Communications Chairs 2023

by Arjun Subramonian, Konstantina Palla, Ogbuokiri Blessing

We are excited to announce this year’s affinity workshops co-located with NeurIPS.

What are affinity groups?

At NeurIPS, affinity groups play a crucial role in advocating for and amplifying the ideas and voices of marginalized communities, bringing attention to the various issues that affect their members. In addition, they provide members of these affinity groups with increased opportunities to showcase their work, engage in discussions, and build connections during NeurIPS events, promoting diversity and inclusion at NeurIPS

The primary goal of workshops is to encourage individuals marginalized in the machine learning community to present their research and become active contributors to the NeurIPS community. In contrast to regular workshops, affinity group workshops adopt a more open and flexible approach around topic area, focusing on forming research communities within the affinity groups and bringing attention to the unique challenges faced by their members.

Additionally, affinity group socials serve as safe and welcoming spaces, allowing members to interact, socialize, and network in an inclusive environment. By fostering such social gatherings, NeurIPS supports the creation of a supportive community that values diversity and ensures that all voices are heard and valued.

What kind of events do affinity groups offer at conferences?

Affinity groups organize workshops and social events for their members at conferences, for which the D&I committee provides support. The main aim of the workshops is to encourage people to showcase their work and step into the NeurIPS community. Most affinity events at NeurIPS this year will take place on Monday, December 11 in-person. NeurIPS will offer streaming support for all the in-person components of the affinity groups. However, individual groups also have the option to organize additional virtual components if they wish to. The specific timings will be communicated by the affinity groups as the conference dates draw nearer.

What can NeurIPS attendees do to support affinity groups?

Participate! Actively attending and participating in panels and sessions for discussions about issues that are relevant to the affinity groups goes a long way in helping promote their cause. We request all members of our community to participate actively!

Black in AI workshop

Black in AI exists to create a space for sharing ideas, foster collaborations, and discuss initiatives to enhance the representation of Black individuals in the field of AI. NeurIPS, being one of the largest AI research conferences, offers a valuable opportunity for researchers in the community to stay updated on the latest research and expand their network. Since its inception in 2017, the Black in AI workshop has had a profound impact. Many members of Black in AI have walked away from their experience at NeurIPS with internship offers, graduate program advisors, mentorship, and renewed energy to continue working in the field. The workshop remains committed to bridging the gap between Black researchers and the AI community at large. For more information, please visit the Black in AI website.

Global South in AI workshop

The Global South in AI workshop is organizing an affinity session focused on Generative AI, with an emphasis on the languages and cultural history of the global south. The session aims to explore both the potential benefits and challenges of Generative AI in a creative and engaging manner. Participants are encouraged to showcase innovative use cases of Generative AI in global south countries using LLMs and to also address issues related to access difficulties or negative impacts arising from its use. For more information, please visit the Global South in AI website.

Queer in AI workshop

The Queer in AI workshop at NeurIPS 2023 aims to gather diverse perspectives from queer students, researchers, and practitioners worldwide to assess the impact of AI on the LGBTQIA* community. The workshop seeks to build a community of queer individuals, foster discussions at the intersection of AI and queer identities, and address the discrimination faced by the LGBTQ+ community in the tech sphere and beyond. The workshop highlights the need for a more ethics-driven approach in AI development and challenges the exclusion of critical voices in AI discussions. It also aims to create an inclusive space for young queer students in academia, where their identities are recognized and celebrated rather than marginalized. By using NeurIPS as a platform, the workshop intends to promote equitable AI and contribute to a future where technology benefits people of all identities and backgrounds. For more information, please visit the Queer in AI website.

LatinX in AI workshop

The LatinX in AI research workshop is a full-day event featuring invited speakers, oral presentations, and posters. It provides an excellent opportunity for faculty, graduate students, research scientists, and engineers to come together, fostering connections and idea exchange. The workshop includes a panel discussion and mentoring session to explore current research trends and career paths in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with a focus on the distinct challenges faced by LatinX identifying researchers. The main objective is to create a platform for showcasing the work of Latinx researchers, and we warmly invite everyone to join us at this event. For more information, please visit the LatinX in AI website.

Women in ML workshop

The goals and activities of WiML are to

1. Highlight the work of researchers in machine learning who are women or nonbinary,
2. Give them a chance to meet, encourage technical discussion, and future collaboration,
3. Give junior researchers an opportunity to present their work to their peers as well as senior members of the community.

The workshop plans to feature speakers who are women or nonbinary to give talks on their research, organize mentorship sessions to discuss relevant topics, and encourage networking. It will encourage and foster research conversations and help participants develop collaboration opportunities. There will also be poster sessions for participants to present a broader array of work and exchange feedback. For more information, please visit the Women in ML website.

North Africans in ML workshop

The North Africans in ML workshop aims to foster collaboration, networking, and skill development and create a supportive community that celebrates and amplifies the contributions of North Africans to the world of machine learning. We aim to create a sense of community among North African researchers in ML, increase the visibility of North Africans within the AI community, highlight their accomplishments, and acknowledge and discuss the hardships faced by researchers based in North Africa.

The workshop will feature various activities such as talks, panel discussions, poster sessions, and a social event. Distinguished experts in machine learning will present cutting-edge research and its applications in the North African context, offering valuable insights and inspiration. The panel discussions will specifically address challenges faced by North African communities in ML research. For more information, please visit the North Africans in ML website.

Muslims in ML workshop

The Muslims in ML workshop aims to explore the intersection of machine learning, fairness, and the global Muslim community. It recognizes the potential of AI and ML to bring positive changes but also acknowledges existing barriers and biases that may perpetuate unfairness against Muslims. The workshop aims to bring together diverse experts and perspectives to examine challenges and opportunities in integrating AI/ML in the lives of Muslims and those in Muslim-majority countries. It will showcase research by Muslim scholars in ML and highlight work addressing challenges faced by the Muslim community. The workshop provides a safe space for open discussions and social activities. It adopts an inclusive approach that considers cultural association and proximity to the Muslim identity, emphasizing the importance of understanding the complexity and diversity within the Muslim community. The workshop seeks to promote awareness, collaboration, and mitigation strategies to ensure fair and equitable implementation of AI/ML technologies for Muslims worldwide.  For more information, please visit the Muslims in ML website

New in ML workshop

The New in ML workshop aims to welcome new researchers in the community and provide them with some guidance to contribute to Machine Learning research fully and effectively. In addition to catering to newcomers, the workshop recently extended its audience to include senior PhDs undergoing role changes, transitioning to academia or industry, thereby embarking on new paths within their ML career. The workshop plans to host presentations offering guidance on how to conduct research from experienced researchers and broadcast them to attract local and remote participants. Attendees will also have the opportunity to be mentored by senior researchers to refine their academic writing and oral presentation skills and boost their chances to have their papers published at the future top conferences. For more information, please visit the New in ML website.

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by Hsuan-Tien Lin, Ismini Lourentzou, Piotr Koniusz and Yarin Gal

We are excited to announce the list of NeurIPS 2023 workshops! We received 167 total submissions — a significant increase from last year. From this great batch of submissions, we have accepted 58 workshops that will take place in-person on Dec. 15 & 16. 

We wish we could have accepted many more workshops given the exceptional quality of submissions this year, but technical and logistical constraints meant we could only accept a limited subset. This marks another year that workshop selection had to be selective, and we expect that many of the excellent proposals that we could not accept will be revised, resubmitted, and presented at other ML conferences.

Of course, we want to thank everyone who put in the effort to propose workshops. As Workshop Chairs, all we can do is guide the authors through the submission process. The actual work of organizing the workshops is done by the organizers. Thank you!

New This Year: Fully In-Person Workshops and Proposal Template

In contrast to the previous year, there will not be a separate virtual workshop day. All workshops are anticipated to be conducted in person. Our Call for Post-Conference Workshops emphasizes that NeurIPS will exclusively host in-person workshops this year, accompanied by comprehensive technical support to livestream the workshops to an online audience. We believe that this decision will offer the best experience for both the attendees present in person and those participating online. To assist proposal authors in preparing their proposals and enable reviewers to efficiently evaluate the key aspects of a successful workshop program, we introduced a proposal template this year. The template is experimental and its use is entirely optional for the proposal authors (although we strongly recommended its use). We are pleased to note that over 80% of the proposals adhered to or closely resembled the template. This greatly facilitated the organization and evaluation process, benefiting both proposal authors and reviewers alike.

Refinements: Review Process

We continued to use OpenReview as our submission platform this year, consistent with other NeurIPS submission tracks, due to the success of OpenReview in matching reviewers to proposals. We strived to ensure that every workshop proposal author had an OpenReview profile before the review period started, to better manage conflict-of-interests through OpenReview. Additional details about the selection process are provided below. Except for providing a proposal template, we did not alter requirements for the proposal much this year. We kept the length of the main proposal limited to three pages and the organizer information limited to two pages, along with unlimited references. We let reviewers know that they need not read beyond those pages.

Another point of feedback incorporated was to further refine the reviewing recruitment process. Thus, we increased the reviewer pool, with a focus on including more experienced organizers from past NeurIPS workshops as reviewers. As a result, we sent out over 300 invitations and managed to recruit 127 reviewers. This resulted in at least three reviews per proposal for all 167 proposals. The completion rate for assigned reviews reached 97%, and every proposal received at least three quality reviews. We thank all the reviewers for their timely and professional efforts to provide quality reviews that greatly assisted our decision-making and facilitated an exciting and well-informed workshop program this year.

Selection Process

In making our selections, we asked the reviewers to closely follow our Guidance for Workshop Proposals, which was also shared with the proposal authors. Workshop proposals must be reviewed somewhat differently from academic papers, and we therefore asked the reviewers to consider both scientific merits and broader impacts in their assessments. We recognize that workshop reviews might be somewhat more subjective than academic paper reviews. Following the practice of past years’ review process, we have decided not to release the reviews directly to the proposal authors. However, like last year, we released a short meta-review alongside the decision for each proposal — explaining how the proposal was perceived by the reviewers with the goal of highlighting what could be improved.

Individual evaluations of proposals by reviewers were important for the decision process, but they were not the only considerations in the decision process. For example, we also strived for a good balance between research areas, and between applications and theory. As interest across research areas is not uniform, some areas were more competitive than others. For example, as anticipated, there were many strong proposals surrounding large language models this year. We also received many submissions on important current topics such as privacy, fairness, and causality, as well as the connection between machine learning and other fields. We attempted to balance topics so they would cover both mainstays and emerging topics.

It is also worth noting that we saw many of the pitfalls in proposals also seen in previous years. This included leaning too heavily on past success of existing workshop series, unconfirmed or irrelevant speakers, insufficient time for discussion, scoping too big and too broad, and lip service to diversity.

The next step is for you to contribute! Several workshops have begun soliciting submissions, many using our suggested submission date of September 29, 2023. We typically let each workshop advertise its own call for papers (if they plan to include workshop papers). We will communicate with the workshop organizers some additional deadlines to facilitate the successful planning of 58 exciting workshops. Stay tuned for more technical and contextual information coming soon!

NeurIPS 2023 Accepted Workshops

On to the best part: the preliminary list of accepted workshops for 2023 (https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/events/workshop):

• Backdoors in Deep Learning: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• OPT 2023: Optimization for Machine Learning
• AI for Science: from Theory to Practice
• Generative AI for Education (GAIED): Advances, Opportunities, and Challenges
• Table Representation Learning Workshop
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design
• Temporal Graph Learning Workshop @ NeurIPS 2023
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Blending New and Existing Knowledge Systems
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Generalization in Planning (GenPlan ’23)
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on AI for Accelerated Materials Design (AI4Mat-2023)
• Synthetic Data Generation with Generative AI
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Diffusion Models
• The Symbiosis of Deep Learning and Differential Equations — III
• Gaze Meets ML
• Medical Imaging meets NeurIPS
• Information-Theoretic Principles in Cognitive Systems (InfoCog)
• Intrinsically Motivated Open-ended Learning (IMOL) Workshop
• Machine Learning with New Compute Paradigms
• Third Workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-III): The Future of Large Language & Speech Foundation Models
• Workshop on Federated Learning in the Age of Foundation Models in Conjunction with NeurIPS 2023 (FL@FM-NeurIPS’23)
• Heavy Tails in ML: Structure, Stability, Dynamics
• XAI in Action:  Past, Present, and Future Applications
• AI meets Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue about Computational Ethics
• Agent Learning in Open-Endedness Workshop
• Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR)
• Foundation Models for Decision Making
• Associative Memory & Hopfield Networks in 2023
• Computational Sustainability: Promises and Pitfalls from Theory to Deployment
• MATH-AI: The 3rd Workshop on Mathematical Reasoning and AI
• Optimal Transport and Machine Learning
• Multi-Agent Security: Risks and Opportunities
• The NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop: Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences
• Workshop on robustness of zero/few-shot learning in foundation models (R0-FoMo)
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Machine Learning for Audio
• Touch Processing: a new Sensing Modality for AI
• 4th Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning: Theory and Practice
• Machine Learning in Structural Biology Workshop
• Regulatable ML: Towards Bridging the Gaps between Machine Learning Research and Regulations
• 6th Robot Learning Workshop: Pretraining, Fine-Tuning, and Generalization with Large Scale Models
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Learning-Based Solutions for Inverse Problems: Opportunities and Challenges
• Workshop on Distribution Shifts: New Frontiers with Foundation Models
• 6th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response
• Mathematics of Modern Machine Learning (M3L)
• I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better (ICBINB): Failure Modes in the Age of Foundation Models
• Generative AI for Biology
• New Frontiers of AI for Drug Discovery and Development
• Symmetry and Geometry in Neural Representations
• Algorithmic Fairness through the Lens of Time
• Machine Learning for Systems
• New Frontiers in Graph Learning (GLFrontiers)
• Adaptive Experimental Design and Active Learning in the Real World
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following
• NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Causal Representation Learning
• Attributing Model Behavior at Scale (ATTRIB)
• Deep Generative Models for Health
• UniReps: Unifying Representations in Neural Models
• Workshop on Advancing Neural Network Training: Computational Efficiency, Scalability, and Resource Optimization

Related Links

• Call for Post-Conference Workshops
• Guidance for Workshop Proposals
• Proposal Template

By Marco Ciccone, Tao Qin, Jake Albrecht

Today, we introduce the competitions that have been accepted at NeurIPS 2023 Competition Track. It seemed especially challenging this year given the number of quality submissions and the limited number that could be accepted.  We selected a total of 20 very strong proposals, covering a wide range of areas and subdisciplines.  Some of the competitions are completely new, others are familiar to the NeurIPS community.  The selected competitions are now official and ready for the community to participate in. Please check the NeurIPS website for full competition details.

This year will mark the seventh year of NeurIPS having a dedicated competition track. Whether this is the first time you’re heard about NeurIPS competitions or you’re a grandmaster, this year’s cohort has something to offer for a variety of backgrounds, skill levels, and domain knowledge.  We hope you’ll take some time to look over this year’s exciting set of competitions, and encourage you to participate! 

Competitions have a valuable place in research and in solving complex problems.

As a participant, you will benefit from being exposed to a vibrant community! Indeed, they’re great for connecting to like-minded researchers, excellent for learning and resume building, and allow you to use your skills to have a real-world impact on important and challenging problems. After the challenges are complete, we hope that you continue collaborating with your former competitors to advance solutions for these important problems.

We are also excited to share that, starting from this year, competition reports co-authored by both organizers and participants will be subject to new publication requirements. To improve scientific rigor, transparency, and reproducibility, accepted competitions in 2023 will be required to submit their post-competition analyses as papers to the 2024 NeurIPS D&B track (next year). 

The NeurIPS 2023 program includes the following exciting competitions:

• Special Topics in Machine Learning
  • NeurIPS 2023 Machine Unlearning Competition
  • Privacy Preserving Federated Learning Document VQA
  • Causal Structure Learning from Event Sequences and Prior Knowledge
  • Practical Vector Search Challenge 2023
• Natural Language Processing and LLMs
  • NeurIPS Large Language Model Efficiency Challenge: 1 LLM + 1GPU + 1Day
  • TDC 2023 (LLM Edition): The Trojan Detection Challenge
• Machine Learning for Physical and Life Sciences
  • Weather4cast 2023 – Data Fusion for Quantitative Hi-Res Rain Movie Prediction under Spatio-temporal Shifts
  • Foundation Model Prompting for Medical Image Classification Challenge 2023
  • The Dynamic Sensorium competition for predicting large-scale mouse visual cortex activity from videos
  • Single-cell perturbation prediction: generalizing experimental interventions to unseen contexts
  • Open Catalyst Challenge
• Multi-Agent Learning
  • The NeurIPS 2023 Neural MMO Challenge: Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning and Curriculum Generation
  • Lux AI Challenge Season 2 NeurIPS Edition
  • Melting Pot Contest
• Urban and Environmental Challenges
  • The CityLearn Challenge 2023
• Autonomous Systems and Task Execution
  • The HomeRobot Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation Challenge
  • ROAD-R 2023: the Road Event Detection with Requirements Challenge
  • The Robot Air Hockey Challenge: Robust, Reliable, and Safe Learning Techniques for Real-world Robotics
  • MyoChallenge 2023: Towards Human-Level Dexterity and Agility
  • Train Offline, Test Online: A Democratized Robotics Benchmark

For full details, see https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2023/CompetitionTrack. 

We are very grateful to the colleagues that helped us with reviewing and selecting the competition proposals for this year.  We congratulate all the authors on their accepted proposals, and we thank everyone who submitted a proposal for their fantastic work. 

Please feel free to reach out to competition-chairs@neurips.cc if you have any questions or suggestions. 

Good luck to our organizers and participants; we look forward to seeing the competition outcomes at the conference! 

By Arjun Subramonian, Konstantina Palla and Ogbuokiri Blessing

We are calling for affinity groups to host workshops and/or socials at NeurIPS 2023. NeurIPS 2023 will take place Sunday, December 10, 2023 through Saturday, December 16, 2023. It will be a livestreamed and recorded conference and will be held in New Orleans at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

Goal of Affinity Workshops

The main aim of workshops is to encourage people to showcase their work and step into the NeurIPS community. Unlike other workshops, affinity group workshops are centered around creating space for communities marginalized in AI and ML, and generally accept a wider scope of submissions topic-wise. The idea of having affinity group workshops is to establish research communities out of affinity groups and raise awareness of the challenges faced by them. Furthermore, affinity group socials provide safe, inclusive spaces for members of affinity groups to socialize and network.

Previously, affinity groups like Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Queer in AI (QinAI), Black in AI (BAI), LatinX in AI (LXAI), {Dis}Ability in AI, Indigenous in AI, Global South in AI, Muslims in ML, and Jews in ML have organized workshops and socials at NeurIPS. In this call, we welcome applications from all kinds of affinity groups.

Affinity workshops will take place Monday, December 11, 2023, which will overlap with tutorials. By default, affinity workshops will be livestreamed and have Zoom access (unless the organizers wish otherwise). While we encourage workshops to have in-person components, we recognize that this is often difficult or impossible; as such, workshops can be entirely virtual.

Workshops may include but are not limited to one or more of the following: Keynote talks, Lightning talks, Panels, Poster presentations, Discussions and Art exhibits.

We will hold a separate in-person and virtual poster session exclusively for affinity groups on Monday, December 11, 2023. Authors from all affinity groups that issue a call for papers/contributions/media are required to participate in either the in-person or virtual joint poster session.

Every group considering submitting a workshop must read the Affinity Workshops and Socials Call NeurIPS 2023, which describes the philosophy behind hosting workshops, affinity group socials, joint poster sessions, selection criteria and process, format for proposals, and other frequently asked questions.

Submission instructions

You can send the proposal to the Affinity Workshops team (affinity-workshop-chairs@neurips.cc) in the form of a PDF file. Important dates for workshop submissions:

•       Workshop Application Open – May 10, 2023
•       Workshop Application Deadline – June 10, 2023 AOE
•       Workshop Acceptance Notification – June 17, 2023 AOE

By Samy Bengio, Sasha Luccioni, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, chairs of the Code of Ethics committee

The increasing real-world impact of ML research and applications increases both the likelihood of meaningful social benefit as well as the attendant risk of harm. This harm can often be minimized by practical improvements to research practice – including improved transparency, better documentation and the more purposeful dissemination of ML models and datasets. 

This week, NeurIPS adopted a Code of Ethics to help guide our community towards higher standards of ethical conduct, including research ethics and the broader societal and environmental impacts of our work. The code is the result of a multi-year effort to establish guidelines and norms for submissions to NeurIPS. As such, it outlines conference expectations about the ethical practices that must be adopted by submitting authors, members of the program, and organizing committees. 

The Code of Ethics complements the NeurIPS Code of Conduct, which focuses on professional conduct and research integrity issues, including plagiarism, fraud and reproducibility concerns. It also informs the NeurIPS Paper Checklist and Code and Data Submission Guidelines, which outline more concrete communication requirements around ML artifacts submitted to NeurIPS.

The Code of Ethics as it exists today is an initial version that will evolve over time, as new approaches and applications of ML are developed. We will continue gathering feedback from the community and will use it to update the code over the coming years, to better reflect the norms and values of the NeurIPS community.

Thank you to those who contributed towards the code of ethics:  Alina Beygelzimer,  Corinna Cortes, Kate Crawford, Thomas G. Dietterich, Barbara Engelhardt, Jeanne Fromer, Iason Gabriel, William Isaac, Amanda Levendowski, Jason Millar, Shakir Mohamed, Nyalleng Moorosi, Alice Oh, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato