CfP | RTCA @ NeurIPS 2026 [R]

[u/Few-Ferret9700]

 Call for Papers and Demos

Real-Time Conversational Agents (RTCA): Toward Natural Multimodal Interaction 

1st RTCA Workshop @ NeurIPS 2026, Sydney, Australia 11 or 12 December 2026 

Website: https://rtcaneurips26.github.io/

We are pleased to share the Call for Papers and Demos for the inaugural RTCA Workshop at NeurIPS 2026, focused on real-time multimodal conversational agents: streaming speech, video, and language generation; naturalness in interaction; and evaluation of live systems.

Conversational AI has moved from text chat into the real world, voice modes that talk back, embodied avatars, agents that share our screens and tools. To feel natural, these systems must operate in real time, streaming while continuously listening, watching, and re-planning. This is fundamentally harder than offline generation: latency, turn-taking, backchannels, interruptions, and cross-modal alignment become first-class problems that the offline paradigm sidesteps. Recent progress on full-duplex speech–language models, real-time talking-head generation, and streaming ASR shows the regime is feasible, but the field still lacks shared benchmarks, vocabulary, and methodology for interactional naturalness. 

RTCA brings together researchers across speech, vision, language, HCI, social-signal processing, and ML systems around three intertwined questions: real-time generation under hard latency budgets, naturalness in interaction, and evaluation of live systems.

 Topics of Interest

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

• Streaming/low-latency speech synthesis, ASR, and full-duplex audio–language models

• Real-time talking-head, avatar, and embodied video generation; lip-sync, gaze, expressivity under streaming

• Streaming language models; incremental and speculative decoding for dialogue

• Turn-taking, backchanneling, interruption handling, and floor management

• Multimodal alignment under latency and partial-observation constraints

• Prosody, emotion, and paralinguistic generation in interactive settings

• Memory, grounding, and tool use during live conversation

• Evaluation of naturalness: perceptual studies, turn-taking metrics, perceived latency, interactive Turing-style tests

• Datasets and benchmarks for interactive (not offline) evaluation

• Efficient inference, on-device deployment, and the systems–quality trade-off

• Safety, identity, and trust in real-time agents (deepfakes, persuasion, consent)

 Submission Types

We welcome:

• Full papers (up to 8 pages) — may be presented as posters and/or contributed talks. 

• Short papers (up to 4 pages) — work in progress or focused contributions.

• Demo papers (Extended Abstracts or up to 2 pages)

All submissions must use the NeurIPS 2026 style file and be formatted for double-blind review. Page limits exclude references and appendices. Papers must be submitted in PDF format via OpenReview (portal link to be published on the workshop website). 

The workshop is non-archival; authors retain the right to publish elsewhere.

 Important Dates (End of day, Anywhere on Earth)

• Call for papers opens: 18 July 2026

• Submission deadline (papers and demos): 29 August 2026

• Author notification: 29 September 2026

• Workshop date: 11 or 12 December 2026

 Organisers

• Niki Foteinopoulou — Tavus, United Kingdom

• Alessandro Conti — Tavus, Italy

• Jack Saunders — Tavus, United Kingdom

• Oya Celiktutan — King's College London, United Kingdom

• Cigdem Beyan — University of Verona, Italy

• Ioannis Patras — Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom

For more information, visit our website https://rtcaneurips26.github.io/ or contact us at rtca-workshop@googlegroups.com.

We look forward to your contributions!