* Call for Papers: The First Workshop on Agent Behavior @ COLM 2026*
https://www.aiagentbehavior.com
We are excited to announce the upcoming workshop on agent behavior (WAB) at the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2026) in San Francisco.
Though capability-centric approaches have driven remarkable advances, it sidesteps a critical question: how do agents achieve what they achieve? A system that achieves a goal through opaque, brittle, or socially harmful processes raises deep concerns that traditional test metrics simply do not capture.
We invite contributions that advance the scientific study of agent behavior across a wide range of topics. These include but are not limited to: 1) behavioral evaluations (beyond task success, eg sensitivity, interventions, mechanistic explanations), 2) behavioral generation (beyond social and opinion survey simulation into grounded actions), 3) behavior foundation modeling (eg supporting the simulation of diverse populations behavior), 4) social and ethical implications.
*Invited Speakers*
- Colin Camerer (Caltech)
- Diyi Yang (Stanford)
- Dawn Song (UC Berkeley)
- Sophia Kazinnik (Stanford)
- Kawin Ethayarajh (UChicago)
- Natasha Jaques (UW)
We invite contributions that advance the scientific study of agent behavior across a wide range of topics and methodologies.
- Paper Track: Non-archival papers (4–9 pages long)
- Benchmark Track: Short proposal (1-2 pages long). If selected, we will provide credits for running the benchmarks, a harness for building them, and an invitation to collaborate towards a large-scale agent behavior evaluation suite and paper.
*Key Dates*
Submissions are already open: https://openreview.net/group?id=colmweb.org/COLM/2026/Workshop/WAB
Submission deadline: EXTENDED June 23 --> June 30, 2026
Acceptance Notifications: July 24, 2026
Workshop day at COLM: October 9, 2026
Yours truly, the WAB organizers:
- Manuel Cherep (MIT)
- Hao Zhu (Stanford)
- Yanzhe Zhang (Georgia Tech + Stanford)
- David (Xinyang) Han (UC Berkeley)
- Benjamin Manning (MIT)
- Isotta Magistrali (ETH)
- Saab Mansour (Amazon)
- Weronika Łajewska (Amazon)
- Pattie Maes (MIT)
- Nikhil Singh (Dartmouth)