EnCORE Workshop on Interpretability in Modern AI - Foundations, Methods, and Emerging Directions

📅 Date: Feb 25-27, 2026 · 📍 Location: UC San Diego Campus (See workshop schedule)

Objectitve

The goal of this EnCORE workshop is to bring together researchers working on different aspects of interpretability in modern AI systems to enable Trustworthy AI. We aim to discuss recent advancements, theoretical foundations, and emerging directions across topics such as automated interpretability methods, representation and concept-level analysis, next-generation interpretable model architectures, trustworthiness and limitations of explanations, and new tools for understanding both deep vision models and large language models.

More broadly, the workshop seeks to consider how interpretability supports reliability, safety, and effective human oversight in AI. It will also highlight the growing significance of interpretability for the theoretical computer science and data science communities, where questions related to model structure, guarantees, abstraction, and reasoning have become increasingly central. By bringing these perspectives together, the workshop aims to foster deeper dialogue and shape future research directions in the study of transparent and understandable AI systems.

Workshop Schedule (Tentative)

📍 Note that the workshop location will change on Day 3:

Day 1 & 2 location: Atkinson Hall’s 4F EnCORE Room
Day 3 location: Jacobs Hall’s 1F Qualcomm Conference Center, Map

Day 1 — Wednesday, Feb 25 (Atkinson Hall)

Time	Session
8:00 – 8:45	🥐 Breakfast
8:45 – 9:00	Opening Remark — Rajesh Gupta (Dean of School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences)
9:00 – 9:30	Overview — Lily Weng (UCSD)
9:30 – 10:15	Keynote 1 — Mikhail Belkin (UCSD)
10:15 – 11:45	Invited Talks — Tuomas Oikarinen (UCSD), Lesia Semenova (Rutgers), Laura Ruis (MIT)
12:00 – 2:00	🍽️ Lunch
2:00 – 2:45	Keynote 2 — Yan Liu (USC)
2:45 – 4:15	Invited Talks — Vatsal Sharan (USC), Freda Shi (U Waterloo), Leilani Gilpin (UCSC)
4:30 – 6:00	🥂 Welcome Reception

Day 2 — Thursday, Feb 26 (Atkinson Hall)

Time	Session
8:15 – 9:00	🥐 Breakfast
9:00 – 9:45	Keynote 1 — Cho-Jui Hsieh (UCLA)
9:45 – 11:45	Invited Talks — Jeremias Sulam (JHU), Eric Enouen (Cornell), Ge Yan (UCSD), Josh Engels (DeepMind)
12:00 – 2:00	🍽️ Lunch
2:00 – 2:45	Keynote 2 — Sameer Singh (UCI)
2:45 – 3:30	Keynote 3 — Arvind Satyanarayan (MIT)
3:30 – 4:30	Student Poster Lightning Talks
4:30 – 6:00	📌 Poster Reception

Day 3 — Friday, Feb 27 (Qualcomm Conference)

Time	Session
8:15 – 9:00	🥐 Breakfast
9:00 – 9:45	Keynote 1 — Kai-Wei Chang (UCLA)
9:45 – 10:30	Keynote 2 — Kate Saenko (Boston U / Meta)
10:30 – 12:30	Invited Talks — Robin Jia (USC), Deepti Ghadiyaram (Boston U), Emanuel Moss (Intel AI), Chung-En Sun (UCSD)
12:30 – 2:00	🍽️ Lunch
2:00 – 2:45	Keynote 3 — Judy Hoffman (UCI)
2:45 – 4:45	Invited Talks — Akshay Kulkarni (UCSD), Jiaxin Zhang (Salesforce AI), Ali Arsanjani (Google), Tz-Ying Wu (Intel AI)
4:45 – 4:50	🎤 Concluding Remark