What We're Looking For
We invite submissions on machine learning methods for spatially resolved, high-dimensional biology, including but not limited to:
- Learning biologically meaningful spatial representations that hold across scales, from molecules to niches to organs
- Integrating transcriptomic, proteomic, imaging, and clinical modalities into a single coherent model
- Modeling cell-cell communication and tissue dynamics over time
- Building interpretable and uncertainty-aware spatial models that biologists can trust
- Designing benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation standards specific to spatial tasks
- Developing novel ML and foundation models for spatial biology by integrating prior biological knowledge and inductive biases to improve interpretability and generalization across platforms, tissues, and species
- Handling data sparsity, noise, batch effects, and limited annotations
- Scaling learning to atlas-scale and whole-slide datasets
Submission Format
We invite extended abstracts of up to 4 pages (excluding references and an optional appendix), prepared using the NeurIPS 2026 style file. Submissions are non-archival, so authors are free to submit related or extended work concurrently to other venues.
Review is double-blind: submissions must be anonymized, with no author names or identifying affiliations. Each submission receives three reviews from a program committee drawn from both the ML and biology communities.
Papers must be formatted using the official NeurIPS 2026 LaTeX style file (neurips_2026.tex / .sty), available from the NeurIPS 2026 Call for Papers page on neurips.cc and mirrored as an Overleaf template. Use the style file's anonymous submission option (no author names or affiliations in the compiled PDF).
Key Dates
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Submission portal opens | August 2026 |
| Submission deadline | August 29, 2026 (AoE) |
| Acceptance notifications | September 29, 2026 (AoE) |
How to Submit
All submissions will be handled through OpenReview, ensuring transparent review and enabling accepted papers to be listed on the NeurIPS workshop schedule.
Submit on OpenReview →Contributed Spotlights
A contributed spotlight track will give early-career researchers visibility during the workshop, with slots explicitly reserved for early-career authors as part of our diversity and inclusion commitments.
Program Committee
To be announced. The program committee will be finalized and, if necessary, expanded based on the number of submissions received. No organizer will review submissions from their own institution or direct collaborators; conflict-of-interest cases will be handled by a non-conflicted organizer following NeurIPS guidelines.
Questions?
Email us at ml4spatialbio.workshop@gmail.com, or contact the organizers: Stefan Bonn, Robin Khatri, Lucia Testa, Behnam Yousefi.