About
Following the workshops held at Dagstuhl in 2024 and MBZUAI in 2025, the third workshop on Rethinking the Role of Bayesianism in the Age of Modern AI will take place in Edinburgh in October 2026. This workshop will concurrently serve as the inaugural meeting of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis section on Bayesian AI. The gathering will bring together researchers exploring the frontiers of Bayesian machine learning and deep learning in a collaborative atmosphere.
As the scale of this workshop grows, we aim to maintain the diversity of opinions and approaches that have characterised the previous events. Postgraduate students and early career researchers are especially encouraged to participate in this unique opportunity to engage with leaders in the field and discover future research directions.
Purpose
Despite the recent success of AI systems using large-scale deep learning, these systems still fall short in terms of their reliability and trustworthiness. They often lack the ability to estimate their own uncertainty in a calibrated way, encode meaningful prior knowledge, avoid catastrophic failures, and reason about their environments to avoid such failures.
Bayesian deep learning has harboured the promise of achieving these desiderata by combining the statistical foundations of Bayesian inference with the practically successful engineering solutions of deep learning methods. However, compared to its promise, BDL methods often do not live up to expectations in terms of real-world impact.
This workshop aims to rethink and redefine the promises and challenges of Bayesian approaches, elucidate which Bayesian methods might prevail against their non-Bayesian competitors, and identify key application areas where Bayes can shine. The event is planned to promote discussion in a collaborative atmosphere and encourage deep exchange, new ideas, and informal collaboration across intersecting areas of research.
Organising committee
University of Edinburgh Sara Wade
University of Edinburgh Vincent Fortuin
TU Nuremberg
Helmholtz AI Konstantina Palla
Spotify Research Theodore Papamarkou
PolyShape
NTU Athens
Registration
Registration link coming soon.
Fees
The generosity of our sponsors allows us to reduce registration fees. Surplus income will be used to provide financial support for participants and to fund the organisation of future Bayesian AI events.
Registration fees are reduced for students and for members of the ISBA Bayesian AI section. It is possible to register as a section member by purchasing or renewing a membership in ISBA.
| Student | Non-student | |
|---|---|---|
| Section member | £100 | £250 |
| Non-section member | £150 | £300 |
Programme
The scientific programme will consist of invited talks, open discussions, interactive breakout sessions, poster sessions for junior participants, and lightning talks.
Topics
The workshop will cover a broad range of topics at the interaction of Bayesian methods and modern AI, including:
- AI-scale probabilistic reasoning (advances in inference that allow scaling to foundation models);
- mathematical underpinnings of generative models (generative modelling in Bayesian AI, deep learning theory in applications to Bayesian methods);
- structure-constrained and -informed AI (incorporation of symbolic constraints, structure, and physical priors);
- probabilistic and uncertainty-aware methods (model selection and evaluation, uncertainty quantification, applications in trustworthy and green AI);
- dynamical systems in probabilistic ML (dynamic process representations, limiting behaviour of Bayesian deep learning models, dynamics-based / diffusion generative modelling);
- robustness and adaptation (Bayesian methods for domain adaptation, continual learning, robustness to distribution shift and adversarial attacks);
- applications and practical considerations.
Schedule
Detailed programme to be announced.
Confirmed participants
TBA.
Local and travel information
Events will be held at the Informatics Forum (10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB). The Forum is located on the University of Edinburgh's central campus, adjacent to the historic Old Town and a 15-minute walk from Waverley railway station.
Daily lunch and twice-daily coffee/snacks will be provided. A light social programme is planned, including an opening reception, conference dinner, and local sightseeing activities (details TBA).
Travel, accommodation, and caring support
We plan to offer limited travel and accommodation support, with priority given to junior participants and those from underrepresented groups. Support for caring costs is also available thanks to a grant from the Heilbronn Institute.
If you would like to be considered, or if your participation is contingent upon receiving such support, please indicate this in the registration form.
Contact
For questions to the organisers, please contact Nikolay Malkin <nmalkin [at] ed.ac.uk>.
Sponsors
