Subbarao Kambhampati
Professor, School of Computing & AI, Arizona State University
WebsiteTentative talk title
About the workshop
NEmo focuses on embodied neuro-symbolic AI: the integration of learned perception, reinforcement learning, large language models, planning, and structured symbolic knowledge in agents that act in physical or richly simulated environments.
Robotic and interactive agents must perceive changing worlds, reason over goals and constraints, execute long action sequences, and recover when assumptions fail. In this setting, hallucinated preconditions, brittle domain models, and ungrounded affordance knowledge become safety and reliability problems.
The workshop is designed for researchers in machine learning, knowledge representation, planning, robotics, human-robot interaction, semantic web, and trustworthy AI who are working on adjacent parts of the same problem.
Venue
NeurIPS 2026
Date
December 12, 2026
Location
Sydney, Australia
Core Challenges
The programme is organised around three technical challenges.
Long-Horizon Planning
Interfaces for learning, revising, and verifying symbolic action models while learned components handle perception and low-level control.
LLMs and Provenance
Reliable use of LLMs as domain-model elicitors, policy priors, symbolic constraint generators, and natural-language interfaces.
Shared Semantics
Reusable knowledge layers connecting environments, object affordances, robot capabilities, plans, and execution traces.
Topics
- Neuro-symbolic AI for embodied agents
- LLMs for planning in atypical domains
- Knowledge representation for planning
- Ontological reasoning for embodied applications
- Tacit planning knowledge in frontier models
- Symbolic model elicitation for embodied reasoning
- Perception and sensor grounding
- Rule-based validation of symbolic domains
- Neuro-symbolic reinforcement learning
- Long-horizon planning and plan repair
- Self-evolving agents
- Ethical aspects of embodied AI systems
Workshop Format
A one-day, in-person workshop of roughly 8.5 hours.
Sessions
The format combines keynotes, paper presentations, posters, demos, and structured breakout discussions. Organizers will introduce and moderate; keynotes will come from external speakers.
The goal is to leave the day with a short public report covering open problems, shared assumptions, and candidate benchmarks or semantic layers.
Demos are expected to be laptop-, video-, or browser-based unless additional equipment is secured.
Session I: Opening, Keynote I, and Papers
Opening, goals, and audience poll
Keynote I
Paper presentations I
Session II: Posters, Demos, Keynote II, and Papers
Coffee, posters, and demos I
Keynote II
Paper presentations II
Session III: Lunch, Keynote III, Papers, and Posters
Lunch
Keynote III
Paper presentation III
Coffee, posters, and demos II
Session IV: Papers, Breakouts, and Closing
Paper presentations IV
Structured breakout discussions
Closing and best contribution award
Invited Speakers
Meet the invited speakers joining NEmo 2026.
Call for Papers
Contributed work is non-archival and managed through OpenReview.
Long Papers
- Up to 8 pages, excluding references and appendices
- Original work on embodied neuro-symbolic AI
- Three reviews per submission
Short Papers
- Up to 4 pages, excluding references and appendices
- Position papers, early results, benchmarks, demos
- Eligible for lightning talks and posters
Submission and Review
- Submit papers through OpenReview.
- Use the official NeurIPS 2026 LaTeX template. For workshop submissions, use the double-blind workshop option,
dblblindworkshop. - Submissions will be reviewed double-blind by the programme committee. Authors should anonymize manuscripts and supplementary material.
- NEmo is a non-proceedings workshop. Accepted papers will be published on the workshop website.
- Dual-submission policy: The workshop will adopt a non-archival policy, welcoming ongoing and unpublished work, as well as papers under review or recently accepted at other venues. We discourage the submission of work previously published at major venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).
Important Dates
Workshop timeline.
- Submission deadline:
September 10, 2026September 14, 2026 (AoE) - Notifications sent: September 29, 2026
- Camera-ready materials: October 2026
- Workshop date: December 12, 2026 (Sydney)
Organizing Committee
The team spans robotics, planning, reinforcement learning, neuro-symbolic AI, semantic web, and knowledge graphs.
Contact
Venue
NeurIPS 2026, Sydney, AustraliaContact Person
Emanuele Musumeci