Paper submission
August 29, 2026
11:59 p.m. AoE
Tentative
I Can't Believe It's Not Better:
Failure Modes of AI in Biology
Workshop at NeurIPS 2026 · Sydney
Stress-testing AI for biology in the real world: failure modes, robustness, and trustworthy scientific discovery
Key Dates
All deadlines are 11:59 p.m. Anywhere on Earth and remain subject to final confirmation.
Review period
August 29–September 21, 2026
TentativeAcceptance notification
September 29, 2026
TentativeCamera-ready & poster
October 20, 2026
TentativeIn-person workshop
December 11–12, 2026
Sydney, Australia · exact date to be confirmed
TentativeBenchmarks are only the beginning.
AI is reshaping genomics, cellular modeling, structural biology, and therapeutic discovery. Yet strong benchmark results often fail to survive new mutations, perturbations, individuals, assays, or deployment settings.
This full-day workshop brings machine learning and life science researchers together to study those failures directly: what breaks, why it breaks, how we should evaluate it, and what more reliable scientific systems require.
Topics
- Out-of-distribution generalization and domain shift
- Failure under weak or confounded supervision
- Causal mechanisms versus spurious correlation
- Uncertainty, calibration, and decision-aware reliability
- Interpretability and trustworthy biological inference
- Learning with limited data and distribution shift
- Deployment-relevant evaluation beyond benchmarks
- Limits of foundation, multimodal, and agentic models
- Causal intervention and experimental design
I Can't Believe It's Not Better Initiative
This workshop forms one workshop in a series as part of the larger I Can't Believe It's Not Better (ICBINB) activities. ICBINB-BIO is the official biology branch of the broader ICBINB initiative, which shares a commitment to candid failure analysis, negative results, unexpectedly strong simple baselines, and benchmarks that support the claims made from them.