The 18th Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML 2026) will take place between December 1st - 4th, 2026, in Melbourne, Australia (just before NeurIPS’26, Dec. 6-12 in Sydney). The conference aims to provide a leading international forum for researchers in machine learning and related fields to share their new ideas, progress, and achievements.

The conference calls for high-quality, original research papers in the theory and practice of machine learning. The conference also solicits proposals focusing on frontier research, new ideas, and paradigms in machine learning. We encourage submissions from all parts of the world, not only confined to the Asia-Pacific region.

Submission Instructions

Similar to previous years, ACML 2026 offers two publication tracks: the conference track and the journal track. Please note that at least one author of each accepted paper (for both tracks) must present the paper at the conference. Failure to do so will result in the paper not being published. All deadlines will be at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) unless otherwise specified.

To maintain high-quality peer review and support our growing community, ACML 2026 encourages all authors to serve as a reviewer. At least one author must be nominated for each submission, unless one author has served as an area chair. Author(s) with extensive research and reviewing experiences at top-tiered machine learning venues (e.g., ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR) are highly preferred to be nominated. Submissions without at least one author serving as a reviewer or area chair will be desk rejected. If your submission cannot nominate any authors that satisfy the above requirement, please email the PCs before 23 June 2026 through the following email: acml_2026_programchairs@googlegroups.com. You need to include the OpenReview submission ID in the email so we can process your information.

Conference Track

Conference Track: (16-page limit with references) for which the proceedings will be published as a volume of Proceedings of Machine Learning Research Workshop and Conference Proceedings (PMLR).

Submission Deadline: 26 June 2026 05 July 2026

For the conference track, please submit your manuscript via OpenReview at: https://openreview.net/group?id=ACML.org/2026/Conference. Manuscripts must be written in English, and should follow the Latex submission template and style file here ACML_camera_ready.zip with a 16-page limit, including references and appendix. Supplementary materials may be submitted as a separate file, but reviewers are not obliged to consider it.

All conference track submissions must be anonymized for double-blinded review. Submissions that are not anonymized, over-length, or not in the correct format will be rejected without review. To anonymize, simply leave the author information empty in the Tex template. There is no separate format for anonymizing.

It is not appropriate to submit papers that are substantially similar to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences or journals (including our journal track). However, submission is permitted for papers presented or to be presented at conferences or workshops without proceedings, or with only abstracts published. Also, submission is permitted for papers that are available as a technical report (e.g., in arXiv) as long as it is not cited in the submission.

Journal Track

Submission Deadline: 20 June 2026

In addition to the conference track, this year’s ACML will also run a journal track, similar to previous years. Papers that are accepted to the journal track must be presented at the conference in order to be published.

IMPORTANT: Similar to previous years, for the journal track, the abstract and the paper must be submitted to two different systems simultaneously for the purpose of review management:

1) First, please submit the title, abstract, and the full manuscript via OpenReview at ACML 2026 Journal Track | OpenReview.

2) Then, please submit the full manuscript via Springer Nature’s manuscript submission system at: ACML 2026 | SpringerLink. When creating a new submission, please make sure to choose “Research” as the article type and “ACML 2026” as the collection type.

Failure to submit to both systems will result in desk-reject of the paper.

For the journal track, manuscripts must be written in English with a maximum of 20 pages (including references, appendices, etc.). For the template and style files, please follow the submission guidelines on the journal website.

The journal track will follow the reviewing process of the Machine Learning journal. This includes allowing papers that require minor changes to be resubmitted after a first-round review. The journal track committee will aim to complete the reviewing process in time for this year’s conference. In the unlikely event that the reviewing process for a paper is not completed in time (for this year’s conference), the paper will not be considered for the conference and the review will be completed as a regular submission to the Machine Learning journal.

The journal track review is single-blind, i.e., the authors’ identity will be visible to reviewers. It is not appropriate to submit papers that are substantially similar to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences or journals. Submissions that are not in the correct format will be rejected without review. In addition, extended versions of published conference papers are not eligible for journal track submission. However, submission is permitted for papers presented or to be presented at conferences or workshops without proceedings, or with only abstracts published. Also, submission is permitted for papers that are available as a technical report (e.g., in arXiv).

Encore Track

We are delighted to introduce the Encore Track at our ACML 2026 conference, created to spotlight influential and innovative research in machine learning and artificial intelligence. This track will feature outstanding work that has previously been published or accepted at leading venues, while encouraging renewed engagement, discussion, and collaboration within our research community.

Submission Scope

Researchers are invited to submit the title, abstract, and author details for recent papers that have been published, accepted, or are in press since 1 June 2025. Eligible venues include, but are not limited to, major conferences and journals such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ECCV, ICCV, CVPR, ACL, AAAI, JMLR, and IEEE TPAMI.

Presentation Format

Accepted papers will be presented as part of the Encore Track, where the ‘encore’ talks will be presented in content-aligned sessions throughout the conference.

Review Process

Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis shortly after they are received. Acceptance decisions will consider both the quality and relevance of the work. To support a rich and varied conference program, we particularly welcome submissions that demonstrate strong scientific merit and broaden the diversity of topics represented.

Submission Requirements

Authors must provide the following materials through the official Google Form:

  • A PDF copy of the published paper.
  • The official URL for the published version.
  • For papers that have been accepted but not yet published, PDF evidence of acceptance, such as an acceptance email.

All required materials should be submitted via the Google Form.

Important Dates

Kindly note that all deadlines would be at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) unless otherwise specified.

Conference Track Dates

Date Event
26 June 2026 05 July 2026 Submission deadline
10 August 2026 Reviews released to authors
15 August 2026 Author rebuttal deadline
15 September 2026 Acceptance notification
29 September 2026 Camera-ready submission deadline

Journal Track Dates

Date Event
15 May 2026 OR website opens for the journal submission
31 May 2026 Springer website opens for the journal submission (The Springer submission portal is now open.)
20 June 2026 Submission deadline
08 August 2026 1st round review results released to authors (accept, minor revision, or reject)
29 August 2026 Revised manuscript submission deadline (for minor revision papers)
13 September 2026 2nd round review results released to authors
22 September 2026 Acceptance notification
13 October 2026 Conditional Camera-Ready Manuscript Submission Deadline (The manuscript will be published only if the authors present at the conference)
25 December 2026 Final Camera-Ready Manuscript Submission Deadline (For manuscripts that were presented at ACML 2026)

Encore Track Dates

Submission deadline: Rolling submissions accepted until 18 October 2026, AoE Time Zone (anywhere on earth)

Notification of acceptance: Within 14 days of submission

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • General machine learning
    • Active learning
    • Bayesian machine learning
    • Clustering
    • Imitation Learning
    • Learning to Rank
    • Meta-Learning
    • Multi-objective learning
    • Multiple instance learning
    • Multi-task learning
    • Neuro-symbolic methods
    • Online learning
    • Optimization
    • Reinforcement learning
    • Relational learning
    • Self-supervised learning
    • Semi-supervised learning
    • Structured output learning
    • Supervised learning
    • Transfer learning
    • Unsupervised learning
    • Weakly-supervised learning
    • Learning with noisy labels
    • Continual / lifelong learning
    • Few-shot and zero-shot learning
    • Out-of-distribution generalization
    • Other machine learning methodologies
  • Deep learning
    • Architectures
    • Deep reinforcement learning
    • Generative models
    • Multi-modality learning
    • Large-language models and other foundation models
    • Deep learning theory
    • Representation learning
    • Other topics in deep learning
  • Generative AI
    • Multimodal generative models
    • Controllable and conditional generation
    • Editing, inpainting, and style transfer
    • Evaluation
    • Creative applications (art, music, media)
  • Theory
    • Bandits
    • Computational learning theory
    • Game theory
    • Optimization
    • Statistical learning theory
    • Other theories
  • Datasets and reproducibility
    • Implementations, libraries
    • ML datasets and benchmarks
    • Synthetic data generation
    • Other topics in reproducible ML research
  • Trustworthy machine learning
    • Accountability, explainability, transparency
    • Adversarial learning
    • Causality
    • Fairness
    • Privacy
    • Robustness
    • AutoML
    • AI safety and alignment
    • Hallucination mitigation and reliability
    • Other topics in trustworthy ML
  • Learning in knowledge-intensive systems
    • Knowledge refinement and theory revision
    • Multi-strategy learning
    • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
    • Knowledge-enhanced foundation models
    • Other systems
  • Applications
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biomedical informatics
    • Climate science
    • Collaborative filtering
    • Computer vision
    • Healthcare
    • Human activity recognition
    • Information retrieval
    • Natural language processing
    • Social good
    • Social networks
    • Web search
    • ML for science discovery
    • Other applications
Asian Conference on Machine Learning
Contact Us
Email: acml_2026@googlegroups.com