IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award

The 2026 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award Committee has selected two winners for this year’s award.

Winner 1: Book

  • Jeffrey S. Rosenschein and Gilad Zlotkin,
    Rules of Encounter: Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation Among Computers, MIT Press, 1994.

This book helped define the field of multi-agent systems by introducing and promoting the application of game theory and mechanism design for creating interaction protocols among agents. Prior to this work, much of the research in distributed AI assumed agents shared a common goal and were fully collaborative. The book advocates a rigorous mathematical foundation for analyzing interactions among self-interested agents.

Winner 2: Collection of Papers

A collection of three influential papers:

  • Amy Greenwald and Keith Hall,
    Correlated-Q Learning, International Conference on Machine Learning, 2003.

  • Junling Hu and Michael Wellman,
    Nash Q-Learning for General-Sum Stochastic Games, Journal of Machine Learning Research, 4 (2003), 1039–1069.

  • Amy Greenwald and Amir Jafari,
    A General Class of No-Regret Learning Algorithms and Game-Theoretic Equilibria, in Learning Theory and Kernel Machines, Springer, 2003.

2026 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award Committee

  • Chair: Maria Gini

  • Members: Kate Larson, Juan Antonio Rodriguez Aguilar

Call for nominations for 2026 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award

The International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS) in 2006 established an award to recognize publications in the autonomous agents and multiagent systems field that have made influential and long-lasting contributions. Candidates for this award are papers that have proved a key result, led to the development of a new subfield, demonstrated a significant new application or system, or simply presented a new way of thinking about a topic that has proved influential. A list of previous winners of this award appears at http://www.ifaamas.org/award-influential.html

This award is presented annually at the AAMAS Conference.

Winning papers must have been published at least 10 years before the first day of the conference. Therefore, papers eligible for the 2026 award must have been published earlier than May 2016, and in a recognized scientific forum (e.g., journal, conference, or workshop).

The criteria that will be considered in the selection for the award are:

    1. Opened up new research line(s) within and even outside AAMAS
    2. Broad impact, e.g. started new fields, new conferences, new journals;
    3. Broadly inspired the community
    4. Posed and/or solved an issue seen as fundamental to the field.

To nominate a publication for this award, please send by December 10 the full reference plus a brief statement (200 words or fewer) arguing for the significance of the paper to the chair of the 2026 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award committee, Maria Gini (gini@umn.edu).