Alternative Architectures and Paradigms on AAP 2026 — Alternative Architectures and Paradigms

Call for Papers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

In the past few years, autoregressive transformers have been the dominant method in Natural Language Generation (NLG). While scaling these models has brought astounding results, this approach relies on a single core method (neural networks), a single generative paradigm (sequential next-token prediction), and a single architecture (the transformer decoder). This layout comes with significant limitations: quadratic computational cost, hallucinations, and a lack of learning during inference time, just to name a few. Furthermore, relying on scaling alone becomes more difficult high-quality training data is becoming scarce and compute more expensive.

Organizers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This workshop is organised by members of the NLP@Utrecht community, a research group spanning Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht. The group works at the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, and real-world applications — combining expertise in language model evaluation, explainable AI, and clinical NLP. AAP 2026 grows directly out of this shared interest in broadening the architectural foundations of language generation.

Robert Bagheri — Utrecht University

Robert A. Bagheri is an Associate Professor of NLP, Machine Learning, and Interpretability at Utrecht University, where he leads the Natural Language and Text Processing lab. His research centres on explainable AI for NLP and the evaluation and application of language models in societal contexts, while actively driving interdisciplinary collaboration through initiatives such as the Utrecht NLP Hub. He holds multiple leadership roles across Utrecht University and the EWUU alliance, contributing to AI strategy, interdisciplinary research, and early-career researcher development.

Program

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

18 October 2026, Utrecht, Netherlands (TBC)

The full program will be announced after the paper acceptance notification (1 September 2026). The schedule below shows the planned structure.

Schedule

Time	Session
09:00–09:15	Opening — Coffee and welcome
09:15–09:30	Introduction — Overview of the AAP workshop
09:30–10:15	Keynote / Oral Session 1 — Invited talk and presentations
10:15–10:30	Coffee Break — Poster viewing
10:30–11:30	Oral Session 2 — 3 oral presentations
11:30–11:45	Coffee Break — Poster viewing
11:45–12:30	Poster Session

Keynote Speaker

To be announced.