GENEA Challenge 2026 on speech-driven gesture generation Call for Papers

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Call for participation: GENEA Challenge 2026 on speech-driven gesture generation
Challenge period: Until June 28
Location: Interactive Social Agents Workshop @ ECCV 2026, Malmö, Sweden
Website: https://genea-workshop.github.io/2026/challenge/
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Motivation

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It is difficult to reproduce co-speech gesture-generation systems
trained by other people, and each publication often uses its own
evaluation methodology that often deviates from best practices. This
makes it difficult to assess the state of the art in the field.

To better compare and understand methods for gesture generation and
evaluation, we are continuing the GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of
Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) challenges, previously run
in 2020, 2022, and 2023, wherein gesture-generation approaches from
different authors are evaluated side by side on a high-quality avatar
in a set of large-scale crowdsourced studies.

Held in conjunction with the Interactive Social Avatars workshop at
ECCV 2026, this year's challenge invites submissions of both novel
models and previously published systems. New research may be submitted
as a formal workshop paper, while published systems should be
accompanied by a structured technical description document.

Data and tasks

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The challenge will be using the Seamless Interaction dataset from Meta
FAIR. The challenge will perform four evaluations:

    Core task 1: Motion realism

    Core task 2: Speech-gesture alignment

    Optional task 1: Semantic appropriateness for a specific spoken
    word (using the Seamless Interaction spoken gesture game subset)

    Optional task 2: Dyadic appropriateness for/alignment to
    interlocutor behaviour


The evaluations will be based on the methodologies of prior challenges
and the recent GENEA Leaderboard paper (CVPR Findings 2026). Challenge
submissions will also be placed on the ongoing GENEA living
leaderboard, which will add a new leaderboard on the Seamless
Interaction dataset following this challenge.

Timeline

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Apr. 15 - Official challenge soft launch

June 21 - Test-set inputs released to participants

June 28 - Deadline for participants to submit generated motion

July 10 - Evaluation results released to participants

July 15 - Paper submission deadline

Aug. 3 - Author notifications

Aug. 8 - Camera-ready paper deadline

Sept. 8 or 9 - Challenge presentations at ECCV Workshop

Registration

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To register for the challenge, please follow this link:

https://forms.gle/MhorH9X3PmLsbQ5e8

Submission format

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Challenge participants are required to make sure that there is a
reproducible description of their system available, so that everyone
can learn from the challenge by connecting what was done to the
resulting system performance. We provide three pathways to do this:

    Submit a full, 8-page paper for publication at the ECCV workshop

    Submit a 4-page non-archival technical report, enabling authors to
    publish a full paper of their work at another conference of their
    choice

    Participants that enter a previously published/described method
    into the challenge may submit a 1-page non-archival extended
    abstract that describe all changes made to train their system for
    the challenge


We look forward to seeing your contributions to the challenge!

Organising committee

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Rajmund Nagy - KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Hendric Voß - Bielefeld University, Germany

Mihail Tsakov - Independent researcher, the Netherlands

Teodor Nikolov - Motorica AB, Sweden

Silvia Arellano García - KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Taras Kucherenko - SEED, Electronic Arts, Sweden

Youngwoo Yoon - ETRI, South Korea
Gustav Eje Henter - KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden / Motorica AB, Sweden

Questions about the challenge can be sent to genea-challenge@googlegroups.com.