The AAMAS 2026 best paper awards were presented at the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, which took place from 25-29 May 2025 in Paphos, Cyprus. The winners and nominees in the three categories (best paper, best student paper, best blue sky paper) are as follows:
Best Paper Award
Winner
Developing Guidelines for Human-LLM Agent Teams: A Multi-Stakeholder Lens, Mireia Yurrita, Davide Dell’Anna, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Catholijn M Jonker, and Pinar Yolum
Nominees
UNCAP: Uncertainty-Guided Neurosymbolic Planning Using Natural Language Communication for Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles, Neel P. Bhatt, Po-han Li, Kushagra Gupta, Rohan Siva, Daniel Milan, Alexander Todd Hogue, Sandeep P. Chinchali, David Fridovich-Keil, Zhangyang Wang, and Ufuk Topcu
Ratio-Based Signaling for Source-Victim Separation in Swarm Fault Detection, Longyin Cui
The Impossibility of Strategyproof Rank Aggregation, Manuel Eberl and Patrick Lederer
Generalized Per-Agent Advantage Estimation for Multi-Agent Policy Optimization, Seongmin Kim, Giseung Park, Woojun Kim, Jiwon Jeon, Seungyul Han, and Youngchul Sung
R-Debater: Retrieval-Augmented Debate Generation through Argumentative Memory, Maoyuan Li, Zhongsheng Wang, Haoyuan Li, and Jiamou Liu
Defection at First Sight: Learning Partner Selection in Optional Social Dilemmas without Prior Information, Benedict Russell, Chin-wing Leung, and Paolo Turrini
Characterizing Consensuses in Belief Flow Networks, Nicolas Schwind, Gauvain Bourgne, and Katsumi Inoue
Grassroots Federation: Fair Democratic Governance at Scale, Nimrod Talmon and Ehud Shapiro
Health Facility Location in Ethiopia: Leveraging LLMs to Integrate Expert Knowledge into Algorithmic Planning, Yohai Trabelsi, Guojun Xiong, Fentabil Getnet, Stéphane Verguet, and Milind Tambe
MeCo: Enhancing LLM-Empowered Multi-Robot Collaboration via Similar Task Memoization, Baiqing Wang, Helei Cui, Bo Zhang, Xiaolong Zheng, Bin Guo, and Zhiwen Yu
Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award
Winner
Planning Ahead with RSA: Efficient Signalling in Dynamic Environments by Projecting User Awareness across Future Timesteps, Anwesha Das, John Duff, Jörg Hoffmann, and Vera Demberg
Nominees
Efficiently Computing Equilibria in Budget-Aggregation Games, Patrick Becker, Alexander Fries, Matthias Greger, and Erel Segal-Halevi
Building Large-Scale Drone Defenses from Small-Team Strategies, Grant Douglas, Stephen Franklin, Claudia Szabo, and Mingyu Guo
Robust Counterfactual Inference in Markov Decision Processes, Jessica Lally, Milad Kazemi, and Nicola Paoletti
Flow-Based Task Assignment for Large-Scale Online Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery, Yue Zhang, Zhe Chen, Daniel Harabor, Pierre Le Bodic, and Peter J. Stuckey
Reputation as a Solution to Cooperation Collapse in LLM-based MASs, Siyue Ren, Wanli Fu, Xinkun Zou, Chen Shen, Yi Cai, Chu Chen, Zhen Wang, and Shuyue Hu
Blue Sky Ideas Award
Winner
Foundation World Models for Agents that Learn, Verify, and Adapt Reliably Beyond Static Environments, Florent Delgrange
Nominees
Guiding Sociotechnical Systems toward Value-Norm Equilibrium, Nirav Ajmeri, Marina De Vos, Davide Dell’Anna, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Vivek Nallur, Luis Gustavo Nardin, and Munindar P. Singh
The Dynamic Turn in Strategy Logics, Rustam Galimullin, Maksim Gladyshev, Munyque Mittelmann, and Nima Motamed