QR 2025: 38th International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning at IJCAI 2025

Call for Papers

The Qualitative Reasoning (QR) community develops qualitative representations and reasoning algorithms to understand the world from incomplete, imprecise, or uncertain data. Our qualitative models span natural systems (e.g., physics, biology, ecology, geology), social systems (e.g., economics, cultural decision-making), cognitive systems (e.g., conceptual learning, spatial reasoning, intelligent tutors, robotics), and more.

The International Workshop on QR provides a forum for researchers from multiple perspectives to share research progress toward these goals. The workshop will be held at IJCAI 2025, Montreal.

The QR community includes researchers in Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, Cognitive Science, Applied Mathematics, and Natural Sciences, commonly seeking to understand, develop, and exploit the ability to reason qualitatively. This broadly includes:

• Developing new formalisms and algorithms for qualitative reasoning
• Building and evaluating predictive, prescriptive, diagnostic, or explanatory qualitative models in novel domains.
• Characterizing how humans learn and reason qualitatively about the (physical) world with incomplete knowledge
• Developing novel, formal representations to describe central aspects of our world: time, space, change, uncertainty, causality, and continuity

Topics of interest include:

• Qualitative modeling in physical, biological and social sciences, and in engineering.
• QR to capture common sense reasoning.
• Methods that integrate QR with other forms of knowledge representation, including quantitative methods.
• Integration of QR and machine learning, for example learning qualitative representations or improve machine learning by means of QR.
• Using QR for diagnosis, design, and monitoring of physical systems.
• Applications of QR, including education, science, and engineering.
• Cognitive models of QR, including the use of existing QR formalisms for cognitive modeling and results from other areas of cognitive science for qualitative reasoning.
• Using QR in understanding language, decision-making, sketches, images, and other kinds of signals and data sources.
• Formalization, axiomatization, and mathematical foundations of QR.

Submission

Submissions are handled via chairingtool. We invite submissions of the following types:

• technical papers (full paper/short paper)
• summary papers (short paper)
• application or demo papers.

Technical papers present novel ideas regarding representation and reasoning, and position this result in the context of known QR theory. For research-in-progress and late-breaking brilliant ideas, submission of short papers are welcome. We particularly encourage young researchers to submit. We also invite authors who recently published results of interest to the QR community to submit a short summary paper which highlights the results and explains relevance to QR.

Application contributions present the use and evaluation of software implementing QR theory in real world applications. Evaluations can range from technology oriented (e.g. address software functioning in operational contexts) to human oriented (e.g. address usability or stakeholders and market related issues).

Demos focus on (novel) implementations of QR theory in software. They can be ‘proof of concepts’, but also mature products. Contributions typically address the ‘extras’ needed to realize the implementation.

Submission Guidelines:

Submissions must not exceed 7 pages for full papers (plus one for references), respectively 3 pages for short papers (plus one for references). Papers should be formatted according to the IJCAI guidelines, available from https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit, and must be in PDF format.

All submissions will be evaluated in a peer review process and selected according to their quality, significance, originality, and potential to generate discussion. Each contribution will be reviewed by at least two referees from the QR 2025 Program Committee. Papers may be accepted for either oral or poster presentation.

Accepted papers will be published as a collection of working papers. As QR 2025 is a workshop, not a conference, submission of the same paper to conferences (e.g. AAAI, ECAI, or IJCAI) or journals is acceptable, but must be indicated. To accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, authors of accepted papers can ask that only a one-page abstract of their paper appear in the proceedings. The workshop is also open to people who would like to attend without submitting a paper.

Organizers:

• Kenneth D. Forbus, Northwestern University, forbus@northwestern.edu
• Marco Kragten, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, m.kragten@hva.nl
• Moritz Bayerkuhnlein, University of Lübeck, moritz.bayerkuhnlein@uni-luebeck.de