Are you a native English speaker? Is your advisor a native speaker? If one of you are, just have that person check for English grammar, and have your advisor check for content, flow and argument.

I don't see too much of a need to have a dedicated group for paper submission of a specific conference, which lasts three months or so. If you have any specific questions, you are most welcome to ask here. People are looking to network with others, but during the conference.

If you've tried some existing xai techniques, I bet that you are left deeply unsatisfied by most of them. I work on interpretability, I am convinced that most (maybe all?) methods don't work right now, but I am also convinced that XAI in general would work eventually. So I would recommend start from the basics: what do you want out of XAI, and in what ways are they failing? Trying to answer these two questions would surface a lot of research questions.

For poster presentations, most likely no need. But you should check with the conference organizer and will almost definitely need to pay the full registration fee.

I'm sure they will allow you to upload a video or even zoom in if your paper is selected as an oral. It happened before the pandemic. But I wouldn't expect too much virtual "conference attendence experience", like virtual poster session on gather town, for this year.

Have you tried colab recently? I found it quite handy, especially if I don't need GPU.

Of course. Can you identify weaknesses (or even straight BS) from papers (spoiler alert, almost none of them are perfect)? These will be good sources for ideas and inspirations for new research, and would definitely require critical thinking, reasoning, logic, analysis skills.

Can you already understand some papers there by reading them? If so, you could get some interesting discussions with the authors. Not having a paper isn't that important. Most people don't care if you have a paper there, as long as you have good thoughts during discussion. If not, I am afraid that it's not too beneficial. For workshops, the invited talks are typically much better than contributed papers, which are mostly preliminary ideas or rejected conference papers.