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 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: October 24-29, 2026 (Budapest)