Call for Papers:

26th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA)
Theme: Social Cognition for Human-AI Cooperation
Co-located with ACII 2026, the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction
September 7-11, 2026
Puebla, Mexico
https://iva.acm.org/2026/

Important Dates:

• Full Paper Abstract Submissions: 28 March 2026
• Full Paper Submissions: 4 April 2026
• Review Notification: 23 May 2026
• Final Notification of Acceptance: 15 June 2026
• Camera-ready Version: 7 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

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:
  https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/word_style/interim-template-style/interim-layout.docx
• “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

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

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/

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