Sunday afternoon, 18 October 2026 · Spoorwegmuseum, Utrecht, Netherlands
Room: Wachtkamer 3e Klasse
Schedule
12:30–13:30
Lunch
Provided at the venue free of charge
13:30–13:45
Welcome and Introduction
Opening remarks and an overview of the workshop
13:45–14:30
Keynote: From Found to Designed: Concepts as a Design Axis for Large Language Models PDF
Chen Shani
Chen Shani is a Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University, where she leads the CoAI Lab, studying concepts, knowledge, and cognition in AI systems. Her research focuses on understanding what language models represent, how their knowledge is organized, and how these representations can be deliberately shaped. Before joining Tel Aviv University, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and a researcher at Amazon. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
14:30–15:30
Presentation Session 1
Accepted paper presentations and discussion
14:30–14:50
Scan Order Is a Reasoning Prior: Geometry-Aware Multi-Directional Mamba-2 for Tiny Recursive Reasoning PDF
Zhenxuan Yu
14:50–15:10
Reconstructing Locality-Disrupted Text: Effects of Architecture and Scale PDF
Evelien van Driel, Amirhossein Mohammadi, Robert A. Bagheri
15:10–15:30
Cancelled — presenter unable to attend
15:30–15:45
Coffee Break
Refreshments and conversation
15:45–16:45
Presentation Session 2
Accepted paper presentations and discussion
15:45–16:05
Does SAM Pay Off? A Cost-Adjusted Analysis of Sharpness-Aware Pretraining PDF
Ivan Maksimov, Joqsan Azocar, Vasily Konovalov
16:05–16:25
Small Encoder-Decoders as Tool-Calling Backbones: A Capability Decomposition at 270M–1B PDF
Sergey Pletenev
16:25–16:45
Autoregressive vs. Diffusion Language Models for Clinical Text Summarisation PDF
Carlos Alejandro Conde Giron, Zexuan Li, Robert A. Bagheri, Ruurd Jan Anthonius Kuiper
16:45–17:00
Closing Discussion
Reflections, next steps, and goodbye
17:00
Reception @ Academiegebouw
Talk format: Each accepted-paper talk consists of a 15-minute presentation followed by 5 minutes for questions.
Attendee Information
The workshop takes place at the Spoorwegmuseum (The Railway Museum), Maliebaanstation 16, 3581 XW Utrecht. Lunch is provided at the venue free of charge.
Attendance requires INLG 2026 registration. The welcome reception at the Academiegebouw is free with registration.