China deepens footprint at AI conference despite NeurIPS dispute, US tensions

Chinese technology companies and researchers turned out in force at a leading global artificial intelligence conference, despite mounting questions over whether they might avoid the event as a consequence of tense relations between Beijing and Washington. Papers with contributors from mainland China and Hong Kong accounted for over 51 per cent of accepted submissions, compared with just under 32 per cent from the United States, according to statistics compiled from the listed affiliations for 5,355 accepted papers at this year’s International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). ICLR, alongside the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and the International Conference on Machine Learning, is considered one of the top conferences for AI and computational neuroscience. This year’s event, held in Rio de Janeiro from April 23 to 27, received about 19,000 submissions with an acceptance rate of 28 per cent. The strong Chinese presence at ICLR comes after several major professional bodies in China urged domestic researchers to boycott NeurIPS. The call came after NeurIPS organisers published a new policy that appeared to bar US-sanctioned entities from taking part. While the NeurIPS Foundation later clarified that its policy did not include major Chinese AI companies such as Huawei Technologies, the dispute raised questions over whether Chinese institutions would reduce their participation in international AI conferences. But despite the heightened geopolitical friction, the ICLR figures suggest global AI research remains an interconnected field. While US tech giant Microsoft still led the corporate realm in representation with 143 accepted papers, Chinese firms were among the event’s most prolific participants. Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post, submitted 135 papers, followed by Huawei Technologies with 111, ByteDance with 107 and Tencent Holdings with 94. Other US companies made significant contributions, with Meta Platforms submitting 103 papers, Nvidia and Amazon each providing 73 papers and Google supplying 68. Among academic institutions, Tsinghua University led with 332 accepted papers, followed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University with 240 and Zhejiang University with 232. Stanford University topped the US academic rankings with 177 accepted papers, while Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology each had 167, followed by Harvard University with 99. “Top conferences remain important for visibility and collaboration despite the tensions,” said a Chinese researcher whose paper was accepted at this year’s conference. The researcher declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject. China has rapidly narrowed its ICLR contributions gap with the US. According to conference data, Chinese firms and institutions surpassed their counterparts from the US last year.