NeurIPS Related Work

Use this skill when novelty or positioning is the main risk. NeurIPS reviewers will often know recent papers from neighboring AI venues and preprint streams; stale comparisons are a serious weakness.

What to cover

• Direct technical ancestors: methods with the same objective, architecture, proof technique, benchmark, dataset, or deployment problem.
• Neighboring venues: ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, AISTATS, UAI, COLT, MLSys, KDD, CVPR, ACL, EMNLP, SIGIR, ICRA, CHI, and other subfield venues as relevant.
• Contemporaneous work: papers that appeared during the current review window. The 2026 handbook treats work appearing online after March 1, 2026 as contemporaneous for review purposes, but authors still need to cite and discuss it when feasible.
• Preprints: public preprints are not automatically disqualifying, but they must not be used to advertise a submission aggressively under review.

Delta-writing template