Call for Contributions

With the rapid growth of the LEAD field, the topic of interests of this workshop cover a wide range of participants, which include but not limited to following:

• Reinforcement Learning-assisted Algorithm Configuration

• Reinforcement Learning-assisted Operator/Algorithm Selection

• Meta-Black-Box Optimization

• Pre-trained Optimization Model

• Surrogate Modelling within Online/Offline Evolutionary Systems

• Hyper-Heuristics

• Large Language Model for Automated Algorithm Design

• Large Language Model for Optimization Modelling

• Large Language Model for Foundational Optimization Systems

• Self-evolved Agentic Systems

• Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning

• Autoregressive Learning for Automated Algorithm Design

• Foundational Optimization Models

• Exploratory Landscape Analysis

• Fitness Landscape Analysis

• Instance Space Analysis

• Evaluation Metrics

• Benchmarks, Tools, Platforms

• Position papers on related LEAD sub-fields

• Applications of LEAD

Submission Guidelines

Submission Website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=leadijcaiecai2026.

Formatting guidelines: The updated LaTeX styles and Word template are available at https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit.

Page limit: Papers must be no shorter than 6 pages and no longer than 9 pages in total: 4 to 7 pages for the body of the paper and 2 pages for references. 

Supplementary material: Authors may submit up to 50MB of supplementary material, such as appendices, proofs, derivations, data, or source code; all supplementary material must be in PDF or ZIP format. Supplementary material should be created by the authors that directly support the submission content. Reviewers may choose to consult the technical appendix at their discretion. Supplementary material must be submitted by the full paper submission deadline.

Anonymity: From the authors’ perspective, reviewing for IJCAI-LEAD 2026 is single-blind. The submitted papers are not required to be anonymous.

Preprints: The existence of non-anonymous preprints (on arXiv, social media, websites, etc.) and prior publication in non-archival venues will not result in rejection. 

Reproducibility: Authors must follow the reproducibility guidelines (available here) and checklist at the time of paper submission.

Dual submissions: IJCAI-LEAD 2026 provides a platform for all kinds of related works, including either published or those being submitted. Sharing ideas is the most important vision of this workshop.

Note: Workshop papers will not be published in the IJCAI-ECAI conference proceedings.

For inquiries, email IJCAI-LEAD@outlook.com