About
Semantic understanding of the world is essential for robots to make safe and informed decisions, to adapt to changing environmental conditions, and to enable efficient interactions with other agents. In pursuit of semantic understanding, agents must be able to (i) interpret and represent high-level goals, agnostic of their physical morphology and despite irrelevant aspects of their environments; they must be able to (ii) reason, i.e., to extract abstract concepts from observations in the real-world, logically manipulate these concepts, then leverage the results for inference on downstream tasks; and they must be able to (iii) execute morphology-, environment-, and socially-appropriate behaviors towards those high-level goals.

Despite substantial recent advancements in the use of pre-trained, large-capacity models (i.e., foundation models) for difficult robotics problems, methods still struggle in the face of several practical challenges that relate to real-world deployment, e.g., cross-domain generalization, adaptation to dynamic and human-shared environments, and lifelong operation in open-world contexts. This workshop intends to sponsor discussion of new hybrid methodologies—those that combine representations from foundation models with modeling mechanisms that may prove useful for semantic reasoning and abstract goal understanding, including neural memory mechanisms, procedural modules (e.g., cognitive architectures), neuro-symbolic representations (e.g., knowledge/scene graph embeddings), chain-of-thought reasoning mechanisms, robot skill primitives and their composition, 3D scene representations (e.g., 3DGS), etc.

Intended audience. We aim to bring together engineers, researchers, and practitioners from different communities to enable avenues for interdisciplinary research on methods that could facilitate the deployment of semantics-aware and generalizable embodied agents in unstructured and dynamic real world environments. In addition to the organizers, the presenters, panelists, and technical program committee are drawn from the following communities: Robot Learning, Embodied AI, Planning + Controls, Cognitive Robotics, Neuro-Symbolism, Natural Language Processing, Multimodal Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Digital Twins. We likewise intend to attract an audience from these diverse sub-communities to contribute to compelling discussions.

Speakers and Panelists

Schedule

Time
07:55		Organizers Introductory Remarks
08:00		Keynote 1: Jean Oh Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
08:20		Keynote 2: Georgia Chalvatzaki Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
08:40		Keynote 3: Abhishek Gupta Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
09:00		Oral Talks
09:20		Coffee Break (+ Poster Session) Abstract Abstract TBD
10:00		Keynote 4: Ranjay Krishna Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
10:20		Keynote 5: Andreea Bobu Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
10:40		Keynote 6: Animesh Garg Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
11:00		Debate (all speakers) - What semantics *must* the data capture for efficient robot learning, and how important is direct human input in generating and curating that data?
12:00		Organizers Closing Remarks

Call for Papers

Targeted Topics

In addition to the RSS subject areas, we especially invite paper submissions on various topics, including (but not limited to):

• Neural architectures leveraging demonstrations as prompts
• Goal understanding through few-shot demonstrations
• Novel abstractions, representations, and mechanisms for few-shot learning
• Retrieval-augmentation mechanisms used in learning and task-execution
• Agentic frameworks for failure reasoning, self-guidance, test-time adaptation, etc.
• LLM-based action models for robot control; large action models
• Semantic representations for generalizable policy learning
• World models used for reasoning and optimization

Submission Guidelines

RSS SemRob 2025 suggests 4+N or 8+N paper length formats — i.e., 4 or 8 pages of main content with unlimited additional pages for references, appendices, etc. However, like RSS 2025, we impose no strict page length requirements on submissions; we trust that authors will recognize that respecting reviewers’ time is helpful to the evaluation of their work.

Submissions are handled through CMT: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/SEMROB2026

(Required acknowledgement: the Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.)

We will accept the official LaTeX or Word paper templates, provided by RSS 2025.

Our review process will be double-blind, following the RSS paper submission policy for Science/Systems papers.

All accepted papers will be invited for poster presentations; the highest-rated papers, according to the Technical Program Committee, will be given spotlight presentations. Accepted papers will be made available online on this workshop website as non-archival reports, allowing authors to also submit their works to future conferences or journals. We will highlight the Best Paper Award during the closing remarks at the workshop event.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: TBD, 23:59 AOE.
• Author Notifications: TBD.
• Camera Ready: TBD.
• Workshop: 13 July 2026, 08:00-12:00 AET.

Organizers