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Call for Papers and Demos Real-Time Conversational Agents (RTCA): Toward Natural Multimodal Interaction 1st RTCA Workshop [@]() NeurIPS 2026, Sydney, Australia 11 or 12 December 2026 Website: https://rtcaneurips26.github.io/ We are pleased to share the Call for Papers and Demos for the inaugural RTCA Workshop at NeurIPS 2026, focused on real-time multimodal conversational agents: streaming speech, video, and language generation; naturalness in interaction; and evaluation of live systems. Conversational AI has moved from text chat into the real world, voice modes that talk back, embodied avatars, agents that share our screens and tools. To feel natural, these systems must operate in real time, streaming while continuously listening, watching, and re-planning. This is fundamentally harder than offline generation: latency, turn-taking, backchannels, interruptions, and cross-modal alignment become first-class problems that the offline paradigm sidesteps. Recent progress on full-duplex speech–language models, real-time talking-head generation, and streaming ASR shows the regime is feasible, but the field still lacks shared benchmarks, vocabulary, and methodology for interactional naturalness. RTCA brings together researchers across speech, vision, language, HCI, social-signal processing, and ML systems around three intertwined questions: real-time generation under hard latency budgets, naturalness in interaction, and evaluation of live systems. Topics of Interest We invite original contributions on topics including (but not limited to): Streaming/low-latency speech synthesis, ASR, and full-duplex audio–language models Real-time talking-head, avatar, and embodied video generation; lip-sync, gaze, expressivity under streaming Streaming language models; incremental and speculative decoding for dialogue Turn-taking, backchanneling, interruption handling, and floor management Multimodal alignment under latency and partial-observation constraints Prosody, emotion, and paralinguistic generation in interactive settings Memory, grounding, and tool use during live conversation Evaluation of naturalness: perceptual studies, turn-taking metrics, perceived latency, interactive Turing-style tests Datasets and benchmarks for interactive (not offline) evaluation Efficient inference, on-device deployment, and the systems–quality trade-off Safety, identity, and trust in real-time agents (deepfakes, persuasion, consent) Submission Types We welcome: Full papers (up to 8 pages) — may be presented as posters and/or contributed talks. Short papers (up to 4 pages) — work in progress or focused contributions. Demo papers (Extended Abstracts or up to 2 pages) All submissions must use the NeurIPS 2026 style file and be formatted for double-blind review. Page limits exclude references and appendices. Papers must be submitted in PDF format via OpenReview (portal link to be published on the workshop website). The workshop is non-archival; authors retain the right to publish elsewhere. Important Dates (End of day, Anywhere on Earth) Call for papers opens: 18 July 2026 Submission deadline (papers and demos): 29 August 2026 Author notification: 29 September 2026 Workshop date: 11 or 12 December 2026 Organisers Niki Foteinopoulou — Tavus, United Kingdom Alessandro Conti — Tavus, Italy Jack Saunders — Tavus, United Kingdom Oya Celiktutan — King's College London, United Kingdom Cigdem Beyan — University of Verona, Italy Ioannis Patras — Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom For more information, visit our website https://rtcaneurips26.github.io/ or contact us at [rtca-workshop@googlegroups.com](mailto:rtca-workshop@googlegroups.com). We look forward to your contributions! submitted by /u/Few-Ferret9700 [link] [Kommentare]
Hey everyone, I wanted to share a project I've been engineering called VAULT. The goal was to build a messaging hub that leaves absolutely zero footprint—no servers storing data, no emails, no phone numbers, and local identity generation. How the stack works: Messaging: Uses the Double Ratchet protocol for end-to-end encryption. Message routing and voice/video calls are handled entirely peer-to-peer (DTLS-SRTP) via WebRTC. Data Storage: Ephemeral by design. Messages have a 24-hour auto-decay window and live only in local storage. Integrations: I also integrated a non-custodial wallet infrastructure supporting Solana and EVM chains directly into the chat interface, using zk-SNARKs for private transaction rails and ERC-4337 for gasless payments so users don't need native tokens to transact. Because it's fully serverless, signaling is the trickiest part. I'm currently looking for feedback on handling WebRTC STUN/TURN fallbacks more efficiently when both peers are behind symmetric NATs. I'll drop the project link/repo in the comments if anyone wants to check out the pre-release or look at the architecture! submitted by /u/mylifeasdisha [link] [Kommentare]
Someone got the private key that signs Ostium's price oracle reports. with that key they pushed fake, future dated price data through ostium's automation system (a contract called PriceUpKeep, triggered by gelato) that made their trades look profitable when they weren't. they ran about 20 open/close trade loops in a few hours and drained somewhere between $11.86M and $18M USDC, roughly 28% of the vault's $63M TVL. Blockaid caught it and flagged it publicly. Ostium paused trading right after, all positions and user funds are frozen as is while they investigate. Ostium had raised $27.8M from general catalyst, Jump crypto, Coinbase ventures, Wintermute and GSR, and processed over $50B in cumulative volume. multiple audits too. none of that stopped a compromised signer key from draining the vault, because the exploit lived in oracle infra, not the contract code. summer.fi also got hit for $6M in a similar oracle/keeper exploit last week. feels like this is becoming the go to attack vector now that contract code itself is actually well audited. anyone else think oracle key management needs the same scrutiny as multisig treasury keys at this point? submitted by /u/Bluejumprabbit [link] [Kommentare]
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We revisit the evaluation of automatic harness evolution for LLM agents. Existing harness evolution methods use unit test cases to search for harness configurations and then report final performance on the same public benchmark. This protocol raises two fundamental concerns. First, harness evolution is itself an iterative search procedure that repeatedly evaluates and revises candidate harnesses using task feedback. As in agentic test-time scaling, it should therefore be compared with simple task-level search baselines under matched feedback and inference budgets to determine whether its gains arise from improved harness design or from additional search alone. Second, because the search and the final evaluation share the same benchmark, the reported gains risk overfitting to that specific task set. To address these concerns, we conduct an extensive evaluation comparing harness evolution with simple test-time scaling and discovery baselines under comparable feedback and inference budgets, and also evaluate evolved harnesses on held-out tasks to assess whether the discovered improvements generalize. Experiments on Terminal-Bench 2.1 with GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 show that automatic harness evolution does not consistently outperform simple test-time scaling methods and exhibits limited generalization. Our results raise important questions about the effectiveness of automatic harness evolution and highlight the need for fairer evaluation protocols and benchmarks for automatic harness design. Our code is available at https://github.com/rethinking-harness-evolution.