Eight universities share the lead with two top-paper wins since 2024
Across the verified Best Paper and Outstanding Paper winners at AAAI, IJCAI, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ACL and CVPR, no university appears on more than two distinct winning papers. The count credits every university represented in a paper’s author affiliations, so one paper may count for several universities.
2
leading wins per university
8
co-leading universities
16
university–paper links
7
conference series scanned
Top-paper wins credited by author affiliation
Distinct papers · 2024–24 Aug 2026
What drives the tie
01
ICML supplies half of the links. Eight of the 16 university–paper credits come from ICML winners in 2024 or 2025, including joint university–industry papers.
02
Shared papers create shared leaders. NeurIPS 2025’s Artificial Hivemind counts for both Carnegie Mellon and Stanford; ICML 2024’s Information Complexity paper counts for both Tel Aviv and Toronto.
03
Oxford’s two wins are both vision papers. VGGT won at CVPR 2025 and D4RT at CVPR 2026; the latter’s short and full titles were deduplicated as one paper.
The winning papers
| University | Paper | Venue | Award | Primary author affiliations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carnegie Mellon | Roll the Dice & Look Before You Leap | ICML 2025 | Outstanding Paper | Google Research; Carnegie Mellon University |
| Carnegie Mellon | Artificial Hivemind | NeurIPS 2025 | Best Paper | University of Washington; Carnegie Mellon; Ai2; Lila Sciences; Stanford |
| Harvard | The Value of Prediction in Identifying the Worst-Off | ICML 2025 | Outstanding Paper | LMU Munich; Munich Center for Machine Learning; Harvard University |
| Harvard | Train for the Worst, Plan for the Best | ICML 2025 | Outstanding Paper | University of Texas at Austin; Harvard University |
| National Univ. of Singapore | Stochastic Taylor Derivative Estimator | NeurIPS 2024 | Best Paper | NUS Computing; Sea AI Lab |
| National Univ. of Singapore | AlphaEdit | ICLR 2025 | Outstanding Paper | University of Science and Technology of China; National University of Singapore |
| Princeton | Safety Alignment Should Be Made More Than Just a Few Tokens Deep | ICLR 2025 | Outstanding Paper | Princeton University; Google DeepMind |
| Princeton | Conformal Prediction as Bayesian Quadrature | ICML 2025 | Outstanding Paper | Princeton University |
| Stanford | CollabLLM | ICML 2025 | Outstanding Paper | Stanford University; Microsoft; Georgia Tech |
| Stanford | Artificial Hivemind | NeurIPS 2025 | Best Paper | University of Washington; Carnegie Mellon; Ai2; Lila Sciences; Stanford |
| Tel Aviv University | Never Train from Scratch | ICLR 2024 | Outstanding Paper | Tel Aviv University; IBM Research |
| Tel Aviv University | Information Complexity of Stochastic Convex Optimization | ICML 2024 | Best Paper | Ben-Gurion; Vector Institute; Google DeepMind; Northeastern; Tel Aviv; Toronto |
| University of Oxford | VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer | CVPR 2025 | Best Paper | University of Oxford; Meta AI |
| University of Oxford | Efficiently Reconstructing Dynamic Scenes One D4RT at a Time | CVPR 2026 | Best Paper | Google DeepMind; University College London; University of Oxford |
| University of Toronto | Information Complexity of Stochastic Convex Optimization | ICML 2024 | Best Paper | Ben-Gurion; Vector Institute; Google DeepMind; Northeastern; Tel Aviv; Toronto |
| University of Toronto | Every Bit Helps: Achieving the Optimal Distortion with a Few Queries | AAAI 2025 | Outstanding Paper | University of Toronto |
Method: web search and paper-page extraction run 24 Aug 2026 across seven conference series. Counts use distinct winning papers and credit each university listed among the authors’ primary affiliations; companies and standalone institutes are not ranked. Honorable mentions, student, demo, dataset, benchmark and test-of-time awards were excluded. 2026 is year-to-date.