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 foundation 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.

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 foundation and generative models, concept discovery, interactive and adaptive explanations, and evaluation of XAI in real-world deployments.

Timeline

Proceedings Track

  • Submission Deadline: March 6, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)
  • Notification to Authors (Accept as Spotlight, Poster, or Reject): April 3, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)
  • Camera Ready Deadline: April 11, 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): April 3, 2026 (Anywhere on Earth)
  • Rolling Submissions and Notifications (Accept as Poster or Reject): Until April 11, 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 Microsoft CMT service (Coming soon).

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.

Schedule

TBA


Invited Speakers

TBA


Organizers

Miguel-Ángel Fernández-Torres

Miguel-Ángel Fernández-Torres

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Yuhui Zhang

Yuhui Zhang

Stanford University

Jon Donnelly

Jon Donnelly

Duke University

Maximilian Dreyer

Maximilian Dreyer

Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute

Marina L. Gavrilova

Marina L. Gavrilova

University of Calgary

Dahye Kim

Dahye Kim

Boston University

Indu Panigrahi

Indu Panigrahi

Princeton University

Sukrut Rao

Sukrut Rao

Max Planck Institute for Informatics

Avinab Saha

Avinab Saha

UT Austin, Google Research

Lenka Tětková

Lenka Tětková

Technical University of Denmark


Program Committee

TBA