We’re excited to announce the 2026 ACII Dyadic Contest (DaiKon) Workshop & Challenge, sponsored by Hume AI, a new machine learning benchmark focused on modeling interpersonal affect and social dynamics in two-person conversations.
Why DaiKon?
Recent advances in affective computing have largely focused on individual-level predictions—what a single speaker is feeling or expressing. But real-world conversations are fundamentally relational. Emotions evolve between people, shaped by interaction, timing, and mutual influence.
DaiKon shifts the focus from isolated speakers to dyadic dynamics, capturing phenomena such as:
- Emotional contagion
- Directional influence between speakers
- Time-evolving affect within conversations
To our knowledge, this is one of the first large-scale efforts in the ML community, and the first at ACII, dedicated specifically to interpersonal affect in dyadic settings.
The Challenge
DaiKon is structured around three core tasks:
Influence
Predict a speaker’s emotional state given conversational context.
Models estimate continuous intensity across 10 emotion dimensions (e.g., joy, anxiety, curiosity).
Turn-Taking
Predict who speaks next and when.
This task captures conversational timing and coordination.
Rapport
Model how interaction quality evolves over time, predicting rapport continuously throughout a conversation.
The Dataset
Participants will work with a large-scale, naturalistic dataset of dyadic conversations:
- 945 sessions
- 743 hours of conversation
- 5 languages and regions
- 10 emotion dimensions
All data were collected via Hume AI’s dual-channel recording platform, enabling clean separation of speakers and detailed analysis of conversational dynamics. Importantly, all participants provided informed consent, and the dataset reflects diverse cultural and linguistic contexts.
Baselines & Research Opportunities
We provide multimodal baselines (audio, video, and combined), highlighting both the promise and difficulty of these tasks. Performance varies across modalities, with multimodal approaches generally offering the strongest results, though significant headroom remains.
Beyond the competition, we welcome workshop submissions on topics such as:
- Dyadic and multi-party interaction modeling
- Temporal modeling of affect
- Multimodal fusion (audio, video, text, physiology)
- Representation learning for social and emotional behavior
- Cross-cultural interaction modeling
Key Dates
- Challenge opens: April 6, 2026
- Baseline paper: April 16, 2026
- Test set release: May 20, 2026
- Submission deadline: May 25, 2026
- Workshop papers due: May 30, 2026
- Conference: September 7–10, 2026 (Pueblo, Mexico)
Get Involved
To participate, register your team by emailing competitions@hume.ai with:
- Team name
- Researcher(s)
- Affiliation
- Research goals
Participants will receive access to the dataset under a research EULA.
Looking Ahead
DaiKon represents a step toward more human-centered AI systems—ones that understand not just what individuals feel, but how emotions emerge and evolve between people.
We’re excited to see what the community builds. For more information on our training datasets, see here.
