"In the evening breeze of Seoul, this battle for talent quietly extended to dining tables and coffee shops. " Author | Zhou Lei, Editor | Cen Feng
From July 6 to 11, ICML 2026 was held at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea. Chinese internet tech giants attending the conference set up their exhibition booths and coffee bars in Seoul, bringing a fierce talent hunt to the venue of the premier academic conference in machine learning.
Judging from the sponsor list, the presence of Chinese companies at this ICML can be described as a systematic layout: JoinQuant at the Diamond level; Alibaba Group at the Platinum level, alongside ByteDance and Xiaomi Corporation; BAAI (Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence), Kuaishou and Minghong Capital at the Gold level; Huawei, Meituan, Jiaqi Capital, Tencent Holdings and Kuande Capital at the Silver level; Baidu at the Bronze level; and Longcheer Technology and Shanghai AI Laboratory at the Gem level.
These booths attracted massive crowds. The venue has evolved into the most efficient spot market for global AI talent, with eager Chinese tech giants standing out as some of the most active players in this exchange.
Beyond the venue, banquets represent another front in the talent war. On the evening of July 8 alone, multiple tech giants including Alibaba Group, ByteDance, and Xiaomi Corporation hosted banquets simultaneously. Paper authors, technical leads, frontline researchers, and HR professionals are the regular attendees at these events. In the evening breeze of Seoul, the AI talent war of Chinese tech giants has quietly extended from exhibition booths to dining tables.
Inside the COEX exhibition halls, the booths set up by these tech giants offer the most direct showcase of this battle. Attendees gathered in front of the booths for discussions and enthusiastic exchanges with the staff. Leiphone also captured live footage of several of these booths on-site.
- JoinQuant JoinQuant is the only Diamond-level sponsor from China at ICML 2026. In the ICML sponsorship hierarchy, the Diamond level sits at the very top, typically corresponding to the highest financial investment and the most prime booth resources. The appearance of a Chinese quantitative private equity firm at this level sends a strong signal in itself: the frontier battlefield of machine learning is shifting from traditional internet tech giants to more vertical industrial applications.
The quantitative track represented by JoinQuant essentially uses models to process high-dimensional financial data, mine non-linear market patterns, and optimize execution strategies. This perfectly aligns with the conference trend of ICML in recent years, expanding from pure algorithmic research to "AI for Science" and "AI for Industry". Quantitative institutions such as Minghong Capital, Kuande Capital, Longcheer Technology, and Jiaqi Capital also attended the conference as Gold, Silver, or Gem-level sponsors. Together with JoinQuant, they have verified that financial quantification has become one of the frontier scenarios for machine learning value validation and talent acquisition.
At the booth, JoinQuant also promoted slogans such as "Flat Teams, Greater Space" and launched the "JoinQuant Night" event, where attendees could engage in in-depth exchanges with JoinQuant investment partners, technical interviewers, and HR professionals on-site.
- Alibaba Group Alibaba Group is one of the Chinese companies with the most accepted papers at this ICML. Teams under the group, including Alibaba Group, Taobao and Tmall Group, Alibaba International, Alibaba ATH, and Amap, had a total of over 170 papers in the field of machine learning accepted.
It is understood that Alibaba Group brought its latest research results and demos to the booth this time. With the theme of "AI for Industry and AI for Science", it showcased its full-chain innovation capabilities from basic research to industrial implementation, covering directions such as Wan high-fidelity audio and video generation, Happy series native applications, omni-modal active perception agents, open-source innovation based on ModelScope, Qoder family product series innovation, RLHF reinforcement learning alignment focusing on medical decision-making and causal robustness, and world models.
On-site activities included Expo Day and multiple Booth Talks, with paper authors also interpreting their research work for attendees in front of the booth.
Alibaba Group will also host the "AliStar Wonder Night" banquet at ICML, where attendees can have in-depth exchanges with multiple business and technical leaders as well as paper authors from Alibaba Group. AliStar HR professionals are also on-site to explain special talent policies and development paths.
- ByteDance At ByteDance's ICML booth, the technical focus remains on the optimization of underlying diffusion algorithms for the SeedEdit/PixArt visual foundation model series, as well as the parallel inference architecture for multimodal video streams. However, as of press time, the total number of ByteDance's papers at this ICML has not yet been released in the form of an official scorecard.
At the "Academic Night for Campus Recruitment in Cutting-edge Technology Fields", ByteDance also arranged for over 10 authors of accepted papers from various global teams to share their technical insights, covering multiple directions such as intelligent advertising sales, long-video understanding and multimodal foundation models, commercialized creation, TikTok business infrastructure and foundational capabilities, international e-commerce foundation models, and content and model safety.
- Xiaomi Corporation Xiaomi Corporation also brought its latest papers and on-site demo demonstrations this time. Luo Fuli, head of Xiaomi's MiMo team, delivered a keynote speech titled "MiMo-V2.5 Series: Efficient Intelligence via Architecture–Training–Inference Co-Design" at the conference. On the second day of the conference, Luo Fuli appeared at the Xiaomi booth, attracting a crowd of attendees.
Like Alibaba Group and ByteDance, Xiaomi Corporation will also host a top-tier talent technical exchange banquet on the evening of July 8, inviting ICML student attendees and young researchers to communicate face-to-face with technical team leaders, core researchers, and paper authors.
- BAAI (Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence) BAAI set up a communication channel for young scientists at its ICML booth, focusing on recruiting talent in research directions such as embodied intelligence, world models, AI for Science, and Flag OS. Positions include Chief Scientist, PI, Researcher, and Engineer, attracting overseas talent to return with its academic reputation and abundant computing power.
- Tencent Holdings Tencent had over 50 papers accepted at this ICML from multiple business and research teams, including Hunyuan, WeChat, Tencent Cloud, YouTu Lab, Tencent Games, Tencent Marketing, and Tencent Video. During the conference, Tencent showcased achievements such as visual foundation models and BOX AI. Its top-tier talent program, Qingyun, also launched a series of academic exchange activities such as the "Qingyun Academic Cafe".
Tencent's attending scholars were also on-site, enthusiastically discussing the latest papers with attendees.
- Meituan The team sent by Meituan this time includes technical experts from the LongCat self-developed foundation model team and the business R&D platform, as well as Meituan HR. ICML has become an extended front for Meituan's high-end campus recruitment, targeting talent related to foundation models and agents, while the Beidou Program focuses on directions such as large model applications, autonomous driving, and drones.
- Huawei Huawei's Noah's Ark Lab still made achievements at ICML 2026, mainly focusing on the extreme multimodal compression (quantization and pruning) of the Pangu large model, as well as meteorological and aerodynamic simulations for scientific computing (AI for Science).
Huawei also sent senior technical experts, R&D teams, and HR to the booth to communicate with attendees, and will set up sessions such as dialogues with top scholars and in-depth exchanges with technical interviewers and HR at the "Huawei Talent Night" on July 9.
In addition to the aforementioned companies, Kuaishou also had technical leads, technical experts, and HR from multiple core businesses stationed at its booth to introduce Kuaishou's AI technology matrix and large model products to attendees. The KuaiStar talent program will also host a "STARRY NIGHT" cruise banquet on a Han River cruise ship.
Notably, although Ant Group did not appear in the main tiers of the aforementioned sponsor list, it booked a within-walking-distance coffee shop near the venue to create an "agenda-free" AGI Coffee Chat, allowing attendees to meet paper authors face-to-face in the coffee shop and exchange ideas with team leaders from Ant Bailing, Afu, Maxiaocai, Ant International, and Big Security. Meanwhile, Ant also joined hands with SGLang to host an exclusive co-branded banquet for the "ANT GROUP × SGLang" Academic Inspiration Night.
It is not hard to see that the talent war at top academic conferences has undergone a clear generational upgrade. In the past, booths at top conferences were more about brand display and resume collection; today, having technical leads personally man the booths, conducting point-to-point exchanges at banquets, and even using paper acceptance as a screening criterion have become the standard practice for Chinese tech giants.
This ICML may well be the most concentrated collective appearance of China's AI power at an international top conference. However, how many researchers the connections established at the booths and banquets will ultimately lead to truly joining the AI teams of tech giants remains to be seen. The true quality of this talent war taking place in Seoul is yet to be determined, and it is worth looking forward to