Socials at ICML 2026
One of the best parts of any conference is meeting and engaging with other people, particularly those interested in the same things as you. Socials serve as a less hectic environment to do just that. There is no waitlist, signup, or separate admission: if you’re registered for ICML, you’re welcome to that day’s socials.
Our Social Chairs, Kevin Leyton-Brown and Chulhee Yun, have curated an excellent selection of 12 Socials, on a range of topics from open-source research to chess to networking at conferences. There will be four socials each day on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. To attend Monday Socials, you must be registered for Tutorials, and to attend Wednesday and Thursday Socials, you must be registered for the main conference. All socials will be from 7 PM to 9 PM. Grab an early dinner with your friends and bring them with you to a Social!
Monday
AI Co-scientists in the Research Loop: Share, Compare, Critique (Mon, ASEM BALLROOM 201-203)
AI co-scientists are beginning to reshape how researchers generate ideas, run experiments, write, review, and evaluate scientific work. This social invites attendees to share practices, compare workflows, and discuss emerging norms around disclosure, authorship, reproducibility, and the responsible use of AI agents in research.
The ICML Chess Club: Blitz, Bullet, and Over-the-Board Networking (Mon, ROOM 300)
Take a break from the main conference and connect with fellow ICML attendees over friendly over-the-board chess. Players of all skill levels are welcome for blitz, bullet, casual games, and relaxed networking.
India @ ICML: Numbers, Stories & What’s Next (Mon, ROOM E1 – E4 (3rd Floor))
This social brings together researchers based in India, the Indian diaspora, and anyone interested in India’s growing role in global AI research. The session will combine data-backed insights, community stories, and open discussion on how to strengthen the ecosystem going forward.
AI for Games (Mon, ROOM E5 – E6 (3rd Floor))
Games have long been a proving ground for AI, and today they are becoming a frontier for agents, world models, generative tools, and large-scale interactive systems. This social brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss where AI for games is heading and what open challenges remain.
Wednesday
How to Network at an AI Conference (Wed, ASEM BALLROOM 201-203)
Networking at a large conference can be intimidating, especially for early-career researchers and newcomers. This social offers a structured, low-pressure environment to practice meaningful academic networking, meet new collaborators, and make ICML feel a little less overwhelming.
Robot Learning Social (Wed, ROOM 300)
Robot learning is rapidly moving from academic labs toward real-world deployment, raising new questions about data, scale, evaluation, and the role of academia. This social gathers the robot learning community to discuss frontiers across reinforcement learning, computer vision, world models, foundation models, and industry-scale robotics.
Bridging Research and Open-Source: A Social for the ML Open-Source Community (Wed, ROOM E1 – E4 (3rd Floor))
Open-source software powers modern machine learning, but researchers and OSS maintainers often work in parallel rather than together. This social creates a space for maintainers, contributors, and academic users to meet, exchange challenges, and build stronger bridges between ML research and open-source infrastructure.
Data Foundations of AI Social (Wed, ROOM E5 – E6 (3rd Floor))
Data is at the center of modern AI, from training data science and curation to attribution, provenance, governance, and evaluation. This social brings together attendees working on different aspects of data foundations to identify shared problems, seed collaborations, and connect a growing community.
Thursday
AI Negotiation and Compensation Social (Thu, ASEM BALLROOM 201-203)
AI career opportunities now span startups, frontier labs, big tech, and global research organizations, each with different compensation structures and negotiation norms. This social offers practical, experience-driven discussion on evaluating offers, understanding leverage, and navigating career decisions in a fast-changing AI job market.
Muslims in ML (MusIML) Social @ ICML 2026: Connecting Global AI and the Muslim World (Thu, ROOM 300)
The MusIML Social is an open, respectful, and non-commercial gathering for the Muslim AI/ML community and all ICML attendees interested in deeper engagement with Muslim scholars, students, practitioners, and institutions worldwide. The event focuses on mentorship, academic exchange, early-career development, cross-regional collaboration, and long-term community building.
Collective, Decentralized Training as a Hedge Against AI Power Concentration (Thu, ROOM E1 – E4 (3rd Floor))
As frontier AI training becomes increasingly centralized, decentralized and collective training offer a compelling alternative technical and institutional direction. This social brings together researchers and practitioners working on distributed training, federated learning, systems, and AI governance to discuss what it would take to make decentralized frontier-scale AI viable.
Cooperative AI (Thu, ROOM E5 – E6 (3rd Floor))
As AI agents increasingly interact, negotiate, and make decisions in shared environments, cooperation becomes a central challenge for AI system design. This social gathers researchers interested in multi-agent systems, mechanism design, AI safety, collective decision-making, and the role of AI in helping humans cooperate on high-stakes problems.