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