About the Workshop
Spatio-temporal reasoning is becoming a central bottleneck for modern AI. Across language, vision, robotics, and multi-agent settings, current learning-based systems can be impressive at pattern recognition, yet they often fail when faced with distribution shifts, long-horizon dependencies, counterfactual queries, or the need to justify decisions in dynamic environments. At the same time, the community is seeing rapid progress in foundation models (including vision-language-action models), neural world models, and spatio-temporal representation learning, which creates an opportunity to couple these advances with structured representations and reasoning to improve robustness, transfer, and explainability.
STRL 2026 brings together the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning and Machine Learning communities to advance dependable spatio-temporal AI. We invite submissions that develop representations, learning methods, and evaluation resources for reasoning about space, time, motion, and events in dynamic environments (see topics below). A key goal is to identify reusable abstractions and benchmarks that improve robustness, generalization, and explainability across tasks and modalities.
August 16, 2026
Workshop Date
University of Bremen
Bremen, Germany
Full Day
In-Person Workshop
Workshop Program
Keynote Speakers
Steven Schockaert
Cardiff University, UK
Steven Schockaert is a professor at Cardiff University and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Ghent University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Foundation Flanders from 2008 to 2011 before joining Cardiff University. His research focuses on natural language processing, commonsense reasoning, representation learning, and neurosymbolic artificial intelligence. He has received several awards for his research work, including the ECCAI Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award in 2008 and Best Paper Awards. He is the editor-in-chief of AI Communications and serves on the editorial boards of Machine Learning and Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence.
Parisa Kordjamshidi
Michigan State University, USA
Parisa Kordjamshidi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, US. Her research focuses on spatial language understanding, multimodal reasoning across vision and language, and neuro-symbolic learning. She received her Ph.D. from KU Leuven and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER, Amazon Faculty Research, and Fulbright Scholar Awards. Her research team received the NAACL-2025 Outstanding Research Paper Award and EMNLP-2025 SAC highlights. Dr. Kordjamshidi serves as Associate Editor of JAIR, Co-Editor-in-Chief of ARR, and Action Editor for TACL, and has held roles on the organizing committees of major conferences including ACL, NAACL, EACL, EMNLP, ECML-PKDD, and AAAI. She was recently a visiting Associate Professor at UCLA and is currently a Visiting Professor at Bloomberg, where she is spending her sabbatical.
Schedule
| Time | Activity |
|---|---|
| 09:00 – 09:10 | Opening remarks, overview of goals, and logistics |
| 09:10 – 10:00 | Keynote Systematic Relational Reasoning with Graph Neural Networks Steven Schockaert 40 min talk + 10 min Q&A |
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Talk
Long talks
2 presentations (10 min talk + 5 min Q&A each)
|
| 10:30 – 11:00 | Coffee break |
| 11:00 – 11:40 | Talk
Short talks
5 presentations (5 min talk + 3 min Q&A each)
|
| 11:40 – 12:00 | Talk
Poster lightning round
2 confirmed poster lightning talks (2 min each + 2 min Q&A)
|
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Interactive Poster session |
| 13:00 – 14:30 | Lunch break |
| 14:30 – 15:20 | Keynote Keynote II: Title TBA Parisa Kordjamshidi 40 min talk + 10 min Q&A |
| 15:20 – 15:30 | Interactive Community Workshop: Interactive Session Community building and roadmap discussion |
| 15:30 – 16:00 | Coffee break |
| 16:00 – 17:15 | Interactive Community Workshop: Interactive Session (continued) Community building and roadmap discussion |
| 17:15 – 17:30 | Wrap-up, takeaways, and community roadmap |
Call for Papers (Closed)
Submissions are now closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted; please see the workshop program for the day’s sessions.
View the original call and submission information
Topics of Interest
We invited submissions related to the integration of spatial and temporal reasoning with machine learning, including but not limited to:
- Neuro-symbolic approaches to spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
- Spatio-temporal commonsense reasoning and learning
- Generalization in spatio-temporal reasoning and learning (compositional generalization, continual learning, transfer learning, causal reasoning)
- Large language models and vision-language(-action) models for spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
- World models for spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
- Explainability and interpretability in spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
- Spatio-temporal reasoning and learning in adjacent fields (e.g., robotics, computer vision, natural language processing, multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, and knowledge graphs)
- Benchmarks for spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
- Real-world problems in spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
Keywords: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning, Neuro-Symbolic AI, Multimodal Learning, Commonsense Reasoning, World Models, Explainable AI, Benchmarks and Evaluation, Continual and Compositional Generalization
Submission Guidelines
We welcome submissions across the full spectrum of theoretical and practical work including research ideas, methods, applications, tools, benchmarks, surveys, and position papers.
Submision Format
Papers should be formatted according to the IJCAI-ECAI conference guidelines (The updated LaTeX styles and Word template are available at https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit).
- Short papers (4 pages, excluding references and appendices)
- Regular papers (8 pages, excluding references and appendices)
- Extended abstracts (2 pages, excluding references and appendices)
Unlimited additional pages containing references and supplementary materials are allowed.
Submission policy
The workshop is non-archival, i.e., authors are allowed to submit work that is under review or will be submitted elsewhere. We welcome ongoing and unpublished work. We will also accept papers that are under review at the time of submission, or that have been recently accepted without published proceedings. Extended abstracts of published papers are welcome, as long as they demonstrate a close link to the topic of the workshop. Authors of selected papers may be invited to submit an extended version of their work to a journal special issue related to the workshop.
Use of LLMs in Submissions: While we encourage the use of LLMs for brainstorming and drafting, we require that all submissions reflect the authors’ original work and ideas. Therefore, any submissions that include errors due to LLM-generated content (e.g., hallucinated references, inaccurate information) will be desk-rejected without review.
Review policy
All papers will be peer-reviewed in a double-blind process and assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, clarity, and reproducibility (when applicable). At least one author per submission must commit to reviewing for the workshop. You will need to designate the reviewing author(s) on charingtool. Submissions without a nominated reviewer may be desk-rejected.
If you would like to become a reviewer for this workshop, please let us know.
Organization
Organizing Committee
Jae Hee Lee
University of Hamburg, Germany
Jakob Suchan
Constructor University Bremen, Germany
Xun Gong
Southwest Jiaotong University, China
Advisory Committee
Michael Sioutis
University of Montpellier, France
Zhiguo Long
Southwest Jiaotong University, China
Parisa Kordjamshidi
Michigan State University, US
Mehul Bhatt
Örebro University, Sweden
Program Committee
- Nassim Belmecheri, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
- Robert Blackwell, University of Leeds, UK
- Xiaoyu Ge, Australian National University, Australia
- Yameng Guo, Ghent University, Belgium
- Shufeng Kong, Cornell University, USA
- Fangjun Li, University of Manchester, UK
- Kaustuv Mukherji, Syracuse University, USA
- Tanawan Premsri, Michigan State University, USA
- John Stell, University of Leeds, UK
- Seppe vanden Broucke, Ghent University, Belgium
- David Wong, University of Leeds, UK
- Bowen Xi, Arizona State University, USA
- Peng Zhang, Australian National University, Australia
Venue
STRL 2026 is co-located with IJCAI-ECAI 2026 and takes place on August 16, 2026 at University of Bremen.
Room: B1410, Geisteswissenschaften 2 (GW2), level 1B.
Address: University of Bremen (Zentralbereich), Bibliothekstraße 1, 28359 Bremen. See the University of Bremen campus map.
Travel: tram line 6 connects Bremen Airport and Bremen Central Station with the Universität / Zentralbereich stop.