Toward Human-Centered GenAI: Cognitive and Behavioral Intelligence with Foundation Models and Agents

Understanding human cognition, emotion, and behavior is fundamental to the development of human-centered Generative AI (GenAI) systems that can interact with people in more natural, adaptive, and trustworthy ways. As digital platforms, wearable devices, and social media continue to generate large-scale behavioral data, new opportunities emerge for studying how humans think, feel, and act across social, emotional, and health-related contexts.

Recent advances in GenAI techniques, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal AI, and autonomous agents have significantly expanded the capability of intelligent systems to model and interpret complex human-centered signals from text, images, speech, physiological data, and social interactions. These technologies offer new pathways for cognitive and behavioral intelligence, enabling AI systems to better understand emotional expression, aesthetic perception, decision-making processes, and health-related behaviors.

This special session aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on computational approaches to human-centered GenAI at the intersection of cognitive computing, behavioral analytics, affective computing, aesthetics, health informatics, foundation models, and agent-based systems. The session seeks to explore new theories, methods, and applications that integrate cognitive insights with advanced AI technologies to advance the understanding of human behavior, emotion, and well-being.

The special session invites submissions addressing (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Cognitive and Behavioral Computing
  • Computational models of human cognition and behavioral dynamics
  • Cognitive architectures and computational theories of behavior
  • Human-centered and cognitively inspired AI systems
• LLMs and AI Agents for Behavioral Intelligence
  • Large Language Models for behavioral and social understanding
  • Agent-based modeling of human behavior and social interactions
  • LLM-driven behavioral simulation and decision modeling
  • Multi-agent systems for social behavior analysis
  • LLM-based conversational agents for emotional or behavioral analysis
• Aesthetic Computing and Perception
  • Computational modeling of aesthetic perception
  • AI analysis of visual aesthetics and artistic expression
  • Cognitive mechanisms of aesthetic experience
  • Human–AI interaction in creative and aesthetic domains
• Emotion and Affective Computing
  • Emotion recognition from multimodal behavioral data
  • Emotion-aware conversational agents
  • Affective computing using physiological, facial, textual, or speech signals
  • Emotion modeling using LLMs and multimodal AI
• Behavioral Computing for Health and Medicine
  • Behavioral signal analysis for mental health monitoring
  • AI for emotional well-being and psychological assessment
  • Wearable sensing and behavioral health analytics
  • Cognitive and behavioral biomarkers for healthcare

Important Dates

submission instruction

Please use the below links to download the Springer template and to submit your work.

The format of Research Papers should be suitable for original research, which is completed work at the time of submission and, regardless of the length of the paper, is a self-sufficient scientific contribution. Selected papers will be invited for submission to journals.

All papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee on the basis of technical quality, relevance to BESC 2026, originality, significance and clarity.

Please note:

• Authors must use Springer LNCS/LNAI manuscript submission guidelines and formatting template for their submissions and each paper must be at least 6 pages and no longer than 16 pages in length (including references).
• All papers must be submitted electronically through the paper submission system in PDF format only.
• Paper review will be double-blind, and submissions not properly anonymized will be desk-rejected without review.
• Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.
• Papers must be clearly submitted in English and will be selected based on their originality, timeliness, significance, relevance, and clarity of presentation.
• Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the conference to present the work.
• Accepted papers will be included in the proceedings of BESC 2026 and indexed by EI Compendex, ISI, Scopus, DBLP, ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar and other A&I services.
• Top quality papers after presented in the conference will be selected for extension and publication in several special issues of international journals (TBC), including:
  • IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (IEEE)
  • CCF Transactions on Pervasive Computing and Interaction (Springer)
  • EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing (Springer)
  • World Wide Web Journal (Springer)
  • Social Network Analysis and Mining (Springer)
  • Human-Centric Intelligent Systems (Springer)
  • Natural Language Processing (Elsevier)
  • Health Information Science and Systems (Springer)
  • Web Intelligence (IOS Press)
• Papers that are substantially or entirely generated by generative AI tools are not permitted. The use of generative AI as an assistive tool (e.g., for language editing) is allowed, provided that such use is clearly and explicitly disclosed in the paper. Authors remain fully responsible for the content, originality, and integrity of their submissions.

Contact

• Dr. Luwei Xiao, National University of Singapore, Singapore (Luwei.xiao[at]nus.edu.sg)
• Dr. Xulang Zhang, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Dr. Shuai Zhao, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Dr. Qika Lin, National University of Singapore, Singapore