The 5th Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) Workshop at CVPR 2026

Date & Time: June 3/4, 2026 (TBD)
Location: Denver, CO, USA

Motivation

Computer vision for high-stakes, real-world applications necessitates robust explanation and transparency to ensure trust, accountability, and ethical deployment. Celebrating its 5th Anniversary, the Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) workshop provides a premier forum for the entire spectrum of XAI research, from interpretable-by-design models to challenges in multimodal foundational models. The program includes invited talks, spotlight papers, a poster session, and a tutorial. XAI4CV accepts paper and demo submissions to define the future of trustworthy visual AI.

Call for Papers and Demos

We welcome paper and demo submissions:

Papers should describe high-quality, original research. Contributions can include novel XAI methods; applications of existing methods on new domains, models, and tasks; evaluation or analysis of existing methods; and practical toolboxes.
Demos should consist of static or interactive presentations of XAI for CV models and tasks, accompanied by a description. Contributions can include visualizations, explanations, and explorations of novel XAI systems; novel visualizations, explanations, and explorations of existing XAI systems; studies of how different visualizations, explanations, and explorations of XAI systems are perceived by people; among others.

We have two tracks of submissions:

Proceedings track: We welcome max 8-page submissions of papers and demos. Submissions accepted to this track will be published in the CVPR workshop proceedings.
Non-proceedings track: We welcome max 4-page submissions (commonly referred to as "extended abstracts") of papers and demos. For the non-proceedings track, we encourage submissions of published or accepted work (e.g., papers and demos accepted to the CVPR main program). Submissions accepted to this track will not be published in the CVPR workshop proceedings.

Topics

We encourage submissions on topics including, but not limited to:

Interpretable-by-design computer vision (CV) models, including transparent CNNs, Vision Transformers (ViTs), and hybrid architectures designed for intrinsic interpretability.
Post-hoc explanation methods for CV models, such as saliency and activation mapping, feature visualization, and counterfactual reasoning.
Mechanistic interpretability, including reverse-engineering network behavior, analyzing layer-wise and concept-level representations, and understanding learned mechanisms.
Multimodal XAI, covering multimodal explanations of CV models (e.g., vision-language, vision-audio) and unimodal explanations of multimodal systems.
Evaluation and benchmarking of XAI methods, including metrics, robustness analysis, human evaluations, and comparative studies.
Datasets for XAI, supporting benchmarking, reproducibility, and human-centered evaluations.
Open-source frameworks and tools for XAI, enabling transparent and scalable research and deployment.
Human-centered XAI, including user studies, human-in-the-loop explanation systems, and the assessment of trust, usability, and decision support.
XAI applications across domains, including healthcare, autonomous systems, robotics, geosciences, and remote sensing.
Explainability in relation to broader constructs, such as fairness, transparency, interpretability, accountability, causality, and trust, and its implications for society.
Emerging directions, including counterfactual and causal explanations, interpretability of foundational and generative models, concept discovery, interactive and adaptive explanations, and evaluation of XAI in real-world deployments.

Timeline

Proceedings Track

Submission Deadline: February 27, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)
Notification to Authors (Accept as Spotlight, Poster, or Reject): March 20, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)
Camera Ready Deadline: April 7, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)

Non-Proceedings Track

Submission Deadline (to be considered for Spotlights): March 6, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)
Notification to Authors (Accept as Spotlight, Poster, or Reject): March 27, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)
Rolling Submissions and Notifications (Accept as Poster or Reject): Until April 7, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)

Submission Instructions

All submissions should be in the anonymized CVPR 2026 format available at https://cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2025/AuthorGuidelines.
The page limits do not include references.
You may optionally upload supplementary material. Reviewers will be encouraged to look at it, but are not obligated to do so.
Submissions can be done at https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/XAICV2026

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.

Attendance and Presentation

Posters: All accepted submissions will be invited to participate in an in-person poster session at our workshop. Additionally, the authors will be asked to upload their posters which will be hosted on our webpage.
Spotlights: We will pick several works among the submissions to be presented as spotlights. Presentations can either be in-person or pre-recorded.
Abiding by the CVPR guidelines, all accepted papers must be presented by one of the authors.