I am happy to announce that Gated DeltaNet-2 has been accepted to NeurIPS 2026 ! 🎉 🎊🥂 Our models are the new SOTA for hybrid/linear models ! Paper: Code:

Taylor Swift really needs to be more thoughtful about scheduling around ML conferences. First her Eras Tour finale clashed with #NeurIPS2024#. And now her wedding conflicts with the start of #ICML2026#? No regrets about turning down the wedding invite. See you soon in Seoul! 🇰🇷

New on @berkeley_ai blog. What actually affects the output of LLMs? New work by Butler et al. (NeurIPS 2025) introduces a model-agnostic method of measuring input, data, and component attribution, giving insight on what really steers generation. 🐻📄

Did you know even frontier AI agents still struggle to admit when a research project is going nowhere, so they keep wasting time and tokens? Here’s why. Researchers gave AI agents six days, $3,000 in API credits, GPU compute, web access, subagents, and two research questions taken from unpublished NeurIPS submissions. Both agents ran the experiments and wrote complete papers without a human writing or editing the code. The researchers who had spent months studying the same questions scored the papers 2 out of 6 and 1 out of 6: clear rejections. The agents were capable of doing the work. They managed compute, debugged code, analyzed results, and responded to reviewer feedback. What they could not do was recognize when the underlying approach had failed. When early experiments weakened their original ideas, they kept making small adjustments. They narrowed claims, added caveats, and polished results their own reviewers repeatedly said were not strong enough. Their self-reviews identified many of the same flaws the human experts later raised. The agents could see the problems. They could not judge when those problems meant the project needed to be redesigned or abandoned. That is a different failure from hallucination or poor coding. Today’s agents are generally optimized to complete a requested workflow. They are much less reliable at deciding whether continuing that workflow is still the best use of time, compute, and money. Fixing this will require more than better models. Long-running agents need explicit stop conditions, budget and time checkpoints, confidence tracking, and the ability to escalate, replan, or abandon an approach when the evidence turns against it. Operators also need to see how those decisions were made. A polished final paper only shows that the agent finished. The execution history will show whether it recognized a dead end, responded intelligently to criticism, and used its resources well.

We want to speak directly to the concern many of you have expressed, and we owe you a clear explanation of what happened, why it happened, and where we stand now. We understand this situation caused genuine alarm and we take that seriously. In preparing the NeurIPS 2026 handbook, we included a link to a US government sanctions tool that covers a significantly broader set of restrictions than those NeurIPS is actually required to follow. This error was due to miscommunication between the NeurIPS Foundation and our legal team; there was never an intention to restrict participation beyond our mandatory compliance obligations. The responsibility for that error is ours as an organization, and we deeply apologize for the alarm and impact this miscommunication had on our community. We have updated the link and clarified the text of our policy, which is consistent with that of ACM and IEEE, as well as other international conferences and NeurIPS in the past. As in previous years, NeurIPS welcomes submissions from all compliant institutions and individuals. We want to reiterate that NeurIPS is a community-driven event, created by and for the community, and strives to be inclusive. The NeurIPS 2026 organizing committee was particularly saddened to learn of this institutional miscommunication. The organizing committee has taken on the responsibility of running the conference this year with the goal of fostering open communication, knowledge sharing, and global scientific discourse. We thank the community for bringing this issue to our attention and working with us through this situation.