About

Reasoning is rapidly moving beyond text-only benchmarks into multimodal, spatial, and embodied settings, where models must interpret long contexts, reason over visual scenes, plan actions, use tools, and interact with dynamic environments. This shift is especially visible in code agents, scientific assistants, embodied systems, and multimodal decision-making pipelines, where strong reasoning quality must now coexist with tight constraints on latency, memory, throughput, and serving cost. At the same time, many of the strongest gains in reasoning still come from more test-time compute, longer trajectories, or deeper search, which makes deployment substantially harder. The central question is therefore no longer only how to make models reason better, but how to make them reason efficiently, robustly, and at scale in the wild.

Building on the success of the 1st Workshop on Efficient Reasoning at NeurIPS 2025 (1,000+ attendees, 275 submissions), this second edition at COLM 2026 will bring together researchers and practitioners working across data, algorithms, systems, and real-world applications to tackle the challenges of making reasoning practical under real-world constraints.

Research Directions

Datasets & Evaluation

Curating data and benchmarks for long-context reasoning, symbolic planning, spatial reasoning, embodied reasoning, multimodal reasoning, and other challenging settings under resource constraints.

Algorithms

Efficient supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, distillation, pruning, compression, progressive generation, and search-based reasoning that improve efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, faithfulness, or robustness.

Systems

Efficient RL training stacks, long-context and multimodal inference engines, KV-cache and memory management, quantized execution, and other systems advances that make reasoning practical on limited hardware.

Safety

Adversarial robustness of efficient reasoning pipelines, including backdoor attacks on compressed or distilled reasoning traces, and alignment degradation under pruning and quantization.

Applications

Deploying reasoning models in domains such as healthcare, embodied agents, autonomous driving, scientific discovery, and other safety-critical settings where latency and cost matter.

Call for Papers

The 2nd Workshop on Efficient Reasoning at COLM 2026 invites submissions from researchers working on making reasoning models faster, cheaper, and more efficient. We welcome contributions across data, algorithms, systems, safety, and applications, as well as interdisciplinary perspectives from the natural and social sciences.

Scope

We welcome contributions across a broad spectrum of topics, including but not limited to:

Pipelines for creating high-quality training data with resource constraints or deployment environments
Benchmark methodologies for assessing the efficiency and efficacy of reasoning models in real-world settings
Innovations in techniques for training reasoning models with a better trade-off between efficiency and performance
Approaches for accelerating inference through the design of algorithms and systems
Advancements in multimodal, spatial, and embodied reasoning under efficiency constraints
Theoretical analysis of the time and space complexity of reasoning models
Empirical investigations into the practical efficiency (latency, throughput, memory) of reasoning models
Efficient large-scale RL training systems and on-device inference engines
KV-cache compression and memory management for long-context reasoning
Safety and robustness of efficient reasoning pipelines
In-depth discussions exploring efficient deployments and applications of reasoning models

Submission Guidelines

Format: All submissions must be a single PDF file in the COLM submission format, with 4–10 pages of main text (references excluded). The main text must be self-contained. Reviewers are not required to read beyond the main text.

Submission Site: Submit papers through OpenReview.

Dual-submission and non-archival policy: We welcome ongoing and unpublished work. We will also accept papers that are under review at the time of submission, or that have been recently accepted, provided they do not breach any dual-submission or anonymity policies of those venues. The workshop is a non-archival venue and will not have official proceedings.

Double-blind reviewing: All submissions must be anonymized and may not contain any identifying information that may violate the double-blind reviewing policy. This policy applies to any supplementary or linked material as well, including code.

Contact: For any questions, please contact us at er.colm2026@gmail.com

Tentative Schedule

Full-day program with eight invited talks, three contributed talks, two poster sessions, and one panel discussion. Detailed schedule will be announced closer to the workshop date.

Morning Session

08:45 - 09:00	Opening Remarks
09:00 - 09:30	Invited Talk 1
09:30 - 10:00	Invited Talk 2
10:00 - 10:30	Morning Break
10:30 - 11:00	Invited Talk 3
11:00 - 11:30	Invited Talk 4
11:30 - 12:00	Contributed Talks
12:00 - 13:30	Lunch Break & Poster Session 1

Afternoon Session

13:30 - 14:00	Invited Talk 5
14:00 - 14:30	Invited Talk 6
14:30 - 15:00	Contributed Talks
15:00 - 15:30	Afternoon Break
15:30 - 16:00	Invited Talk 7
16:00 - 16:30	Invited Talk 8
16:30 - 17:15	Panel Discussion
17:15 - 18:00	Poster Session 2

Submission Deadline	July 12, 2026 (AoE)
Notification of Acceptance	July 24, 2026 (AoE)
Camera-ready Deadline	TBD
Workshop Day	October 9, 2026

News

About

Research Directions

Call for Papers

Scope

Submission Guidelines

Key Dates

Tentative Schedule

Morning Session

Afternoon Session

Confirmed Invited Speakers

Arman Cohan

Junjie Hu

Heng Ji

Sewon Min

Niklas Muennighoff

Yuandong Tian

Jiajun Wu

Workshop Organizers

Zefan Cai

Cheng Luo

Yijiang Li

Weijia Shi

Songlin Yang

Jiawei Zhao

Zhen Dong

Haozheng Luo

Manling Li

Zhijian Liu

Beidi Chen

Jiahao Yu

Rui-jie Zhu

Xinnan Dai

Previous Editions

1st Workshop on Efficient Reasoning @ NeurIPS 2025

1st Workshop on Efficient Spatial Reasoning @ ICLR 2026