Core Insights - The 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) will be held in Vancouver, Canada, from July 13 to 19, 2025, with a significant increase in submissions this year [1] - A total of 12,107 papers were submitted, marking a 28% increase from the previous year, with an acceptance rate of 26.9% as 3,260 papers were accepted [1] - The article discusses both high-quality accepted papers and controversial rejected papers, providing a platform for discussion among researchers [1] Accepted High-Quality Papers - Spotlight papers are the highest recommended by ICML, including notable titles such as "Neural Discovery in Mathematics" and "Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion for System 2 Planning" [3][5] - The paper "MARS: Unleashing the Power of Variance Reduction for Training Large Models" achieved an average score of 4.25, showcasing a variance reduction adaptive optimizer framework with a convergence rate of (T⁻²/³), outperforming AdamW's (T⁻¹/²) [7][8] - "EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents" received an average score of 4.5 and includes 1,128 test tasks across various environments [10] Controversial Rejected Papers - Some rejected papers, despite high evaluations, have raised concerns among researchers regarding the review process [12][15] - Instances of low-quality reviews and discrepancies in scoring have been reported, with some researchers receiving incomplete and irrelevant feedback [18][20] - The article highlights the contradictions in the review process, where some papers with lower scores were accepted while higher-scoring papers were rejected [12][20]