Call for Submissions
We invite submissions of papers in two categories:
- Full research papers: these papers describe empirical or theoretical research results, e.g., based on a controlled experiment, questionnaire survey, case study, or mathematical modeling, or introduce a novel design contribution, e.g., a conceptual framework or tool-supported approach. Design contributions presented in full research papers must be appropriately evaluated. Secondary studies, replication studies, and negative results are also welcome. A full research paper is up to 10 pages, plus a maximum of 2 pages for references.
- Short papers: these papers do not describe full empirical studies but should be seen as research-oriented position or new idea papers that are worth discussing with the community. For example, a short paper might identify and describe important challenges or present visionary new solution ideas (no evaluation required). Preliminary research results are also appropriate for a short paper. A short paper is up to 5 pages, plus a maximum of 1 page for references.
Each paper submission will undergo a double-anonymous review process with three independent reviews and a virtual PC discussion. Acceptance criteria include novelty, academic and industrial relevance for SE4AI, rigor, and verifiability & transparency. The accepted full and short papers will be published in the ICSE Companion proceedings, and at least one author needs to register for CAIN’26 to present the paper in person.
If a paper is rejected as a full paper because the reviewers consider that the research is in the early stages or lacking evaluation, the paper will be reevaluated as a short paper. If accepted as a short paper, authors can choose to accept or decline to resubmit as a short paper. Rejected papers may also be considered for the poster track – this will depend on the quantity of papers received and the agreement of the authors.
Scope and Topics of Interest
The area of interest for CAIN is Software Engineering for AI-Enabled Systems, i.e., systems that contain at least one AI component. An AI component is a software component that uses at least one AI technique to provide (parts of) its functionality, such as ML models, generative AI like large language models (LLMs), reinforcement learning, symbolic AI, AI planning, evolutionary algorithms, etc. CAIN focuses on a system and/or life cycle perspective. Relevant topics therefore include, but are not limited to:
- Requirements engineering for AI-enabled systems, e.g., elicitation, specification, or management, and the relationship of requirements to AI/ML model development.
- Data management for AI-enabled systems to ensure relevance and efficiency related to stakeholder goals.
- System and software architecture for AI-enabled systems, e.g., architecture modeling, architectural tactics, architecture/design patterns, or reference architectures.
- Integration of AI and software development activities into the AI engineering life cycle, e.g., continuous integration and deployment, operation and monitoring, and system and software evolution.
- Assurance and management of system quality attributes and their relationship to AI/ML properties, including runtime properties such as performance efficiency, safety, security, and reliability; and life cycle properties such as reusability, maintainability, evolvability, and observability.
- Collaboration, organizational, and management practices for the successful engineering of AI-enabled systems.
- Building effective infrastructures to support the development and operation of AI-enabled systems and components.
- Software engineering methods and tools for next-gen AI-enabled systems, e.g., systems that integrate foundation models or AI agents.
Note on Scope: Submissions that report predominantly on data science or AI/ML algorithms without any or only minor connection to software engineering for AI-enabled systems will be desk-rejected. There are many venues for data science and AI/ML papers, where authors would get much more valuable and relevant feedback. More details on the scope are available here.
Submission Form
Research and experience papers should be submitted to HotCrp. The submission deadline is firm, no extensions.
All submissions must adhere to the following requirements:
- Page limit is 10 pages plus 2 additional pages of references for full papers and 5 pages plus 1 additional page of references for short papers.
- Submissions must be unpublished original work and should not be under review or submitted elsewhere while being under consideration.
- By submitting to CAIN, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. The authors also acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE.
- Paper review will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:
- Authors’ names must be omitted from the submitted paper.
- All references to the authors’ prior work should be in the third person.
- Linked artifact repositories need to be anonymized.
- While we allow the posting of preprints on arXiv or similar sites, authors are encouraged to change the title of their submission to make the accidental discovery by reviewers less likely. During the review period, authors must not publicly use the submission title, e.g., by advertising the paper on social media.
Submissions must conform to the official ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document: \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}
Accepted papers will be published in the ICSE 2026 Co-located Event Proceedings and included in the IEEE and ACM Digital Libraries. Authors of accepted papers are required to register and present their accepted paper at the conference for the paper to be included in the proceedings and the Digital Libraries.
The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.
Authors of papers receiving a Conditional Accept decision are expected to submit the revised papers with changes marked in a different color, such as using LaTeXdiff. The authors also need to submit an “Author Response” document capturing the authors’ response to each reviewer comment and how those comments were addressed in the revision. This is similar to the “Summary of Changes and Response” document that is typically submitted by authors for a journal paper major revision. The reviewers will check the revised paper against the original paper and the suggested changes. Conditional Accepts will be checked by only one member of the Program Committee, and this will be done in one pass.
Authors of rejected full papers may receive an acceptance as a short paper if the PC chairs and reviewers agree that it better meets the criteria for short papers. In this case, authors may decide to accept or reject the invitation if they would rather submit as a full paper to a different venue.
Similarly, authors of rejected full and short papers relevant to the field of AI engineering may be invited to publish their papers in a different CAIN track, such as the Posters track. In this case, authors may decide to accept or reject the invitation.
Important: ACM Open Access and APCs
All ICSE 2026 papers, including those from co-located events, will be subject to ACM’s Article Processing Charges (APCs) under the open access model. Authors without an institutional agreement such as ACM Open will have to pay the APC when they submit the camera-ready version. This is $250 for ACM members and $350 for non-members, only one charge per paper, irrespective of the number of authors. Please note that short papers are still subject to APCs. Further information is available here.