Call for Papers

The NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Medical Reasoning with Vision Language Foundation Models (Med-Reasoner) invites submissions of original research papers exploring the development, application, and evaluation of reasoning capabilities in vision-language foundation models for medical imaging and clinical decision-making. Both accepted long papers and short papers are non-archival and will be presented at the workshop without appearing in any proceedings.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Reasoning Architectures for Medical Vision-Language Models

• Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Medical Diagnosis
• Interpretable and Explainable Decision-Making in Medical AI
• Multimodal Reasoning Across Imaging, Clinical Notes, and Pathology
• Probabilistic Reasoning Frameworks for Clinical Decisions
• Grounding Visual Features in Clinical Knowledge

Evaluation and Benchmarking

• Evaluation Frameworks for Reasoning Quality Assessment
• Metrics for Clinical Reasoning Validation
• Benchmarks for Diagnostic Reasoning in Medical Imaging
• Human-AI Collaboration and Clinical Validation Studies

Foundation Models for Medical Applications

• Vision-Language Models for Radiology, Pathology, and Clinical Imaging
• Multimodal Medical Foundation Models
• Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Reasoning in Medical Contexts
• Retrieval-Augmented Medical Reasoning Systems

Clinical Deployment and Safety

• Bias Detection and Fairness Across Patient Populations
• Privacy-Preserving Reasoning Systems
• Workflow Integration in Healthcare Settings
• Hallucination Detection and Mitigation in Medical Explanations

Emerging Topics

• Large Language Models for Clinical Reasoning
• Agent-Based Medical AI Systems
• Interpretability and Transparency in Medical Foundation Models
• Ethical Aspects of Reasoning-Based Medical AI

Submission Guidelines

Paper Formatting

Papers are limited to eight pages for long papers and four pages for short papers, including figures and tables, in the NeurIPS 2026 style. Additional pages containing only cited references are allowed. Please use the official NeurIPS 2026 Submission Template for detailed formatting instructions.

Papers that are not properly anonymized, or do not use the template, or exceed the page limits (excluding references) will be rejected without review.

Submission and Review Process

The review process is double-blind. We will be using OpenReview to manage submissions. Similar to the review process for the NeurIPS 2026 conference, submissions under review will be visible only to their assigned members of the program committee. The reviews and author responses will never be made public, and we will not be soliciting comments from the general public during the reviewing process.

Anyone who plans to submit a paper as an author or a co-author will need to create (or update) their OpenReview profile by the paper submission deadline. We recommend you use institution emails to register your account on OpenReview, as non-institution emails can take up to two weeks to register. By submitting a paper to this workshop, the authors agree to the review process and understand that papers are processed by the OpenReview system to match each manuscript to the best possible area chairs and reviewers.

Ethics and Data Governance

All submissions must disclose dataset licensing and governance protocols, including the use of any synthetic data. Submissions should ensure that datasets and demonstrations do not include protected health information and respect all consent and sharing regulations.

Submission Process

All submissions should be made through the workshop's OpenReview portal:

Submit on OpenReview

📅 Important Dates