2025 Conference

Piotr Koniusz, Nancy Chen, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Razvan Pascanu, Hsuan-Tien Lin (Program Chairs)

Lora Aroyo, Francesco Locatello, Konstantina Palla (Datasets & Benchmark Track Chairs)

As NeurIPS expands, maintaining review quality and punctuality of the review process is increasingly difficult. While many reviews are thoughtfully written to elevate the quality of submissions, many authors have had experiences with late and low-quality reviews. Moreover, poor communication between the reviewers and the area chairs often delays the recruitment of emergency reviewers. Together, these problems threaten the conference’s long‑term sustainability. Therefore, for NeurIPS 2025, we are piloting new initiatives that will safeguard reviewing quality and timeline.

Submitting to NeurIPS Is a Partnership

As authors can see on the submission form, every submission needs to nominate a reciprocal reviewer from the authors. In addition, many of the invited reviewers also submit papers. Therefore, each submission fosters a partnership between authors-reviewers and the conference, emphasizing a reciprocal system where authors expect timely, high-quality feedback. Consequently, reviewers—often authors themselves—must fulfill their crucial obligation to provide thorough, punctual reviews. By setting an expectation on this shared commitment, we hope to reinforce to the community that authors’ professional participation as reviewers is essential to sustaining the high quality, high standards, and continuous success of NeurIPS.

New Measures to Safeguard Review Quality & Timeliness

To enforce our expectation that authors on NeurIPS 2025 papers should also be reviewers that will provide timely and high-quality reviews, we introduce two measures:

• Reviews Withholding Mechanism: Learning from the experience of SIG KDD ‘24/25, we are implementing for NeurIPS 2025 a policy in which reviewers who are also authors (and their co‑authors) will not see the reviews of their own submission(s) unless they will have completed all assigned reviews. If reviews are late, the reviewers (and their co-authors) will lose access to the reviews of their own papers until completion of their professional reviews (maximally until two days before the end of the authors rebuttal period).
  
  Reviewers will receive several reminders before the reviewing deadline. Those who are also authors—and fail to submit their reviews—will be specifically alerted. That is, in the worst case, the negligent reviewers and their co‑authors will lose access to reviews on their own papers for the first five days of rebuttal.
  
• Desk Rejection Sanction: Learning from the experience of CVPR ’25, we will reserve desk rejection at the meta‑review stage as a last‑resort sanction against grossly negligent reviewer‑authors. ACs and SACs will flag any low-quality review, such as placeholder ones, regardless of whether it’s submitted on time or late. The reviewer will be notified and required to address the issues. If significant problems persist and are verified by the PC chairs and D&B track chairs, the reviewer’s own submitted papers may face desk rejection during the meta-review stage.

Expected Outcomes

With these two new safeguards, we expect that a significant portion of papers will receive more responsible, timely reviews. Both the main track and the D&B track will adopt these measures. For this reason alone, we kindly ask all reviewers to think about reviewing as a partnership with NeurIPS that will improve outcomes for the whole community.

Authors: Manuel Gomez Rodriguez, Pascale Fung, Theodore Papamarkou

With the rapid growth and interest in NeurIPS and its associated workshops, the competition for workshops has increased alongside logistical constraints. To facilitate the process, the workshop chairs have agreed on the following guidelines for proposals to hold NeurIPS workshops in 2025. This document highlights the requirements and expectations for proposals. Organizers of workshop proposals should take care to respect all guidance provided here and each requirement should be explicitly addressed in the proposal.

Important Dates

1. Workshop Application Open: April 14, 2025
2. Workshop Application Deadline: May 30, 2025, AoE
3. Workshop Acceptance Notification: July 4, 2025, AoE
4. Suggested Submission Date for Workshop Contributions: August 22, 2025, AoE
5. Accept/Reject Notification Date: September 22, 2025, AoE
6. Workshop Date: December 6 or December 7, 2025.

If a workshop does not meet the above accept/reject notification date, it will have their complementary tickets withheld. Moreover, if workshop organizers are not responsive after this date, the workshop may even be canceled.

Workshop Format

NeurIPS 2025 workshops will be one-day in-person events that spread 7 to 9 hours. A maximum of 1-hour remote presentation will be allowed in case of unforeseen emergencies.

Workshop Goals

• Workshops provide an informal, dynamic venue for discussion of work in progress and future directions. Good workshops have helped to crystallize common problems, explicitly contrast competing frameworks, and clarify essential questions for a subfield or application area.
• Workshops are a structured means of bringing together people with common interests to form communities. We expect the workshops to include some form of community building and stand apart from other parts of the NeurIPS program such as Tutorials or Competitions.

Selection Criteria

• Importance of the topic and its relevance for the community: is the workshop focused on a clear and topical problem, and will the community find it interesting, exciting and useful? 
• The degree to which the proposed program offers an opportunity for discussion among participants and for community building.
• Diversity and inclusion in all forms.
• Invited speakers. Workshop organizers are encouraged to confirm tentative interest from proposed invited speakers and mention this in their proposal. Speakers are expected to be present at the workshop in person to give their talk unless there are exceptional circumstances.
• Organizational experience, potential, and ability of the team.
• Points of difference. What makes this workshop enticingly different from the hundreds of NeurIPS workshops held previously?
• Details of logistics for the workshop. The proposal should clearly lay out the logistics for the workshop, both prior to the conference (calls for papers, confirmation of the speakers) and during the conference (schedule and organization during the day).

Workshop Proposal Format

Submissions for workshop organization should be no more than three pages of proposal, plus no more than two pages of organizer information, and unlimited references. The reviewers are not obligated to read anything beyond those. To simplify the preparation of the proposal, we strongly recommend utilizing this template as a foundation for every proposal.

The three pages (or fewer) for the main proposal must include:

• A title and a brief description of the workshop topic and content.
• A list of invited speakers, if applicable, with an indication of which ones have already agreed and which ones are tentative.
• An account of the efforts made to ensure demographic diversity of the organizers and speakers. Also an account of any efforts to include diverse participants (e.g., via mentoring, subsidies, or the wording and topics in the call for proposal).
• An estimate of the number of attendees.
• A description of special requirements and technical needs.
• If the workshop has been held before, a note specifying how many submissions the workshop received, how many papers were accepted (extended abstract/long format), and how many attendees the workshop attracted.
• Optionally, a URL for the workshop website.

The two pages (or fewer) for information about organizers must include:

• The names, affiliations, and email addresses of the organizers, with one-paragraph statements of their research interests, areas of expertise, and experience in organizing workshops and related events. Please highlight how the organizers’ profiles can make the proposed workshop successful. Please also indicate what other workshops (if any) are concurrently being proposed by an organizer. 
• A list of Program Committee members, with an indication of which members have already agreed. Organizers should do their best to estimate the number of submissions (especially for recurring workshops) in order to (a) ensure a sufficient number of reviewers so that each paper receives 3 reviews, and (b) anticipate that no one is committed to reviewing more than 3 papers. This practice is likely to ensure on-time and more comprehensive and thoughtful reviews.

Assessment Process 

The workshop chairs will appoint a number of reviewers who will provide written assessments of the proposals against the criteria listed above. Reviewers’ reports will be considered by the workshop chairs who will jointly decide upon the selected workshops (subject to the notes on COIs listed below). The final decisions will be made by the workshop chairs via consensus and judgment; we will not simply add up scores assigned to all the criteria.

Hard Constraints/Workshop Requirements

1. Mandatory Accept/Reject Notification Deadline Before September 22, 2025: By submitting a workshop proposal, workshop organizers commit to notifying those who submit contributions (including talks and posters) to the workshop of their acceptance status before September 22, 2025. A timeline should be included in the proposal that will allow for this. This deadline of September 22 will be published on the NeurIPS main web page and cannot be extended under any circumstances.
   
2. Use CMT or OpenReview for Contributed Work
   Workshops that accept contributions must use either CMT or OpenReview to manage their submission process. This ensures that accepted submissions can be efficiently uploaded to the NeurIPS.cc site to announce the workshop schedule to NeurIPS attendants clearly.

3. Managing Chair and Reviewer Conflicts of Interest
   1. Workshop chairs and assistant chairs cannot be organizers or give invited talks at any workshop. However, they can submit papers and give contributed talks.
   2. Workshop reviewers cannot review any proposal on which they are listed as an organizer or invited speaker, or on which they have conflicts of interest as defined by the NeurIPS Conflicts of Interest. Moreover, they cannot accept invitations to speak at any workshop they have reviewed after the workshop is accepted.
   3. Workshop chairs and reviewers cannot review or shape acceptance decisions about workshops with organizers from within their organization. (For large corporations, this means anyone in the corporation worldwide).

4. Managing Organizer Conflicts of Interest
   • Workshop organizers cannot give talks at the workshops they organize. They can give a brief introduction to the workshop and/or act as a panel moderator.
   • Workshop organizers should state in their proposals how they will manage conflicts of interest in assessing submitted contributions. At a minimum, an organizer should not be involved in the assessment of a submission from someone within the same organization. 

Other Guidance and Expectations for Workshop Proposals 

1. We encourage, and expect, diversity in the organizing team and speakers. This includes the diversity of viewpoints and thinking regarding the topics discussed at the workshop, gender, race, affiliations, seniority, etc. If a workshop is part of a series, the organizer list should include people who have not organized it in the past. Organizers should articulate how they have addressed diversity in their proposal in each of these senses. Invited speakers should not give the same talk or very similar talks at multiple workshops.
2. Since the goal of the workshop is to generate discussion, sufficient time and structure need to be included in the program for this. Proposals should explicitly articulate how they will encourage broad discussion. 
3. Workshop proposals should list explicitly the problems they would like to see solved or at least advances made as part of their workshop. They should explain why these are important problems and how holding their proposed workshop will contribute to their solution.
4. Workshops are not a venue for work that has been previously published in other conferences on machine learning or related fields. Work that is presented at the main NeurIPS conference should not appear in a workshop, including as part of an invited talk. Organizers should make this clear in their calls and explain in their proposal how they will discourage the presentation of already finalized machine learning work.
5. We encourage workshop submissions of varying lengths and scopes. Organizers should state whether their workshops are meant to be large-attendance talk format or small group presentations. Organizers should articulate what they hope to achieve from the format of the proposal beyond the talks listed.
6. Workshops should have a clear and well-communicated agenda or schedule that outlines the topics and speakers to be presented, to provide attendees with the ability to choose which talks or sessions they want to attend based on the content being presented. Good workshops will put talk titles up publicly before site publication and note the archival status of their submissions. Organizers should articulate how they will do this.
7. Organizing a workshop is a complex task, and proposals should outline the organizational experience and skills of the proposed organizers (as a team). We encourage junior researchers to be involved in workshop organization but prefer some collective experience in organizing a complex event.

Frequently Asked Questions From Past Workshops

1. Workshop Series
   Although we ask for statistics and information if the workshop has been held before, we neither encourage nor discourage workshops on topics that have appeared before. Membership in an existing sequence of workshops is irrelevant in the assessment of a workshop proposal (it neither helps nor hinders). Workshop proposals will be evaluated solely on their merits for this year’s conference. That said, proposals from the workshop series are encouraged to differentiate from past versions with some freshness (contents, organizers, etc.) to help the reviewers evaluate the merits.
   
2. Overlapping Proposals
   We will not forcibly merge proposals. If multiple strong proposals are submitted on similar topics, we might accept 1-2 workshops in overlapping topics to curate the best workshop program.

Common Pitfalls From Past Workshops

1. Insufficient time for discussion
   Too many invited speakers—some proposals listed a dozen or more—do not make for a great audience experience, and a workshop with nothing but long-form talks is unlikely to lead to new breakthroughs. We encourage organizers to allocate a larger amount of time to contributed talks and posters, and open discussion.
   
2. Leaning too heavily on past success
   Proposals for workshops that are part of a series sometimes lean too heavily on the declared popularity of previous workshops. In some cases, this led to proposals that were less creative and innovative than what we had hoped to see.
   
3. Unconfirmed or irrelevant speakers
   The vast majority of proposals included lists of confirmed invited speakers. This made it hard to champion any workshop that didn’t have at least a few speakers confirmed, especially when many unconfirmed big-name speakers were listed (it’s unlikely all would say yes), or when the diversity statement centered on the assumed presence of unconfirmed speakers. There were also several proposals featuring long lists of “celebrity” speakers without clear relevance to the topic of the workshop.
   
4. Going too big
   We saw only a few proposals that we felt were too narrow, but many we found too broad. There seems to be a tendency to overreach for the sake of going big, while we’d prefer to see more focused workshops.
   
5. Too many organizers or organizing too many workshops
   Several proposals had remarkably large organizing committees. It’s not clear why more than five or six organizers would be necessary for a workshop. Similarly, organizing too many workshops can be a negative factor towards high-quality workshops.
   

Track Chairs: Barbara Engelhardt, Cynthia Rudin

This year at NeurIPS, we are initiating a Position Paper Track, following ICML 2024 and 2025 Position Paper Tracks. This is a time of accelerated development and deployment of methods designed in the NeurIPS community, where many people interact with AI in myriad ways – including high-stakes settings. Our position track is one way to ensure our community is fully engaged in the ways that our methods may impact the broader scientific community, and the world, through these critical discussions. 

Our CFP asks the questions we ourselves are grappling with: What is the field getting right? Getting wrong? How can our work be used for positive or destructive ends in government, military, medicine, public policy, or law? What are open problems that we should focus more on? Or less? We want to hear from the community that designed these methods. We encourage perspectives that stimulate discussion, and ask that authors engage with the complexities of AI methods in the wild. 

While we suggest many topics for submissions from the violation of copyright laws, the environmental cost of training some models, and appropriate benchmarks and validation processes, we encourage topics that we have not yet discussed as a community. With the accelerated and preemptive use of our models across nearly every aspect of society, we would like to open many more conversations along these lines. 

Accepted NeurIPS position papers will be included in the conference proceedings, including being presented in orals and poster sessions, so that all NeurIPS paper authors will have opportunities to engage with the ideas in these papers as part of the main conference.

Authors:
Program Chairs: Razvan Pascanu, Nancy Chen, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Piotr Koniusz, Hsuan-Tien Lin;
Assistant Program Chairs: Elena Burceanu, Junhao Dong, Zhengyuan Liu, Po-Yi Lu, Isha Puri

NeurIPS relies on the active participation of the research community to evaluate numerous submissions and uphold scientific quality. Being involved in the reviewing process provides an opportunity to engage with the NeurIPS community, while contributing to the advancement of research excellence. Starting this year, we are aiming to enhance transparency and fairness of the NeurIPS reviewing process by introducing a self-nomination system, in addition to the usual reviewer invitation procedures. The main track and the D&B track decided to recruit reviewers and area chairs together this year, and the selected ones will be allocated to either the main track or the D&B track afterwards.

Criteria

We encourage anyone who wants to be part of the NeurIPS community and believes has the experience to act as a reviewer or area chair to apply. Good research cannot happen without fair and careful review, and being a reviewer or an area chair is an integral part of being a researcher and will help you hone vital skills that will help you in your career. 

To provide guidance of whether you are ready to be a reviewer or an area chair, we provide a few criteria. Note that you should not take these criteria in a very strict sense, and you do not need to meet all of them, but rather a subset of them to qualify. 

Also, as our goal is to increase fairness, we understand that individuals may come from different contexts, and due to the large diversity of backgrounds in the field, many might qualify as strong reviewers without fitting the criteria below. In that sense, we provide a free-form text box that allows self-nominations to justify their readiness to be a reviewer if their background does not fit the criteria below. 

As this initiative is intended to extend the list of reviewers from previous years, depending on the volume of self-nomination applications and the needs of the conference, we may invite only a random subset of eligible candidates. So please do not treat not being selected as not being qualified for the role you applied for and do consider re-applying in future years, as the pool of reviewers changes from year to year. 

If you have accepted an invitation to be a reviewer, but want to self-nominate as an AC, please note that in the form you should indicate that you previously accepted being a reviewer. This will allow us to remove you from the double role in case you are selected. Please understand that the most crucial role in the whole reviewing pipeline is that of the reviewer, and is where NeurIPS needs most support. So in case you are not selected as an AC, please consider staying as a reviewer providing your expertise in judging submitted works. 

Self-nominating reviewers

For each self-nomination application for reviewing at NeurIPS 2025, we will consider the following criteria as relevant. You do not need to meet all of them, but should ideally meet several of them to qualify.

• Hold a Ph.D. in a relevant field
• Published at least 2 papers as first author in the past 5 years in any conference/journal from the following list: REVIEWER_VENUE_LIST
• Received at least 10 citations on your first-authored papers (in relevant fields)
• Served as a reviewer at any conference/journal in REVIEWER_VENUE_LIST, for at least 2 times in a row
• Be an author on at least 4 peer-reviewed papers (this can include non-archival venues like workshops) on relevant topics

REVIEWER_VENUE_LIST: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, WACV, COLM, CoLLAs, RLC, AISTATS, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI, COLT, ML4H, CHIL, TMLR, JMLR

If you are willing to self-nominate to serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS 2025, please fill in this form.

Self-nominating ACs

For each self-nomination application for being an AC at NeurIPS 2025, we will consider the following criteria as relevant. You do not need to meet all of them, but should ideally meet several of them to qualify.

• At least 5 last-authored papers accepted at AC_CONF_LIST in the past 5 years
• At least 10 papers accepted at AC_CONF_LIST in the area of expertise
• Served as an AC at any conference in the AC_CONF_LIST at least 2 times in a row
• Served as a reviewer at AC_CONF_LIST at least 5 times in a row

AC_CONF_LIST: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, COLT

If you are willing to self-nominate to serve as an AC for NeurIPS 2025, please fill in this form.

Authors:
DB Track chairs: Lora Aroyo, Francesco Locatello, Konstantina Palla, 
DB Track resource and metadata chairs: Meg Risdal, Joaquin Vanschoren

The NeurIPS Datasets & Benchmarks Track exists to highlight the crucial role that high-quality datasets and benchmarks play in advancing machine learning research. While algorithmic innovation often takes center stage, the progress of AI depends just as much on the quality, accessibility, and rigor of the datasets that fuel these models. Our goal is to ensure that impactful dataset contributions receive the recognition and scrutiny they deserve.

This blog post accompanies the release of the Call for Papers for the 2025 Datasets & Benchmarks Track (https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2025/CallForDatasetsBenchmarks), outlining key updates to submission requirements and best practices.  Please note that this year Datasets & Benchmarks Track this year will follow the NeurIPS2025 Main Track Call for Papers, with the addition of three track-specific points: (1) Single-blind submissions, (2) Required dataset and benchmark code submission and (3) Specific scope for datasets and benchmarks paper submission. See the Call for Papers for details. 

The Challenge of Assessing High-Quality Datasets

Unlike traditional research papers that have well-established peer review standards, dataset and benchmark papers require unique considerations on their review evaluation. A high-quality dataset must be well-documented, reproducible, and accessible while adhering to best practices in data collection and ethical considerations. Without clear guidelines and automated validation, reviewers face inconsistencies in their assessments, and valuable contributions risk being overlooked.

To address these challenges, we have developed submission and review guidelines that align with widely recognized frameworks in the research community and the open-source movement. For instance, in 2024, we encouraged authors to use established documentation standards such as datasheets for datasets, dataset nutrition labels, data statements for NLP, data cards, and accountability frameworks. By promoting these frameworks, we aim to ensure that dataset contributions are well-documented and transparent, making it easier for researchers to assess their reliability and impact.

Raising the Bar: Machine-Readable Metadata with Croissant

A persistent challenge has been the lack of a standardized, reliable way for reviewers to assess datasets against industry best practices. Unlike the main track, which has commonly accepted standards for paper submissions, dataset reviews still have to mature in this respect. 

In 2024, we took a significant step toward improving dataset review by encouraging authors to generate a Croissant machine-readable metadata file to document their datasets. Croissant is an open community effort created because existing standards for dataset metadata lack ML-specific support and lag behind AI’s dynamically evolving requirements. Croissant records ML-specific metadata that enables datasets to be loaded directly into ML frameworks and tools, streamlines usage and community sharing independent of hosting platforms, and includes responsible AI metadata. At that time, Croissant tooling was still in its early stages, and many authors found the process burdensome. Since then, Croissant has matured significantly and gained industry and community adoption. Platforms like Hugging Face, Kaggle, OpenML, and Dataverse now natively support Croissant, making metadata generation effortless.

Making High-Quality Dataset Submissions the Standard

With these improvements in tooling and ecosystem support, we are now requiring dataset authors to ensure that their datasets are properly hosted. That means that they release their datasets via a data repository (e.g., Hugging Face, Kaggle, OpenML, or Dataverse) or provide a custom hosting solution that supports and ensures long-term access and includes a croissant description. We also provide detailed guidelines for authors to make the process as smooth as possible. This requirement ensures that:

• Datasets are easily accessible and discoverable through widely used research platforms over long periods of time.
• Standard interfaces (e.g., via Python client libraries) simplify dataset retrieval for both researchers and reviewers.
• Metadata is automatically validated to streamline the review process.

By enforcing this requirement, we are lowering the barriers to high-quality dataset documentation while improving the overall transparency and reproducibility of dataset contributions.

Looking Ahead

The NeurIPS Datasets & Benchmarks Track is committed to evolving alongside the broader research community. By integrating best practices and leveraging industry standards like Croissant, we aim to enhance the visibility, impact, and reliability of dataset contributions. These changes will help ensure that machine learning research is built on a foundation of well-documented, high-quality datasets that drive meaningful progress.

If you are preparing a dataset submission for NeurIPS, we encourage you to explore Croissant-integrated repositories today and take advantage of the powerful tools available to streamline your metadata generation. Let’s work together to set a new standard for dataset contributions