AI4ABM Workshop at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023

Key dates

  • Paper submission deadline: Sunday, 5 Feb 10 Feb 2023 Anywhere on Earth (1 pm GMT on Monday, Feb 6th Feb 11th)
  • Paper acceptance notification deadline: 3 Mar 2023
  • Workshop date: 4 May 2023 - Rooms/Online Link TBA

Mentorship Program

AI4ABM is hosting a mentorship program in which we pair senior researchers with junior mentees who are wishing to submit a paper to the workshop. Senior researcher volunteers will be matched with junior researchers (< 3 years of Ph.D.-level research experience) at a rolling basis - so please apply ASAP!
To sign up as either mentor or mentee please use the following forms:

Mentee sign-up link.
Mentor sign-up link.

Both mentees and senior mentors are free to arrange their mentorship relationship at their own discretion, however, we do suggest mentors and mentees should strive to entertain weekly update calls until the workshop submission deadline. In case there is a shortage of mentors, mentees from underprivileged background will be given preference.

Aims and Focus

Many of the world’s most pressing issues, such as climate change, pandemics, financial market stability and fake news, are emergent phenomena that result from the interaction between a large number of strategic or learning agents. Understanding these systems is thus a crucial frontier for scientific and technology development that has the potential to permanently improve the safety and living standards of humanity. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) (also known as individual-based modelling) is an approach toward creating simulations of these types of complex systems by explicitly modelling the actions and interactions of the individual agents contained within. This approach, unlike equation-based modelling techniques, has been shown to enable the study of complex heterogeneous systems, including in non-equilibrium settings. ABMs have recently seen increasing interest across various disciplines, ranging from economics(Arthur, 1994; Buchanan, 2009; Lamperti et al., 2019) and epidemiology (Ferguson et al., 2005; Ferris et al., 2015) to cybersecurity (Thompson & Morris-King, 2018), social sciences (Conte & Paolucci, 2014; Gilbert & Doran, 1994; Sert et al., 2020), and climate policy(Gerst et al., 2013), not least through their use in the COVID19-pandemic (Wang et al., 2021; Truszkowska et al., 2021; Hinch et al., 2021; Kerr et al., 2021) . However, current methodologies for calibrating and validating ABMs to real-world data generally rely on low-dimensional summary statistics crafted by human domain experts (Andrianakis et al., 2015; Platt, 2019). In addition, current ABMs are still very much based on heuristic approaches, e.g. relying on hand-coded behaviours for individual agents and environment dynamics.

The field has thus far taken little advantage of the recent progress in AI, which has the potential to offer exciting new approaches to learning, calibrating, validation, analysing and accelerating such models, including deep multi-agent learning and simulation-based inference. This interdisciplinary workshop is meant to bring together practitioners and theorists to boost ABM method development in AI, and stimulate novel applications across disciplinary boundaries. Based on attendance and interest in our weekly new AI4ABM community meetings at Oxford (and remote), it has become clear that there is a need for an interdisciplinary space to bring AI researchers and ABM practitioners together to stimulate research on the intersection of both. A workshop at ICML is a perfect venue for this, since the ICML community has all of the required expertise in Machine Learning and also has shown previous interest in expanding to new application domains (cf this workshop).

Our inaugural workshop will be organised along two axes. First, we seek to provide a venue where ABM researchers from a variety of domains can introduce AI researchers to their respective domain problems, ranging from economics (Zheng et al., 2021; Curry et al., 2022; Radovic et al., 2021), finance (Castro et al., 2020), epidemiology (Reiker et al., 2021; Reiker et al., 2021; Alsdurf et al., 2020; Gram-Hansen et al., 2019), biology (Girvan et al., 2002; Kolic et al., 2021), to the social and political sciences (Girvan & Newman, 2002; Aymanns et al., 2017), and physics (Baydin et al., 2019). To this end, we are inviting a number of high-profile speakers across various application domains, including network and complex systems scientists who might not ordinarily attend ICML.

Second, we seek to stimulate research into AI methods that can scale to large-scale agent-based models with the potential to redefine our capabilities of creating, calibrating, and validating such models. These methods can be broadly divided into simulation-based inference (Cranmer et al., 2020; Lavin et al., 2021), which is an umbrella term for a large variety of likelihood-based and likelihood-free scalable probabilistic inference methods ranging from emulation techniques to probabilistic programming, and multi-agent learning (Foerster, 2018; Sutton & Barto, 1998), which encompasses fields such as deep multi-agent reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, as well as inverse learning. Other relevant AI methods whose development for agent-based modelling we seek to stimulate include causal inference and discovery, program synthesis, and the development of domain-specific languages and tools that allow for tight integration of ABMs and AI approaches.

Call for Papers

For our international Call for Papers, please see this page.

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