GENEA 2025 is the sixth GENEA Workshop and an official workshop of ACM MM ’25, which will take place in Dublin, Ireland. Accepted paper submissions will be included in dedicated proceedings by the ACM.

Generating non-verbal behaviours, such as gesticulation, facial expressions and gaze, is of great importance for natural interaction with embodied agents such as virtual agents and social robots. At present, behaviour generation is typically powered by rule-based systems, data-driven approaches like generative AI, or their hybrids. For evaluation, both objective and subjective methods exist, but their application and validity are frequently a point of contention.

The aim of the GENEA Workshop is to bring together researchers working on the generation and evaluation of non-verbal behaviours for embodied agents. The goal is to

• facilitate knowledge transfer and discussion across different communities and research fields;
• promote data, resources, evaluation, and reproducibility, also evolving best practices in these areas; and
• provide an inclusive environment where new and established researchers can learn from each other.

To kickstart this process, we invite all interested researchers to submit a paper or a poster for presentation at the workshop, and to attend the event.

Paper topics include (but are not limited to) the following

• Automated synthesis of facial expressions, gestures, and gaze movements, including multi-modal synthesis
• Audio-, music- and emotion-driven or stylistic non-verbal behaviour synthesis
• Closed-loop/end-to-end non-verbal behaviour generation (from perception to action)
• Non-verbal behaviour synthesis in two-party and group interactions
• Using LLMs/VLMs in the context of non-verbal behaviour synthesis
• New datasets, annotation methods, and analyses of existing datasets related to non-verbal behaviour
• Cross-cultural and multilingual influences on non-verbal behaviour generation
• Cognitive and affective models for non-verbal behaviour generation
• Social perception and attribution of synthesised non-verbal behaviour
• Ethical considerations and biases in non-verbal behaviour synthesis
• Subjective and objective evaluation methods for all of the above topics

Submission guidelines

We will accept long (8 pages) and short (4 pages) paper submissions, all in the same double-column ACM conference format as used by ACM MM . Pages containing only references do not count toward the page limit for any of the paper types. Submissions should be made in PDF format through OpenReview and formatted for double-blind review.

Submission site: Coming soon

To encourage authors to make their work reproducible and reward the effort that this requires, we have introduced the GENEA Workshop Reproducibility Award.

We will also host an open poster session for advertising your late-breaking results and already-published work to the community. No paper submission is needed to participate in the poster session, and these posters will not be part of any proceedings (non archival). Submission guidelines for the poster session will be available on the workshop website.