RTCA 2026 NeurIPS Workshop

NeurIPS 2026 Workshop · Sydney

RTCA 2026

Real-Time Conversational Agents: Toward Natural Multimodal Interaction

RTCA looks to explore the challenges of realtime conversational agents across multiple modalities.

Call for papers Contact organizers
Date Dec. 12, 2026
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. AEDT
Location ICC Sydney
Room MR C4.11
Format Full-day, in-person
Submission Deadline Extended Aug. 29 Sep. 10, 2026 AoE
Why RTCA

Real-time interaction is a different research problem.

Conversational AI has moved beyond text chat into voice modes, visual avatars, shared screens, and tools. Systems that feel natural must stream speech, video, and language while listening, watching, and re-planning continuously with challenging latency constraints.

RTCA focuses on the problems that offline generation can afford to ignore: latency, partial observability, turn-taking, backchannels, interruptions, cross-modal alignment, and evaluation of interactional naturalness.

01

Real-Time Generation

Streaming speech, video, and language under hard latency budgets.

02

Naturalness in Interaction

Prosody, gaze, timing, grounding, expressivity, and turn-taking dynamics.

03

Evaluation of Live Systems

Metrics and protocols for responsiveness, perceived latency, and conversational quality.

Scope

Topics of interest

We invite original contributions from speech, vision, language, HCI, social-signal processing, and ML systems communities working on interactive multimodal agents, 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)
Invited Talks

Invited speakers

Confirmed speakers so far, with more to be announced.

Evonne Ng

Evonne Ng

Meta Reality Labs / UC Berkeley

Photoreal conversational embodiment
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Dimitris Samaras

Dimitris Samaras

Stony Brook University

Gaze, expression dynamics, and behavioral cues
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Mohammad Soleymani

Mohammad Soleymani

USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Affective computing and multimodal interaction
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Workshop Day

Tentative schedule

RTCA runs on Saturday 12 December 2026, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. AEDT, in Room MR C4.11 at the International Convention Centre Sydney. A full day of invited talks, contributed talks, posters, live demos, and a closing panel. Times and sessions below are tentative and subject to change.

  1. Welcome
  2. Invited talk: real-time speech and full-duplex audio LMs
  3. Invited talk: streaming video and avatar generation
  4. Coffee and poster setup
  5. Contributed talks I
  6. Invited talk
  7. Lunch
  8. Poster session with concurrent live-demo booths
  9. Invited talk
  10. Contributed talks II
  11. Coffee
  12. Conversational Agents Showcase: live interactions with deployed and research systems
  13. Panel: What does naturalness mean, and how should we measure it?
  14. Best paper and best demo announcements; close
Submissions

Call for papers

The call for papers opens July 18, 2026. The submission deadline has been extended: papers and demos are now due September 10, 2026 AoE (previously August 29), submitted via OpenReview, formatted for double-blind review using the NeurIPS 2026 style file.

Submit on OpenReview

Full papers

Up to 8 pages. Original contributions; may be presented as posters and/or contributed talks.

Short papers

Up to 4 pages. Work in progress or focused contributions.

Demo papers

Up to 2 pages.

Important dates

July 18
Call for papers opens
Aug. 29 Sep. 10 AoE
Extended submission deadline (papers and demos)
Sep. 29 AoE
Author notification
Dec. 12
Workshop day, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. AEDT, Room MR C4.11, ICC Sydney

Page limits exclude references and appendices. The workshop is non-archival; authors retain the right to publish elsewhere. Dataset submissions should include an ethics statement covering consent for voice or likeness, deepfake risk, and provenance. The workshop follows the NeurIPS Code of Ethics, Code of Conduct, and Main Track LLM policy. Questions? Contact us at rtca-workshop@googlegroups.com.

Team

Organizers

The organizing team spans industry and academia across real-time agents, digital humans, social robotics, affective computing, computer vision, and multimodal AI.

Alessandro Conti

Alessandro Conti

Research Scientist, Tavus

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Oya Celiktutan

Oya Celiktutan

Reader in AI and Robotics, King's College London

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Cigdem Beyan

Cigdem Beyan

Associate Professor, University of Verona

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Ioannis Patras

Ioannis Patras

Professor, Queen Mary University of London

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