Please read all of these instructions carefully when preparing your submissions. Please reach out to the organizers if in doubt.

We welcome contributed papers from machine learning, the physical sciences, cognitive and developmental psychology, and robotics that provide new theories, models, or empirical data for studying physical understanding. We especially encourage contributors to submit work that investigates the following questions:

  • What forms of inductive biases best enable the development of physical understanding techniques that are applicable to real-world problems?
  • How do we ensure that the outputs of physical reasoning modules are reasonable and physically plausible?
  • Is interpretability a necessity for physical understanding and reasoning techniques to be suitable for real-world problems?

Submission instructions

We invite short papers of up to 4 pages (excluding references) in the areas listed above. Submissions will undergo a double-anonymous reviewing process and thus need to be appropriately anonymized. Additionally, submissions may upload supplementary materials (appendices, code, videos, etc.). Looking at the supplementary materials is at the sole discretion of the reviewers. Submissions must follow the workshop LaTeX template (NOT the Neurips 2021 conference template). The workshop is non-archival: papers/abstracts accepted to the workshop will not appear in formal proceedings. However, the papers, talks, and other materials (if any) will be posted on the workshop webpage to maximize visibility. Submissions that are currently under review or that have been recently accepted to a conference other than Neurips 2021 are permitted (but work accepted to NeurIPS 2021 is disallowed, following guidance from the workshop chairs for Neurips 2021 to appear in a Neurips 2021 workshop). The accepted papers will be presented in a virtual poster session and lightning talks. Outstanding original contributions will be chosen for longer oral presentations.

Submission portal

Our submission portal can be accessed at: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/PRIBRW2021/

Important dates

  1. Workshop submission deadline: 11 October 2021. 23:59 hours, anywhere-on-Earth time (firm deadline)
  2. Acceptance notification: 21 October 2021

Note on reviewing

By submitting to this workshop, authors agree to provide meaningful peer-reviews for (up to) 3 other non-conflicting submissions to the workshop.