Call for Papers: Strategic Engineering Workshop at AAMAS 2026 in Cyprus!
Ian Gemp
We are seeking paper & demo submissions to our upcoming AAMAS workshop on Strategic Engineering at the intersection of Game Theory & LLMs.
Submission Deadline: Feb 4, 2026 (AoE)
Workshop Date: May 25, 2026
Location: Paphos, Cyprus
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/se-aamas2026
TL;DR: Unlike traditional board games, real-world strategic interactions are messy. Traditional game theory thus needs a boost for the future of agentic AI. Come help us unlock truly strategic AI!
As AI agents diffuse into the fabric of our everyday lives, they will interact with each other (and also us) more and more often. Agents acting on the behalf of humans might adopt their incentives, and so naturally some of these interactions will be cooperative, some competitive, and some mixed-motive. Game theory has long provided a framework for thinking about how to balance both individuals and the collective’s incentives.
Real world scenarios include:
Negotiation (e.g., buying a car, new hire compensation, homework extension)
Zero-shot Coordination (e.g., answering questions with insufficient information and asymmetric goals (student-teacher), assisting a brainstorm with a new group)
Social Intelligence (e.g., offer your seat to the elderly, write a grateful / not indignant resignation letter).
Yet applying game theory to real world problems requires rigorous modelling and translation to precise mathematical specifications, algorithm selection and possibly novel design, scalable deployment, as well as potentially multiple rounds of iteration. In addition, the end product is often a limited, quantitative strategy specification lacking the typical richness or color of human negotiation (e.g., optimal offer = $5 rather than “I’ll give you $5 and nothing more; take it or leave it.”). We would like to bring together a community interested in reducing the friction in this pipeline. Moreover, modern AI agents should be able to complete this pipeline autonomously and transparently to provide the world with more strategic and interpretable agents.
This workshop will foster discussions around answering the following questions:
How can we build tools to automate the construction of strategic models (e.g., game trees) from rich multimodal inputs (e.g., textual/visual descriptions) as well as the exploration of alternative strategic models when new information arrives?
How can we evaluate the accuracy / usefulness of the constructed model?
How can we handle mismatches between different models across different players?
How can we collect data from humans to construct / verify the models? What form of interaction is most efficient / informative?
How might a strategic model be used to teach humans how to better interact and cooperate with each other?
Could building models help us further develop economic theory and design better institutions, markets and rules?
In addition, given the open-ended nature of the topic, we would like to invite participants to submit demonstrations of agents either succeeding or failing in interesting every-day strategic scenarios.
Imagine agents that can mediate human conflict and guide international diplomacy, agents that can assist us in navigating office politics, agents that fully autonomously re-negotiate your utility bill, and more. Come join us to usher in the next generation of strategic agents.
Relevant subthemes:
- Games as LLM Benchmarks
- Gamification of LLM Training (e.g., AI Debate)
- Constructing Game-Theoretic Models with LLMs
- Techniques to make LLMs more strategic
- Automated Mechanism Design.