About the Workshop
Motivated by growing interest in the similarities between problems in learning and social choice, SCaLA-26 aims to bring together researchers across these domains to highlight the benefits of collaboration. Recent work has explored theoretical bounds on the learnability of common voting rules alongside experimental evaluation of these bounds, has shown how neural networks can improve properties of voting rules or learn mechanism design, and has raised many questions.
The goal of this workshop is to highlight new connections between social choice and learning algorithms. We seek contributions that demonstrate how either one of these fields can be used to strengthen the other and, more broadly, that combine aspects of the two domains in novel ways. We are interested in a broad range of topics from both disciplines.
Topics
We invite both full-length papers and extended abstracts that explore at least one aspect of learning topics and at least one aspect of social choice topics. Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
Auctions
Coordination and cooperation
Equilibrium computation
Fair Division
Game theory (behavioral, cooperative, ...)
Incentive design
Matching
Mechanism design
Voting
Negotiation
Participatory Budgeting
Recommender Systems
Social networks
Sortition
Teamwork and coalitions
Fair division
Clustering
Computational aspects of machine learning
Distributed learning
Ensemble learning
Explainable ML
Fairness (in social choice, ML, or elsewhere)
Language models
Learning preferences
Learning solution concepts/equilibria in games
Learning trust
PAC-learning
Reinforcement learning
RLHF
Supervised learning
Training algorithms
Uncertainty
Unsupervised learning
Important Dates
Submission Extended - May 8, 2026 May 15, 2026
Acceptance notification - June 8, 2026
Workshop - TBA (August 15/16/17 2026)
Format
The workshop takes place at IJCAI 2026 in Bremen, Germany. This will be a full day meeting consisting of technical sessions, an invited speaker and social sessions aimed at fostering collaborations.
IJCAI 2026 is planned as a fully in-person event. If you would like to submit your work but may not be able to attend in person, please contact one of the organizers.