[IVA/ACII26] 2nd Call for papers ans 1st call for Worshop Proposal: ACM’s International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
Apologies for multiple postings
Call for Papers and Workshop Proposal: 26th ACM International Conference
on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA)
Sept, 7-11, 2026 - Puebla (Mexico)
Co-located with ACII 2026 (the Int. Conf. on Affective Computing and
Intelligent Interaction)
(see Workshop proposal call below)
Important Dates
* Full Paper Abstract Submissions: 28th March 2026
* Full Paper Submissions: 04th April 2026
* Review Notification: 23rd May 2026
* Final Notification of Acceptance: 15th June 2026
* Camera-ready Version: 07th July 2026
* Conference: Sept 7-11, 2026
All deadlines are anywhere on earth (23:59 UTC-12).
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The ACM Annual Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) is the
premier international event to present and discuss the newest research
on socially interactive agents and human-agent interaction.
Specifically, IVAs are AI-based virtual or robotic agents that exhibit
human-like capabilities of social interaction, including multimodal
communication using facial expressions, speech, or gestures, as well as
real-time perception, cognition, emotion, and action that allow them to
simulate or participate in dynamic social or task-oriented interaction.
ACM IVA 2026 will showcase cutting-edge research on the design,
implementation, application, and evaluation of IVAs, as well as the
basic research underlying the technology that supports human-agent
interaction, such as social perception, dialog modeling, and social
behavior planning. We also welcome submissions on central theoretical
issues, uses of virtual agents in psychological or behavioral research
and showcases of working applications.
This year's theme "_Social Cognition for Human-AI Cooperation" _explores
in particular how the fundamental mechanisms and processes of social
cognition can be studied using IVAs, as well as how they can be
computationally modelled for IVAs to enable a new level of cooperative
interaction between humans and AI-based agents. Unraveling possible and
emerging forms of human-AI cooperation, along with their effects and
implications, will provide impulses for the advancement and critical
reflection on socially interactive agents. Such contributions are also
widely welcomed and appreciated.
All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by expert reviewers.
All accepted full-paper submissions will be presented orally and
published in the conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library.
ACM IVA 2026, the 26th Annual Conference, will be held in Puebla,
Mexico, September 7-11, 2026.
IVA 2026 will be co-located with 14th International Conference on
Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2026), with
selected joint keynotes and social events and the ability to attend ACII
paper sessions.
SCOPE AND LIST OF TOPICS
IVA invites submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not
limited to:
Agent design and modeling of:
* Cognition
* Emotion (including personality and cultural differences)
* Socially communicative behavior (e.g., of emotions, personality
traits)
* Conversational behavior
* Social perception
* Machine learning approaches to agent modeling
* Approaches to realizing adaptive behavior
* Models informed by theoretical and empirical research in psychology
* Large Language Models for Conversational Agents
* Generative AI and Virtual Agents
Multimodal interaction:
* Verbal and nonverbal behavior coordination
* Face-to-face communication skills
* Engagement
* Managing co-presence and interpersonal relation
* Multi-party interaction
* Data-driven multimodal modeling
Social agent architectures:
* Design criteria and design methodologies
* Engineering of real-time human-agent interaction
* Standards / measures to support interoperability
* Portability and reuse
* Specialized tools, toolkits and toolchains
Evaluation methods and studies:
* Evaluation methodologies and user studies
* Ethical considerations and societal impact
* Applicable lessons across fields (e.g. between robotics and virtual
agents)
* Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior
Applications
* Applications in education, training, health, counseling, games, art,
etc.
* Virtual agents in games and simulations
* Social agents as tools in psychology
* Migration of agents between platforms
* Virtual Agents in Virtual and Augmented Reality
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
All submissions should be in PDF-format and submitted via Easychair :
https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=iva2026 [1]
Full papers are 4 to 8 pages long (not including references), should be
submitted anonymously, and prepared in the "ACM Standard" format, more
specifically the "SigConf" format.
* The LaTeX template for the "ACM Standard"/"SigConf" format can be
found inside the official ACM Master article template package. Please
use the most recent version (2.12) available at:
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template [2] * The "ACM
Standard" Microsoft Word template is currently not part of the
downloadable package as the ACM is currently revising it to improve
accessibility of resulting PDF-documents. Please use the "Interim Word
Template" instead:
https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/word_style/interim-template-style/interim-layout.docx
[3]
* "By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby
acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM
Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on
Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations
of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by
ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to
other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy."
* "Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so
you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM
has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a
commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. We
are committed to improving author discoverability, ensuring proper
attribution and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name
normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts."
Please refer to the poster and demo CFPs for instructions for these
formats.
REVIEW PROCESS
Submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind fashion by at least two
expert reviewers and overseen by a senior program committee member. The
possible outcomes of this review process are:
* Desk rejection due to violations of the ACM IVA submission policies
* Rejection
* Conditional Acceptance
* Acceptance
Authors of conditionally accepted papers are expected to address any
recommendations and conditions of acceptance prior to the final
submission of camera-ready materials. This will be verified by the
primary reviewer.
Rejected full paper will be considered for invitation to submit a
shortened version as poster abstract (deadline after full paper
notification).
Large-scale language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can only be used by
the authors to edit grammar or style of their own text. More information
about the ACM publication policies can be found here:
https://www.acm.org/publications/policies [4]
All submissions must be original work not previously presented at any
workshop, symposium, or conference and not published in any archived
conference proceeding, magazine, or journal.
Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable and will lead to the removal of
the submission from the review process. Please also see the ACM
guidelines under
https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism-overview [5]
NOTES: IVA 2026 will as usual have workshops/tutorials and a doctoral
consortium. Details on submissions can be found at the website:
https://iva.acm.org/2026/workshops/ [6]
CONTACTS
For more information, please contact the Program Chairs:
* Chloé Clavel, INRIA Paris, France
* Marco Gillies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
* Stefan Kopp, Bielefeld University, Germany
via the following email address:
(c) 2026 26th ACM IVA Conference [7]
*
X: https://x.com/IVA_conference [8]
*
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-virtual-agents-iva-conference/
[9]
*
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61587130414946
Call for Workshop proposal
Important Dates
* Workshop/tutorial proposal submission date: 31st March 2026
* Notification of acceptance: 7th April 2026
Motivation
IVA 2026 is looking for exciting proposals for half-day or full-day
workshops or tutorials to be held on Friday 11th September.
Workshops provide a forum for community members to discuss common
interests of the IVA community in a focused way. Your workshop could,
for example, (a) address a pre-defined set of focus questions, (b)
present alternative views on particular issues and attempts to resolve
them, (c) identify priorities for new research directions, and/or (d)
initiate appropriate collaborations.
Tutorials are intended to provide a high-quality learning experience to
participants with a varied range of backgrounds. It is expected that
tutorials are self-contained and structured to: (a) introduce
foundational concepts or techniques relevant to the IVA community, (b)
explore emerging tools, methods, or frameworks, (c) offer hands-on
experiences or demonstrations, and/or (d) provide insights into
practical applications.
Organisers of accepted workshops or tutorials are expected to:
* Plan, announce, and coordinate the workshop or tutorial
* Set up and maintain a website, linked to the official IVA website,
with information about the workshop or tutorial, materials, and a
summary of the outcomes
* Create and distribute their call for papers or participation
* Collect and review submissions and decide on the final programme
* Decide how, and if, they want to publish any papers presented during
the workshop
* Ensure that participants are informed of the need to register for
the workshop or tutorial
* Register for IVA 2026 early (at least one of the organisers)
Submission Requirements
Please email your proposal as a PDF document to
workshopchairs@iva.acm.org using the subject line: "WS-IVA 2026 | [your
workshop/tutorial name]"
Describe your workshop or tutorial using the following structure:
* Workshop or tutorial title
* Organiser(s), affiliation(s), email address(es), corresponding
person, brief bio including relevant organising experience
* Objectives of the workshop or tutorial
* If the workshop or tutorial has been organised before, describe why
it should be repeated
* Duration (full or half day)
* For workshops: Overview of the workshop including schedule, format,
invited keynote speakers (if any) and types of activities (e.g.,
whole-group discussions, break-out sessions, position paper
presentations, etc.). We explicitly encourage interdisciplinary
approaches and new perspectives from the local (Mexican) community.
* For tutorials: specify the targeted audience (student / early stage
/ advanced researchers, prerequisite knowledge, field of study) and
learning objectives
* Latex template:
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
* MS Word template:
https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/word_style/interim-template-style/interim-layout.docx
* Max 2 pages
* PDF format
The following criteria will guide the review process: (i) relevance to
IVA, (ii) originality and interdisciplinarity of the approach, (iii)
quality of the organisation.
We are looking forward to receiving your proposals!
Contact
If you have any questions, please contact us: workshopchairs@iva.acm.org
Ilaria Torre and Dirk Heylen
Workshop and Tutorial Chairs for IVA '26
(c) 2026 26th ACM IVA Conference [7]
*
X: https://x.com/IVA_conference [8]
*
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-virtual-agents-iva-conference/
[9]
*
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61587130414946
Links:
[1] https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=iva2026
[2] https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
[3]
https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/word_style/interim-template-style/interim-layout.docx
[4] https://www.acm.org/publications/policies
[5] https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism-overview
[6] https://iva.acm.org/2026/workshops/
[7] https://iva.acm.org/2026/
[8] https://x.com/IVA_conference
[9]
https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-virtual-agents-iva-conference/