ECAI 2024
Workshop on Trustworthy Sequential
Decision-making and Optimization 

Important Dates

Paper submission: June 15, 2024 (Anywhere on Earth)
Review transfer option for papers rejected from main conference: July 11
Notification: July 18
Camera-ready submission: August 8
Workshop: 19 or 20 October 2024

Call for Papers

An increasing number of AI decision-making methods are applied to real-world problems from diverse domains, such as logistics, manufacturing, and resource allocation, among others. Ensuring the trustworthiness of both sequential decision-making (SDM) methods (e.g. reinforcement learning, planning...) as well as optimization approaches (e.g. mathematical programming, meta-heuristics...) is therefore critical.

A variety of research areas are concerned with aspects of AI trustworthiness: this includes explainability and interpretability, which are key for establishing accountability, improving human-AI collaboration, and addressing ethical concerns around autonomous systems. It includes robustness to distributional shift and non-stationarity, as real-world environments can evolve over time in unseen ways. Trustworthy systems should also be sustainable, for example, by being transparent in the computational costs of their training and achieving their benefits with minimal energy consumption. Furthermore, fairness is critical in real-world decision-making concerning the reasonable trade-off between multiple criteria and multiple agents. These and other research directions aim at increasing trust and acceptance of SDM and optimization systems by going beyond pure performance maximisation.

The purpose of this workshop is to promote collaboration and cross-fertilisation of ideas between researchers working in different areas of trustworthy sequential decision-making and optimization. The workshop aims to provide a forum for dissemination of high-quality research on aspects of trustworthiness in SDM and optimization, facilitating the development of the respective research communities.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics that we would like to cover in the workshop:

• Explainable reinforcement learning

• Explainable planning, search or combinatorial optimization

• Explainability in multi-agent systems

• Visualizations or (LLM-assisted) dialogue systems for explainable decision-making

• Robust or safe reinforcement learning

• Robustness in stochastic SDM or optimization

• Uncertainty quantification, out-of-distribution detection or handling concept drift in SDM or optimization

• Fairness in reinforcement learning or multi-agent systems

• Fairness in SDM or optimization

• Privacy in SDM or optimization

• Sustainable reinforcement learning

• Sustainable, energy-aware or surrogate-based SDM or optimization

• Sustainable hyper-parameter tuning or automated machine learning

• Validating, measuring or evaluating trustworthiness for SDM or optimization

• Multi-objective trustworthy reinforcement learning

• Multi-objective trustworthy optimization

TSDO 2024 will welcome submission of original work, including preliminary results or work-in-progress (i.e., theory, simulation studies, subject studies, demonstrations, applications), as well as contributions that survey related work; describe key issues that require further research; or highlight relevant challenges of interest to the AI community and plans for addressing them. Finally, the workshop also aims to be a platform for published journal/conference paper abstracts.

Submission Details

Authors may submit long papers (up to 7 pages plus unlimited references) or extended abstracts (2 pages plus unlimited references). We will also consider relevant papers which were rejected from the main conference based on review transfer; to use this option, authors are invited to submit a request after rejection. We will then make a decision based on the reviews written for the main conference, which will be made available to us in anonymized form. Please note the relevant deadlines at the top of this page.

All papers should be typeset in the ECAI style (ECAI LaTeX Template). Accepted papers will be made available on the workshop website. 

Supplementary material can be added as an appendix at the end of the main PDF file; that is, just submit a single PDF file with the main body of the paper, with an appendix that is not included in the page count. Reviewers will not be required to read the supplementary material, so ensure the body of the paper is self contained.

Accepted papers will not be published in archival proceedings. This means that you can submit your paper to another venue after the workshop. However, we aim at editing a special issue on the topic of the workshop, giving an opportunity for selected papers to be published in an extended version.

Reviews are double blind, so no identifying information should be on the papers. The reviewing criteria will be the soundness of the scientific approach, the novelty of the work, and its fit with the scope of the workshop, while explicitly welcoming preliminary results and work-in-progress.

Submission link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/TSDO2024 

Workshop Organizers

Hendrik Baier (h.j.s.baier@tue.nl)
Laurens Bliek
Zaharah Bukhsh
Isel Grau
Yaoxin Wu
Yingqian Zhang

Workshop Schedule

Program Committee