Chinese tech giants dominate ICLR 2025 submissions amid NeurIPS boycott

At the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025, which took place in Rio de Janeiro from April 23 to 27, Chinese technology leaders Alibaba and ByteDance were at the forefront of paper submissions. Contributions from mainland China and Hong Kong represented over 51% of the 5,355 accepted papers, while the United States accounted for less than 32%. The conference received approximately 19,000 submissions, resulting in a 28% acceptance rate. This significant representation from China follows calls from several major professional organizations in the country for researchers to boycott NeurIPS due to a policy that seemed to exclude US-sanctioned entities. Although the NeurIPS Foundation later clarified that prominent Chinese firms like Huawei Technologies were unaffected, concerns about Chinese involvement in global AI conferences lingered.