Introducing the ACII 2026 Dyadic Contest (DaiKon) Workshop & Challenge

The 2026 ACII Dyadic Contest (DaiKon) Workshop & Challenge, sponsored by Hume AI, introduces a novel machine learning benchmark aimed at understanding interpersonal affect and social dynamics in two-person conversations, shifting the focus from individual to dyadic emotional interactions. This initiative highlights key phenomena like emotional contagion, directional influence, and time-evolving affect, making it one of the first large-scale efforts dedicated to interpersonal affect in dyadic settings. The challenge is structured around three core tasks: predicting a speaker’s emotional state, determining conversational timing and coordination, and modeling how interaction quality evolves over time. Participants will work with a diverse, multilingual dataset of 945 sessions covering 743 hours of conversation, collected via Hume AI's dual-channel recording platform. The event encourages submissions on various related topics and provides multimodal baselines, with a conference scheduled for September 2026 in Pueblo, Mexico, marking a step toward developing AI systems that comprehend how emotions develop between individuals.