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:
- Game-based Benchmarking (functional linguistic competence).
- Machine Language Acquisition (social interaction vs. massive text observation).
- 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:
- Challenge track: Technical reports for the LM-Playschool challenge (archival).
- 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 5, 2026
- Direct paper submission deadline (challenge track and paper-only track): July 12, 2026
- Direct submissions review due:: July 31, 2026
- Peer-reviewed ARR commitment deadline: August 2, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: August 8, 2026
- Camera ready due: August 23, 2026
- Challenge winners announced: Early October 2026
- Workshop at EMNLP’26: October 28, 2026 (Budapest)