Every ICML 2026 award paper, sorted for you

Still haven’t caught up on ICML 2026? 😱

We condensed the core idea of all ten award papers into one slide each. 👍

Outstanding Paper Award

1. The Flexibility Trap: Rethinking the Value of Arbitrary Order in Diffusion Language Models Tsinghua University, Alibaba Group

2. High-Accuracy Sampling for Diffusion Models and Log-Concave Distributions MIT, Yale University

Outstanding Position Paper Award

3. Position: The Alignment Community is Unintentionally Building a Censor’s Toolkit LMU Munich, Munich Center for Machine Learning, Independent Researcher

Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention

4. The Obfuscation Atlas: Mapping Where Honesty Emerges in RLVR with Deception Probes FAR.AI

5. Motion Attribution for Video Generation NVIDIA, Princeton University, MIT, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, Vector Institute

6. How much can language models memorize? FAIR at Meta, Google DeepMind, Cornell University, NVIDIA

7. A Random Matrix Perspective on the Consistency of Diffusion Models Harvard University, Kempner Institute

8. To Grok Grokking: Provable Grokking in Ridge Regression Purdue University, Weizmann Institute of Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Outstanding Position Paper Honorable Mention

9. Position: AI/ML Deepfake Research is Misaligned with AI Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (AIG-NCII) University of Michigan School of Information

Test of Time Award

10. Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning Google DeepMind, Mila, Université de Montréal