AAAI-26 Bridge CFP: Reliable Embodied AI via Testing & Formal Verification

[James Zheng]

Call for Participation

Making Embodied AI Reliable with Testing and Formal Verification

Description of the Bridge

This Bridge addresses one of the most pressing challenges in modern AI: ensuring that embodied AI systems — such as autonomous vehicles, UAVs, and robots — are interpretable, testable, and formally verifiable. While current AI models demonstrate remarkable capabilities in perception and decision-making, they pose fundamental challenges for traditional verification and assurance methods, especially in safety-critical applications.

The goal of this Bridge is to bring together the AI/ML, formal methods, software engineering, robotics, and cyber-physical systems communities to establish a shared research roadmap for reliable and certifiable embodied intelligence. Participants will explore advances in neuro-symbolic reasoning, LLM-guided specification mining, scenario-based testing, compositional verification, and robustness under uncertainty, with an emphasis on how these techniques can support safety certification and assurance of AI-enabled autonomy.

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Topics of Interest

• Testability and verifiability of AI-enabled autonomy
• LLM-guided specification mining and scenario generation
• White-box and compositional verification of neural and neuro-symbolic components
• Neuro-symbolic architectures for modular reasoning and knowledge distillation
• Robustness under sensing noise, ambiguous instructions, and human-robot interaction
• Formal guardrails for LLMs and VLMs in embodied decision-making

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Format of the Bridge

This one-day event will include tutorials, keynote talks, technical presentations, panel discussions, and interactive breakout sessions.

• Morning: Tutorials and invited keynotes by leaders in neuro-symbolic AI, formal verification, and embodied autonomy, followed by selected technical presentations.
• Afternoon: A panel discussion on certification challenges and breakout sessions focusing on open problems in scenario-based testing, compositional verification, and robustness under uncertainty.

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Attendance

We anticipate 50–80 participants, including researchers and practitioners from AI, robotics, formal methods, and autonomous cyber-physical systems.

Early-career researchers and graduate students are strongly encouraged to participate, with dedicated mentoring opportunities available.

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Submission Requirements

We invite 2–4-page extended abstracts or position papers describing research advances, tools, or case studies relevant to reliable embodied AI.

Submissions should clearly articulate how the work contributes to testing, interpretability, or verification of embodied AI systems.

Accepted contributions will be presented as talks, posters, or lightning sessions.

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Submission Site

Submissions should be made through:

🔗 https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aaai26bridgereai

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Bridge Chairs

• Assoc. Prof. Xi (James) Zheng, Macquarie University — james...@mq.edu.au
• Prof. Corina S. Pasareanu, Carnegie Mellon University / NASA Ames — corina.p...@cmu.edu
• Asst. Prof. Ivan Ruchkin, University of Florida — iruc...@ece.ufl.edu
• Prof. Archan Misra, Singapore Management University — arc...@smu.edu.sg

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Bridge Program Committee

Ziyang Li (Johns Hopkins University)

David Lo (Singapore Management University)

Djordje Žikelić (Singapore Management University)

Anna Lukina (Delft University of Technology)

Aloysius K. Mok (University of Texas at Austin)

Kenneth Kwok (ASTAR, Singapore)

Daniel Neider (TU Dortmund University)

Vijay Ganesh (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Biplav Srivastava (University of South Carolina)

Guy Van Den Broeck (University of California, Los Angeles)

Basura Fernando (ASTAR, Singapore)

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Bridge URL

🔗 https://www.tacps.org

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Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: October 31, 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: November 14, 2025

Kind Regards,

A/Prof. James Xi Zheng

Australian Research Council Future Fellow 

Director of Intelligent Systems Research Group (itseg.org)

Director of International Engagement

Editor, Springer Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments https://link.springer.com/journal/40860 

Co-Founding Chair, TACPS https://www.tacps.org
Associate Professor and Deputy Program Leader in Software Engineering
School of Computing |  Room 361, Level 3 
4 Research Park Drive
Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
T: +61 2 9850 6330 |  F: +61 2 9850 9551 | W: https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/xi-zheng