International Conference on Machine Learning

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is one of the three top-tier academic conferences in machine learning, alongside ICLR and NeurIPS . During the COVID-19 pandemic, ICML shifted to virtual format, which prompted creative alternatives such as a doctoral student hosting the first ACAI conference inside the video game *Animal Crossing* . The conference has served as a key venue for breakthrough work in the field: for instance, Jian Tang received ICML 2014's best paper award for his work on graph representation learning, reportedly the only such win by a China-based researcher at that time . More recently, ColorfulClouds Technology secured a speaking slot at ICML after demonstrating performance gains at the billion-parameter scale . The conference also functions as a benchmark for research quality—Gaorong Ventures' AI research system FARS produced papers that, when evaluated by an AI reviewer against ICLR standards, scored an average of 5.05, above ICLR 2026's human-submission average of 4.21 .