Value Engineering in AI (VALE Track)
Fourth International Workshop on Value Engineering in AI (VALE 2026), affiliated with the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2026)
15–21 August 2026, Bremen, Germany
Fourth International Workshop on Value Engineering in AI (VALE 2026), affiliated with the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2026)
15–21 August 2026, Bremen, Germany
AI's growing influence in daily life has made the need for ethical, trustworthy systems a global priority, as evidenced by the numerous ethical guidelines and requirements. One of the most critical challenges facing society today is ensuring that AI systems, and the interactions they facilitate among humans and other agents, are aligned with human values.
Aligning with human values is one of the requirements for achieving true trustworthiness, and it requires AI to be value-aware. The value engineering challenge is about developing AI that identifies and understands human values, reasons about those values, and is capable of explaining behaviour in terms of those values. We argue that just as values guide our own morality, values can guide the morality of software agents and systems, bringing machine morality closer to reality. As a result, value-aware systems would take value-aligned decisions, interpret human behaviour in terms of values and enrich human reasoning by enhancing its value-awareness. This aligns with Stuart Russell’s call to shift the overarching goal of AI from "intelligence" to "intelligence provably aligned with human values".
Today, there is a growing wealth of work in the field of AI on accounting for human values and working towards value-aligned behaviour. The VALE workshop @ IJCAI-ECAI 2026 intends to bring together researchers on value engineering and foster in-depth discussions on the topic.
We note that the VALE 2026 workshop is the fourth edition of the successful VALE series held at ECAI 2023, 2024, and 2025.
The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:
Value representation
Value learning and aggregation
Value agreement and conflict resolution
Value-driven argumentation and negotiation
Value alignment, value-driven decision making, and value-driven system design
Value-driven explainability
Trust in value-aligned systems
Value engineering in generative AI, physical AI, and embodied algorithms
Participatory design and Human-AI interaction for value awareness
Human and behavioural foundations of values
Human perception of value-aligned systems
Legal questions in value awareness and engineering
Paper submission deadline: 15 May 2026
Notification of acceptance: 10 June 2026
VALE 2026 workshop: 15-17 August 2026
All times are Anywhere on Earth (AoE), UTC-12
VALE 2026 is supported by the following projects:
The EU funded VALAWAI project, with Grant no. 101070930
The Spanish funded EVASAI project, with Grant no. PID2024-158227NB-C31 / C32 / C33