Call for Participation: LM Playschool (LMP 2026)

Improving Language Models through Learning from Dialogue Interaction Co-located with EMNLP 2026 — 28 October 2026, Budapest

Website: https://lm-playschool.github.io/ Starter Kit: https://github.com/lm-playpen/playpen

The submission deadlines for the LM Playschool Workshop are fast approaching! Please note that some dates have been updated since our previous announcements — see below.

📝 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).

🏆 CHALLENGE TRACK (SHARED TASK) The shared task focuses on post-training LLMs to master communicative skills in unseen dialogue games while retaining original language capabilities. Participants are free to choose any base model; evaluation is based on improvement relative to that base model on an unseen test set. Not signed up yet? Register here: https://forms.gle/fhpXPH5kZk4psPXp9

🛠️ STARTER KIT Our sandbox environment Playpen is available on GitHub and ready to use. Key features: * Comprehensive Evaluation: A single command to get your "clemscore" (interactive competence) and "statscore" (classic benchmarks). * Training Recipes: Example scripts for SFT and GRPO to help models learn from game-state success. * Resource Friendly: We encourage using the Qwen3.5 family (0.8B to 27B) to ensure participation is possible with modest compute.

🎯 PAPER-ONLY TRACK: 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.

📅 IMPORTANT DATES (updated) * ARR paper submission deadline: May 25, 2026 * Challenge submission deadline: July 5, 2026 (3 weeks away!) * Direct paper submission deadline: July 12, 2026 (1 month away!) * Pre-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 2026: October 28, 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