Call for Papers
We invite paper submissions to the workshop on Foundation Models for Science (FM4Science) co-located with the ICLR 2026, the Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Topics will include, but are not limited to:
- How to achieve better scaling laws for foundation models in scientific problems by designing datasets, network architectures, and training algorithms?
- How to design data augmentation and multi-modal self-supervised pretraining for scientific problems?
- How to design efficient fine-tuning with scientific awareness?
- How to quantify and reduce the uncertainty of scientific foundation models?
- How to improve the out-of-distribution generalization of scientific foundation models?
- How to make foundation models compatible with and enable the integration of classic scientific tools (simulators, solvers, etc.)?
- How to make scientific foundation models benefit from the reasoning and in-context learning of LLMs?
- How to better combine symbolic learning and data-driven learning?
- How to use foundation models to facilitate visualizations in scientific problems?
- How to accelerate scientific discovery and the collection/assimilation of scientific data with foundation models?
- How to diagnose failure cases or modes where scientific foundation models do not perform well?
- How to align scientific foundation models with scientific facts without hallucination?
Scientific Domains. We invite paper submissions from various scientific domains, including but not limited to: Astrophysics and Space Science, Biomedicine (e.g., proteins, biosequences, virtual screening), Computational Science (e.g., PDEs, forecasting), Earth Science, Materials Science (e.g., batteries, chemical synthesis), Quantum Mechanics (e.g., nuclear fusion), Small Molecules. Applications-driven submissions focusing on AI-for-Science and Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) are also highly encouraged.
Tentative important dates (AoE time):
- Abstract Submission Deadline: February 8, 2026
- Paper Submission Deadline: February 10, 2026
- Review Bidding Period: February 8 - February 11, 2026
- Review Deadline: February 24, 2026
- Acceptance/Rejection Notification Date: March 1, 2026
- Import Workshop Program and Accepted Papers to iclr.cc: March 11, 2026
- Camera-Ready Submission: April 1, 2026
- Workshop Date: April 26 or 27, 2026
Awards
Among exceptional research papers with high review scores, we will select one best paper award and two runner-ups.
Submission policy
Submission Format (inherit from ICLR 2026): Latex Template.
Submission portal: OpenReview.
Our submission policy is inherited from ICLR 2026. All authors and submissions must adhere to the ICLR code of conduct.
- Submissions: The main text of a submitted paper must be at least four pages long and no more than nine pages, including all figures and tables. Additional pages containing references don’t count as content pages. If your submission is accepted, you will be allowed an additional content page for the camera-ready version.
- The main text and references may be followed by technical appendices, for which there is no page limit.
- The maximum file size for a full submission, which includes technical appendices, is 50MB.
- Supplementary material: While all technical appendices should be included as part of the main paper submission PDF, authors may submit up to 100MB of supplementary material, such as data, or source code in a ZIP format. Supplementary material should be material created by the authors that directly supports the submission content. Like submissions, supplementary material must be anonymized. Looking at supplementary material is at the discretion of the reviewers.
- We encourage authors to upload their code and data as part of their supplementary material in order to help reviewers assess the quality of the work. Check the policy as well as code submission guidelines and templates for further details.
- Use of Large Language Models (LLMs): We welcome authors to use any tool that is suitable for preparing high-quality papers and research. However, we ask authors to keep in mind two important criteria. First, we expect papers to fully describe their methodology, and any tool that is important to that methodology, including the use of LLMs, should be described also. For example, authors should mention tools (including LLMs) that were used for data processing or filtering, visualization, facilitating or running experiments, and proving theorems. It may also be advisable to describe the use of LLMs in implementing the method (if this corresponds to an important, original, or non-standard component of the approach). Second, authors are responsible for the entire content of the paper, including all text and figures, so while authors are welcome to use any tool they wish for writing the paper, they must ensure that all text is correct and original.
- Double-blind reviewing: All submissions must be anonymized and may not contain any identifying information that may violate the double-blind reviewing policy. This policy applies to any supplementary or linked material as well, including code. If you are including links to any external material, it is your responsibility to guarantee anonymous browsing. Please do not include acknowledgements at submission time. If you need to cite one of your own papers, you should do so with adequate anonymization to preserve double-blind reviewing. For instance, write “In the previous work of Smith et al. [1]…” rather than “In our previous work [1]...”.
Any papers found to be violating this policy will be rejected.
- Anti-collusion: We do not tolerate any collusion whereby authors secretly cooperate with reviewers, ACs or SACs to obtain favorable reviews.
- Publication of accepted submissions: Reviews, meta-reviews, and any discussion with the authors will be made public for accepted papers (but reviewer, area chair, and senior area chair identities will remain anonymous). Camera-ready papers will be due in advance of the conference. All camera-ready papers must include a funding disclosure. We strongly encourage accompanying code and data to be submitted with accepted papers when appropriate, as per the code submission policy. Authors will be allowed to make minor changes for a short period of time after the conference.
- Posting papers on preprint servers like ArXiv is permitted.
- All submissions must represent original work and not previously published elsewhere.
- Submissions are only accepted in written English.
- All papers must be proofread by the authors before submission.
- This workshop is non-archival; even though all accepted papers will be available on OpenReview, there are no formally-published proceedings.
Contact
If you have any questions about paper submission and the workshop, please send email to: foundationmodelscience@gmail.com.