Beyond a Concrete: Workshop on Grounding Abstract Concepts in Multimodal Interaction

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

concepts pose a fundamental challenge for multimodal interactive systems, as they cannot be grounded in single perceptual features or fixed motor patterns; instead, they require abstraction across perception, action, language, and affect. Examples include superordinate categories (e.g., animal, tool), generalised actions (e.g., use, make), and evaluative concepts (e.g., good, appropriate) that depend on the interaction context. This workshop focuses on computational and interactional mechanisms for grounding abstract concepts beyond concrete sensory inputs, bringing together work on multimodal representation learning, embodied and developmental models, robotics, and hybrid cognitive architectures. The workshop aims to consolidate approaches, datasets, and evaluation strategies for abstract concept grounding, identify shared modelling assumptions, and clarify open challenges. Expected outcomes include a comparative discussion of architectures and benchmarks and a post-workshop summary outlining research gaps and future directions, supporting multimodal interactive systems with improved generalisation and interpretability.