Call for Papers [Español]
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Call for Papers – Deadline Extension!
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)
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Important Dates
Full Paper Abstract Submissions: 3th April, 2026 (Extended)
Full Paper Submissions: 10th April, 2026 (Extended)
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
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
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:
“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…”
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.
Rejected full paper will be considered for invitation to submit a shortened version as poster abstract.
Large-scale language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can only be used by the authors to edit grammar or style of their own text.
All submissions must be original work not previously presented at any workshop, symposium, or conference.
Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable.
NOTES: IVA 2026 will as usual have workshops/tutorials and a doctoral consortium.
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:
programmchairs@iva.acm.org