AAAI AIIDE 2026 - Call for Papers

[Matthew Guzdial]

AAAI's 22nd conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment

Host: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil

Dates: November 9-13, 2026

AIIDE 2026 welcomes submissions across the vast field of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. We are particularly interested in novel contributions and applications, as well as developments in established problems in the field.

Important Dates

• All deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE (anywhere on earth) time (UTC-12).
  
• Peer-Reviewed Abstract Deadline: June 19, 2026
  
• Peer-Reviewed Full Submission Deadline: June 26, 2026
  
• Reviews Due: July 24, 2026
  
• Paper Reviews Released: July 26, 2026
  
• Author Response Period: July 27 - July 31, 2026
  
• Final Notification: August 7, 2026
  
• Publication-ready (Camera-ready) Deadline: August 28, 2026
  

Special Theme: New Grounds
AIIDE 2026 marks the first time the conference is held outside the United States and Canada, taking place in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. As a result, AIIDE enters new geographic and technical ground as a venue for research at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. For AIIDE 2026 we encourage authors to engage with the theme of “New Grounds.” This theme is meant to highlight technical work that explores new problem settings, emerging applications, and novel constraints for AI in games and interactive systems, including extensions of established AIIDE methods to new domains, platforms, and deployment contexts. Submissions are not required to fit this theme but authors may optionally identify their work as fitting the theme at the time of submission.

What to Submit
Papers describe AI research results relevant to Interactive Digital Entertainment, including but not limited to establishing new entertainment AI problems, making advances on existing problems, and/or enabling new forms of interactive digital entertainment. Papers are held to the highest standards of academic rigor. In general:

• The contribution of the paper should be clearly articulated, usually in the Introduction.
• The paper should demonstrate knowledge of related systems and other approaches to solving similar problems, usually in a Related Work section.
• Results should be validated in a prototype or test-bed system (e.g., game, robot, generative algorithm), but need not be tested in a commercial environment.
• The title and claims made in the paper should match the evaluation carried out and the results obtained. Overly broad titles are discouraged.
• Papers should include a Limitations section, which discusses the limitations of the work. It may not contain any additional experiments, figures or analysis. In addition, limitations such as lack of generalization to other digital entertainment domains (other games), the requirement of large GPU resources, or other things that inspire crucial further investigation are welcome.

Format
Papers should be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style. The AAAI Press Author Kit provides instructions for writing papers using both LaTeX and Microsoft Word.

Length
Authors are allotted 9 pages of content, with no limit on the number of pages for references. Thus, authors are encouraged to submit a paper of length proportional to its contribution.  Authors may choose to split these content pages into primary content and appendices, but will be required to move appendices into the main body of the paper before final publication. Note, reviewers may, but are not required to, read the appendices, and therefore the paper’s central thesis should be understandable without them. 

Submissions longer than 9 pages will be considered for desk rejection. Papers whose lengths are incommensurate with their contributions will be rejected.

Evaluation Criteria
Submissions will be peer reviewed. Abstracts and other submitted materials will be judged on technical merit, accessibility to developers and researchers, originality, presentation, impact, and significance. 

For more details please see the full copy for papers: https://sites.google.com/view/aiide2026/calls/call-for-papers