AIAS 2026
The 3rd Workshop on Lifelong Agents:
Learning, Aligning, and Evolving

Registration Link Submit via OpenReview (Coming Soon)

November 7th, 2026
San Francisco, USA

About The Workshop

Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase: from one-shot assistants to persistent agents that remember, act, and adapt across extended interactions. Recent work increasingly studies agents as stateful systems with memory, planning, tool use, and environment interaction, rather than static models evaluated only on short-horizon benchmarks. This shift makes the central challenge more concrete: how can agents continuously improve while remaining reliable, efficient, and aligned over time?

The notion of a lifelong agent offers a natural lens for this challenge. A lifelong agent should not only acquire new knowledge and skills, but also manage memory, personalize safely, interact with evolving tool ecosystems, and withstand long-term deployment without drift or brittle failures. This workshop brings these emerging directions under a unified agenda centered on agents that learn, align, and evolve throughout their lifespan.

As the second edition of the Lifelong Agents workshop, this event builds on the strong community interest from the first edition while moving the conversation toward next-stage questions: how learning changes alignment, how new tools alter reliability, how personalization affects oversight, and how persistent deployment demands new forms of evaluation and governance. By bringing together language agents, reinforcement learning, multimodal and embodied systems, human-AI interaction, evaluation, and AI safety, we aim to shape a coherent roadmap for agents that can be built responsibly and studied rigorously under real-world conditions.



Topics

Our topics include but are not limited to:

(1) Persistent Memory and Personalization:

Long-term memory, preference modeling, memory governance, and adaptive personalization for agents operating across sessions.

(2) Continual Adaptation of Agentic LLMs:

Continual post-training, online adaptation, domain shift handling, and mechanisms for balancing plasticity and retention in deployed agents.

(3) Computer-Use and Web Agents:

Agents that browse, operate interfaces, and learn from interaction in realistic digital environments, including structured exploration and long-horizon execution.

(4) Protocols, Tools, and Interoperability:

Protocol-based tool use, modular skill composition, delegation, and security challenges arising from interoperable agent ecosystems.

(5) Dynamic Alignment and Auditing:

Evolving preferences, alignment drift, continual oversight, red-teaming, and agentic auditing methods for persistent systems.

(6) Reliability, Observability, and Evaluation:

Interactive benchmarks, execution traces, reproducibility, observability, and metrics for long-horizon reliability, recovery, and robustness.

(7) Multi-Agent Lifelong Systems:

Coordination, delegation, specialization, and collective adaptation in persistent multi-agent environments.

(8) Efficient and Sustainable Lifelong Agents:

Resource-aware adaptation, efficient memory and retrieval, latency-cost tradeoffs, and sustainable deployment under real-world constraints.



Call For Papers

The Workshop on Lifelong Agent @ AIAS 2026 invites submissions on the development of lifelong agents that can continuously learn, maintain stable alignment, and sustainably evolve over extended deployment. We welcome novel architectures, algorithms, theoretical analyses, empirical studies, benchmarks, and real-world applications spanning topics such as agent post-training, agentic RL, user-agent alignment, self-evolving agents, embodied lifelong agents, and agents for science. Submissions must present original, unpublished research.

Key Dates

  • Submission Date for Workshop Contributions: August 31st, 2026, AoE (subject to adjustment)
  • Accept/Reject Notification Date: September 30th, 2026, AoE (subject to adjustment)
  • Workshop Date: November 7, 2026, AoE
Deadlines are strict and will not be extended under any circumstances. All deadlines follow the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) timezone.

Submission Site

Submissions will be managed via OpenReview. Papers will remain private during the review process. All authors must maintain up-to-date OpenReview profiles to ensure proper conflict-of-interest management and paper matching. Incomplete profiles may result in desk rejection. Learn how to create an OpenReview profile here.

Submit papers through the AIAS 2026 Workshop Submission Portal on OpenReview (Coming Soon) (Lifelong Agent Workshop Submission Portal).

Scope

We welcome contributions across a broad spectrum of topics related to our themes. Accepted papers will be presented as posters, with a subset selected for oral presentations. The workshop will take place in person at AIAS 2026, with virtual participation options to be confirmed.

Submission Guidelines

Formatting Requirements
Submissions must be in English and follow the EasyChair style LaTeX Template to be consistent with the main conference submissions.

Papers must be submitted as a single PDF file:
  • Long Papers: at most 9 pages (main text)
  • Short Papers: at most 5 pages (main text)
  • References and appendices are not included in the page limit, but the main text must be self-contained. Reviewers are not required to read beyond the main text.

Submissions exceeding the page limit will be desk rejected.

Anonymity
The workshop follows a double-blind review process. Submissions must be anonymized by removing author names, affiliations, and acknowledgments. Prior work should be cited in the third person. Identifying information, including in supplementary materials, must be omitted.

Dual Submission and Non-Archival Policy

ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, ACL, and EMNLP submissions are all welcome to submit to our workshop. You can submit your work if it's currently under review at other venues. The workshop is not archival.



Speakers and Panelists

Invited speakers and panelists from the proposal (Coming Soon)

Schedule

Tentative full-day hybrid workshop schedule. All talks include a Q&A session.

Time (PDT) Session Speaker
10:10 – 10:30 Morning Session Opening Remarks Organizers
10:30 – 11:00 Invited Talk 1 Coming Soon
11:00 – 11:30 Invited Talk 2 Coming Soon
11:30 – 12:00 Invited Talk 3 Coming Soon
12:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break and Poster Session TBA
14:00 – 14:10 Afternoon Session Opening Remarks Organizers
14:10 – 15:00 Oral Presentation and Award Ceremony TBA
15:00 – 15:30 Invited Talk 4 Coming Soon


Organizers

This workshop is organized by

Cheng Qian
Cheng Qian

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Emre Can Acikgoz
Emre Can Acikgoz

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Hongru Wang
Hongru Wang

University of Edinburgh

Xiusi Chen
Xiusi Chen

Chinese University of Hong Kong



Advisory Board

This workshop is advised by

Heng Ji
Heng Ji

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign / Amazon Scholar

Dilek Hakkani-Tür
Dilek Hakkani-Tür

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Gokhan Tur
Gokhan Tur

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign / Amazon Scholar





Sponsor