CFP: LM Playschool (LMP 2026) (@EMNLP2026)

Call for Papers: LM Playschool (LMP 2026).  Website: https://lm-playschool.github.io/ 

Improving Language Models through Learning from Dialogue Interaction

Co-located with EMNLP 2026 — 24-29 October 2026, Budapest

The LM Playschool Workshop (LMP 2026) invites submissions exploring the frontier of language agents that learn, adapt, and improve through situated interaction. We focus on conversational, collaborative, goal-oriented, and multi-turn environments—moving beyond static training and evaluation datasets to explore whether interactive learning can yield more data-efficient, robust, and adaptable language agents.

💡 WORKSHOP VISION

LMP 2026 aims to bridge the gap between three ongoing research trends:

1. Game-based Benchmarking (functional linguistic competence).

2. Machine Language Acquisition (social interaction vs. massive text observation).

3. Interactive Learning Signals (communicative success vs. token-level rewards).

🎯 TOPICS OF INTEREST

We welcome original research and work-in-progress on:

* Architectures and training regimes for interactive agents.

* Intrinsic rewards and learning signals (RL from game-state success).

* Benchmarking via dialogue games.

* Data efficiency and social interaction.

* Social cognition and Theory of Mind in interactive systems.

* Human-agent collaboration and coordination.

* Embodied interactive agents.

* Communicative and perceptual grounding.

🏆 THE LM PLAYSCHOOL CHALLENGE (SHARED TASK)

LMP 2026 will feature a new shared task: post-training LLMs to master communicative skills in unseen dialogue games while retaining original language capabilities. Rules and settings will be announced soon on our website!

📝 SUBMISSION TRACKS

We welcome either long or short submissions for the following tracks:

1. Challenge track: Technical reports for the LM-Playschool challenge (archival).

2. Paper-only track: Work-in-progress (archival or non-archival) or recently published papers (non-archival).

📅 IMPORTANT DATES

* Starter pack release: Late March 2026

* ARR paper submission deadline: May 25, 2026

* Challenge submission deadline: July 10, 2026

* Direct paper submission deadline (challenge track and paper-only track): July 17, 2026

* Notification of acceptance: August 20, 2026

* Camera ready due: September 20, 2026

* Workshop at EMNLP’26 in Budapest: October 24-29, 2026 (Budapest)

For more information, visit our website: https://lm-playschool.github.io/ 

We look forward to your submissions!

The LMP 2026 Organizing Committee:

Raffaella Bernardi, Raquel Fernández,  Mario Giulianelli,  Sherzod Hakimov,  Alexander Koller,  Dieu-Thu Le,  Oliver Lemon,  Davide Mazzaccara,  Sabrina McCallum, David Schlangen,  Alessandro Suglia.