Site menu:

Sydney

OPT2026

We welcome you to participate in the 18th International OPT Workshop on Optimization for Machine Learning, to be held as a part of the NeurIPS 2026 conference. This year we particularly encourage (but not limit) submissions with a focus on "Can Anything Beat Adam? Frontier Optimizers".

We are looking forward to an exciting OPT!

The Workshop

Optimization lies at the heart of many machine learning algorithms and continues to attract great interest across our community. This close connection between optimization and machine learning is the key motivation behind the OPT series of workshops. Now in its 18th edition, OPT aims to foster the discussion, discovery, and dissemination of state-of-the-art research in optimization relevant to machine learning.

The focus of OPT 2026 is "Can Anything Beat Adam? Frontier Optimizers." Over the past decade, Adam and its variants have become the dominant methods for training machine learning models. Recently, however, new optimization algorithms, including non-diagonal and second-order methods such as Muon, K-FAC, and Shampoo, have shown promising empirical gains while remaining practical at scale. Their emergence raises fundamental questions about how data properties, stochasticity, batch size, model scale, and architecture should inform optimizer design. Under what conditions can these methods meaningfully outperform Adam? How can their practical gains be explained theoretically? And what are the limits of increasingly sophisticated optimizers? OPT 2026 will bring together researchers from theory and practice to advance our understanding and design of the next generation of optimization algorithms for machine learning.

We are looking forward to seeing you at OPT 2026 in Sydney!

The OPT2026 Organizers (preferred contact email: optmlworkshop@googlegroups.com)

Registration

For registration and pricing see NeurIPS.cc.

Important Dates