submitting | ICLR Blogposts 2026

A more open process

As with the previous edition of the Blog Post track, we forgo the requirement for total anonymity. The blog posts must be anonymized for the review process, but users will submit their anonymized blog posts via a pull request to the blog track’s repository (in addition to a submission on OpenReview). The pull request will trigger an automated pipeline that will build and deploy your post onto a website.

Reviewers will be able to access the posts directly through a public URL (generated by the Github action), and will submit their reviews on OpenReview. Reviewers should refrain from looking at the git history for the post, which may reveal information about the authors.

This still largely follows the Double-Blind reviewing principle; it is no less double-blind than when reviewers are asked to score papers that have previously been released to arXiv, an overwhelmingly common practice in the ML community. This approach was chosen to lower the burden on both the organizers and the authors; in 2022, many submissions had to be reworked once deployed due to a variety of reasons. By allowing the authors to render their websites to Github Pages prior to the review process, we hope to avoid this issue entirely.

However, we understand the desire for total anonymity. Authors that wish to have a fully double-blind process might consider creating new GitHub accounts without identifying information which they will only be use for this track. For an example of a submission in the past which used an anonymous account in this manner, you can check out the World Models blog post (Ha and Schmidhuber, 2018) and the accompanying repository.

Template

The workflow you will use to participate in this track should be relatively familiar to you if have used Github Pages. Specifically, our website uses the Al-Folio template. This template uses Github Pages as part of its process, but it also utilizes a separate build step using Github Actions and intermediary Docker Images.

We recommend paying close attention to the steps presented in this guide. Small mistakes here can have very hard-to-debug consequences.

A more open process
Template
Contents
Quickstart
Download the Blog Repository
Creating a Blog Post
Local serving
Submitting your Blog Post
Reviewing Process
Camera-ready

Quickstart

This section provides a summary of the workflow for creating and submitting a blog post. For more details about any of these steps, please refer to the appropriate section.

Fork or download our repository.
Create your blog post content as detailed in the Creating a Blog Post section. In summary, to create your post, you will:
- Create a Markdown or HTML file in the _posts/ directory with the format _posts/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].md. If you choose to write the post in HTML, then the extension of this last file should be .html instead of .md. NOTE: HTML posts are not officially supported, use at your own risk!
- Add any static image to assets/img/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME]/.
- Add any interactive HTML figures to assets/html/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME]/.
- Put your citations into a bibtex file in assets/bibliography/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].bib.
DO NOT touch anything else in the repository. We will utilize an automated deployment action which will filter out all submissions that modifiy more than the list of files that we just described above. Read the relevant section for more details. Make sure to omit any identifying information for the review process.
To render your website locally, we highly recommend the use of VSCode devcontainers. Make sure to have Docker installed for this to work. Once the devcontainer is entered, a webserver on localhost:8080 should be automatically started and you can preview your blog post on localhost:8080/2026/blog/2026/[SUBMISSION-NAME]. More information about the local setup can be found in the Local Serving section.
To submit your website, create a pull request to the main repository. Make sure that this PR’s title is _posts/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME]. This will trigger a GitHub Action that will build your blogpost and write the host’s URL in a comment to your PR.
If accepted, we will merge the accepted posts to our main repository. See the camera ready section for more details on merging in an accepted blog post.

Should you edit ANY files other your new post inside the _posts directory, and your new folder inside the assets directory, your pull requests will automatically be rejected.

You can view an example of a successful PR here. You can view an example of a PR with erroneous files here.

Download the Blog Repository

Download or fork our repository. You will be submitting a pull request this repository.

Creating a Blog Post

To create a blog post in Markdown format, you can modify the example Markdown post _posts/2026-04-27-distill-example.md and rename it to _posts/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].md, where [SUBMISSION NAME] is the name of your submission. You can see the result of the sample post .

While most users will want to create a post in the Markdown format, it is also possible to create a post in HTML format. For this, modify instead the example _posts/2026-04-27-distill-example2.html and rename it to _posts/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].html. (NOTE: HTML is not officially supported, use at your own risk).

You must modify the file’s header (or ‘front-matter’) as needed.

---
layout: distill
title: [Your Blog Title]
description: [Your blog post's abstract - no math/latex or hyperlinks!]
date: 2026-04-27
future: true
htmlwidgets: true

# anonymize when submitting
authors:
  - name: Anonymous

# do not fill this in until your post is accepted and you're publishing your camera-ready post!
# authors:
#   - name: Albert Einstein
#     url: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein"
#     affiliations:
#       name: IAS, Princeton
#   - name: Boris Podolsky
#     url: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Podolsky"
#     affiliations:
#       name: IAS, Princeton
#   - name: Nathan Rosen
#     url: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Rosen"
#     affiliations:
#       name: IAS, Princeton

# must be the exact same name as your blogpost
bibliography: 2026-04-27-distill-example.bib

# Add a table of contents to your post.
#   - make sure that TOC names match the actual section names
#     for hyperlinks within the post to work correctly.
toc:
  - name: [Section 1]
  - name: [Section 2]
    # you can additionally add subentries like so
    subsections:
      - name: [Subsection 2.1]
  - name: [Section 3]
---

# ... your blog post's content ...

You must change the title, discription, toc, and eventually the authors fields (ensure that the submission is anonymous for the review process).

Read our sample blog post carefully to see how you can add image assets, and how to write using \(\LaTeX\)! Read about rendering your post locally below.

Important: make sure your post is completely anonymized before you export and submit it!

Before going any further, it will be useful to highlight exactly what folders and files you are going to add or modify. Even if you use one of our simpler quickstart methods, this will always be what’s happening behind the scenes.

If you clone our repo or download a release, you will find a directory structure that looks like the following (excluding all files and directories that are not relevant to your submission):

your_blogpost_repo/
│
├── _posts
│   ├── 2026-04-27-[YOUR SUBMISSION].md         # <--- Create this markdown file; this is your blogpost
│   └── ...
├── assets
│   ├── bibliography
│   │   ├── 2026-04-27-[YOUR SUBMISSION].bib    # <--- Create this bibtex file
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── html
│   │   ├── 2026-04-27-[YOUR SUBMISSION]        # <--- Create this directory and add interactive html figures
│   │   │   └──[YOUR HTML FIGURES].html
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── img
│   │   ├── 2026-04-27-[YOUR SUBMISSION]        # <--- Create this directory and add static images here
│   │   │   └──[YOUR IMAGES].png
│   │   └── ...
│   └── ...
└── ...

In summary, to create your post, you will:

Create a Markdown (or HTML) file in the _posts/ directory with the format _posts/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].md (_posts/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].html in the case of an HTML file).
Add any static image assets will be added to assets/img/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME]/.
Add any interactive HTML figures will be added to assets/html/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME]/.
Put your citations into a bibtex file in assets/bibliography/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].bib.

DO NOT touch anything else in the blog post! If you do, our automated pipeline will reject your PR and you will have to undo those changes in order for it to be accepted!

Note that 2026-04-27-[YOUR SUBMISSION] serves as a tag to your submission, so it should be the same for all three items. For example, if you’re writing a blog post called “Deep Learning”, you’d likely want to make your tag 2026-04-27-deep-learning, and the directory structure would look like this:

your_blogpost_repo/
│
├── _posts
│   ├── 2026-04-27-deep-learning.md         # <--- Create this markdown file; this is your blogpost
│   └── ...
├── assets
│   ├── bibliography
│   │   ├── 2026-04-27-deep-learning.bib    # <--- Create this bibtex file
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── html
│   │   ├── 2026-04-27-deep-learning        # <--- Create this directory and add interactive html figures
│   │   │   └──[YOUR HTML FIGURES].html
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── img
│   │   ├── 2026-04-27-deep-learning        # <--- Create this directory and add static images here
│   │   │   └──[YOUR IMAGES].png
│   │   └── ...
│   └── ...
└── ...

Local serving

So far we’ve talked about how to get the relevant repository and create a blog post conforming to our requirements. Everything you have done so far has been in Markdown, but this is not the same format as web content (typically HTML, etc.). You’ll now need to build your static web site (which is done using Jekyll), and then serve it on some local webserver in order to view it properly. We will now discuss how you can serve your blog site locally, so you can visualize your work before you open a pull request on the staging website so you can submit it to the ICLR venue.

Devcontainer

The easiest way and the only method we officially support is via VSCode devcontainer. A devcontainer is a docker container meant for local development.

Prequisites

Make sure to have the following tools installed:

Entering the devcontainer

Once the extension is installed, VSCode should automatically prompt you to open the folder within the devcontainer once you open the repository within vscode. If this does not happen automatically, you can use the command palette (Ctrl + P / Cmd + P) and enter >Dev Containers: Reopen in Container.

Previewing your Blog Post

The devcontainer direct starts serving the website on localhost:8080/2026/ and you may find your blog post under localhost:8080/2026/blog/2026/[SUBMISSION-NAME]. Crucially, if the files contain errors the build process may fail and no server may be started. In that case, you may restart the server manually using bundle exec jekyll serve --future. Make sure to use this command from within the devcontainer.

Submitting your Blog Post

To submit your blog post:

Anonymize your blog post. Strip all identifying information from your post, including the author’s list (replace with Anonymous).
Double check that your post matches the formatting requirements, including (but not limited to):
- Only modify files in the following locations (failure to do so will result in your PR automatically being closed!):
  - a Markdown (or HTML) file in _posts/ with the format _posts/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].md (or .html)
  - static image assets added to assets/img/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME]/
  - interactive HTML figures added to assets/html/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME]/
  - citations in a bibtex file in assets/bibliography/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].bib
- Have a short 2-3 sentence abstract in the description field of your front-matter (example)
  - Please make sure to not include special characters like " in your description since it may cause the bibliography to not render correctly.
- Have a table of contents, formatted using the toc field of your front-matter (example)
- Your bibliography uses a .bibtex file as per the sample post
Open a pull request against the main branch of the 2026 repo. Fill in the checklist provided in the PR template. The title of your pull request should be exactly the name of your markdown/html file.
- i.e. _posts/2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME].md would require a PR name 2026-04-27-[SUBMISSION NAME]
Your post will automatically run two pipelines: one to verify that you have not modified any other file in the repo, and another that will push it to a public URL of the format https://iclr-blogposts.github.io/2026/blog/2026/[SUBMISSION NAME]/.
- Verify that everything looks correct in the given URL.
- If the pipelines failed, check if it was because of improper formatting (i.e. you modified restricted files). If this is the case, fix the issues. If the issue persist, please ping one of the repo admins.
Submit the name of your blog post and its URL to our OpenReview through this link.

Note: If you wish to make updates to your submission, you should update the content in the PR that you already opened.

Reviewing Process

Reviewers will be required to only view the live content of the reviewing website - the website to which the Pull Requests push to. We ask that they act in good faith, and refrain from digging into the repository’s logs and closed Pull Requests to find any identifying information on the authors.

Camera-ready

Instructions for the camera-ready will be provided closer to the submission deadline.