From November 19th to November 21st 2025, UNamur’s Faculty of Computer Science organised the 37th edition of the annual Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC 2025) jointly with the 34th Belgian Dutch Conference on Machine Learning (BeNeLearn 2025). As every year, the Benelux Association for Artificial Intelligence (BNVKI) and the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) supported the organisation of the conference financially and administratively.

Held yearly, the objective of these conferences is to promote and disseminate recent research developments in Artificial Intelligence in the Benelux. For the scientific part, we welcomed five types of contributions, namely A) regular papers, B) encore abstracts of papers published at international AI venues, C) demonstration abstracts, D) thesis abstracts, and E) late-breaking abstracts. We received 95 submissions this year, out of which 92 were accepted (46 as poster presentations). A selected number of the full papers submissions was invited to submit their paper to this year’s post-proceedings (to be published in the Springer CCIS series).

In addition to the regular research presentations, we were happy to include several other elements in the program of BNAIC 2025, among which keynote presentations by Anna Rogers (IT University of Copenhague) and Decebal Mocanu (University of Luxembourg), a special FACt (FACulty focusing on the FACts of AI) session with presentations by Antske Fokkens (VU Amsterdam), Jerry Spanakis (University of Maastricht) and Tias Guns (KU Leuven), an introduction by Women in AI Benelux, and a dedicated EurAI session, featuring invited speakers from the Italian AIxIA association, as well as the winner and runner-up of the very first BNVKI dissertation prize!

Participants received a programme booklet in their conference bags, but last-minute changes were announced through the conference website.

Prof. Annick Castiaux, rector of the UNamur, addressed all participants during the opening ceremony, while Prof. Anthony Cleve, dean of the Faculty of Computer Science, spoke during the closing ceremony. Their speeches were much appreciated by the participants. We include the set of slides used during the opening ceremony, as an appendix to this report for your reference.

Participants

We welcomed 166 participants coming from all corners of the Benelux, as well as two Italian AI researchers that were invited by BNVKI as the organisers of this year’s ECAI conference. Apart from the 166 registered participants, our second year master’s students were allowed to follow the plenary sessions in the context of their coursework for Actualités en data science.

Prizes

A new feature at this year’s conference was a presentation by the winner of the first BNVKI Artificial Intelligence dissertation award, as well as the presentation of this award. Dr. Emile van Krieken (Universiteit van Amsterdam) won the award, for his dissertation entitled Optimisation in Neurosymbolic Learning Systems (supervisor: Prof. Annette ten Teije). Emile presented his work in an accessible manner, combining a diverse set of AI techniques in novel ways.

Winner of the first BNVKI Artificial Intelligence dissertation award

Apart from the runner-up to the 2024 AI dissertation award (Dr. Simon Van de Velde, KU Leuven), three more prizes were awarded at the BNAIC conference:

  • Best paper award: The best paper award was won by Aditya Shourya, Guangzhi Tang and Chang Sun from Maastricht University for their paper entitled “Self-Compressing Vision Tower for Efficient Dense Prediction Tasks”. The paper will be published in the Springer Nature postproceedings volume.
  • Best thesis award: The best master/bachelor thesis award was awarded to Angela Petkova for her bachelor thesis supervised by Dr. Farnaz Faramarzi Lighvan and Prof. Lynn Houthuys (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) for her thesis entitled “Gender and Ethnicity Bias Mitigation in Automatic Recruitment”.
  • Best demo award: The best demo was presented by Martin Colot, Cédric Simar, Ana Maria Cebolla Alvarez and Gianluca Bontempi from the Université Libre de Bruxelles for their demonstration entitled “Demonstration of Cross-Subject Hand Gesture Recognition from EMG”.

Closing words

We are currently editing the post-proceedings for which 12 long papers were selected, which will be published as a volume in Springer Nature’s Communications in Computer and Information Science (cf. https://link.springer.com/conference/bnaic).