Call for Submissions to the HRI 2026 Workshop on Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI)

• Website: https://leap-hri.github.io/
• Workshop: March 16, 2026
• Location: Hybrid (Edinburgh, UK and online), as part of the 21^st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2026)
• Manuscript submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=leaphri2026 
• Contact for submissions: mzhao2 AT andrew.cmu.edu

Important Dates

• Early-bird submission deadline: January 25, 2026  - to be able to register at a low rate for the workshop
• Early-bird notification of acceptance: January 30, 2026
• General submission deadline: February 16, 2026
• General notification of acceptance: March 2, 2026
• Camera-ready deadline: March 9, 2026

All deadlines are at 23:59 Anywhere on Earth time.

Aim and Scope

Today’s high-capacity generalist robot policies provide a strong foundation for broad task-level competence, yet achieving effective and equitable support for people in everyday settings remains a significant challenge. Real-world environments are dynamic and unstructured, and human needs evolve over time, requiring robots that can adapt accordingly. The ultimate evaluator of any robotic system is the person it assists, and personalization is essential to ensuring equitable and meaningful support across diverse users and contexts. Developing robots that can continually learn from interaction, adapt their behaviors over time, and flexibly assume roles as learners and collaborators is a critical step toward realizing effective integration of robots into daily life.

With this year's theme of "Evolving Assistance for Everyday Life", and in alignment with the conference theme "HRI Empowering Society", the sixth edition of the "Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI)" workshop aims to bring together insights across diverse disciplines, focusing on how robots can progressively adapt their support to suit diverse individuals, each with unique and changing needs, across real-world contexts. Through this lens, the workshop aims to discuss current and future directions in how assistive systems can flexibly respond, continually improve over time, and deliver more inclusive and empowering support in everyday life.

Workshop Schedule

The workshop will be hybrid (at Edinburgh International Conference Centre, Edinburgh, UK and online) on March 16, 2026. It will consist of a 1-hour fireside chat with Laurel Riek and Chris Paxton, accepted paper talks (7-minute presentation, 3-minute Q&A), and two discussion sessions (1-hour in total) to encourage richer interactions between participants that could spark new ideas, foster collaborations, and lead to fresh research directions.

Fireside Chat 

• Laurel Riek, University of California San Diego (USA)
• Industry researcher, TBD

List of Topics

We encourage researchers from HRI, robotics, cognitive science, rehabilitation and educational backgrounds to contribute. The workshop welcomes contributions across a wide range of topics including, but not limited to:

• Lifelong personalization and/or adaptation
• Continual/lifelong machine learning
• Adaptive assistance for evolving daily routines and real-world tasks
• Human–robot co-adaptation and shared autonomy over long-term use
• Evaluation methods and metrics for long-term adaptive assistance
• Balancing autonomy and user control in adaptive assistance
• Incremental and/or online learning in HRI
• Modeling user(s) and/or user behavior(s) in multi-session/long-term HRI
• Modeling robot behavior in multi-session/long-term HRI
• Modeling context in multi-session/long-term HRI
• Agent/robot architectures for personalization/adaptation
• Lifelong (long-term) human-agent or multi-user/multi-agent interactions
• Lifelong (long-term) multimodal interactions
• Long-term memory (episodic, semantic, associative)
• Transfer and generalization of learned behaviors across tasks, users, and contexts
• Privacy and ethical considerations in lifelong learning/ personalization in HRI
• Cross-cultural adaption in HRI

Submission Guidelines

We invite submissions of scientific papers of 3 to 4 pages in length, with additional pages permitted for references and appendices. Contributions may include a wide range of work, such as ongoing projects with preliminary results, technical reports, case studies, surveys, or novel research advancing the state of the art in lifelong learning and personalization. Relevant topics span real-world applications including (but not limited to) rehabilitation, elder care, companion robots, collaborative work, education, customer-facing services, and long-term interaction studies.

This year, we particularly encourage submissions that reflect the workshop's theme: "Evolving Assistance for Everyday Life". All submitted papers will undergo a thorough review process to assess their relevance, originality, and scientific and technical robustness.

Submissions do not need to be anonymized for review. All manuscripts must be written in English and submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair (link given at the top). The accepted papers will be published on the workshop website.

Authors should use ACM SIG format (use “sigconf” as document class, instead of “manuscript,screen,review”) template files (US letter). Overleaf template (use “sigconf” as document class, instead of “manuscript,screen,review”).

Organizing Committee

• Bahar Irfan, Senior Research Scientist at Familiar Machines & Magic (USA)
• Nikhil Churamani, Visiting Researcher at University of Cambridge (UK)
• Michelle Zhao, PhD Candidate at Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
• Rajat Kumar Jenamani, PhD Candidate at Cornell University (USA)
• Ali Ayub, Assistant Professor at Concordia University (Canada)
• Silvia Rossi, Professor at University of Naples, "Federico II'' (Italy)

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to mzhao2 AT andrew.cmu.edu.