GENEA

Workshop 2026

Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents

Official ICMI 2026 Workshop – October 5, 2026 (in person, Naples, Italy)

The GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) Workshop 2026 aims to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines working on different aspects of non-verbal behaviour generation, facilitating discussions on advancing both generation techniques and evaluation methodologies. We invite contributions from fields such as human-computer interaction, machine learning, multimedia, robotics, computer graphics, and social sciences. This is the seventh installment of the GENEA Workshop, to learn more about the GENEA Initiative, please go here.

The proceedings of the previous edition of the workshop can be found here.


Important dates

Submission Deadlines: All deadlines are set at the end of the day, Anywhere on Earth (AoE)

July 2, 2026
Paper abstract deadline
July 3, 2026
Submission deadline
July 23, 2026
Notification of paper acceptance
July 31, 2026
Camera-ready deadline
Sept 3, 2026
Poster-session submission deadline
Sept 16, 2026
Notification of poster acceptance
Oct 5, 2026
In-person workshop at ICMI

Call for papers

We are pleased to share the Call for Papers for the 7th edition of the GENEA Workshop, focusing on the generation and evaluation of non-verbal behaviours such as gesticulation, facial expressions, and gaze — essential components of natural interaction with embodied agents, including virtual agents and social robots.

Currently, behaviour generation is typically powered by rule-based systems, data-driven approaches such as generative AI, or hybrid models. For evaluation, both objective and subjective methods are used, though their application and validity are often debated. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines working on various aspects of non-verbal behaviour generation, fostering discussion on advancing both generation techniques and evaluation methodologies.

✨ Topics of Interest

We invite original contributions on topics including (but not limited to):

  • Automated synthesis of facial expressions, gestures, and gaze movements, including multimodal synthesis
  • Closed-loop / end-to-end non-verbal behaviour generation (from perception to action)
  • Use of 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
  • Ethical considerations and biases in non-verbal behaviour synthesis
  • Subjective and objective evaluation methods for any of the above topics

šŸ“ Submission Types

We welcome:

  • Long papers (8 pages)
  • Short papers (4 pages)

All submissions should follow the double-column ACM conference format. Pages containing only references do not count toward the page limit. Papers must be submitted in PDF format via OpenReview and prepared for double-blind review.

Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the ICMI companion proceedings.

Submission site: Comming Soon.

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


Call for posters

Comming Soon!

We are currently preparing our Call for posters and will update this section shortly with all the details. We look forward to receiving your poster submissions. Stay tuned for updates!


Reproducibility Award

Reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific method. Lack of reproducibility is a serious issue in contemporary research which we want to address at our workshop. To encourage authors to make their papers reproducible, and to reward the effort that reproducibility requires, we are introducing the GENEA Workshop Reproducibility Award. All short and long papers presented at the GENEA Workshop will be eligible for this award. Please note that it is the camera-ready version of the paper which will be evaluated for the reward.

The award is awarded to the paper with the greatest degree of reproducibility. The assessment criteria include:
  • ease of reproduction (ideal: just works, if there is code - it is well documented and we can run it)
  • extent (ideal: all results can be verified)
  • data accessibility (ideal: all data used is publicly available)

Invited speakers

Evonne Ng

Evonne Ng
Biography
Evonne is a Research Scientist at Meta Reality Labs in Pittsburgh. Her research broadly investigates the full stack of large models for AI gesture and motion generation, spanning everything from data curation and modeling to real-time streaming and deployment. Previously, she completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, where she was co-advised by Trevor Darrell and Angjoo Kanazawa.

Organising committee

The main contact address of the workshop is: genea-contact@googlegroups.com.

Workshop organisers

Taras Kucherenko
Taras Kucherenko
Electronic Arts (EA)
Sweden

Gustav Eje Henter
Gustav Eje Henter
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Motorica AB
Sweden

Alice Delbosc
Alice Delbosc
Davi, The Humanizers
France

Oya Celiktutan
Oya Celiktutan
King's College London
United Kingdom

Jieyeon Woo
Jieyeon Woo
Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials
South Korea

Eneko Atxa Landa
Eneko Atxa Landa
University of the Basque Country
Spain

Haoyang Du
Haoyang Du
Technological University Dublin
Ireland


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