[CFP] FG 2026 Workshop "Empathic AI: Face, Gesture, and Accessibility Technologies"

[EmpAI]

Empathic AI: Face, Gesture, and Accessibility Technologies (EmpAI 2026)

in conjunction with FG 2026 (May 25-29, Kyoto, Japan)

In the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable progress in recognizing faces, gestures, and multimodal signals. However, the most challenging question remains: How can AI understand all humans, not only the “typical” ones? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report in 2023, an estimated 1.3 billion people (about 16% of the global population) live with significant disabilities affecting vision, hearing, cognition, or mobility. Their gestures are subtler, their facial cues atypical, and their voices sometimes silent.

This workshop proposes “Empathic Intelligence,” which extends beyond perception and action, bringing social understanding, affective awareness, and human-centered reasoning into intelligent systems. We aim to explore how multimodal AI can perceive, express, and respond responsibly to non-normative human signals, designing technologies and applications that make the world more accessible, inclusive, and emotionally intelligent.

Topics of Interest:

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

Foundations of Empathic Intelligence

• Predictive processing, embodied cognition, and symbol emergence

• Modeling emotion, intention, and individual diversity

• Multimodal learning across vision, physiology, and language

• Computational modeling of emotion and intention under individual differences

Inclusive and Accessible Interaction

• Face, gesture, and gaze systems for sensory, motor, or cognitive impairments

• Adaptive interaction for diverse sensory, motor, and cognitive abilities

• Assistive communication and embodied interaction (e.g., AR/VR accessibility)

Robustness Across Human Variability

• Recognition under atypical, incomplete, or noisy signals

• Learning from small, imbalanced, or underrepresented datasets

• Fairness-aware benchmarking and evaluation frameworks

Ethics and Human-Centered Design

• Privacy, consent, dignity, and value-sensitive design

• Bias mitigation for accessibility-focused AI

• Cross-disciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, psychology, and social sciences

Important Dates:

• Paper submission deadline: February 11, 2026 (11:59 pm AOE)

• Notification to authors: March 20, 2026 (11:59 pm AOE)

• Camera-ready deadline: April 21, 2026 (11:59 pm AOE)

• Workshop date: TBC (May 25 or 29, 2026)

Submission Guidelines:

We invite authors to submit their contributions as a long paper (8 pages excluding references)  or a short paper (4 pages + 1 page for references). The format for paper submission is the same as the FG 2026 main conference. All submissions will be peer-reviewed for their novelty, relevance, contribution to the field, and technical soundness. Authors are also encouraged to provide an ethical considerations statement, which will not count towards the total page limit. 

More details can be found on the “Call for Papers” from official website.

Organizers:

• Yutong Zhou (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research)

• Von Ralph Dane Marquez Herbuela (The University of Tokyo)

• Haifeng Zhang (The University of Tokyo)

• Mariza Ferro (Fluminense Federal University)

• Nobutaka Shimada (Ritsumeikan University)

Contacts:

For further questions, please contact the organizing committee at empathi...@gmail.com