AI conference ICLR is drowning in abstracts, with roughly 50,000 submissions before the deadline
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ICLR 2027 has already received around 50,000 abstracts, even though the submission deadline is still about a week away. For comparison, ICLR 2026 had roughly 19,500 valid submissions. Some of the abstracts may come from authors hedging their bets while waiting on NeurIPS results, since they plan to withdraw if accepted there, so the final ICLR count will likely be lower. Even so, it is expected to remain far above last year's total. The article attributes the surge to broader AI hype, corporate research spending, and pay sometimes being tied to publication records. However, the biggest factor is probably that AI makes it much faster to produce papers. A NeurIPS analysis found that authors used AI heavily to write their submissions. ICLR 2026 already struggled with low-quality AI-generated submissions and reviews that eroded trust in peer review, and with more papers arriving this year, those complaints are expected to get louder.
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