ACII 2026

Submission Guidelines

For Main Track, Special Track, and Workshop Papers

Submissions must be original – For a list of all topics relevant to ACII 2026, please see the Call for Papers . Original submissions to ACII 2026 should not substantially overlap with any other paper already submitted or published, or to be submitted during the ACII 2026 review period. 

ACII 2026 does not consider a paper on arXiv.org and similar open preprint repositories to be dual submission. However, papers deposited in ResearchGate, Academia, or paid-access repositories will not be accepted.

Please see the Some Best Practices for Writing A Paper below for additional guide.

Ethical impact statements are mandatory – In the past few years, we have seen greater deployment of AI in our society, which has resulted in greater impact on our daily lives. Yet, with AI’s increased societal benefit, we have also seen greater risks for potential harm. The Affective Computing community, in particular, is particularly aware of the risks and possible harm of the technology that we study. AAAC has had an Ethics Special Interest Group since its founding, and our community’s attention to ethics has also grown in recent years to match the growing risks. In 2019, ACII held a community-wide town hall to discuss ‘misuses’ of Affective Computing. Further, in 2021 and 2025, the conference’s themes were “Ethical Affective Computing” and “Socially Responsible Affective Computing” respectively. 

Similar to previous years, the ethical impact statement will be a mandatory part of all paper submissions. Please see the Guideline for Writing Ethical Impact Statements below for more information.

Page limit – The main body of the paper, from beginning to the conclusion(s), can be up to 7 pages in length. The Ethical Impact Statement can take up to one page (additional to the 7-page limit of the main content). The References does not have a page limit.

Co-authors – All persons who have made any substantial contribution to the work should be listed as authors, and all listed authors should have made some substantial contribution to the work. All authors must be aware of the paper being submitted to ACII 2026.

Submitted papers must be anonymised – The reviewing process for ACII 2026 will be double-blind. Thus, the submitted version of the paper should be appropriately anonymised to not reveal either the authors’ identities or institutions. Any submission that contains information revealing the authors’ identity will be removed from the reviewing process (desk reject). Please see the Guideline for Anonymising Submissions  below for more information.

Paper format & Templates – Submissions must be in PDF format, in final and publishable form, by the submission deadline. Paper submissions to ACII 2026 must use one of the following templates (as per IEEE specifications):

Papers that use different formatting from the ACII 2026 Latex or Word templates will be automatically removed from the reviewing process (desk reject). The final versions of all papers accepted for publication must also adhere to the IEEE Xplore PDF specifications. ACII 2026 will use the IEEE PDF eXpress to enforce the requirements for papers appearing in IEEE Xplore. The ACII 2026 conference proceedings will be published on IEEExplore.

Supplementary materials – Supplementary material (images, video, etc.) may optionally be submitted with papers. Such material must be submitted as a single zip file and must be no larger than 100MB. Please ensure anonymity, including the file names/properties or other hidden text. The supplementary materials will not be part of the conference proceedings, so they will only aid the reviewing process. Reviewers are not required to view the supplementary material (though most reviewers are likely to do so), so any information critical to understanding the work should be in the main paper.

Submit on Easychair & to only one track – Main Track, Special Track, and Workshop papers need to be submitted to EasyChair. A paper may only be submitted to one track. Submitting the same paper to multiple tracks is not allowed. The only exception is the paper-to-demo fast track offer explained below.

Paper-to-demo fast track – Authors of main track papers that include an interactive system, prototype, simulator, or tool can opt in to be additionally considered for the demo track. If authors opt in and their main track papers are accepted, the work in the accepted paper will be additionally considered for the demo track. Due to space and logistics constraints, there will be a final selection of demos (from both the paper-to-demo fast track and the standard demo track submissions). This will be done by demo chairs and based on relevance to the conference, technical robustness, and diversity of topics. Please see the Call for Interactive Demos for more details.

Accepted papers must be presented at the conference in person – If a paper is accepted, an author must register and attend the conference to present the paper in person. The conference and IEEE reserve the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference, including via the IEEE Xplore® Digital Library, if the paper is not presented by one of the authors at the conference. However, special consideration will be given to authors who can provide documentary evidence that despite their best and timely efforts, a visa was not granted in time by the Mexican authorities.

Carefully proofread your paper before submission.

Some Best Practices for Writing A Paper

  • Read the ACII Submission Guidelines.
  • Make sure the paper’s contributions are clearly stated in the abstract and introduction.
  • Make sure your claims in the paper match the theoretical and/or experimental findings.
  • If you include theoretical results, state the full set of assumptions and the complete proofs of the theoretical results. If the complete proofs of the theoretical results are too long to be included in the main paper, they must be included in the supplementary material.
  • If you run Machine Learning experiments:
    • Ensure you include and share all the necessary information to reproduce your results (e.g., hyperparameters, training splits). We encourage you to release your code and trained models if you are allowed to do so.
    • Make sure you provide evidence of the stability of your results. For example, run the experiments multiple times with different random seeds if you use random initialisation and provide error bars.
    • We encourage you to share the amount of computation and the type of computational resources used.
  • If you run statistical inference:
    • Explicitly state which statistical test(s) you ran (e.g., Welch’s t-test, Mann-Whitney U-test, OLS regression, Pearson correlation), and ideally include your analytical code in the supplemental materials.
    • Report all your p-values, including non-significant ones, and report them exactly unless they are smaller than .001 (e.g., p=.459, p=.003, p<.001).
    • Report effect sizes and confidence intervals (e.g., the mean of Group 1 was 0.4 SDs higher than that of Group 2, d=0.40, 95% CI: [0.30, 0.50]).
    • Avoid causal language unless testing for causality (e.g., talk about X explaining or being associated with Y, rather than X causing/leading to Y).
    • Briefly discuss the plausibility of the assumptions of your model(s).
  • If you use existing assets (e.g., code, data, models), properly cite the original source.
  • If your work contributes new assets (e.g., code, data, models) and you cannot release them, explain why you are not releasing the asset.

Guideline for Anonymising Submissions

ACII 2026 follows a double-blind review process, requiring authors to prepare an anonymised submission.

  • To prepare an anonymised submission, authors must remove author and institutional identifiable information from all parts of the paper, including the acknowledgments section, and the PDF meta-data. None of the submission material can contain any information that directly or indirectly reveals the authors’ identity.
  • Institution information should also be removed from the body of the text. For instance, use “…participants were recruited from a university campus” instead of “…participants were recruited from University X.” Additionally, we recommend removing marks that identify institutional affiliation from images and supplementary videos (e.g., institutional attire, logos) as much as possible. However, pictures of equipment, robots, etc. used and study setup generally do not need to be anonymised, even if the robot uniquely identifies your group.
  • We also ask authors to leave the citations to their previous work following the same format as citations to others’ work. More concretely, as an example, when the authors refer to their previous work in the text, they should use “Prior work by [6]…” instead of “Our prior work [6]…”, and [6] should be included in the reference list with the same format as the other citations.
  • Please note that any mention of IRB/Ethics Committee approval or other Ethics-related information should also be anonymised in the initial submission (and replaced with the correct information in the camera-ready version).

Guideline for Writing Ethical Impact Statements

Please refer to ACII Ethical Impact Statements – Full Guide for a lengthier discussion of the details on how to write an Ethical Impact Statement. Both authors and reviewers should use this document for clarity and a shared understanding of the ACII community’s vision.

  • Papers must have a dedicated Ethical Impact Statement section at the end of the paper, before the reference list. The Ethical Impact Statement can take up to one page (additional to the 7-page limit of the main content).
  • This Ethical Impact Statement requirement applies to papers to the ACII main conference, special tracks, and workshop paper tracks. Please note that Ethical Impact Statements may also be mandatory for extended abstracts for workshops, demos, or special tracks. Thus, ensure you verify the Ethical Impact Statement requirements before your submissions.
  • Ethical Impact Statements will be reviewed. Ethical reviews will be based on papers flagged by technical reviewers and area chairs.
  • ACII reserves the right to reject submissions that do not fulfil the Ethical Impact Statement requirements for submissions and/or have violated the ethical principles stated in this document.

Checklists

A. Checklist for Anonymising Submissions

  • Remove author and institution information from the cover page as well as from the acknowledgments section.
  • Clear meta-data in a word processor or PDF viewer/editor.
  • Replace institution information in the body of the text (including any approvals from IRBs or equivalent ethics boards/committees) with generic identifiers (e.g., “this research was approved by [anonymized] Institutional Review Board”; “we obtained approval from our university ethics committee”).
  • Use third person for citations to own work.
  • Remove marks for institutional affiliation from images and supplementary materials (as much as possible).

B. Checklist for Ethical Impact Statements 

  • Please read through the Ethical Impact Statement guideline above and also the full guide referenced in the guideline for details on how to write an Ethical Impact Statement.
  • Then, fill out the checklist below and note any items that do not apply or that you would like to elevate for discussion.
  • If you conducted research with human subjects:
    • Include in your Methods section a short, clear summary of what instructions were given to the participant that may have influenced your findings. (Note that full study instructions may be too long to include; it is fine to omit lengthy instructions that are not likely to have influenced the study findings).
    • State if the study was IRB-approved, IRB-exempt, or not given to any IRB. Give the IRB approval number. In the case of “no IRB”, say why not.
    • Describe how informed consent and/or assent were obtained from human participants or explain why these were not applicable. (These should go in the Methods section of your paper.)
    • Explain how human participants were compensated for their participation and how that compensation was determined. (These should go in the Methods section of your paper.)
  • Discuss any potential negative impact of your work and strategies for mitigating these risks:
    • Can the research be used to deceive people? What steps could be taken to mitigate this?
    • Does or could the research contain bias against certain groups of people that could result in discrimination? Will it exacerbate already-existing biases (e.g., will it perpetuate gender or racial bias?)?
    • Can the research or technology described be used in applications that limit human rights or impact people’s livelihoods, for example, surveillance or limiting access to jobs, schools, etc?
  • Discuss the limits of generalizability of your work.
    • For example, point out strong assumptions and discuss how robust your results are to violations of these assumptions.
    • Discuss the scope of your claims. For example, maybe you used a small dataset with poor demographic diversity. If that’s the case, you might want to discuss how the limited diversity of the dataset you used affects the scalability of your approach to larger and more diverse datasets.
    • Discuss the factors that can influence the performance of your approach. For example, an English affective speech-to-text system might not work properly for non-native English speakers.
    • How sensitive is the research to contextual factors? If the work is “generic”, e.g., a generic facial expression classifier, what are the considerations about generalizing to particular contexts?

Acknowledgements

The ACII submission guidelines take inspiration and information from the following guidelines: