NeurIPS 2026 Creative AI Track opens under 'Agency' theme

The NeurIPS Creative AI Track is back for a fourth year, and the 2026 theme is Agency. That is a broad prompt on purpose. The call from NeurIPS frames agency as something that can belong to an artist, a collaborator, a model, an audience, a platform, a community, or a larger social and technical system, and asks how it gets asserted, delegated, shared, resisted, constrained, or redistributed through creative practice with AI.

Practically, the track invites research papers and artworks. Papers run 2-6 pages without references. Artwork submissions want a description of up to 3 pages in PDF plus a short biography of all authors with reference to relevant prior works, and cover the full range of creative disciplines the call names, visual art, music, performing art, film, design, architecture, installations and more, in the format of a video recording.

The dates worth writing down: the submission portal opens June 30, the deadline is August 3 anywhere on earth, decisions come back September 18, and the final camera-ready is due October 23. Presentations take place only at the main conference site in Sydney, Australia, and if a work is accepted at least one author has to register for the conference and attend in person.

The honest caveat is what the retrieved page does not say. It doesn't name the track chairs (general inquiries go to creative-ai-chairs@neurips.cc), it doesn't publish an acceptance target or a historical hit rate, and it doesn't spell out how installations get physical exhibition space at the Sydney venue. The in-person-only requirement is also a real filter for artists who can't travel and don't have a co-author who can.

For people working at the intersection of ML and creative practice, a peer-reviewed slot at NeurIPS is a rare venue where the technical paper and the artwork get read side by side. Between now and August 3, the interesting question for anyone drafting a submission is which sense of agency the reviewers actually reward: the artist's, the model's, or the system's.