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.
Target Venue
NeurIPS 2026
Status
Pending
Locations (TBD)
Sydney, Paris, Atlanta
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
Planned as a one-day, in-person workshop of roughly 8.5 hours.
Planned Sessions
The format combines invited talks, contributed talks, posters, demos, and structured discussion. Organizers will introduce and moderate; invited talks 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.
Call for Papers
Contributed work is planned as non-archival and managed through OpenReview.
Long Papers
- Up to 8 pages
- Original work on embodied neuro-symbolic AI
- Three reviews per submission
Short Papers
- Up to 4 pages
- Position papers, early results, benchmarks, demos
- Eligible for lightning talks and posters
The call will discourage already-published work, near-duplicates of NeurIPS main-conference presentations, and invited talks reused across workshops.
OpenReview
Important Dates
Draft timeline for planning.
- Call for papers released: July 2026
- Submission deadline: Around August 29, 2026
- Reviews due: Mid-September 2026
- Notifications sent: Before September 29, 2026
- Camera-ready materials: October 2026
Final dates will be confirmed after workshop acceptance.
Organizing Committee
The team spans robotics, planning, reinforcement learning, neuro-symbolic AI, semantic web, and knowledge graphs.
Contact
Venue
NeurIPS 2026, location to be confirmedContact Person
Emanuele Musumeci