Call for Papers - TRAIL Conference April 2026 - Catania, Italy

[Hariharan Arunachalam]

Dear Colleagues,

We have extended the deadline for submissions of the 1st Transparent and Interpretable Robots (TRAIL) Conference to the 31st of January. It will be taking place April 16 - April 17 2026 in Catania, Italy
 
Conference website : https://sites.google.com/view/trail-conference 

About the conference :

This conference is ideal for early–career researchers and students, offering a friendly environment to present short contributions — including work-in-progress, novel concepts, and early results. It’s a great opportunity to receive constructive feedback and build international collaborations.
There are no registration fees, since this event is proudly supported by the TRAIL Marie Skłodowska–Curie European Union project (https://www.inf.uni-hamburg.de/research/projects/trail.html), promoting transparency and interpretability in human–robot interaction.

Topics include (but not limited to):

- Causal and Counterfactual Reasoning in AI    
- Cognitive Modeling for Interpretable and Human-Aligned AI
- Evaluation for Explainability, Trust, Transparency, and Faithfulness
- Explainable Reinforcement Learning (RL)
- Failure Recognition, Assessment, and Recovery in Robotic Scenarios
- Foundation models for Interpretability and Transparency  
- Human and Context Awareness in Robotics
- Interactive Visualization and Explanation Interfaces
- Interpretable and Transparent Robot Behavior    
- Knowledge-Based Robotic Design
- Multimodal and Grounded Explanations (Vision, Language, and Sensor Data)
- Multimodality and Language Grounding in Vision, Sound, Robotics, and Beyond
- Navigation, Planning, and Control in Robotic Systems
- Post-hoc Explanation Techniques
- Robotic Decision-Making
- Security and Ethics AI in Explainable Systems
- Trustworthiness, Faithfulness, and Robustness in AI and Robotics

Dates :

Extended Abstract Deadline: 16th January, 2026  31st January 2026
Acceptance Notification: 13th February, 2026  27th February 2026
Camera Ready Deadline: 14th March, 2026 20th March 2026

Venue :

The Conference will be collocated with SWEET Spring School at :  
Museo della Rappresentazione  
Via Etnea, 742, 95128 Catania CT, Italy

Submission Guidelines :

Authors are invited to submit original contributions (2-4 Pages excluding appendix and references) following the format provided at the website : https://sites.google.com/view/trail-conference/call-for-papers

We look forward to your contributions and seeing you at Catania !

Best Regards,

TRAIL Conference Organisers