ICML reference format

What ICML expects

• Reference style: APA reference format, “regardless of your formatter or word processor”, with authors' last names and year in the text.
• BibTeX style: icml2026.bst with natbib, both named in the example paper.
• Style file: \usepackage{icml2026} for submission, \usepackage[accepted]{icml2026} for the camera-ready.
• Length: Main body up to 8 pages, then any number of pages for references and appendices. The camera-ready body may be 9 pages.
• Review: Double-blind. Refer to your prior work in the third person, and leave out acknowledgements, grant numbers and links to public repositories.

Setting up the bibliography

From the ICML 2026 example paper, at the end of the document:

\bibliography{example_paper}
\bibliographystyle{icml2026}

Replace example_paper with the name of your .bib file. The style file loads natbib, so \cite gives (Author, Year) and \yrcite gives the year alone.

Three references in icml2026.bst

1. Bengio, Y., Louradour, J., Collobert, R., and Weston, J. Curriculum learning. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 41–48. ACM, 2009. doi: 10.1145/1553374.1553380. https://doi.org/10.1145/1553374.1553380
2. Collobert, R. and Weston, J. A unified architecture for natural language processing: deep neural networks with multitask learning. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 160–167. ACM, 2008. doi: 10.1145/1390156.1390177. https://doi.org/10.1145/1390156.1390177
3. Vincent, P., Larochelle, H., Bengio, Y., and Manzagol, P.-A. Extracting and composing robust features with denoising autoencoders. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 1096–1103. ACM, 2008. doi: 10.1145/1390156.1390294. https://doi.org/10.1145/1390156.1390294

Three ICML papers, produced by running icml2026.bst over a .bib file built from the Crossref record for each DOI. The link after each entry is added here for checking. Titles, authors, volumes and pages were checked against Crossref on 2026-10-01.

LaTeX template

ICML publishes its own kit each year. The 2026 kit is icml2026.zip, which contains icml2026.sty, icml2026.bst and example_paper.tex. ICML had not published a 2027 kit when this page was checked.

Common mistakes

• Unprotected capitals. The author instructions give the fix: put braces around a proper name in the .bib entry, such as {Markov}, so it keeps its capital.
• Reusing last year's kit. The style and .bst file names carry the year, and the call says papers that do not use the correct style files are rejected without review.
• Outdated entries. The instructions ask authors to keep the bibliography current, including names and venues, and ICML 2026 ran an automated reference check on accepted papers.
• Using “et al.” for two authors. The example paper reserves it for citations with three or more authors.

Check your .bib file

• BibTeX Validator (free) checks a .bib file for syntax errors and missing required fields.
• Citation Generator (free) builds IEEE, APA, MLA and Chicago citations from entry fields, in your browser.
• Reference Converter (free) converts between BibTeX, RIS and EndNote. The same converter is below.
• Paper Review with the Journal Pack checks a manuscript against the submission rules of 25 venues, ICML among them.