May 7th, 2026 
Daniela Lopez de Luise Call for Paper
We are pleased to invite paper submissions for the Research Topic in Explainable, Interpretable, and Human-Aligned AI and Robotics (Frontiers in Robotics and AI).
As AI and robotic systems become more autonomous, their use in real-world, human-centered environments raises urgent challenges around transparency, trust, and safety. Despite impressive advances in foundation models and reinforcement learning, many systems remain opaque, limiting human understanding, oversight, and effective collaboration, especially in safety-critical settings.
This Research Topic aims to advance socially intelligent robots that can operate transparently and adapt to human needs. We seek contributions that enable robots to explain their decisions and intentions, reason about human behavior and context, learn from multimodal, real-world interactions, and detect and communicate uncertainty and failures.
We particularly encourage interdisciplinary work combining technical innovation with human-centered design, including areas such as interpretability, causal reasoning, multimodal grounding, and cognitive modeling. Our goal is to foster the next generation of robotic systems that are not only capable but also understandable, trustworthy, and aligned with human values.
List of topics
Authors are encouraged to address (but are not limited to) the following themes:
– Cognitive Modeling for Interpretable and Human-Aligned AI.
– Foundation models for Interpretability and Transparency.
– Interpretable and Transparent Robot Behavior.
– Knowledge-Based Robotic Design.
– Multimodal and Grounded Explanations.
– LLM-based and Neural-Symbolic Approaches for Explanation Generation.
– Evaluation for Explanations, Interpretability, Trust, and Faithfulness.
– Explainable Reinforcement Learning.
– Failure Recognition, Assessment, and Recovery in Robotic Scenarios.
– Human and Context Awareness in Robotics.
– Causal and Counterfactual Reasoning in AI.
Manuscript Summary Deadline: 9 July 2026.
Manuscript Submission Deadline: 9 October 2026.
Link to the RT webpage: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78859/explainable-interpretable-and-human-aligned-ai-and-robotics
Kind regards,
The Research Topic organizers
CONAIISI-Call-1eraCircular.docx-1.pdf