Call for Papers and Submission

Dear colleagues,

AI 2026, the 39^th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence invites papers that present original work in all areas of Artificial Intelligence, either theoretical or applied. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Agent Systems
• AI Applications
• Automated Reasoning
• Case‐based Reasoning
• Cognitive Models
• Constraint Satisfaction
• Data Mining
• Deep Learning and Neural Models
• E‐Commerce
• Ethics in AI, AI for social good
• Evolutionary Computation
• Explainable AI
• Fair, Secure, Private, and Trusted AI
• Games
• Information Retrieval and Search

• Knowledge Management
• Knowledge Representation
• Large Language Models
• Machine Learning
• Multimedia Processing
• Natural Language Processing
• Planning
• Robotics
• Swarm Intelligence
• Uncertainty
• User Modeling
• Web Mining and Applications

We also welcome the submission of position papers, which present evidence-based arguments for a particular point of view without necessarily presenting a new system. There will be an option during the submission process to indicate that a paper is a position paper.

Important dates

This year, the conference will feature two submission rounds. Authors may choose to submit their papers to either round. Papers rejected in the first round may be invited to submit a revised version for the second deadline (this can be considered as a third outcome in addition to accept or reject) provided that they are accompanied by a response letter detailing the changes and addressing the initial review comments. The final outcome of this revised submission will be either accept or reject.

First round

Second round

Camera Ready Copy due: Monday, April 20^th, 2026 (11:59 p.m. AoE time zone)

Conference dates: May 25-29, 2026

Accepted papers from both rounds will be presented at the conference. Submissions received in the first round may receive revision requests and can be resubmitted for consideration in the second round.

Awards

A Best Paper Award and a Best Student Paper Award will be given at the conference, respectively, to the authors of each best paper, as judged by the Best Paper Award Selection Committee. For the Best Student Paper Award, the first author must be a registered student at the time of submitting the paper.

Submission details

We invite submissions of both long and short papers. Long papers must be no longer than 12 pages, and short papers must be no longer than 6 pages, including references, formatted using the conference template. The authors should use this proceedings template for LaTeX to prepare their papers.

Papers submitted to the conference must not have already been published, or accepted for publication, or be under review by a journal or another conference (preprint is acceptable if the title is different). Submissions will go through a double-blind review process by Program Committee members to assess originality, significance, technical merit, and clarity of presentation. As such, submissions must be anonymized, and papers that fail to do so will be desk rejected without a review.

The link to submit your paper is: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CANADIANAI2026/

CMT acknowledgment: The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

Camera-ready Instructions

The camera-ready version of your paper is due by April 20th, 2026 (AoE). Please submit your camera-ready PDF and signed permission form through CMT.

Here are the instructions for preparing and submitting your camera-ready paper:

1. The camera-ready paper should follow the PMLR template

• Long papers: Maximum 12 pages for the main content (including main text, acknowledgments, and references). An optional appendix* of up to 4 additional pages may be included and must appear at the end of the camera-ready PDF, not as a separate file.
• Short papers: Maximum 6 pages for the main content (including main text, acknowledgments, and references). An optional appendix* of up to 2 additional pages may be included. The appendix must appear at the end of the camera-ready PDF and should not be submitted as a separate file.

2. One important note. PMLR does not allow videos to be submitted as supplementary material.  If you have videos, code, datasets, and other supplementary materials, please host them on your own (e.g., YouTube, Github, etc). You should provide, in the main text of your paper, a link to this material, or a link to your project website.

3.  Please sign the permission form for publication in PMLR. Please rename the PDF to <CAI26_paperId_Permission>.pdf

*Authors may optionally submit a technical appendix (PDF) containing additional supporting information such as proofs of theorems that are stated in the main paper; additional information needed to reproduce experiments; further experimental results; figures and examples to illustrate technical claims; etc. The main submission may reference the appendix, but should be self contained. If proofs or other supplementary matter are an important part of the contribution, their essential elements should be included in the main paper.

Publication and Presentation

The conference proceedings will be published in PMLR open-access online format and submitted to be indexed/abstracted in leading indexing services such as DBLP, ACM, and Google Scholar.

Authors of accepted long papers will be allotted time for an oral presentation during the conference. Accepted short papers will also be allotted time for a 2-minute oral presentation, followed by a poster session presentation. It is mandatory for at least one author of each accepted paper to attend the conference in person to present their work. Authors are expected to agree to this requirement before submitting their paper for review.

Furthermore, the corresponding author of each paper must complete and sign a copyright form on behalf of all authors associated with the paper. It is important that the corresponding author who signs the copyright form is the corresponding author listed on the paper. For the final submission, please use the camera-ready template linked above.

Program Co-chairs