Paper Presenters Guidelines

Attendance

ACM Multimedia 2026 is not a hybrid conference. We expect everyone presenting a paper to do it on-site. Please read the following guidelines carefully:

Oral sessions: If you are presenting a paper in an oral session of the main conference, you are expected to do that on-site. No on-line oral presentations will be authorised in the main conference. If you were supposed to present a paper in an oral session and cannot do it, please submit a proxy presenters request using this form. The track chairs will evaluate your request and let you know whether it is accepted or rejected. The proxy presenter should be knowledgeable about your paper’s topic AND be already registered to attend ACM Multimedia 2026. Papers not presented at the main conference might be subject to be removed from the proceedings a posteriori.
Poster sessions: If you are presenting a paper in a poster session of the main conference, you are expected to do that on-site. No on-line poster presentations will be authorised in the main conference. If you were supposed to present a paper in a poster session and cannot do it, please let us know who will present the paper on your behalf using this form this form. The proxy presenter should be knowledgeable about your paper’s topic AND be already registered to attend ACM Multimedia 2026. Papers not presented at the main conference might be subject to be removed from the proceedings a posteriori.
Workshop papers: If you are presenting a paper in a workshop, please contact the organisers of your workshop to understand what are the presentation options that are available to you.

Please note that the Doctoral Symposium papers are excluded from this initiative, as they must be presented by the corresponding PhD Student.

Format

Oral Presentation Instructions (Main, BNI, and Datasets track)

Presentations are on-site, and both the slides and the speech must be in English.
Each paper will be allocated 12+5 min (12 min for the presentation, plus 5 min for Q&A).

Poster Presentation Instructions

In addition to the oral presentation, you are also expected to present your paper as a poster.
Posters are to be prepared in portrait A0 format. A printing service is available, please check the Poster Printing Service page.

Oral Presentation Coaching: Tips and Tricks

Guidelines for Your 12-Minute Oral Presentation

These are general guidelines for giving a good presentation. It is not meant to be a one-size-fits-all formula, not a recipe to be followed strictly. Adapt them to your paper and your own style. Feel free to bring your own flair to the talk, and to preserve your voice in how you want your research to be heard.

The Core Mindset

You have 12 minutes. That is not enough time to present the whole paper, and that should not be your goal anyway. Your goal is to convince the audience to read your paper.

By the end of your talk, the audience should:

Understand the problem
Remember your main idea
Believe your results
Want to know more

Keep this in mind for every slide you design and every sentence you write.

Pick One Message

You will not have time to explain everything you did. Decide on one main message you want the audience to walk away with, and structure the entire talk to convince them of it. Every slide should serve that message.

Tell a Story, Not a Table of Contents

You do not need to present in the order the paper is written. Papers follow a logical structure for readers (Introduction → Related Work → Method → Experiments → Conclusion); talks should follow a narrative structure for listeners.

Instead, build your talk around the story of your idea. For example,

What is the problem/challenge/gap?
Why is it hard? Why is it relevant?
What is the paper’s core idea?
What did you do?
How well did it work and why? What did you measure and how?
What did you learn/why does it matter for the community?

Establish the Problem First

ACM Multimedia (and most conferences) draws researchers from broad subfields. So not everyone in the room knows the problem you're solving. Within the first two minutes, make sure the audience knows:

What problem are you solving?
Why does it matter?
Why is it difficult?

Only once the problem lands should you move to your solution.

Show, Don't Tell

Whenever possible, demonstrate rather than describe:

Use visual or audio examples to illustrate the problem, instead of explaining it in words.
Use visual or audio examples of your results, instead of just presenting numbers in a table.

A well-chosen example will stick with the audience far longer than a paragraph of description or a row of statistics.

Lead with the Big Idea

Don't dive into implementation details. Before explaining how your solution works, tell the audience what the big idea is:

What is the intuition behind your approach?
What is the key insight that makes it work?

Once the audience grasps the idea at a high level, the details become easier to follow and less critical if time runs short.

Go Deep on One or Two Components, Not Shallow on All

If your solution has multiple components, and you don't have time to cover them all, resist the urge to rush through everything. Instead, pick the one or two most interesting or important components and make sure the audience truly appreciates them. The rest can be left for readers of the paper.

Design Slides to be Understood at a Glance, Not a Read

The audience should be listening to you, not reading and parsing your slides. Keep this rule in mind: one slide, one message.

If you need to put something more complex on the slide, explain it. For instance, if you put a table, explain what each row is and what each column is. If you put a plot, explain the x-axis and the y-axis. Do these before you explain the cells in the table or the lines/points on the plot.

Avoid: dense paragraphs of text, result tables and equations copied directly from the paper, dense neural network diagrams, or multi-panel figures with many plots crammed onto one slide. If a figure works in a paper, it usually needs to be simplified or redrawn for a slide.

Don't be afraid to use more slides to spread out what you want to say, as long as you stay within your time budget.

Transition, Don't Jump

Never let a slide change come as a surprise. Before you click to the next slide, say a sentence that bridges from where you've been to where you're going, e.g., "Now that we've seen why this is hard, here's the key idea that makes it tractable." A talk without transitions feels like a slideshow of disconnected facts; transitions are what turn it into a story.

Speak, Don't Read

Don't read from notes, and don't read your slides aloud. If you're reading, you're not looking at the audience, and the audience can tell. Know your material well enough to speak naturally, making eye contact and reacting to the room.

If you need a memory aid, use cue cards with a few keyword prompts per slide rather than full sentences, never a script you read verbatim. Glance at them briefly, then look back up at the audience; rehearse enough that you need them less and less each time.

End on Substance, Not "Thank You"

Close with your contribution and the take-home message, not a slide that just says "Thank You" or "Questions?" This final slide will be on-screen for the entire Q&A session, so make it earn its place. After you thank the audience and invite them to ask questions, leave the audience staring at your key message, not a blank sign-off.