From November 30 to December 7, 2025, Mila students, researchers, and staff traveled to San Diego and Mexico City for the 39th edition of NeurIPS, the world’s largest AI research conference, to present their work and network with international experts from both academia and industry.
For the first time, NeurIPS experimented with a hybrid model featuring a satellite conference in Mexico City, opening the dialogue to a new audience. Hugo Larochelle, Mila’s Scientific Director, was present to support this initiative.
Spotlight Posters at the Main Conference
Mila held the strongest Canadian representation at NeurIPS¹, with over 80 accepted papers affiliated with the institute. These included one oral presentation and more than a dozen highlighted with the "spotlight" designation, an honor awarded to the top 3% of recognized papers. These include:
Oral Presentation:
- State Entropy Regularization for Robust Reinforcement Learning by Yonatan Ashlag, Uri Koren, Mirco Mutti, Esther Derman, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Shie Mannor
Spotlight Posters:
- A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skilled SAILOR: Robust Imitation via Learning to Search by Arnav Kumar Jain, Vibhakar Mohta, Subin Kim, Atiksh Bhardwaj, Juntao Ren, Yunhai Feng, Sanjiban Choudhury, Gokul Swamy
- Stable Gradients for Stable Learning at Scale in Deep Reinforcement Learning by Roger Creus Castanyer, Johan Obando-Ceron, Lu Li, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Glen Berseth, Aaron Courville, and Pablo Samuel Castro
- Open-Insect: Benchmarking Open-Set Recognition of Novel Species in Biodiversity Monitoring by Yuyan Chen, Nico Lang, B. Christian Schmidt, Aditya Jain, Yves Basset, Sara Beery, Maxim Larrivée, David Rolnick
- Causal Differentiating Concepts: Interpreting LM Behavior via Causal Representation Learning by Navita Goyal, Hal Daumé III, Alexandre Drouin, Dhanya Sridhar
Workshops
Mila researchers also co-organized workshops, providing platforms for discussion on targeted themes.
Several sessions addressed topics regarding inclusion within the community, as well as AI applications in environmental and health sciences, such as:
- Women in Machine Learning
- Queer in AI
- Urban AI
- Foundation Models for the Brain and Body
- Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
The Mila Booth
The Mila booth served as a showcase for the institute, where several students presented their research to their peers (view the daily schedule here). Staff members were present to promote Mila to prospective researchers and students and to network with industry partners.
Aaron Courville and his student, Samuel Lavoie, also highlighted their research during the Exhibitor Spot Talks.
Mila Alumni Evening
Amidst this week of academic excitement, Mila brought together its alumni, partners, and professors for a memorable evening aboard a cruise ship overlooking the San Diego coastline, an opportunity for the Mila community to reconnect and exchange ideas in a relaxed setting.
