Alternative Architectures and Paradigms: A workshop on next-generation NLG architectures, co-located with INLG 2026
A half-day workshop co-located with the 19th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2026), Utrecht, Netherlands. Autoregressive transformers have dominated Natural Language Generation for years. While scaling these models has brought remarkable results, next-token prediction is not the only path forward. This workshop creates a dedicated forum — the Alternative Architectures and Paradigms (AAP) Workshop — to broaden the academic focus and look beyond traditional Transformers.
We aim to bring together foundational AI builders and language generation experts to explore non-traditional architectures that learn, process, and generate language differently: structures that scale efficiently, update their memories dynamically, and make language systems more transparent and factuality accurate.
Core Themes
We invite submissions exploring any alternative core models and non-traditional generation paradigms. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Non-autoregressive generative paradigms — Models that generate text by parallel refinement across a window rather than token-by-token, enabling native text rewriting and infilling.
- Test-Time Training (TTT) & deep neural memory — Architectures where model weights dynamically update during inference, replacing static KV caches to handle long contexts efficiently.
- State Space Models (SSMs) & linear hybrids — Layouts like Mamba that process sequences with linear complexity, enabling massive context processing at a fraction of the computing cost.
- Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) — Non-generative core structures that predict abstract concepts in a latent space instead of predicting individual surface tokens.
- Explainable & transparent generation models — Architectures with traceable reasoning paths instead of opaque calculations, allowing humans to see exactly why a model chooses its words.
- Any other creative approaches to more efficient, adaptive, or interpretable language generation.
Important Dates
- Workshop Paper Submission: 9 August 2026
- Paper Acceptance Notification: 12 September 2026
- Camera-Ready Papers: 16 September 2026
- INLG 2026 Conference: 17–21 October 2026
- AAP Workshop: 18 October 2026 (TBC)