Call for Papers: LM Playschool (LMP 2026) Improving Language Models through Learning from Dialogue Interaction

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

Website: https://lm-playschool.github.io/

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.