Call for Pre-Conference Workshops

Before the RLC 2026 main conference, workshops on a variety of current topics will be held on August 15th, 2026 in Montreal, Canada. We invite researchers interested in organizing workshops to submit proposals. Workshop Organizers have several responsibilities, including coordinating workshop participation and content, providing this program in a timely manner, publicizing the workshop, and moderating the program throughout the workshop.

Goal of RLC Workshops

RLC workshops are meant to provide an informal, cutting-edge venue for discussion of works that are both in progress and/or present interesting directions for the future. Good workshops have helped to crystallize common problems, explicitly contrast competing frameworks, and clarify essential questions for a subfield or application area; they are a structured means of bringing together people with common interests to form communities. There will be one day of workshop meetings, with the general outline being two sessions – one for morning and another for afternoon, along with free time between the sessions for individual exchange. Please note in your proposal if you have an alternative outline you wish to follow. Workshop topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Reinforcement learning algorithms,
• Theoretical foundations of reinforcement learning,
• Reinforcement learning in low-resource settings,
• Representation learning for reinforcement learning,
• Robustness, safety, and fairness in reinforcement learning,
• Exploration in reinforcement learning,
• Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning and RLHF,
• Imitation learning and inverse reinforcement learning,
• Uncertainty in reinforcement learning,
• Applications of reinforcement learning: e.g., resource allocation, recommendation systems, robotics, healthcare, climate change, agriculture, pandemic response, etc,
• Societal impacts and policy aspects of reinforcement learning deployment,
• Any other topic relevant to an appreciable fraction of the RLC community.

Workshop schedules should encourage lively debates, stimulate the production of new ideas, and foster discussion of important issues. To this end, a workshop proposal should be designed to attract roughly between 1% and 10% of conference attendees.

Guidance for RLC 2026 Workshop Proposals

Organizers of workshop proposals should take care to respect every piece of guidance provided here, and explicitly address details of their workshop pertaining to the “Selection Criteria” outlined below. Additionally, please be sure to add any details that you believe would strengthen your proposal, along with explicitly addressing any relevant points mentioned in the “Other Guidance and Expectations for Workshop Proposals” section.

Timeline

1. Workshop Application Open: 20 February 2026
2. Workshop Application Deadline: 13 March 2026 AOE
3. Workshop Acceptance Notification: 27 March 2026 
4. Suggested Submission Date for Workshop Contributions: 15 May AOE
5. Suggested Accept/Reject Notification Date for Workshop Contributions: 29 May AOE
6. Workshop Day: 15 August, 2026

Please note that the submission and accept/reject notification dates for Workshop Contributions is a suggestion, and that there is a trade-off between the time the workshops give authors to submit their works, and the time given to reviewers to review the submissions. Additionally, any implemented timeline needs to be cognizant of the conference registration deadline in order to ease planning for all attendees – that is, ideally, accept/reject notifications need to be sent out prior to the conference registration deadline..

Submission format

Please submit a 3-page pdf in the RLC paper format (excluding references), containing

1. A short introduction: presenting the motivations for the topic of the workshop,
2. Invited speakers/Panelists: please include them in a table with their affiliation, gender, role / job title, along with the confirmation status of their participation,
3. Tentative schedule: workshops will tentatively run from 9am-5pm,
4. Organizers and biographies: please stick to short bios and achievements, highlight their role and reason for inclusion in the organizing team,
5. Plan for outreach: avenues that will be employed to get an audience for the workshop (advertising, reaching out, etc.)
6. Planned timeline for contributions: both submission and accept/reject timelines,
7. Diversity commitment: please state how you plan to garner a diverse audience.

Submission page

Proposals should be submitted to OpenReview. Please note that new OpenReview profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks. New profiles created with an institutional email will be activated immediately.

Selection Criteria

1. The degree to which the proposal is focused on an important and topical problem and the degree to which it is expected that the community will find the workshop interesting, and valuable.
2. The intellectual excitement of the topic. Is it likely to break new ground, provide a new lens for examining existing viewpoints, or merely reiterate tired, old debates?
3. Diversity and inclusion, in all forms. (See expectations below.)
4. The degree to which the proposed program offers an opportunity for discussion.
5. The extent to which proposed invited speakers advance the goals of the workshop and meet the expectations outlined below (for example, contributing to diversity or generating discussion).
6. Other dimensions in the expectations below that are not explicitly listed in these criteria.

Workshop submissions will be assessed through a light single-blind review process. The Reviewers will provide written assessments of the proposals against the criteria listed above. Their reports will be considered by the Workshop Chairs alongwith the notes prepared by the Workshop Chairs themselves about the proposals regarding the constraints listed below. The final decisions will be made by the Workshop Chairs via consensus and judgment; we will not simply add up scores assigned to the different criteria.

Hard Constraints/Workshop Requirements

1. Managing Workshop Chairs’ and Reviewers’ Conflicts of Interest

1. The Workshop Chairs cannot be Workshop Organizers nor give invited talks at any workshop, but can submit papers and give contributed talks.
2. Workshop Reviewers cannot review any proposal on which they are listed as an Organizer or Invited Speaker, and may not accept invitations to speak at any workshop they have reviewed after the workshop is accepted.
3. Workshop Chairs and Reviewers cannot review or shape acceptance decisions about workshops with organizers from within their organization (for large corporations, this means anyone in the corporation worldwide).

2. Managing Workshop Organizers’ Conflicts of Interest

1. Workshop Organizers cannot give invited talks at the workshops they organize. They can give an introduction to the workshop and/or act as a Panel Moderator, along with helping moderate the workshop itself, if necessary.
2. Workshop Organizers should state in their proposal how they will manage conflicts of interest in assessing submitted workshop contributions, if accepted. At a minimum, an organizer should not be involved in assessing a submission from someone who shares their organization.

Other Guidance and Expectations for Workshop Proposals

1. We encourage and expect diversity in the organizing team and speakers. This includes diversity of viewpoint and thinking regarding the topics discussed at the workshop, gender, ethnicity, affiliations, seniority, geographic location, etc. If a workshop is part of a series, the organizer list should include people who have not helped organize the series in the past. Organizers should articulate how they have addressed diversity in their proposal in each of these senses.
2. Since the goal of the workshop is to generate discussion, sufficient time and structure needs to be included in the program for facilitating this. Proposals should explicitly articulate how they will encourage broad discussion.
3. Workshop proposals should explicitly list what problem areas they would like to provide solutions for, or make advances towards, as a part of their workshop. They should explain why these are important problems and how the holding of their proposed workshop will contribute towards a solution.
4. We encourage workshop submissions of varying lengths and scopes. Organizers should state whether their workshops are meant to be large-attendance talk format or small-group discussions format. Organizers should articulate what they hope to achieve from the format proposal beyond the talks listed.
5. Workshops should allow for choice of attendance based on content. Good workshops will put talk titles up publicly prior to site publication and note the archival status of their submissions. Organizers should articulate how they will do this.
6. Organizing a workshop is a complex task, and proposals should outline the organizational experience and skills of the proposed organizers (as a team). We encourage junior researchers to be involved in workshop organization, but prefer some collective experience as a part of organizing the event.

Contact: [email protected]

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Workshop Series
   We neither encourage nor discourage workshops on topics that have appeared before. Membership in an existing sequence of workshops is irrelevant in the assessment of a workshop proposal (it neither helps nor hinders). Workshop proposals will be evaluated solely on their merits for this year’s conference. If your workshop is a part of an ongoing series (at other conferences), please do indicate that.
2. Overlapping Proposals
   We will not forcibly merge proposals.  If multiple strong proposals are submitted on similar topics, we will choose a single proposal to accept. We will then reach out to the organizers of the rejected proposals to ask whether they would like us to share their proposals with the organizers of the accepted workshop. The organizers of the accepted workshop may then optionally initiate a merge.
3. Workshop Modalities

RLC will host only in-person workshops.