Late Breaking Reports

Important Dates

All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE).

The HRI 2027 Late Breaking Reports (LBR) venue invites submissions that present early-stage results, emerging ideas, and cutting-edge or experimental research in human-robot interaction. LBRs provide a forum for timely work that may not yet be ready for a full paper and are an excellent way for researchers who are new to the field to participate in the conference.

Conference Theme

The theme of HRI 2027 is “Innovative HRI.” From SRI’s Shakey to today’s fleets of autonomous vehicles, Silicon Valley has been a cradle of robotics research where ideas become real. HRI 2027 brings the community to the region where academic labs and the industries they created have been shaping human-robot interaction for over half a century. We particularly welcome submissions that contribute to innovative HRI.

Submission Instructions

Submit the paper as a PDF that conforms to the ACM Proceedings specifications. Use the general ACM SIG “sigconf” format (double column, US letter), not the SIGCHI format.

• Submission length: 2–4 pages (excluding references); do not include appendices
• Video figure (optional): maximum duration of 2 minutes
• Peer review: double-blind; Authors must review up to three other LBRs per submission (see Peer Review Process)
• Presentation: A0 portrait poster; in-person attendance required
• The author list entered with the initial submission is final and may not be changed after submission.

Format

Submissions must be in PDF format and conform to ACM Proceedings specifications. Please note that we follow the general ACM SIG format ("sigconf", double column), not the SIGCHI format. Templates are available at this link (US letter).

ACM has partnered with Overleaf, where you can start writing using this link directly. Note that the Overleaf document defaults to the new ACM workflow, which is not what HRI uses — make sure your document uses the sigconf document class rather than the manuscript,screen,review class enabled by default.

Anonymization

The HRI 2027 review process for this track is double-blind; every aspect of all submissions must be properly anonymized. For full details, see the anonymization guidelines. If a submission contains any element — text or figures in the document, artifacts, or supplementary materials — that violates the anonymization guidelines, it will be desk rejected.

If there are exceptional circumstances, please contact the chairs of this track as soon as possible.

Studies with Human Participants

If your submission reports research involving human participants, you must outline your methodology (participant demographics and sampling, data collection and analysis, study environment, and — where applicable — the Wizard-of-Oz setup and robot platform), and you must include an ethical approval statement. Anonymize these statements for review. See the full human participants requirements before submitting.

Please also look at the full Studies with Human Participants page.

Submission to Multiple Tracks

The same work may not be published in more than one HRI 2027 track. In particular, submitting the same project to both LBR and the Student Design Competition (SDC) is not permitted; authors found to have duplicate accepted submissions will be asked to choose one track.

Avoiding Desk Rejection

To avoid desk rejection, confirm that the submission:

• Uses the ACM SIG format/template (“sigconf”, double column format), not the SIGCHI format. Make sure the document uses the “sigconf” document class, rather than the “manuscript,screen,review” document class that is enabled in the Overleaf document by default.
• Is 2–4 pages long, excluding references.
• Does not include appendices.
• Has all author names and affiliations removed.
• Anonymizes self-citations where appropriate. Cites the authors’ own prior work in the third person and leaves those citations un-anonymized — e.g., “Prior work by [6]…” rather than “Our prior work [6]…” — anonymizing a self-citation only where the cited work is non-public (for example, still under review) and naming it would reveal author identity.
• Has acknowledgements removed or anonymized.
• Has funding information removed or anonymized, as required.
• Removes or anonymizes institutional names, including universities, laboratories, companies, hospitals, and schools.
• Ensures that ethics approval statements do not reveal the institution or Institutional Review Board.
• Has identifying file metadata, including PDF properties and author information, cleared.
• Has all supplementary materials anonymized.
• Anonymizes GitHub repositories, project websites, and code repositories, or replaces them with blinded links or placeholders, as required.
• Ensures that demonstration videos do not reveal author identities, institution names, laboratory signage, or logos.
• Ensures that URLs do not contain author or institution names.
• Ensures that dataset, software, and project names do not unintentionally identify the authors.
• Ensures that robot speech, interfaces, and screenshots do not reveal institutional branding.
• Ensures that references to “our previous work” do not identify the authors through wording or citation patterns.

Optional Video Figure and Publication Policies

Authors may submit an accompanying video figure of no more than 2 minutes (up to 300 MB) to help reviewers understand the work. A video figure is optional. Only MPG, MPEG, or MP4 formats can be used. Ensure that the video is properly anonymized prior to submission (see the Anonymization section above). For accessibility, we encourage authors to caption or subtitle their video.

Accessibility

We ask all authors to make their submissions as accessible as possible. At minimum: mark up headings and lists using the template’s styles, provide a text description for every figure, distinguish elements in figures by shape or pattern as well as colour, create tables and equations as real tables and equations rather than images, and set your document metadata.

Please read the full HRI 2027 accessibility guidelines before submitting. If you have questions or need assistance, contact the Diversity & Accessibility Chairs: diversityaccessibility2027@humanrobotinteraction.org

ACM Publication Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Policy on Use of Generative AI

HRI 2027 follows the ACM Policy on Authorship and the ACM Publications Policy FAQ. We do not impose requirements beyond ACM's.

• Using generative AI to help write your submission is permitted and does not need to be disclosed. Your submission as a whole must still be an accurate representation of your own work and novel intellectual contributions, and must not be primarily the product of a tool's generative capabilities.
• If you used generative AI in conducting the research, you must describe that use in detail in the methods section of your paper. This applies to research design and methodology, creation or selection of data sources, experiment design, data generation, collection, or analysis, coding, model implementation, simulations, testing, validation, and deployment. It also applies to artifacts that bear on your conclusions, such as code, datasets, and figures.
• Generative AI tools cannot be listed as authors. All named authors are responsible and accountable for every part of the submission, including any AI-generated material, regardless of its source. ACM may reject a submission before publication, or retract it afterwards, where content-integrity problems arising from AI use are identified.

Article Processing Charges

Submissions to this track are not subject to Article Processing Charges (APCs). There is no publication fee for authors.

Peer Review Process

Late Breaking Reports are evaluated through double-blind peer review. Reviews use a brief questionnaire addressing the quality and relevance of the submitted work.

To ensure that all authors receive feedback and to support the HRI community, the authors of each LBR submission must collectively review up to three other LBR submissions. This commitment is per submission, not per author: a paper with one author and a paper with five authors owe the same three reviews, shared among the author team as they choose.

Note that the review period overlaps with the year-end holidays. Authors serving as reviewers should declare conflicts of interest promptly after the submission deadline and complete their assigned reviews by the review deadline (January 4, 2027).

Publication and Presentation

Accepted LBRs will be published in the companion proceedings (non-archival companion, non-APC, category).

Authors of accepted LBRs must prepare a camera-ready version by the camera-ready deadline (January 25, 2027). The camera-ready version must:

• De-anonymize the paper. Add author names and affiliations, and restore any content removed for review (acknowledgements, funding statements, self-citations, and links).
• Conform to the ACM SIG “sigconf” format and remain within the 2–4 page limit (excluding references).
• Incorporate the ACM rights and copyright information provided after acceptance.

Detailed camera-ready and ACM rights instructions will be sent to the authors of accepted submissions.

Accepted LBRs will be presented as posters during the main conference. HRI 2027 will be held in person only; at least one author of each accepted LBR must register for the conference and attend in person.

Authors are responsible for printing and bringing their posters. No predefined poster template is required beyond portrait orientation, but posters should be readable from several meters away.