CFP: The 2nd Computational Social Choice Competition (IJCAI-COMPSOC 2024)

[Rafik Hadfi]

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CFP: The 2nd Computational Social Choice Competition (IJCAI-COMPSOC 2024)

https://compsoc.algocratic.org

** Sincere apologies if you receive multiple copies of this email **

Background

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The field of computational social choice (COMSOC) combines ideas, techniques, and models from computer science and social choice theory for aggregating collective preferences. This thriving and multidisciplinary field of research has numerous applications to group decision-making, resource allocation, fair division, and election systems. One of the most well-studied problems in COMSOC focuses on designing voting mechanisms for selecting the winning candidates for an election. Paradoxes and impossibility results are commonly encountered when implementing voting rules in electoral systems. Researchers are therefore exploring alternatives to classical voting mechanisms by incorporating, for instance, principles and techniques from Machine Learning. Agent-based simulations can also tackle such challenges, as evidenced by their successful applications in negotiation research, supply chain management, and energy markets. In line with this vision, the Computational Social Choice Competition (COMPSOC) series capitalizes on the progress in agent research and computational social choice to drive the development of inclusive, robust, and fair election systems.

What is IJCAI-COMPSOC 2024?

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The 2nd Computational Social Choice Competition (IJCAI-COMPSOC 2024) aims to advance research in computational social choice by leveraging multiagent simulations and machine learning techniques. The competition will focus on the principled evaluation and analysis of voting rules in a competitive setting. The competitors will develop and submit the code of their voting rules, which will then be compared in a tournament based on social welfare and axiomatic satisfiability (anonymity, neutrality, monotonicity, Pareto optimality, unanimity, and non-imposition). The competition aims at providing valuable insights into the performances of voting mechanisms defined over parametrically generated voting problems, alternatives, and voters. COMPSOC will bring together researchers from computational social choice, social sciences, political sciences, multiagent systems, and machine learning and provide a unique benchmark for evaluating voting mechanisms in various synthetic (or real) problem domains. The competition also aims to advance the field by providing a systematic approach to designing and assessing voting mechanisms in the absence of established theoretical results. This advancement will help bridge the gap between axiomatic and experimental analysis of voting systems, ultimately leading to improved explainability.

Flow of the Competition

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1. Competitors register on the COMPSOC website (https://compsoc.algocratic.org/).
2. Competitors develop voting rules using the COMPSOC SDK and then upload them to the competition server.
3. Synthetic voting profiles are parametrically generated on the competition server using various state-of-the-art voter models.
4. The competitors' voting rules will then be applied to the generated baseline of profiles.
5. Optimal voting rules are selected based on social welfare and axiomatic satisfiability (anonymity, neutrality, monotonicity, Pareto optimality, unanimity, and non-imposition).

The top four winning competitors will be the competitors with the voting rules that yield the highest social welfare for the multiagent voters (given the baseline ballots of the competition) while satisfying the properties mentioned above. Various sample codes of well-known voting rules will be provided to the participants to guide their implementations (including Borda, Copeland, Dowdall, etc.).

In addition to submitting the Python code of their voting mechanisms, the participants are expected to submit a report describing their mechanism, implementation, and expected results. This will help disseminate the lessons learned from running the competition to the community and set the direction for future tournaments.

Timeline

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• May 15th: Call for participation open (AoE).
• May 20th: Registration open.
• June 20th: Initial submission deadline.
• June 25th: Review and initial feedback.
• July 25th: Final submission deadline.
• August 3rd - 9th: Announcement of the results at IJCAI 2024.

Important Links

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• What is COMPSOC? https://compsoc.algocratic.org/
• COMPSOC SDK: https://github.com/raviq/compsoc
• Register & participate in COMPSOC 2024: https://compsoc2024.algocratic.org/

• Active voting mechanisms: https://compsoc2024.algocratic.org/competition/public

• Past COMPSOC (2023): https://compsoc2023.algocratic.org/

Competition Guidelines

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1) Start by registering on the COMPSOC Website: https://compsoc2024.algocratic.org/

• All participating teams need to register, one registration per team.
• Each team has one manager that could submit the voting rules.
• Each person belongs to at most one team.

2) After setting up your team profile, you can develop your voting rule in Python using the COMPSOC SDK (https://github.com/raviq/compsoc)

• You can use the SDK locally to test your voting rules.
• Sample codes of well-known voting rules (Borda, Copeland, Dowdall, etc.) are provided in the SDK to guide your implementation.
• When implementing your rules, you can only import the libraries in LIBRARIES  into your Python code.  The COMPSOC server will not validate your code if other libraries are used. The complete list is found on the COMPSOC SDK page.

3) Once your voting rule is ready,  the team manager can upload it to the COMPSOC server from the Rules menu. 

• You can upload and manage as many rules as you want from the Rules page.
• Uploaded rules are assigned version numbers so that you keep track of your modifications.
• Please make sure you select an active rule by ticking the star next to the rule name to add it to the pool of running rules. Running rules are the ones that will be scored in the active tournament.
• The running tournament will score your rule, and the result will be available on the public interface of COMPSOC (https://compsoc2024.algocratic.org/competition/public).

• Please submit your final voting rule by the deadline of the competition.
• Along with the Python code of your voting rule, please submit a report describing your mechanism, implementation, and expected results.

4) The COMPSOC server will initially test and validate your voting rule in case of syntactic or runtime errors.

5)The server will use the uploaded, active, and valid voting rule to aggregate their scores based on the defined competition ballots, or randomly generated profiles. The winners will be selected based on social welfare and axiomatic satisfiability (anonymity, neutrality, monotonicity, Pareto optimality, unanimity, and non-imposition). 

6) All the scores of the voting rules will be listed on the public interface of the server

For questions or requests, contact comps...@gmail.com

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