Extended abstracts
Submissions presenting concise research insights or preliminary results.
Machine Learning/CORE Unranked
LIGHT 2026
Neurips 2026 Workshop - LIGHT: Deployable Small Foundation Models
LIGHT 2026 is a NeurIPS workshop focused on advancing lightweight, trustworthy, and energy-efficient foundation models for real-world deployment in industrial and regulated environments. It bridges research in model compression, distillation, and trustworthy AI to enable compact systems that are explainable, robust, and sustainable.
Paper fit
Contribution paths
A strong submission should clearly identify its contribution and evaluate it appropriately.
Position papers
Submissions offering conceptual or visionary perspectives on lightweight trustworthy AI.
System demonstrations
Submissions showcasing implemented systems or tools for compact AI.
Industrial deployment reports
Submissions detailing real-world deployment experiences of compact models.
Reproducibility contributions
Submissions focused on enabling replication of results in lightweight AI.
Benchmark contributions
Submissions proposing new evaluation benchmarks for compact and trustworthy models.
Research areas in scope
01
Topics of Interest
Distillation of foundation-model capabilities into compact modelsSmall language models and compact multimodal systemsTrustworthiness-by-design through model compressionNeuro-symbolic extensions for compact foundation modelsExplainability, reasoning and verification in small modelsRobustness and safety of compressed AI systemsRuntime guarantees for deployable AIEfficient adaptation beyond fine-tuningEdge and resource-constrained deploymentSustainable AI through compact architecturesBenchmarks and evaluation methodologiesIndustrial deployment of compact and trustworthy AI
Policies worth checking twice
- All submissions must be handled through OpenReview.
- Each submission will receive at least three reviews from the Program Committee.
- Submissions must use the official NeurIPS 2026 author template (LaTeX or Word).
- Long papers may contain up to 9 pages of content; short papers up to 4 pages (references and appendices excluded).
- LIGHT is a non-archival workshop — accepted submissions are not published in archival proceedings.
- Authors may submit work to other conferences or journals after LIGHT.
- Outstanding papers may be invited to submit extended versions to a Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, subject to standard journal peer review.
Official sources
Compiled from the official call for papers. The organizers’ pages remain authoritative.
Last verified September 9, 2026