezone for paper deadlines unless noted otherwise.
  • Virtual attendance means the conference sells a virtual-only pass with live streams and recordings. Hybrid means in-person is the default but virtual exists for those who can't travel. In-person only means there is no remote option.
  • Submission deadline is the main-track paper deadline. Workshops, demos, and tutorials usually have their own later deadlines on the same site.
  • We mark a venue as peer-reviewed only when papers go through formal external review with rebuttal. Industry summits and curated talk series do not.
  • Focus area is the sub-field the venue centers on, not an exhaustive scope. Most venues accept work outside their headline area; this tells you what the bulk is.

Peer-reviewed conferences, 2026 cycle

The academic record. If your work needs to be cited by anyone who isn't already on your Slack, it should land in one of these. All dates and deadlines below are from the official conference pages, accessed June 2026.

VenueAAAI-26
DatesJan 20-27, 2026
LocationSingapore EXPO
Paper deadlineAug 1, 2025 (passed)
Virtual optionHybrid
FocusGeneral AI, broad scope
VenueICLR 2026
DatesApr 23-27, 2026
LocationRio de Janeiro, Brazil
Paper deadlineSep 24, 2025 (passed)
Virtual optionHybrid, virtual pass available
FocusRepresentation learning
VenueCVPR 2026
DatesJun 3-7, 2026
LocationDenver Convention Center
Paper deadlineNov 13, 2025 (passed)
Virtual optionHybrid
FocusComputer vision, pattern recognition
VenueFAccT 2026
DatesJun 25-28, 2026
LocationLe Centre Sheraton Montreal
Paper deadlineJan 13, 2026 (passed)
Virtual optionIn-person, check site
FocusFairness, accountability, transparency
VenueICML 2026
DatesJul 6-11, 2026
LocationCOEX, Seoul, South Korea
Paper deadlineJan 24, 2026 (passed)
Virtual optionHybrid
FocusMachine learning, broad scope
VenueACL 2026
DatesJul 2-7, 2026
LocationSan Diego, California
Paper deadlineJan 5, 2026 (passed)
Virtual optionHybrid
FocusComputational linguistics
VenueCOLM 2026
DatesOct 6-9, 2026
LocationHilton SF Union Square
Paper deadlineMar 31, 2026 (passed)
Virtual optionIn-person, check site
FocusLanguage modeling specifically
VenueAIES 2026
DatesOct 12-14, 2026
LocationMalmo Live, Sweden
Paper deadlineMay 21, 2026 (passed)
Virtual optionCheck site
FocusAI ethics and society
VenueEMNLP 2026
DatesOct 24-29, 2026
LocationBudapest, Hungary
Paper deadlineMay 25, 2026 (ARR)
Virtual optionHybrid
FocusEmpirical NLP methods
VenueNeurIPS 2026
DatesDec 6-12, 2026
LocationSydney, Australia + Atlanta + Paris satellites
Paper deadlineMay 6, 2026 (passed)
Virtual optionHybrid, virtual pass available
FocusNeural information processing

What each peer-reviewed venue is actually for

The conference name tells you the year. It does not tell you what the venue is for. A short field guide so you don't submit a vision paper to ACL.

NeurIPS

neurips.cc/Conferences/2026

The biggest annual ML conference by volume and the venue with the deepest historical footprint. Strong on deep learning methods, optimization, generative modeling, and the connective tissue between sub-fields. 2026 is the 40th edition, in Sydney, with official satellites in Atlanta and Paris. Two-stage submission: abstracts first (May 4), then full papers (May 6).

ICML

icml.cc/Conferences/2026

The second of the Big Three. Slightly more theory-and-methods than NeurIPS in feel, though the line has blurred. In Seoul in 2026. Submission ran on a single deadline of January 24, 2026 via OpenReview. Workshops on July 10-11 are where a lot of the most current applied work lands.

ICLR

iclr.cc/Conferences/2026

Founded specifically for deep learning representation work, and still the venue where the most influential pre-training and architecture papers tend to surface first. 2026 in Rio de Janeiro is the first ICLR in South America. Notable for fully open OpenReview discussion during the rebuttal window.

AAAI

aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26

Older and broader than the Big Three. Covers everything the modern field calls AI plus the symbolic and planning lineages the others have largely shed. 2026 is the 40th edition, in Singapore, January 20-27. Multiple tracks with different deadlines; main track deadline was August 1, 2025.

CVPR

cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2026

The dominant computer vision conference. IEEE/CVF-sponsored. 2026 is in Denver, June 3-7. If your work is on images, video, or 3D scene understanding, this is the venue. Acceptance rates are competitive enough that getting in is itself a credential.

ACL

2026.aclweb.org

The flagship of the computational linguistics community. 2026 in San Diego, July 2-7. The ACL community runs on ARR (ACL Rolling Review), so the submission pipeline is continuous rather than a single annual gate. ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL share the ARR review pool.

EMNLP

2026.emnlp.org

The empirical-methods sister to ACL, weighted slightly more toward experimental NLP work. 2026 in Budapest, October 24-29. Submissions go through ACL Rolling Review with the long-and-short paper window closing May 25, 2026.

COLM

colmweb.org

The Conference on Language Modeling, launched in 2024 specifically to give LLM-centric work a dedicated home. Single-track, three-day format. 2026 in San Francisco, October 6-9. Submission deadline March 31, 2026. Younger than ACL or EMNLP but already where a lot of frontier LLM papers premiere.

FAccT

facctconference.org/2026

The ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 2026 in Montreal, June 25-28. Genuinely interdisciplinary: technical fairness papers, policy work, audits, and qualitative research all land here. Paper deadline was January 13, 2026.

AIES

aies-conference.com/2026

The AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. Ninth edition, in Malmo, Sweden, October 12-14, 2026. Complement to FAccT, with somewhat more philosophy and policy emphasis. Abstract deadline May 14, paper deadline May 21, 2026.

Workshops worth tracking

The workshop track at NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR is often where the actual frontier shows up, six to twelve months before the work surfaces as main-conference papers. A few that matter for the current cycle. The Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop at ICML 2026 is the third iteration of what has become the field's anchor venue for circuit-level neural network understanding. It runs July 10, 2026, in Seoul, in Hall C. The 2025 NeurIPS edition drew over 600 attendees; the field has gone from a handful of papers a year to a dedicated workshop circuit in roughly four years. The 2026 call for papers closed May 8, 2026; submissions originally written for NeurIPS were explicitly encouraged. Beyond mech interp, the workshop landscape now reliably includes dedicated tracks for alignment, evaluation, multi-agent systems, scientific machine learning, and a rotating set of domain workshops (medicine, climate, robotics). The ICLR workshop call for proposals typically opens in late summer for the following year; the NeurIPS workshop list is finalized roughly six months before the main conference. If you can't attend the main conference, the workshops are often the most efficient way to absorb the year's direction. Many workshops post talk recordings, and OpenReview makes the submitted papers public regardless of acceptance status.

Industry summits and curated events

Different animal. These are conferences for buying, partnering, hiring, and absorbing market direction. They are not peer-reviewed and the talks vary widely in technical depth. They are useful, but they are not a substitute for the academic venues.

EventAI Engineer Europe
DatesApr 8-10, 2026
LocationLondon
FormatIn-person
Best forProduction AI engineering, EU ecosystem
EventAI Engineer World's Fair
DatesJun 29 - Jul 2, 2026
LocationMoscone West, San Francisco
FormatIn-person, talks recorded
Best forFrontier engineering practice, hiring
EventAI4
DatesAug 4-6, 2026
LocationThe Venetian, Las Vegas
FormatIn-person
Best forEnterprise AI deployment, broad industry
EventThe AI Conference
DatesSep 29 - Oct 1, 2026
LocationPier 48, San Francisco
FormatIn-person
Best forFrontier lab leadership, general industry
EventAI Engineer NYC
DatesOct 12-14, 2026
LocationNew York City
FormatIn-person
Best forEast Coast AI engineering
EventTED AI Vienna
DatesOct 28-30, 2026
LocationVienna, Austria
FormatIn-person, talks recorded
Best forTalk-format AI thought leadership
EventAI Engineer Code Summit
DatesNov 2026 (date TBA)
LocationTBA, invite-only
FormatIn-person, curated
Best forAI coding agents and tooling

Mila and the Montreal AI ecosystem

We were asked specifically about a Mila / Bengio symposium. The full picture, as of June 2026: Mila does not run a single annual conference called by that name. What Mila runs in 2026 includes the Mila AI Policy Conference (January 15, 2026), Mila Techaide on May 29 (a one-day research conference in support of Centraide of Greater Montreal), and After Mila on June 10 (community meetups pairing researchers with field experts). Yoshua Bengio remains Mila's scientific director and speaks at most of these and at external venues throughout the year; there is no standalone Bengio-keynoted symposium with a fixed annual slot that we could confirm. For broader Montreal AI programming, ALL IN, billed as Canada's largest AI and tech event, runs annually and is the closest thing to a Mila-adjacent industry venue. Check mila.quebec/en/events for the current list. If a specific Mila event is being marketed to you under the symposium label, ask for the URL — Mila publishes all its events on the main site, and anything not listed there warrants a second check.

Honest signal on virtual attendance

Virtual passes exist at most major peer-reviewed venues, but the realistic value is uneven. NeurIPS and ICLR put real engineering into their virtual portals: live streams, recorded sessions, Rocket Chat for attendee interaction, and a functional schedule UI. The remote experience for talks is genuinely good. The remote experience for hallway conversation, poster sessions, and the social fabric of the conference is much weaker, and that fabric is often the highest-value part of a top-tier AI conference. Workshops in particular benefit from being in the room. For industry summits, virtual options are inconsistent. AI Engineer World's Fair posts most talks to YouTube within a few weeks, which makes the virtual experience effectively equivalent to free, on your own schedule. TED AI does the same for its main talks. AI4 and The AI Conference are more in-person centered. If budget or travel is the constraint, our honest recommendation is: pay for a virtual pass at the one peer-reviewed venue most central to your work, and wait for YouTube uploads from everything else. The ROI of the second-tier pass is usually low.

Deadline calendar through end of 2026

The forward-looking dates remaining in 2026 that haven't yet passed as of June 2026. Confirm each on the official site before depending on it.

  1. 2026-07-10

    ICML Workshops, including Mechanistic Interpretability

    Seoul. Day one of the workshop track; the third Mech Interp workshop runs in Hall C.

  2. 2026-08-20

    EMNLP acceptance notifications

    Authors of papers submitted via ARR in May get accept/reject decisions.

  3. 2026-09-20

    EMNLP camera-ready due

    Final paper versions for the Budapest conference.

  4. 2026-10

    Workshop proposal windows open for 2027

    ICLR 2027 typically calls for workshop proposals in early autumn. Watch iclr.cc for the official deadline.

  5. 2026-11

    AI Engineer Code Summit

    Invite-only coding agent summit. Apply through ai.engineer/code/2026 if you build agentic developer tools.

  6. 2026-11-12

    NeurIPS in-person-to-virtual conversion cutoff

    Last day to convert a NeurIPS full registration to virtual and refund the difference.

  7. 2026-12-06

    NeurIPS 2026 begins

    Sydney is the main venue; Atlanta and Paris run as official satellites with slightly later start dates.

How we use this calendar at AtomEons

We don't go to most of these. AtomEons is solo-operator scale right now, and the realistic value of flying to Sydney or Rio for a week is hard to justify against the marginal cost. What we do, and what we'd recommend if you're in a similar position: One, watch the OpenReview pages for the venues closest to your work. ICLR's open discussion model means you can read the rebuttals as they happen, which is a faster way to learn what reviewers actually look for than reading accepted papers retroactively. NeurIPS and ICML have similar visibility once decisions land. Two, follow the workshop tracks more than the main conferences. The workshops at NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR are where genuinely current work shows up. The Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop, the Re-Align Workshop on representational alignment, and the evaluation-focused workshops each cycle are usually six to twelve months ahead of where the main conference is. Three, treat industry summits as snapshots of what's already shipped, not previews of what's next. AI Engineer World's Fair is excellent for understanding what AI engineering teams are actually doing in production. It is not where the next paradigm shift will first be visible. Four, if you do attend in person, attend one venue per year and attend it well. Talk to people. Read the papers before you arrive. The conference is a forcing function for the prep, not the prep itself.

Caveats and what we don't know

Things we couldn't fully confirm and that you should verify directly.

  • TED AI San Francisco for 2026 was not confirmed on the official TED conferences page as of June 2026. TED AI Vienna is confirmed for October 28-30, 2026. If you specifically want SF, check tedai-sanfrancisco.ted.com for an update before assuming the event continues.
  • The Mila symposium pattern is not a single named annual event we could verify. The Mila events page lists the actual programming. Treat any external marketing of a Bengio-keynoted standalone symposium with appropriate skepticism.
  • Workshop acceptance rates and the final workshop lists for NeurIPS 2026 and ICLR 2027 are not yet final at time of writing. The current Mech Interp Workshop ICML 2026 acceptance was scheduled for June 12, 2026 notification.
  • Industry summit dates occasionally shift. AI Engineer Code Summit November 2026 date and location were still TBA as of the June 2026 official page. Check ai.engineer/code/2026 closer to the event.
  • Several deadlines on this page have already passed for the 2026 cycle. For 2027 deadlines, watch the same official URLs in late summer and autumn of 2026.

Sources

  1. [01]

    NeurIPS 2026 runs December 6-12, 2026 in Sydney; abstract deadline May 4, paper deadline May 6, 2026 AoE.

    neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/Dates

  2. [02]

    Official NeurIPS 2026 call for papers and submission instructions.

    neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/CallForPapers

  3. [03]

    ICML 2026 runs July 6-11, 2026 at COEX, Seoul; submission deadline January 24, 2026 AoE.

    icml.cc/Conferences/2026/Dates

  4. [04]

    ICLR 2026 runs April 23-27, 2026 in Rio de Janeiro; abstract Sept 19, full paper Sept 24, 2025 AoE.

    iclr.cc/Conferences/2026/Dates

  5. [05]

    ICLR 2026 official call for papers with submission timeline.

    iclr.cc/Conferences/2026/CallForPapers

  6. [06]

    AAAI-26 is the 40th annual AAAI conference, January 20-27, 2026, in Singapore EXPO.

    aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26

  7. [07]

    AAAI-26 main technical track abstract due July 25, 2025; full paper August 1, 2025 AoE.

    aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/submission-instructions

  8. [08]

    CVPR 2026 runs June 3-7, 2026 at Denver Convention Center; submission November 13, 2025 AoE.

    cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2026/Dates

  9. [09]

    Official CVPR 2026 call for papers.

    cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2026/CallForPapers

  10. [10]

    ACL 2026 is the 64th annual meeting; San Diego, July 2-7, 2026.

    2026.aclweb.org

  11. [11]

    ACL Rolling Review unifies submission for ACL/EMNLP/NAACL conferences.

    aclrollingreview.org/dates

  12. [12]

    EMNLP 2026 runs October 24-29, 2026 in Budapest; ARR submission window closes May 25, 2026.

    2026.emnlp.org

  13. [13]

    COLM 2026 runs October 6-9, 2026 at Hilton San Francisco Union Square; submission March 31, 2026.

    colmweb.org/dates.html

  14. [14]

    Official COLM 2026 call for papers; review release May 22, rebuttal June 8, decisions July 8, 2026.

    colmweb.org/cfp.html

  15. [15]

    FAccT 2026 abstract due January 8, paper due January 13, 2026; Montreal, June 25-28.

    facctconference.org/2026/cfp.html

  16. [16]

    AIES 2026 is the 9th AAAI/ACM AI Ethics & Society conference, Malmo, October 12-14, 2026.

    aies-conference.com/2026

  17. [17]

    AI4 2026 runs August 4-6, 2026 at The Venetian, Las Vegas, with pre-conference training August 3.

    ai4.io

  18. [18]

    AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 runs June 29 - July 2, 2026 at Moscone West, San Francisco.

    ai.engineer/worldsfair/2026

  19. [19]

    AI Engineer Europe 2026 runs April 8-10, 2026 in London.

    ai.engineer/europe/2026

  20. [20]

    AI Engineer New York 2026 runs October 12-14, 2026.

    ai.engineer/nyc/2026

  21. [21]

    AI Engineer Code Summit scheduled for November 2026, invite-only application process.

    ai.engineer/code/2026

  22. [22]

    Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop at ICML 2026 is the third iteration; held July 10, 2026 in Seoul, Hall C.

    mechinterpworkshop.com

  23. [23]

    ICML 2026 official workshop listing for Mech Interp Workshop with timing and venue.

    icml.cc/virtual/2026/workshop/54071

  24. [24]

    Mila's official events calendar lists Mila AI Policy Conference (Jan 15, 2026), Mila Techaide (May 29), and After Mila (June 10) for 2026.

    mila.quebec/en/events

  25. [25]

    NeurIPS 2026 sells a virtual-only pass with live streams, recordings, and Rocket Chat interaction; conversion deadline November 12, 2026.

    neurips.cc/Register/view-registration

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