[Call for Papers] 2nd Neuro-Symbolic Software Engineering Workshop at ICSE

[Christian M. Adriano]

Dear Colleagues,

Please distribute this call for papers among your peers.

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2nd International Workshop on Neuro-Symbolic Software Engineering (NSE)
Co-located with the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE),
to be held April 12-18, 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Workshop day TBA

Website: https://conf.researchr.org/home/icse-2026/nse-2026
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Software engineering has a long history of advancing symbolic techniques—such as formal methods and programming languages—to address complex challenges, including ensuring safety and performance in autonomous and mission-critical systems. With the rise of machine learning (ML), the field has expanded to new areas such as code summarization and generation, automated testing and repair, and formal verification.

Integrating symbolic and ML techniques introduces methodological challenges beyond the familiar perspectives of ML for Software Engineering (ML4SE) and Software Engineering for ML (SE4ML). These challenges, often framed as Neuro-Symbolic methods, center on “reasoning about learning” and “learning about reasoning” when building and using ML-based software and tools.

The NSE 2026 workshop offers a forum to explore these challenges in the context of software engineering tasks transformed by ML. We invite contributions on the synergy of symbolic and ML techniques across the software development life cycle. Submissions may include case studies, innovative approaches, empirical evaluations, and formal or theoretical work.

*Topics - Neuro-symbolic Methods in:*
- automated software engineering tools, e.g., requirements, code, and test (summarization, generation, refactoring, fixing, inspection/review, etc.).
- collaboration and decision-making in software development.
- validation and verification methods and tools.
- safety-mission-critical systems.
- knowledge graphs for software engineering.
- reasoning and learning about software and data.
- formal methods and theoretical frameworks.

*Important Dates:*
- Paper submissions: October 20th, 2025.
- Paper notifications: November 24th, 2025.
- Camera-ready versions: January 26th, 2026.
- Workshop: TBA

Link to Call for Papers: https://conf.researchr.org/home/icse-2026/nse-2026#Call-for-Papers

*NSE welcomes contributions in any of the following formats:*
- Full papers (research) up to 8 pages
- Short papers (research, experience, or industry demonstration) up to 6 pages
- Extended abstracts up to 5 pages (free of APC - article processing charge).

Best regards

NSE 2026 Co-organizers
- Christian Medeiros Adriano
- Sona Ghahremani
- Daiki Kimura
- Ruben Ruiz-Torrubiano



Christian Medeiros Adriano | Researcher
System Analysis & Modeling Department
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Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Design IT. Create Knowledge.

Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Digital Engineering gGmbH
Digital Engineering | Universität Potsdam
Prof.-Dr.-Helmert Str. 2-3 | D-14482 Potsdam
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