NeurIPS Main Track Handbook

NeurIPS Main Track Handbook (Authors, Reviewers, ACs, and SACs) V2026.1 Everyone OpenReview Setup All authors, reviewers, ACs, and SACs will need an OpenReview profile by the full paper submission deadline. Your OpenReview profile can be edited by logging in and clicking on your name in https://openreview.net/ . This takes you to a URL "https://openreview.net/profile?id=~[Firstname]_[Lastname][n]" where the last part is your profile name, e.g., ~Po-Yi_Lu1. The OpenReview profiles must be up to date, with all publications by the authors, and their current affiliations. The easiest way to import publications is through DBLP but it is not required, see OpenReview FAQ . Because profiles are used to inform conflicts of interest, a profile that has not been appropriately updated risks desk rejection (for authors) and sanctions (for reviewers). Please be aware that OpenReview has a moderation policy for newly created profiles: New profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks. New profiles created with an institutional email will be activated automatically. If you have any questions about the use of OpenReview, please refer to its FAQ: https://openreview.net/faq All emails are sent from noreply@openreview.net. Please make sure that your preferred contact email in OpenReview is up to date and that your email servers or spam filters are not rejecting email from OpenReview. For general questions related to OpenReview, please visit https://openreview.net/faq .  For technical issues, please contact the OpenReview support team at info@openreview.net directly. Additional FAQs: Q: I don't have a DBLP page or previous publications, how can I complete my OpenReview profile? A: It is okay to leave the DBLP and papers empty in this case, but please make sure to add all of your email addresses and add your affiliations under "Education & Career History". Q: I have publications but no DBLP page. A: You can import your papers directly into Openreview. Q: I have publications but not related to the NeurIPS topic areas. Do I need to upload them? A: No. Sanctioned Institutions The NeurIPS Foundation, like any entity operating within U.S. legal jurisdiction, is required by law to comply with U.S. sanctions and trade restrictions. Under these regulations, providing 'services' (which includes peer review, editing, and publishing) to individuals representing sanctioned institutions is prohibited. Consequently, we are unable to accept or publish submissions from these institutions. This list of US-sanctioned institutions is available here: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/ Conflicts of Interest All authors, reviewers, ACs, SACs, and PCs must declare their conflicts of interest in OpenReview. You will be asked to declare two types of conflicts---domain conflicts and personal conflicts. Both types are declared by filling out appropriate sections of your OpenReview profile, as described below. Domain conflicts (entered in Education & Career History). When you enter a domain conflict, none of your submissions will be visible to reviewers, area chairs, or senior area chairs who have also entered this domain conflict. Only the last three years of your and their Education & Career History will be used. This part of your profile is public. Note: All affiliations including e.g. 20% consulting, sabbaticals, etc. should be included. Conflicts with individual authors and program committee members (entered in Advisors & Other Relations). The following constitutes a personal conflict: Family or close personal relationship Ph.D. advisee/advisor relationship All co-authors on original research articles in the last three years. Perspective pieces do not count. In some cases, you may have a personal conflict that is not covered by the definition above, but would nonetheless significantly compromise the fairness of the review process. You may choose to mark such a conflict as hidden from your OpenReview profile by changing its visibility from "everyone" to "NeurIPS 2026 Program Chairs". If program chairs have any reason to doubt the validity of such a conflict, they may ask the Ethics and Grievances committee to confidentially inquire into its nature. Please note that OpenReview profiles are persistent across conferences, but other conferences may have a different conflict resolution policy. Any attempt to impact reviewer assignment via false declaration of conflicts may result in rejection without review. Anti-collusion Unfortunately, in past years there have been a small number of reviewers who engage in deceptive bidding practices. NeurIPS does not tolerate any collusion whereby authors secretly cooperate with reviewers, ACs or SACs to obtain favorable reviews. If collusion is identified, the authors and reviewers involved will be notified, and be able to respond to the accusation. While their answers will be carefully taken into consideration, given the short time window to act, the PCs will deliberate and their decision will be final. Identifying collusion can happen at any point during the review process, including but not limited to the bidding process and the rebuttal period. The penalty for collusion is immediate removal from the reviewing system, rejection of all papers under consideration, sharing of identities with sister conferences, informing the colluding parties home institutions, and/or sanctions to future NeurIPS. Confidentiality of Submissions Reviewers, ACs, SACs, and PCs must keep everything relating to the review process confidential. Do not share, discuss, or disclose any information related to submissions with anyone, including any unsanctioned LLMs. You may not use ideas, code, or results from submissions in your own work unless and until they become publicly available and the author has granted the appropriate permission or license covering your intended use. Code submitted for review may not be distributed to anyone, including any unsanctioned LLMs, and may not be used for any purpose other than the review process. If a reviewer, AC, or SAC needs additional support via an external reviewer, they should be formally invited through OpenReview. Finally, reviewer, AC, and SAC assignments are made to ensure that there are no conflicts of interest. Reviewers, ACs, and SACs should not discuss any of their assigned papers with other reviewers, ACs, or SACs that are not assigned to the same submission. It is also a violation for reviewers, ACs, and SACs to ask other reviewers, ACs, and SACs for information about their own submissions as authors. NeurIPS Code of Ethics The Code of Ethics aims to guide the NeurIPS community towards higher standards of ethical conduct as it pertains to elements of research ethics and the broader societal and environmental impact of research submitted to NeurIPS. It outlines conference expectations about the ethical practices that must be adopted by the 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. The points described below also inform the NeurIPS Submission Checklist, which outlines more concrete communication requirements. Academic Integrity See the NeurIPS Academic Intregrity policy Potential Harms Caused by the Research Process Research involving human subjects or participants: Fair Wages: all human research subjects or participants must receive appropriate compensation. If you make use of crowdsourcing or contract work for a particular task as part of your research project,  you must respect the minimum hourly rate in the region where the work is carried out. Research involving human participants: if the research presented involves direct interactions between the researchers and human participants or between a technical system and human participants, authors are required to follow existing protocols in their institutions (e.g. human subject research accreditation, IRB) and go through the relevant process. In cases when no formal process exists, they can undergo an equivalent informal process (e.g. via their peers or an internal ethics review). Data-related concerns: The points listed below apply to all datasets used for submissions, both for publicly available data and internal datasets. Privacy: Datasets should minimize the exposure of any personally identifiable information, unless informed consent from those individuals is provided to do so. Consent: Any paper that chooses to create a dataset with real data of real people should ask for the explicit consent of participants, or explain why they were unable to do so. Deprecated datasets: Authors should take care to confirm with dataset creators that a dataset is still available for use. Datasets taken down by the original author (i.e., deemed obsolete, or otherwise discontinued), should no longer be used, unless it is for the purposes of audit or critical assessment. For some indication of known depreciated datasets, please refer to the NeurIPS list of deprecated datasets. Copyright and Fair Use: While the norms of fair use and copyright in machine learning research are still evolving, authors must respect the terms of datasets that have defined licenses (e.g. CC 4.0, MIT, etc). Representative evaluation practice: When collecting new datasets or making decisions about which datasets to use, authors should assess and communicate the degree to which their datasets are representative of their intended population. Claims of diverse or universal representation should be substantiated by concrete evidence or examples. Societal Impact and Potential Harmful Consequences Authors should transparently communicate the known or anticipated consequences of research: for instance via the paper checklist or a separate section in a submission. The following specific areas are of particular concern: Safety: Contributors should consider whether there are foreseeable situations in which their technology can be used to harm, injure or kill people through its direct application, side effects, or potential misuse. We do not accept research whose primary goal is to increase the lethality of weapons systems. Security: Researchers should consider whether there is a risk that applications could open security vulnerabilities or cause serious accidents when deployed in real world environments. If this is the case, they should take concrete steps to recommend or implement ways to protect against such security risks. Discrimination: Researchers should consider whether the technology they developed can be used to discriminate, exclude, or otherwise negatively impact people, including impacts on the provision of services such as healthcare, education or access to credit. Surveillance: Researchers should consult on local laws or legislation before collecting or analyzing any bulk surveillance data. Surveillance should not be used to predict gender, race, sexuality, or other protected characteristics, or be used in any way to endanger individual well-being. Deception & Harassment: Researchers should communicate about whether their approach could be used to facilitate deceptive interactions that would cause harm such as theft, fraud, or harassment, and whether it could be used to impersonate public figures and influence political processes, or as a tool to promote hate speech or abuse. Environment: Researchers should consider whether their research is going to negatively impact the environment by, e.g., promoting fossil fuel extraction, increasing societal consumption or producing substantial amounts of greenhouse gasses. Human Rights: We prohibit circulation of any research work that builds upon or facilitates illegal activity, and we strongly discourage any work that could be used to deny people rights to privacy, speech, health, liberty, security, legal personhood, or freedom of conscience or religion. Bias and fairness: Contributors should consider any suspected biases or limitations to the scope of performance of models or the contents of datasets and inspect these to ascertain whether they encode, contain or exacerbate bias against people of a certain gender, race, sexuality, or other protected characteristics. Impact Mitigation Measures We propose some reflection and actions taken to mitigate potential harmful consequences from the research project. Data and model documentation: Researchers should communicate the details of the dataset or the model as part of their submissions via structured templates. Data and model licenses: If releasing data or models, authors should also provide licenses for them. These should include the intended use and limitations of these artifacts, in order to prevent misuse or inappropriate use. Secure and privacy-preserving data storage & distribution : Authors should leverage privacy protocols, encryption and anonymization to reduce the risk of data leakage or theft. Stronger measures should be employed for more sensitive data (e.g., biometric or medical data). Responsible release and publication strategy: Models that have a high risk for misuse or dual-use should be released with necessary safeguards to allow for controlled use of the model, e.g. by requiring that users adhere to a code of conduct to access the model. Authors of papers exposing a security vulnerability in a system should follow the responsible disclosure procedures of the system owners. Allowing access to research artifacts: When releasing research artifacts, it is important to make accessible the information required to understand these artifacts (e.g. the code, execution environment versions, weights, and hyperparameters of systems) to enable external scrutiny and auditing. Disclose essential elements for reproducibility: Any work submitted to NeurIPS should be accompanied by the information sufficient for the reproduction of results described. This can include descriptions of the code, the actual code, data, model weights, and/or a description of the computational resources needed to train the proposed model or validate the results. Ensure legal compliance: Ensure adequate awareness of regional legal requirements. This can be done, for instance, by consulting with law school clinics specializing in intellectual property and technology issues. Additional information is required from authors where legal compliance could not be met due to human rights violations (e.g. freedom of expression, the right to work and education, bodily autonomy, etc.). Violations Violations to the Code of Ethics should be reported to hotline@neurips.cc . NeurIPS reserves the right to reject the presentation of scientific works that violate the Code of Ethics. Notice that conference contributors are also obliged to adhere to additional ethical codes or review requirements arising from other stakeholders such as funders and researc