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.

The ByteDance logo is displayed on a smartphone screen. Photo: Shutterstock

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.

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