Efficient Multimodal Question Answering (EMM-QA)

EMM-QA is an ICML 2026 workshop focused on question answering systems that must balance accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability across multiple input modalities. The workshop brings together researchers from academia and industry working on knowledge-intensive multimodal systems that operate under practical resource constraints.

Rather than focusing only on larger models, the workshop emphasizes methods that make multimodal question answering usable in real settings, including retrieval-augmented systems, compact models, efficient inference, and human-in-the-loop evaluation.

ANNOUNCEMENTS
📌 The exact Contributed Paper Spotlight Schedule is now available.

📌 List of Accepted Papers and Shared Challenge Papers is now available! ⚠️ Virtual poster presentations are also available here under ▶️ icon!

📌 Check Accepted Papers, Poster Sessions and Board Assignments section at the bottom of this page to find your poster ID, session, and board number in Hall A.

📌 Workshop Schedule is now available.

📌 Call for Papers

📌 Computer Teams

📌 Join the community on Discord.

Scope

The workshop is centered on efficient multimodal question answering. It also welcomes closely related work on multimodal retrieval, reasoning, evaluation, benchmarking, and efficient inference when those contributions are clearly connected to question answering or other knowledge-intensive multimodal tasks.

Like the previous iteration of EfficientQA, which focused on text-only question answering, we will also host a human-computer question answering competition. If you’d like to take part in that part of the competition (it should be fun!), you can either play as a team or write questions.

Workshop Format

The workshop is planned as a one-day event combining:

• Contributed papers
• Poster presentations
• Invited keynotes
• Shared-task highlights
• A live human-computer question answering event

The workshop will also serve as the venue where we announce the winning systems from the QANTA 2026 computer competition.

Schedule

• Workshop takes place on July 11th. Both poster sessions
• All talk sessions (invited talks, spotlights, challenge talks, awards, etc.) will take place in the ASEM Ballroom 201 at COEX.
• All poster sessions will take place separately in Hall A, poster boards 1612–1617, 1700–1711, outside the workshop room area at COEX. You can review the Hall A plan here.

Legend

• 🟦 Invited Talks
• 🟨 Contributed Paper Spotlights / Best Challenge Team Talk
• 🟧 Poster Sessions

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

• Sewon Min (UC Berkeley EECS & Allen Institute for AI)
• Mrinmaya Sachan (ETH Zürich)
• Robin Jia (University of Southern California)
• Naman Goyal (Google DeepMind) & Jenny Ni (Google)

Organizers

• Jordan Boyd-Graber, University of Maryland
• Martin Fajčík, Brno University of Technology
• George Jojo Boateng, ETH Zurich / Kwame AI
• Ikuya Yamada, Studio Ousia / Tohoku University / Nagoya University / RIKEN
• Chen Zhao, NYU Shanghai

Contact

Questions about the workshop can be sent to emm-qa-organizers@googlegroups.com. Or join the Discord.

Accepted Papers, Poster Sessions and Board Assignments

🗺️ The plan of the Hall A is here.

Sponsors/Acknowledgements

• This workshop is partially supported by Horizon EU programme through project ELOQUENCE, grant no. 101135916.