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
All times are Anywhere on Earth (AoE), UTC-12
Paper submission deadline: 15 May 2026
Notification of acceptance: 10 June 2026
VALE 2026 workshop: 15-17 August 2026
Papers should be formatted according to the IJCAI-ECAI templates.
All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format.
They should not exceed 7 pages (not including references).
A single-blind review process will be followed, which means that papers should list the authors.
For every submission, one author is expected to review at least one other paper as part of the peer review process.
Submissions are now open! You can submit your work through the ChairingTool platform
Submission of a paper is regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the workshop in person to present their work.
We plan to have post-proceedings published by Springer, under its LNAI series, following in the footsteps of previous editions.
IJCAI-ECAI 2026's ethics policy will be followed:
IJCAI is committed to the highest standards of research integrity. Submissions must adhere to fundamental ethical principles, including the responsible use of datasets (respecting privacy, copyright, and informed consent) and mitigating potential societal harms (such as risks to safety, and issues related to discrimination and bias).
Consistent with the previous editions of the conference, IJCAI-ECAI 2026 will implement a streamlined ethics review policy. Reviewers will be asked to flag glaring violations of ethical principles. In rare situations, the Chairs, advised by the Ethics Chair, reserve the right to reject a submission on ethical grounds. However, we anticipate that the primary approach to addressing ethical concerns will require authors to revise their submissions to include a discussion that identifies these concerns and proposes strategies for their mitigation.
Authors can include in the main body of their paper, or on the reference pages, an ethics statement that addresses both ethical issues regarding the research being reported and the broader ethical impact of the work. Note that such an ethics statement is not required, but we recommend that papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks include such discussion. The IJCAI review form will include a section asking reviewers and ACs to flag any serious ethical concerns.