CfP: BEACON 2026 Workshop @ ICMI – Grounding Abstract Concepts in Multimodal Interaction (Deadline: July 2, 2026)

[Niyati Rawal]

Dear All, 

We invite submissions to the BEACON 2026 Workshop (Beyond a Concrete: Grounding Abstract Concepts in Multimodal Interaction), Co-located with ICMI 2026.

Multimodal systems have made strong progress in grounding concrete concepts (e.g., objects, actions), but abstract concepts (e.g., “tool,” “use,” “good”) remain poorly understood. Grounding these concepts requires integrating perception, language, action, and context and is essential for flexible, human-like interaction. This workshop focuses on computational and interactional mechanisms for grounding abstract concepts beyond concrete sensory inputs, bringing together work on multimodal representation learning, embodied and developmental models, robotics, and hybrid cognitive architectures. The workshop aims to consolidate approaches, datasets, and evaluation strategies for abstract concept grounding, identify shared modeling assumptions, and clarify open challenges.

Topics of Interest
We invite submissions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Grounding abstract concepts in multimodal interaction
• Hierarchical and developmental models of abstraction
• Cross-modal abstraction and alignment
• Embodied and interactive concept learning
• Multimodal action and goal representations
• Affective and contextual abstraction
• Embodied and interactive learning of abstract language
• Hybrid cognitive architectures for abstract grounding
• Evaluation methodologies for abstract concept grounding
• Multimodal datasets and benchmarks for abstract concepts
• Applications of abstract grounding in HCI and HRI
  
  

Submission Details

• Short papers (4 pages)
• Full Papers (8 pages)

• Submit via OpenReview: https://openreview.net/group?id=ICMI/2026/Workshop/BEACON
• All accepted and presented papers will be included in the proceedings of the ACM ICMI 2026 workshop.

Important Dates

• Submission: July 2, 2026
• Notification: July 25, 2026
• Camera-ready: July 31, 2026
• Workshop: October 5 or 9, 2026

Website: https://beacon2026.github.io/

We welcome contributions from the multimodal interaction, AI, robotics, and cognitive science communities.

For any questions or requests, please feel free to contact us (rahulsing...@manchester.ac.uk).

BEACON 2026 Organizers

Rahul Singh Maharjan - University of Manchester (rahulsing...@manchester.ac.uk)

Haodong Xie  - University of Manchester (haodo...@manchester.ac.uk)

Niyati Rawal - IAIRO-BITS (niyati...@iairo.ai)

Luca Raggioli - University of Naples Federico II (luca.r...@unina.it)

Angelo Cangelosi - University of Manchester (angelo.c...@manchester.ac.uk)