ICML 2026 outstanding paper drama: concurrent diffusion sampling result, only one got the award
peter_richtarik · x · 2026-09-09
Peter Richtarik shares a "concurrent efforts" story behind the ICML 2026 outstanding paper awards: his team uploaded an arXiv paper on January 15 achieving polylog(1/ε) high-accuracy complexity for diffusion models.
Chen et al., colleagues who independently and concurrently established a similar result ("High-accuracy sampling for diffusion models and log-concave distributions"), reached out shortly after — and their paper received an Outstanding Paper Award, while Richtarik's did not. He remarks with irony that this less dramatic race still ended up "award winning."
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