Call for Papers

Accepted papers will be presented as posters during the poster sessions. Selected works will also be highlighted as contributed talks.


Topics

We invite submissions related (but not limited) to the following topics:

  • Exploration vs. exploitation dilemma
  • Exploration in reinforcement learning, search algorithms, and autonomous robotics
  • Safe exploration and exploration for Sim2Real
  • Large language model–guided exploration
  • Artificial curiosity and intrinsic motivation
  • Exploration in hierarchical and abstract worlds
  • Active learning and proactive querying
  • Evolutionary algorithms for exploration
  • Reward shaping, hacking, and diversity measures
  • Attention and pruning mechanisms
  • Exploration in human–robot interaction
  • Tactile exploration
  • Continual and reset-free learning
  • Horizon-aware exploration and planning for exploration
  • Meta-learning and learning-to-explore
  • Open-ended, open-world exploration
  • Visual question answering for exploration

Submission Details

To encourage participation and foster high-quality discussions from a broad community, we plan to:

  • Announce open calls for submissions on this website at least 2 months before the submission deadline.
  • Notify authors at least 1.5 months before the workshop to facilitate travel plans.
  • Present accepted submissions on the website prior to the conference and as spotlight talks during the workshop.
  • Target ~10 accepted submissions, with each spotlight ~6 minutes (no Q&A).
  • Host a poster session and a junior panel for deeper interaction.
  • Invite a subset of authors to the junior panel to discuss challenges, emerging topics, and blue-sky ideas.

Tracks & Format

We plan to accept two kinds of submissions:

  1. Traditional submissions presenting preliminary results of ongoing research (long papers), including negative results and open problems (extended abstracts).
  2. Submissions linked to already published papers, including:
    • Journal papers that have not been discussed at a conference.
    • Conference papers from other Robotics and Machine Learning/AI venues where a focused community discussion would add value.

These two categories will be managed separately, so there is no competition between already peer-reviewed work and preliminary results.

Length & Style:

  • Paper (long): up to 6 pages (excluding references).
  • Extended abstract: up to 2 pages (excluding references).
  • Use the IEEE conference style (no template link provided).

Review:

  • Single-blind review process.

Multimedia:

  • Authors are encouraged to include videos illustrating their work.

Selection preference:

  • Works at the intersection of multiple workshop topics are favored.

Questions

If you have any questions, please contact us at
xploreworkshop@gmail.com.