NeurIPS Workflow

Use this skill as the router for the NeurIPS depth pack. It helps choose the next skill and stage the work so a manuscript does not arrive at submission with hidden policy or evidence gaps.

NeurIPS is a conference, not a journal: it has no standing editor-in-chief and no article-processing charge. The rotating leadership is the per-edition General Chairs and Program Chairs (2026 General Chairs: Hsuan-Tien Lin and Razvan Pascanu, verified 2026-06-22), and the cost model is registration fees, not APCs — proceedings are open-access on OpenReview. Conference organizers rotate yearly, so re-check the current CFP and committees page rather than carrying a name forward.

Stage map

1. Topic and track fit: use neurips-topic-selection.
2. Paper shaping: use neurips-writing-style, neurips-related-work, and neurips-experiments.
3. Artifact and supplement planning: use neurips-artifact-evaluation, neurips-reproducibility, and neurips-supplementary.
4. Final pre-submission audit: use neurips-submission.
5. Review diagnosis: use neurips-review-process.
6. Rebuttal and discussion: use neurips-author-response.
7. Acceptance and public release: use neurips-camera-ready.

Operating principles

• Start official-source checks early; NeurIPS annual policies change.
• Keep track choice explicit. A main-track method paper, E&D paper, position paper, and MLRC paper are not interchangeable.
• Write the checklist in parallel with the paper rather than at the end.
• Maintain one evidence table mapping every central claim to proof, experiment, data, artifact, and limitation.
• Keep an anonymous review artifact and a de-anonymized public release artifact as separate states.

Deadline ladder to schedule backward from

NeurIPS spreads its gates across the year, so plan backward from the abstract deadline, not the full-paper deadline. The exact dates move every cycle; reopen the current CFP and Main Track Handbook for the live calendar.

Track-fork early warning

Decide the track before drafting, because the Datasets & Benchmarks track, Position Papers track, and MLRC/TMLR reproducibility route each have a distinct call, checklist emphasis, and review rubric. A dataset paper forced into the main track, or a reproduction study that belongs in MLRC, wastes a full cycle. If neurips-topic-selection flags a fork, resolve it before any other stage.

Worked vignette: where this router intervenes

A team has strong benchmark wins for a new retrieval method but no mechanism analysis and a thin limitations paragraph. The router routes them to neurips-experiments (add ablations and error analysis) and neurips-writing-style (calibrate the claim and the limitations) before neurips-submission, rather than letting a leaderboard-only paper reach OpenReview where reviewers predictably ask for the missing mechanism.

Output format

[Current stage] topic / drafting / pre-submission / review / rebuttal / camera-ready / reroute
[Next skill] <one NeurIPS skill>
[Official source to open] <CFP/handbook/template/OpenReview/checklist>
[Blocking gap] <policy/evidence/artifact/writing>
[Next action] <concrete task>