This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference Academic on Artificial Intelligence, WAICA 2026, held in Shanghai, China, during July 18–20, 2026.

The 57 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 282 submissions. They are organized into the following topical sections: Intelligent Agents; Reasoning; Evaluation and Benchmarks; Large Model Systems; Model Learning; Computer Vision; Speech; Embodied Intelligence; Decision and Optimization; Trustworthy AI; AI for Healthcare; AI for Science; and Intelligent Communications.