We invite submissions to our upcoming workshop at COLM 2026. 

Reviewer Self-Nomination

If you want to nominate yourself as a potential reviewer for our workshop, please fill out this form.

Topics

Our areas of interest include:

  1. Practical applications of interpretability insights to address challenges such as hallucinations, bias, adversarial robustness, and model reliability.

  2. Interpretability in high-stakes and less-explored domains, including healthcare, finance, cybersecurity, and other deployment-sensitive settings.

  3. Comparative analyses of interpretability-based approaches versus alternative techniques like fine-tuning, prompting, and more.

  4. New model architectures, training paradigms or design choices informed by interpretability findings.

  5. Incorporating interpretability–often focusing on micro-level decision analysis–into more complex scenarios, like reasoning processes or multi-turn interactions.

  6. Developing realistic benchmarking and assessment methods to measure the real-world impact of interpretability insights, particularly in production environments and large-scale models.

  7. Critical discussions on the feasibility, limitations, and future directions of actionable interpretability research. We also invite perspectives that question whether actionability should be a goal of interpretability research.

Tracks

We accept submissions under two tracks: Workshop Track and a Fast Track for accepted COLM 2026 papers.

Workshop Track

We welcome submissions of novel, unpublished work.  All accepted papers are considered non-archival (so they can be submitted to other venues), but will be presented at the workshop and will be displayed at the workshop website. Submissions will undergo a double-blind review process and must be fully anonymized. Please note that there will be no rebuttal phase.

Paper Types

  • Long Papers: Up to 9 pages (excluding references and appendix).
  • Short Papers: Up to 5 pages (excluding references and appendix)

Fast Track

We also welcome submissions from papers accepted to the COLM 2026 main conference that are relevant to the workshop’s themes. These submissions will not undergo a second full peer-review process. Instead, they will go through a light-touch review, solely to assess their relevance to the workshop’s themes. Authors may submit the camera-ready version of their paper, up to 9 pages. Anonymization is not required for this track.

Submission Details

Submissions will be managed through OpenReview (Submission Link), and must use the COLM template and follow the official guidelines. Work that is currently under review in other venues is eligible to be submitted, but must be withdrawn if accepted elsewhere before the workshop.

Dates

  • Submission Deadline: June 21, 2026 (Fast Track papers may be submitted after the COLM acceptance notification)
  • Acceptance Notification: July 24, 2026

All accepted papers, across all tracks and paper types, will be presented as posters at the workshop. A select number of submissions will also be invited for spotlight presentations. For spotlight talks, at least one author must attend the workshop in person.