Call for papers
Clustering is a fundamental task in data mining that aims to partition unlabeled data into groups, such that data points within the same cluster exhibit semantic similarity. Recent advances in large-scale pre-trained foundation models, including CLIP, LLMs, and MLLMs, have significantly advanced clustering research across images, texts, and graphs. This workshop offers a timely opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners from multimodal learning, foundation models, and clustering. It will provide a platform for discussing recent advances, emerging methodologies, and practical applications. By fostering collaboration across these domains, the workshop aims to create new opportunities for addressing complex challenges at the intersection of foundation models and clustering.
Topics of Interest
This workshop welcomes all papers that are related but not limited to the following topics:
- Theoretical foundations of PFMs for clustering
- Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of PFMs for clustering
- Model selection among a zoo of PFMs for clustering
- Interpretability, Fairness, Robustness, and Privacy in PFMs-based clustering
- PFMs-based clustering under fine-grained/continual/long-tailed environments
- New datasets and benchmarks for PFMs-based clustering
- Applications of PFMs-based clustering for scientific domains, including program languages, climate science, healthcare, life sciences, physics, and cognitive science
- Surveys that summary recent advances in leveraging PFMs for clustering
Program
The workshop will be held during ICDM 2026.
The workshop will include two major activities, the invited keynotes, and the paper presentations. We will invite keynote presentations for a half-day workshop, following by workshop presentations. The speakers are the experts on the relevant community from different organizations globally. The schedule of the workshop will come soon!
Important dates
All times are at 11:59PM AOE (Anywhere on Earth)
Submission deadline: August 20, 2026
Paper notification: September 18, 2026
Camera-ready deadline: October 5, 2026
Workshop date: November 12, 2026 (Tentative)
Submission Guidelines
Paper Length and Submission Requirements
Authors are encouraged to submit original, English-language research contributions that have not been concurrently submitted or published elsewhere. All submissions must adhere to the IEEE 2-column format. For the regular paper track, submissions should not exceed 8 pages of content, plus an additional 2 pages for references. For the short paper track, submissions should be limited to a maximum of 4 pages of content, plus 1 extra page for references. Other submission requirements are same as ICDM 2026.
Review Guidelines
In alignment with the ICDM 2026 reviewing scheme, all submissions will undergo triple-blind reviews by Committee Members, evaluating technical quality, relevance to the conference scope, originality, significance, and clarity. All accepted papers will be presented as oral/poster presentations. By the unique ICDM tradition, all accepted workshop papers will be published in the dedicated ICDMW proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.
Registration and Attendance
At least one author per paper must register at the AUTHOR rate per paper. Student registration does not satisfy this requirement, even if the author is a student. At least one author of each accepted paper must present the paper at the conference for it to be included in the proceedings and program. In cases where an author is unable to attend the conference in person due to visa issues, a pre-recorded video presentation is allowed. The presenting author must still register for the conference.
Organizers
General Chair
- Christian Böhm (University of Vienna)
Program Co-chairs (alphabetical order by surname)
- Chunchun Chen (Tongji University)
- Bo Peng (University of Technology Sydney)
- Junming Shao (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China)
- Xin Sun (City University of Macau)
- Hanchen Wang (University of Technology Sydney)
- Wei Ye (Tongji University)
Publication Co-chairs
- Wengang Guo (Tongji University)
- Xing Wei (Tongji University)
Program Committee Members
- Jiayi Yang - Tongji University
- Yue Niu - Tongji University
- Zhaokai Sun - Tongji University
- Yang Liu - Shanghai Innovation Institute
- Jinyang Wu - Shanghai Innovation Institute
- Tongbo Guo - Tongji University
- Chenrun Wang - Tongji University
- Chenyi Xiong - Tongji University
- Maozheng Li - Tongji University
- Bohan Li - Tongji University
- Ziyang Zhu - Tongji University
- Zhengxuan Chen - Tongji University
- Jingsong Ai - Tongji University