CONSEQUENCES '26

Call for Contributions

An increasing amount of research understands recommender systems as a decision-making problem, instead of a pure prediction problem. Indeed, this view of the recommendation task makes it clear that recommendation decisions on real-world platforms have consequences. 

Actions and decisions come in many forms, from selecting rankings to LLM tokens, and their consequences come in many forms as well: algorithms are often responsible for collecting training data for the next iteration, but algorithmic decisions also impact the utility that all stakeholders can get from participating on the platform. Indeed, the recommender systems research community is well aware that solely optimising for short-term engagement metrics is not always in the best interests of all stakeholders (such as item providers or the platform itself), but many research problems in this space remain open.

This is the fifth instalment of the CONSEQUENCES workshop series, which has seen significant interest from across academia and industry. It is our belief that advances in the intersection of these fields foster progress in effective, efficient and fair use of logged data for both learning and evaluation, and can have a strong impact on practical systems. 

The CONSEQUENCES workshop aims to bring a dedicated forum to learn and exchange ideas. To this end, we welcome contributions from both academia and industry and bring together a growing community of researchers and practitioners interested in sequential decision making, reinforcement learning, offline and off-policy evaluation, batch policy learning, fairness in online platforms, as well as other related tasks, such as A/B testing.

The CONSEQUENCES workshop is an in-person event co-located with the Twentieth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in Minneapolis, MN, USA.
If necessary, arrangements will be made to allow speakers to present their accepted work remotely.

The workshop will accept contributions in the form of extended abstracts over three tracks:

1. Theoretical and Methodological Research

2. Benchmark, Datasets, and Software

3. Open Problems and Industry Experiences

We welcome both abstracts covering previously published work, as well as abstracts describing novel contributions or ongoing research. CONSEQUENCES '26 is a non-archival workshop to not obstruct future submissions to archival conferences and journals.

List of Topics

Relevant topics to the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Multi-armed and Contextual Bandits, and other policy-learning problems for recommender systems

• Training GenAI models such as LLMs for recommendation based on interaction data

• Learning, finding and designing metrics for long-term engagement and satisfaction

• Benchmarks, datasets, and software

• Causality in recommender systems

• Counterfactual inference for learning and evaluation of recommender systems

• Fairness and other long-term objectives in rankings and recommender systems

• Open problems and challenges in applications

Important dates

Submission deadline July 27th, 2026

Author notification August 14th, 2026

Camera-ready version deadline August 28th, 2026

CONSEQUENCES ‘26 October 2nd, 2026

These dates consider in particular the synchronisation with the notification of acceptance in other tracks, and the early bird registraton deadline.

Deadlines refer to 23:59 (11:59pm) in the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone.

Submission instructions

Submissions should be made via EasyChair.

Formatting instructions

Submissions are limited to a single extended abstract with a length of at most four pages (excluding references). Authors can optionally include an appendix with further technical details to support the reviewing procedure. If the submission is an abstract of previously accepted work, please indicate this and cite the work in a titlenote.

Reviewing process

Papers will be reviewed following a single-blind process. All accepted papers will be presented as posters, selected papers will be presented as long talks.

Publication process

Accepted contributions will be made publicly available on the workshop website as non-archival reports, allowing future submissions to archival conferences and journals. 

Organisers

• Olivier Jeunen, aampe

• Harrie Oosterhuis, University of Amsterdam

• Flavian Vasile, Criteo

• Yixin Wang, University of Michigan

• Thorsten Joachims, Information Science and Computer Science, Cornell University

• Haruka Kiyohara, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University