IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2026
Madrid, September 1–4, 2026

Special session: Evaluating and Advancing Spatial Intelligence through Games

CFP for auxiliary papers: https://cog2026.fdi.ucm.es/cfp-spatial
Submission deadline: 14 May 2026


Organizing committee
Prashant Jayannavar — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, US (paj3@illinois.edu)
Alessandro Suglia — University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom (asuglia@ed.ac.uk)
Sina Zarrieß — University of Bielefeld, Germany
Massimo Poesio — Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom

Scope
Spatial intelligence, the ability to perceive, reason about, and manipulate spatial relationships, is fundamental to human cognition and essential for artificial intelligence systems operating in both physical and virtual environments. Games provide rich, controlled, and interactive testbeds for evaluating and advancing spatial intelligence in AI, offering diverse scenarios that require understanding spatial configurations, navigation, object manipulation, and communication about spatial concepts.

This special session seeks contributions that use games as diagnostic tools or environments for developing and evaluating spatial intelligence in AI systems. We welcome research spanning both embodied and unembodied games, as well as multimodal and unimodal settings. Of particular interest are collaborative and interactive scenarios where spatial intelligence enables AI agents to serve as instruction followers or instruction givers, playing alongside or assisting humans in open-ended gameplay or task-specific applications such as navigation, construction/assembly, object manipulation, etc. Further, reward modeling in such domains also inherently requires spatial understanding, and we encourage work that studies this.

The session is in part motivated by prior workshops such as the 4th Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding and Grounded Communication for Robotics (SpLU-RoboNLP 2024), When Language meets Games Workshop (Wordplay 2025), with particular inspiration drawn from the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop Human in the Loop Learning through Grounded Interaction in Games (https://www.dagstuhl.de/seminars/seminar-calendar/seminar-details/24492).

Topics of Interest
We are seeking papers that present methodological contributions to relevant tasks as follows.
Relevant Tasks
Including, but not limited to:
Core instruction following and giving tasks (dialogue-based or single-turn)
Related sub-problems, e.g., referring expression comprehension/generation, clarification question generation, planning
Reward modeling
Novel task formulations to evaluate spatial intelligence capabilities
Methodological Contributions
For the above tasks, we invite contributions including, but not limited to:
Data and Resources
Data collection, synthetic data generation, and simulation frameworks
Data scarcity in embodied or interactive settings
Inverse Dynamics Models and related approaches for pseudo-labeling, enabling scalable dataset creation from abundant unlabeled sources
Resources and environments for interactive/online learning
Modeling Approaches
LLMs, VLMs, VLAs, agentic frameworks
Reinforcement Learning
Model design, fine-tuning strategies, in-context learning, parameter-efficient methods, and specific techniques for spatial reasoning or spatio-temporal memory representations
Evaluation and Analysis
Automated metrics, human evaluation studies, and benchmark design
Games as diagnostic environments for behavioral analysis (manual or automatic) of models to uncover their strengths and limitations
Evaluating reward modeling ability itself as an effective proxy for spatial reasoning ability

Program Committee members
Julia Hockenmaier — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Marc-Alexandre Cote — Microsoft Research – Montreal
Raffaella Bernardi — Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
David Schlangen — University of Potsdam
Manling Li — Northwestern University
Parisa Kordjamshidi — Michigan State University
Simon Dobnik — University of Gothenburg
Nikolai Ilinykh — University of Gothenburg
Vardhan Dongre — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ruiyi Wang — University of California San Diego
Sandro Pezzelle - University of Amsterdam

Submission Instructions
This is a call for auxiliary papers. We invite the submission of short, competition and vision papers:
Short papers (4 pages page limit) describe work in progress, smaller projects that are not yet ready to be published as a full paper, or new progress on projects that have been reported elsewhere.
Competition papers (8 pages page limit) describe research related to one of the competitions in the Games community, including the design of new competitions and in particular submissions to existing competitions.
Vision papers (8 pages page limit) describe a vision for the future of the Games field or some part of it, be based on extensive research, and include a comprehensive bibliography. Please notice that the standards for vision papers are high: literature reviews and opinion papers with speculations not grounded in research are immediately rejected.

All page limits include references and appendices.
All accepted auxiliary papers will be included in the proceedings of the conference.
NONE OF THE SUBMISSION DEADLINES WILL BE EXTENDED.
All deadlines are Anytime on Earth (AoE).

Relevant dates for this call are as follows:
Submission of auxiliary papers: 14th May 2026
Notification of acceptance of auxiliary papers: 10th June 2026
Submission of the camera-ready version of auxiliary papers: 24th June 2006
Conference dates: 1st – 4th September 2026

Papers must be submitted through the conference submission system available at the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=ieeecog2026
All paper submissions should follow the recommended IEEE conference author guidelines. MS Word and LaTeX templates can be found at https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates

All submitted papers will be fully peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and on IEEE Xplore. CoG will use a *double-anonymous review process*. Authors must omit their names and affiliations from their submissions, avoiding obvious identifying statements. Submissions not abiding by anonymity requirements will be desk rejected.
Papers might be allocated to either poster presentations or oral presentations.