AI/ML Conferences to Watch in 2026

If you plan to submit AI research in 2026, the real work starts months earlier. Most major conferences open abstract or paper submissions roughly 6 to 9 months before the event, which means many 2026 decisions will begin in late 2025.

A new GitHub list from Laudarisd pulls together many of the biggest AI, machine learning, computer vision, and medical imaging venues in one place. The repository is simple, but the timing is useful: labs, PhD students, and independent researchers already need a working calendar.

Why this conference list matters

The repository focuses on a practical problem. Researchers do not just need a ranking of conferences. They need a rough map of when to draft, when to polish experiments, and when to expect abstract deadlines.

That matters because the top venues in AI are crowded, selective, and often split across subfields. A team building foundation model training methods might aim for NeurIPS or ICML, while a group working on visual recognition or image segmentation will likely prioritize CVPR or ECCV. Medical imaging researchers often have a very different shortlist led by MICCAI.

• The list groups conferences into flagship and field-specific tiers.
• It tracks approximate submission windows rather than waiting for every CFP to go live.
• It includes official links, which saves time when deadlines move or venue pages change.
• It covers core AI, computer vision, medical imaging, signal processing, and graphics-adjacent events.

That last point is more useful than it sounds. Plenty of papers now sit between categories: multimodal learning can fit at AI conferences, vision conferences, or signal processing venues depending on the paper's emphasis and evaluation style.

The flagship venues still set the pace

The top section of the list includes the names most researchers already expect: ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, CVPR, and ECCV. These are the conferences that shape hiring packets, citation patterns, and a large share of the annual research conversation.

One useful detail in the repository is how it frames deadlines as planning anchors. For example, ICLR 2026 submissions will likely land around October or November 2025 if the conference follows its usual cadence. CVPR 2026 abstracts are expected around October 2025. That means teams waiting until January 2026 to organize their submission strategy will already be late for some of the most visible venues.

"The conference maintains a strong commitment to the values of openness, integrity, and reproducibility."

— NeurIPS Code of Conduct

That quote is not marketing fluff. It points to why these events still matter even in an era where arXiv papers spread instantly. Conferences remain where peer review, rebuttals, workshops, sponsor recruiting, and hallway conversations all collide in one place.

There is one oddity in the GitHub list worth noting. It mentions ICCV as “ICCV 2027” while also tying it to October 2026. ICCV is typically held in odd-numbered years, alternating with ECCV, so readers should treat that row as a reminder to verify dates directly with the official site.

Specialized conferences are often the better fit

A lot of researchers overfocus on the biggest names. Prestige matters, but fit matters more. If your work is in clinical imaging, document analysis, or applied vision systems, a specialized venue can put the paper in front of the exact people who care.

The repository includes a strong second group: MICCAI, MIDL, ICIP, ICASSP, SIGGRAPH, WACV, and BMVC. Those conferences can be a better home for papers that might get lost in the volume at a giant general-purpose event.

• MICCAI 2026 is listed for October 4 to 8 in Abu Dhabi, with submissions expected around March or April 2026.
• ICIP 2026 is listed for September 13 to 17 in Tampere, Finland, with a likely January 2026 submission window.
• ICASSP 2026 is listed for May 4 to 8 in Barcelona, with deadlines expected around October 2025.
• WACV 2026 is expected in January 2026, with submissions around July 2025.

Those dates make one thing obvious: the conference calendar is not annual in the casual sense. It is a rolling pipeline. By mid-summer 2025, some 2026 opportunities will already be closing.

How the major venues compare

The GitHub document is not a ranking database, and that is probably for the best. Still, it gives enough structure to compare conferences by timing and research fit.

For core machine learning, the likely sequence is ICLR in spring, ICML in summer, and NeurIPS in December. For computer vision, WACV arrives early in the year, CVPR in June, and ECCV later in the year. Medical imaging follows a different arc, with MICCAI usually landing in the fall.

• Core AI/ML: ICLR 2026 likely opens first, with submission timing around Oct to Nov 2025. ICML 2026 likely follows with February 2026 deadlines. NeurIPS 2026 likely targets May 2026 submissions.
• Computer vision: WACV 2026 likely closes around July 2025, CVPR 2026 around October 2025, and ECCV 2026 around March 2026.
• Medical imaging: MIDL 2026 likely takes papers around February 2026, while MICCAI 2026 likely follows around March to April 2026.
• Signal and multimodal work: ICASSP 2026 likely closes around October 2025, while ICIP 2026 appears set for January 2026.

If you are building a submission plan, this kind of comparison helps you stack fallback options. A paper rejected from one venue can often be reworked for another, but only if the timelines line up and the contribution matches what reviewers in that community expect.

That is especially true now that AI papers often mix theory, systems, product-oriented evaluation, and multimodal benchmarks. The right venue is partly about prestige, but also about reviewer culture. A systems-heavy paper can struggle at one conference and do very well at another with a different standard for novelty and empirical depth.

Use the list as a draft calendar, not a final source

The GitHub repository is useful because it puts the 2026 cycle in one place early. It is not enough on its own. Conference dates change, CFP pages move, and some placeholder links point to prior-year sites. That means every serious submission plan still needs direct checks against official conference pages.

My advice is simple: turn this list into a live spreadsheet for your team, add columns for abstract deadline, paper deadline, rebuttal period, notification date, and camera-ready date, then review it every two weeks. If you are targeting CVPR, ICLR, or WACV, start now rather than after summer. The labs that treat conference planning like project management usually get more papers out the door.

If OraCore covers more research workflow tools soon, this repository would pair well with a deadline tracker, rebuttal planner, or venue-fit database. Until then, this GitHub page is a decent starting point, and it answers a practical question many researchers have already started asking: which 2026 deadlines are close enough that we should be writing today?