Workshop on the Elements of Reasoning:
Objects, Structure, and Causality (OSC)

Call for Papers We are sourcing short, four-page papers focusing on discrete abstractions such as objects, concepts, and events and the causal structure that relates them. Specific topics of interest include:

• Benchmarks that quantify the benefits of structured representations (e.g. systematic generalization, OOD performance, robustness wrt. interventions, etc.)
• Methods for discovering / extracting abstract entities from raw data, especially self-supervised learning of structured representations
• Integrating ideas from causality into neural network architectures
• Applying tools from deep learning to more traditional causal discovery approaches, which may sacrifice recovery guarantees
• Structure Inference (relations, interactions, compositions, etc.) especially between unobserved variables
• Reasoning tasks, interventional and counterfactual questions
• Theoretical work on the challenges of learning abstractions and invariances from data
• Discovering or leveraging objects, concepts or causal structures for reinforcement learning (e.g. for exploration or model-learning)
• Integration of neural networks and symbolic or probabilistic reasoning (e.g. neurosymbolic methods or probabilistic programming)
• Applications of objects, structured representations, or causal reasoning (e.g. in computer vision, audio processing, robotics)

Submission Policy:

• We encourage 4 page submissions but are enforcing a hard maximum of 5, plus any number of pages for references and supplementary material. We ask authors to use the supplementary material only for minor details that do not fit in the main paper. We reserve the right to desk reject papers that strongly violate this format (e.g. more than 5 pages main content before references)
• Submissions should be fully anonymized for double-blind review.
• Papers should use this style file.
• Dual submission policy: submissions cannot have appeared at previous conferences or at ICLR 2022.
• Accepted submissions will appear on the workshop website (non-archival).

Important Dates and Links