MAIN educational 2026 will run on a single track over two days, on October 26th-27th 2026, at the CRIUGM. The first day focuses on reasoning about the world (world models and embodied agents), and the second day on benchmarking, i.e. the alignment between the brain, behaviour and AI models.
Monday October 26th: reasoning about the world¶
08:30-09:00 Registration with coffee
09:00-09:05 Welcome
09:05-09:50 World models and embodied agents: lecture by Sonia Joseph, followed by questions
09:50-10:05 Break with coffee
10:05-12:05 World models and embodied agents: hands-on tutorial with Glen Berseth
12:05-13:00 Lunch provided
13:00-14:45 Vision-language-action models
14:45-15:05 Break with coffee and snack
15:05-16:50 Session to be announced
Tuesday October 27th: benchmarking brain-behaviour-model alignment¶
08:30-09:00 Registration with coffee
09:00-12:00 Evaluating reasoning in large language models: tutorial (with a break)
12:00-13:00 Lunch provided
13:00-13:50 Alignment across modalities and across brains: talk on vision-language alignment by Aishwarya Agrawal, followed by questions
13:50-14:00 Break with coffee
14:00-16:00 Alignment across modalities and across brains: hands-on tutorial on functional alignment across participants with fmralign, with Elizabeth DuPre
The MAIN 2026 conference will follow on October 29th-30th 2026, at HEC Montréal.
More details on each session can be found on the following pages:
The program of past editions is available on the past events page.