VISA 2026 examines the virtual ISA — a stable, hardware-agnostic abstraction between high-level programming models and diverse hardware backends — as the pivotal interface of the agentic era: the contract surface where LLM-driven code synthesizers, autonomous autotuners, compilers, and microarchitectural innovation meet. When the programmer is a machine, the ISA must be self-describing enough to reason over and verifiable enough to trust.

We invite short papers (4–6 pages, IEEE format) describing work in progress, position papers, vision papers, or early results. The scope spans the full accelerator stack — ISA design and semantics, compilation and optimization, DSLs and programming models, hardware co-design, and deployment experience. The agent-facing interface is the flagship theme that runs through all of them: wherever your work sits, we encourage you to ask how the problem changes when the primary reader and writer of the ISA is a machine.