NeurIPS 2026 Accepts 102 Workshops as the Conference Goes to Three Cities for the First Time

On 10 August 2026, the NeurIPS organizing committee announced the final list of workshops: of 477 submitted proposals (454 passed validation), 102 were accepted. That is significantly more than last year, and the organizers call it a record.

Three Venues, 102 Research Tracks

For the first time, NeurIPS 2026 will host workshops simultaneously in three cities on three continents. The accepted workshops are distributed as follows:

• Sydney (Australia) — 48 workshops, 21.5% acceptance rate
• Paris (France) — 28 workshops, 25.4% acceptance rate
• Atlanta (USA) — 26 workshops
• Total proposals submitted: 477, of which 454 were valid
• Total accepted: 102 workshops

According to the official NeurIPS blog, submissions grew significantly compared with the previous year. Across the conference, roughly 22% of all valid proposals were accepted. Competition is about the same at every venue, although Paris posted a slightly higher acceptance rate.

Historically, NeurIPS has been held at a single venue, usually Montreal or New Orleans. The move to three parallel cities in 2026 marks a qualitative change in the conference's scale.

What Are NeurIPS Workshops, and Why Are There So Many?

NeurIPS, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, is among the most prestigious conferences in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Each year it draws researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta AI*, as well as from leading universities around the world.

Workshops are a distinct format within the conference. Main-track papers go through strict double-blind peer review. Workshops, by contrast, let researchers discuss work at an early stage: they are a space for live discussion, unfinished ideas and the formation of new research directions. Workshops cover narrowly specialized topics, from neural network interpretability to ML applications in climate science. This is often where work is first presented that becomes a key NeurIPS paper, or a key paper at related conferences such as ICML and ICLR, a year later.

"We are pleased to announce the list of

NeurIPS 2026 workshops," the organizing committee said in an official statement published on the NeurIPS blog on 10 August 2026.

The high level of competition, with acceptance rates of 21–25%, means that getting into the program is not easy at any venue. Each of the 102 accepted workshops is a separate research track with its own talks, discussions and participants.

Why Three Cities Instead of One?

The three-city format reflects the real globalization of AI research. Sydney serves the academic and industry community of the Asia-Pacific region, Paris the European one, and Atlanta the North American one. For researchers in each of these regions, attending no longer requires a transcontinental flight and thousands of dollars in travel costs.

Running in three cities in parallel makes it possible to accept far more workshops: 102 tracks would not fit at a single venue without serious logistical constraints. In effect, in 2026 NeurIPS is turning from a single event into a distributed global conference.

What This Means

The growth in submissions and NeurIPS's expansion to three venues indicate that the academic AI community continues to accelerate. The three-venue format will likely become the standard for the largest AI conferences in the coming years, since the scale of the industry no longer fits in one city. For researchers, 102 accepted workshops mean more opportunities to present early-stage work, get feedback and find co-authors across three continents.

*Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in the Russian Federation.