ICLP 2026 Report

By Laura Giordano, and Wolfgang Faber

The 42nd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2026) was held at ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal, as part of the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) 2026, from July 20-23, 2026, which brought together 10 leading international conferences focused on mathematical logic and its applications in computer science.

Since the first conference In Marseille in 1982, ICLP has been the premier international event for presenting research in logic programming. Contributions are sought in all areas of logic programming, including but not restricted to:

• Theoretical Foundations: Formal and operational semantics, Non-monotonic reasoning, Reasoning under uncertainty, Knowledge representation, Semantic issues of combining logic and neural models, Complexity results.
• Language Design and Programming Methodologies: Concurrency and parallelism, Mobility, Interacting with ML, Logic-based domain-specific languages, Hybrid logical and imperative/functional languages, Programming techniques, Answer Set Programming, Inductive Logic Programming, Coinductive Logic Programming
• Program Analysis and Optimization: Analysis, Transformation, Verification, Debugging, Profiling, Visualization, Logic-based validation of generated programs.
• Implementation Methodologies: Compilation, Parallel/distributed execution, Constraint implementation, Tabling, Logic-based prompt engineering, User interfaces.

ICLP implemented the hybrid publication model used in all recent editions of the conference, with journal papers and Technical Communications (TCs), following a decision made in 2010 by the Association for Logic Programming. Papers of the highest quality were selected to be published as rapid publications in a special issue of TPLP. The TCs comprise papers which the Program Committee (PC) judged of good quality but not yet of the standard required to be accepted and published in TPLP, plus extended abstracts from the RPR track.

ICLP 2026 also had a track for Recently Published Research (RPR) papers, that is, extended abstracts of papers that have appeared or been accepted for publication in journals or conference proceedings but which have not been already presented at ICLP conferences nor at other main logic programming-related conferences (such as, for example, LPNMR, LOPSTR, or LPAR).

ICLP received 83 submissions of abstracts across the main track and RPR Track. Out of these, 70 resulted in paper submissions, distributed as follows: ICLP main track regular papers (48 papers), ICLP main track TC papers (17 papers), and the RPR Track (5 papers). The Program Chairs organized the refereeing process that involved the Program Committee and several external reviewers. Each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers who provided detailed written evaluations. This yielded in two submissions to be directly accepted for rapid communications in TPLP, and more shortlisted as candidates for rapid communication in TPLP. The authors of the latter papers revised their submissions in light of the reviewers’ suggestions, and the papers were subject to a second round of reviewing, of which additional 17 were accepted. 35 papers were accepted as TCs, and all 5 RPRs were accepted. The latter were published in EPTCS vol. 450

ICLP 2026 included two FLoC-wide keynote talks:

• Giuseppe De Giacomo. Symbolic Coding Agents: Temporal Synthesis as a Foundation for Strategic Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence
• Alessandra Russo. Learning with Logic: Neuro-Symbolic Methods for Grounded and Robust AI

Two keynote talks were ICLP-only:

• Mario Alviano. ASP in the Loop: From Structured Prompting to Agentic Logic Programming;
• Peter Stuckey. From CLP(R) to MiniZinc: there and back again.

The conference presented the following awards:

• Best Paper Award:
  Angelos Charalambidis, Giannos Chatziagapis, Babis Kostopoulos, Panos Rondogiannis. Equilibrium Semantics and Strong Equivalence for Higher-Order Logic Programs.

• Best Student Paper Award:
  Rafael Bankosegger, Thomas Eiter, Johannes Oetsch. Answer-Set-Programming-based Abstractions for Reinforcement Learning.

Furthermore, after an in-depth analysis of citation indices (e.g., SCOPUS, Web of Science, and Google Scholar), two Test-of-Time awards were identified:

• The John Alan Robinson 20-Year Test-of-Time Award (ex aequo):
  • Luke Simon, Ajay Mallya, Ajay Bansal, Gopal Gupta (2006). Coinductive Logic Programming. In Logic Programming. ICLP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4079, pp. 330–345, Springer, 2006, doi:10.1007/11799573_25;
  • Enrico Pontelli, Tran Cao Son (2006). Justifications for Logic Programs Under Answer Set Semantics. In Logic Programming. ICLP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4079, pp. 196–210, Springer, 2006, doi:10.1007/11799573_16.

• The 10-Year Test-of-Time Award:
  Martin Gebser, Roland Kaminski, Benjamin Kaufmann, Max Ostrowski, Torsten Schaub, and Philipp Wanko (2016). Theory Solving Made Easy with Clingo 5. In TCs of the 32nd Int. Conf. on Logic Programming, ICLP 2016, New York City, USA, October 16–21, 2016, OASIcs, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, doi:10.4230/OASIcs.ICLP.2016.2.

In addition to the main technical program at ICLP 2026, FLoC 2026 hosted

• the 22nd Doctoral Consortium on Logic Programming,

• the 2026 Summer School on Logic Programming, and

• the 2026 FloC Modeling Contest, a renamed instance of the LP/CP Programming Contests.

The following FLoC workshops were listed as affiliated with ICLP:

• 33rd RCRA Workshop on Experimental Evaluation of Algorithms for Solving Problems with Combinatorial Explosion (RCRA 2026).

• 19th Workshop on Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP 2026).

• 2nd Workshop on Cognitive Architectures for Robotics: LLMs and Logic in Action (CARLA).

• EULP 2026, Workshop on End-user Logic Programming.

• Fourth Prolog Education Workshop (PEG 2026).

• Third Annual Workshop on Prolog Improvement Proposals (PIPs).

ICLP 2026 was organized by:

• General Chairs:
  • Ricardo Rocha, University of Porto, Portugal;
  • Vítor Santos Costa, University of Porto, Portugal

• Program Chairs:
  • Wolfgang Faber, University of Klagenfurt, Austria;
  • Laura Giordano, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy

• Workshop Chair:
  • Miguel Areias, University of Porto, Portugal

• Publicity Chairs:
  • Emanuele De Angelis, IASI-CNR, Italy;
  • Zachary Hansen, University of Nebraska Omaha, USA

• Web Chair:
  • Michael Morak, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

• FLoC Chairs:
  • Rajeev Alur, University of Pennsylvania, USA;
  • Nuno Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal;
  • Alexandra Silva, Cornell University, USA

The ICLP 2026 Program Committee consisted of:

• Salvador Abreu, University of Evora / NOVA LINCS, Portugal;
• Mario Alviano, University of Calabria, Italy;
• Nicos Angelopoulos, Imperial College London, UK;
• Joaquín Arias, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain;
• Marcello Balduccini, Saint Joseph’s University, USA;
• Mutsunori Banbara, Nagoya University, Japan;
• Elena Bellodi, University of Ferrara, Italy;
• Bart Bogaerts, KU Leuven, Belgium;
• Pedro Cabalar, University of A Coruña, Spain;
• Roberta Calegari, University of Bologna, Italy;
• Francesco Calimeri, University of Calabria, Italy;
• Angelos Charalambidis, Harokopio University of Athens, Greece;
• Stefania Costantini, University of L’Aquila, Italy;
• Alessandro Dal Palù, University of Parma, Italy;
• Carmine Dodaro, University of Calabria, Italy;
• Agostino Dovier, University of Udine, Italy;
• Thomas Eiter, TU Wien, Austria;
• Esra Erdem, Sabancı University, Turkey;
• François Fages, Inria Saclay, France;
• Jorge Fandinno, University of Nebraska Omaha, USA;
• Johannes Fichte, Linköping University, Sweden;
• Fabio Fioravanti, University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy;
• Andrea Formisano, University of Udine, Italy;
• Gerhard Friedrich, University of Klagenfurt, Austria;
• Sarah Alice Gaggl, TU Dresden, Germany;
• Marco Gavanelli, University of Ferrara, Italy;
• Martin Gebser, University of Klagenfurt, Austria;
• Ricardo Gonçalves, NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal;
• Gopal Gupta, University of Texas at Dallas, USA;
• Markus Hecher, University d’Artois, CRIL, France;
• Giovambattista Ianni, University of Calabria, Italy;
• Daniela Inclezan, Miami University, USA;
• Tomi Janhunen, Tampere University, Finland;
• Nikos Katzouris, National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece;
• Gabriele Kern-Isberner, TU Dortmund University, Germany;
• Matthias Knorr, NOVA FCT Lisbon, Portugal;
• Isabelle Kuhlmann, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany;
• Joao Leite, NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal;
• Michael Leuschel, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany;
• Vladimir Lifschitz, University of Texas at Austin, USA;
• Francesca Alessandra Lisi, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy;
• Annie Liu, Stony Brook University, USA;
• Marco Maratea, University of Calabria, Italy;
• Viviana Mascardi, University of Genova, Italy;
• José Morales, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain;
• Johannes Oetsch, Jönköping University, Sweden;
• Simona Perri, University of Calabria, Italy;
• Enrico Pontelli, New Mexico State University, USA;
• Francesco Ricca, University of Calabria, Italy;
• Fabrizio Riguzzi, University of Ferrara, Italy;
• Alessandra Russo, Imperial College, London, UK;
• Chiaki Sakama, Wakayama University, Japan;
• Zeynep G. Saribatur, TU Wien, Austria;
• Torsten Schaub, University of Potsdam, Germany;
• Tom Schrijvers, KU Leuven, Belgium;
• Dietmar Seipel, University of Würzburg, Germany;
• Gerardo Simari, Universidad Nacional del Sur and CONICET, Argentina;
• Tran Cao Son, New Mexico State University, USA;
• Theresa Swift, JHUAPL, USA;
• Hans Tompits, TU Wien, Austria;
• Mirek Truszczynski, University of Kentucky, USA;
• Athénaïs Vaginay, University of Caen / GREYC, France;
• German Vidal, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain;
• Alicia Villanueva, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain;
• Johannes P. Wallner, Graz University of Technology, Austria;
• Kewen Wang, Griffith University, Australia;
• David Warren, Stony Brook University, USA;
• Felix Weitkämper, German University of Digital Science, Germany;
• Jan Wielemaker, SWI-Prolog Solutions, Netherlands;
• Stefan Woltran, TU Wien, Austria;
• Roland Yap, National University of Singapore, Singapore;
• Jia-Huai You, University of Alberta, Canada;
• Zhizheng Zhang, Southeast University, China;
• Neng-Fa Zhou, City University of New York, USA

Additional Reviewers:

• Müge Fidan,
• Salvatore Fiorentino,
• Tobias Geibinger,
• Johanna Groven,
• Roland Kaminski,
• Magnus Liebl,
• Maximilian Moeller,
• Hidetomo Nabeshima,
• Samuele Pollaci,
• Javier Romero,
• Takehide Soh,
• Gioacchino Sterlicchio,
• Robbe Van den Eede,
• Baturay Yılmaz