[CFP] ICLR 2026 Workshop on Scaling Post-Training for LLMs (SPOT)

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Gagan Jain

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Jan 12, 2026, 5:00:53 PM (10 days ago) Jan 12
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Dear RL-List community,

We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for the ICLR 2026 Workshop on Scaling Post-Training for LLMs (SPOT).

Post-training, spanning Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and beyond, has become a compute-intensive, first-class phase that increasingly determines the capabilities, safety, and efficiency of modern foundation models. Despite its importance, post-training at scale remains far less understood than pre-training. SPOT aims to close this gap by developing a principled scientific framework for post-training, across algorithms, systems, data, architectures, and objectives.

We warmly invite submissions from the RL community, especially work related to:

  • RL formulations for LLM post-training, stability, and scaling behavior

  • Reward modeling, preference learning, and verification

  • Efficient feedback mechanisms and evaluation at scale

  • Infrastructure and systems challenges

  • Architectures for scalable post-training

  • Data curation, synthetic data, and generalization

  • Safety, alignment, and real-world or embodied environments

Key dates:

  • Paper submission: February 05, 2026

  • Author notification: March 01, 2026

  • Camera-ready: April 01, 2026

  • Workshop date: April 26/27, 2026

Invited Speakers

We are thrilled to host an outstanding lineup of invited speakers: 

  • Nouha Dziri (AllenAI)
  • Rishabh Agarwal (Periodic Labs)
  • Aakanksha Chowdhery (Reflection AI, Stanford)
  • Sanmi Koyejo (Stanford)
  • Jiantao Jiao (NVIDIA, UC Berkeley)
  • Junyang Lin (Alibaba Qwen Team)
  • Sami Jaghouar (Prime Intellect)
  • Yuandong Tian (Stealth)
  • Cho-Jui Hsieh (UCLA)

Submission portal: OpenReview Submission Portal
Call for Reviewers: Reviewer Nomination Form
Workshop website: https://spoticlr.github.io
Contact: spot...@gmail.com

We believe SPOT will be a great venue for researchers working at the intersection of RL, alignment, and large-scale post-training to exchange ideas and shape a more rigorous understanding of how post-training should scale.

We look forward to your submissions and participation. Follow our X (previously Twitter) handle to stay updated.

Best regards,
Gagan Jain
Website | Twitter
(on behalf of the SPOT 2026 Organizing Committee)

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