DBML 2026 - 5th International Workshop on Databases and Machine Learning

in conjunction with ICDE 2026 — May 2026

About

DBML 2026 Workshop, held in conjunction with ICDE 2026 in Montréal, Canada, explores the growing synergy between databases and machine learning.

Advances in data management techniques have become essential for building robust, scalable ML systems. Applications range from data preparation and cleaning to feature engineering and managing the ML lifecycle. The recent rise of LLMs and RAG has only intensified demand for high-performance data infrastructure. Modern AI systems increasingly rely on vector databases and scalable model serving. Multimodal AI adds further requirements for storing and querying images, audio, and video.

In the opposite direction, ML techniques are now incorporated as core components of database systems: query optimization, indexing, storage layout, and self-tuning. Long-standing challenges like cardinality estimation, operator and plan selection, and resource management - traditionally handled via human knowledge or heuristics - increasingly benefit from learned models.

DBML 2026 brings together researchers and practitioners working at this intersection. We welcome work combining DB and ML strengths, ranging from foundational techniques and system design to practical applications and real-world deployments, including ML for scientific and data-intensive domains.

Information about previous editions can be found at DBML 2025 DBML 2024, DBML 2023, and DBML 2022.

For questions regarding the workshop, please contact: dbml26@googlegroups.com.

Topics of Interest

ML for Data Management and DBMS

  • Learned data discovery, cleaning, and transformation
  • ML-enabled data exploration and discovery in data lakes and lakehouses
  • Learned database design, configuration, and tuning
  • ML for query optimization, indexing, and storage/layout decisions
  • Natural language interfaces for data (querying, exploration, summarization, assistants)
  • Pretrained, foundation, and LLM-based models for data management
  • Representation learning for data cleaning, preprocessing, and integration
  • Benchmarking and evaluation of ML-enhanced data management and DBMS components

Data Management for ML and AI Systems

  • Data collection, preparation, and governance for ML/LLM/RAG applications
  • Data quality, robustness, provenance, and lineage for ML workflows
  • Systems and storage for efficient training, inference, and model serving
  • Vector databases, indexing, and hybrid query processing for embeddings
  • Management of multimodal data (text, images, audio, video, etc.) for AI applications
  • DB-inspired techniques for modeling, storage, and provenance of ML and AI artifacts

Keynote Speakers

Details on the keynote speakers for DBML 2026 will be announced soon.

Program

The final program and list of accepted papers will be announced soon.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE.

Deadlines have been extended!

Submission deadline: Feb 14th, 2026
Author notification: April 5th, 2026
Camera-ready version: April 19th, 2026
Workshop day: May 4th, 2026

Submission and Author Guidelines

Submissions should be made electronically via the submission site. Papers must be prepared in accordance with the official IEEE conference templates. Submitted papers must not exceed 6 pages including references. No appendix is allowed. Only electronic submissions in PDF format will be accepted. Submissions will be reviewed in a single-blind manner.

Organisation

Fatemeh Nargesian
Fatemeh Nargesian
University of Rochester
Workshop Chair
Guillaume Lachaud
Guillaume Lachaud
École polytechnique
Workshop Chair
Jiwon Chang
Jiwon Chang
University of Rochester
Publicity Chair

Program Committee

The current program committee members are tentative.

  • Amine Mhedhbi - Polytechnique Montréal
  • Gerardo Vitagliano - MIT CSAIL
  • Roee Shraga - WPI
  • Xue Li