The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (formerly the AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence) honors papers that exemplify the highest standards in technical contribution and exposition. During the blind review process, members of the Program Committee recommend papers to consider for the Outstanding Paper Award in the main technical track and special tracks, as indicated. In 2021, an additional category of Distinguished Papers was added for special recognition.
Past Recipients
2022
AAAI-22 Outstanding Paper Award
Online Certification of Preference-based Fairness for Personalized Recommender Systems
Virginie Do, Sam Corbett-Davies, Jamal Atif, Nicolas Usunier
Honorable Mention:
Bayesian Persuasion in Sequential Decision-Making
Jiarui Gan, Rupak Majumdar, Goran Radanovic, Adish Singla
Honorable Mention:
Operator-Potential Heuristics for Symbolic Search
Daniel Fišer, Alvaro Torralba, Joerg Hoffmann
AAAI Distinguished Papers
In 2021, an additional category of Distinguished Papers was added for special recognition.
AAAI-22 Distinguished Papers
AlphaHoldem: High-Performance Artificial Intelligence for Heads-Up No-Limit Poker via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning
Enmin Zhao, Renye Yan, Jinqiu Li, Kai Li, Junliang Xing
Certified Symmetry and Dominance Breaking for Combinatorial Optimisation
Bart Bogaerts, Stephan Gocht, Ciaran McCreesh, Jakob Nordström
Online Elicitation of Necessarily Optimal Matchings
Jannik Peters
Sampling-Based Robust Control of Autonomous Systems with Non-Gaussian Noise
Thom S. Badings, Alessandro Abate, Nils Jansen, David Parker, Hasan A. Poonawala, Marielle Stoelinga
Subset approximation of Pareto Regions with Bi-objective A*
Jorge A. Baier, Carlos Hernández, Nicolás Rivera
The SoftCumulative Constraint with Quadratic Penalty
Yanick Ouellet, Claude-Guy Quimper
AAAI Outstanding Student Papers
In 2022, an additional category of Distinguished Papers was added for special recognition.
Outstanding Student Paper
InfoLM: A New Metric to Evaluate Summarization & Data2Text Generation
Pierre Colombo, Chloé Clavel, Pablo Piantanida
Honorable Mention:
Compilation of Aggregates in ASP Systems
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Francesco Ricca, Carmine Dodaro
Honorable Mention:
Entropy estimation via normalizing flow
Ziqiao Ao, Jinglai Li
Student Abstract Program Awards
Best Student Abstract:
Annotation Cost-Sensitive Deep Active Learning with Limited Data
Renaud Bernatchez, Audrey Durand and Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal
Honorable Mention:
On the Relation between Distributionally Robust Optimization and Data Curation
Agnieszka Słowik and Leon Bottou
2022 Best Demonstration Award
A Demonstration of Compositional, Hierarchical Interactive Task Learning
Aaron Mininger, John Laird
2021
AAAI-21 Outstanding Paper Award
Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting
Haoyi Zhou, Shanghang Zhang, Jieqi Peng, Shuai Zhang, Jianxin Li, Hui Xiong, Wancai Zhang
AAAI-21 Outstanding Paper Award
Exploration-Exploitation in Multi-Agent Learning: Catastrophe Theory Meets Game Theory
Stefanos Leonardos, Georgios Piliouras
Honorable Mention:
Learning from eXtreme Bandit Feedback
Romain Lopez, Inderjit S. Dhillon, Michael Jordan
Honorable Mention:
Self-Attention Attribution: Interpreting Information Interactions Inside Transformer
Yaru Hao, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Ke Xu
AAAI-21 Outstanding Paper Award: Special Track on AI for Social Impact
Mitigating Political Bias in Language Models through Reinforced Calibration
Ruibo Liu, Chenyan Jia, Jason W Wei, Guangxuan Xu, Lili Wang, Soroush Vosoughi
Honorable Mention:
Dual-Mandate Patrols: Multi-Armed Bandits for Green Security
Lily Xu, Elizabeth Bondi, Fei Fang, Andrew Perrault, Kai Wang, Milind Tambe
AAAI-21 Distinguished Papers
IQ – Incremental Learning for Solving QSAT
Thomas L Lee, Viktor Tóth, Sean B Holden
Ethically Compliant Sequential Decision Making
Justin Svegliato, Samer Nashed, Shlomo Zilberstein
On the Tractability of SHAP Explanations
Guy Van den Broeck, Anton Lykov, Maximilian Schleich, Dan Suciu
Expected Eligibility Traces
Hado van Hasselt, Sephora Madjiheurem, Matteo Hessel, Andre Barreto, David Silver, Diana Borsa
Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Counting and Sampling Markov Equivalent DAGs
Marcel Wienöbst, Max Bannach, Maciej Liskiewicz
Self-Supervised Multi-View Stereo via Effective Co-Segmentation and Data-Augmentation
Hongbin Xu, Zhipeng Zhou, Yu Qiao, Wenxiong Kang, Qiuxia Wu
2020
AAAI-20 Outstanding Paper Award
WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale
Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi
Honorable Mention:
A Unifying View on Individual Bounds and Heuristic Inaccuracies in Bidirectional Search
Vidal Alcazar, Pat Riddle, Mike Barley
AAAI-20 Outstanding Student Paper Award
Fair Division of Mixed Divisible and Indivisible Goods
Xiaohui Bei, Zihao Li, Jinyan Liu, Shengxin Liu, Xinhang Lu
Honorable Mention:
Lifelong Learning with a Changing Action Set
Yash Chandak, Georgios Theocharous, Chris Nota, Philip S. Thomas
AAAI-20 Outstanding Paper Award: Special Track on AI for Social Impact
A Distributed Multi-Sensor Machine Learning Approach to Earthquake Early Warning
Kevin Fauvel, Daniel Balouek-Thomert, Diego Melgar, Pedro Silva, Anthony Simonet, Gabriel Antoniu, Alexandru Costan, Véronique Masson, Manish Parashar, Ivan Rodero, Alexandre Termier
Honorable Mention:
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Inverse Reinforcement Learning in Advancing Cancer Research
John Kalantari, Heidi Nelson, Nicholas Chia
2019
AAAI-19 Outstanding Paper Award
How to Combine Tree-Search Methods in Reinforcement Learning
Yonathan Efroni, Gal Dalal, Bruno Scherrer, Shie Mannor
Honorable Mention
Solving Imperfect-Information Games with Discounted Counterfactual Regret Minimization
Noam Brown, Tuomas Sandholm
AAAI-19 Outstanding Student Paper Award
Zero Shot Learning for Code Education: Rubric Sampling with Deep Learning Inference
Mike Wu, Milan Mosse, Noah Goodman, Chris Piech
Honorable Mention:
Learning to Teach in Cooperative Multiagent Reinforcement Learning
Shayegan Omidshafiei, Dong Ki Kim, Miao Liu, Gerald Tesauro, Matthew Riemer, Chris Amato, Murray Campbell, Jonathan How
2018
AAAI-18 Outstanding Paper Award
Memory-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Search
Chenjun Xiao, Jincheng Mei, and Martin Müller
Honorable Mention:
Generalized Adjustment under Confounding and Selection Biases
Juan D. Correa, Jin Tian, Elias Bareinboim
AAAI-18 Outstanding Student Paper Award
Counterfactual Multi-Agent Policy Gradients
Jakob N. Foerster, Gregory Farquhar, Triantafyllos Afouras, Nantas Nardelli, Shimon Whiteson
Honorable Mention:
Adapting a Kidney Exchange Algorithm to Align with Human Values
Rachel Freedman, Jana Schaich Borg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, John P. Dickerson, Vincent Conitzer
2017
AAAI-17 Outstanding Paper Award
Label-Free Supervision of Neural Networks with Physics and Domain Knowledge
Russell Stewart and Stefano Ermon
AAAI-17 Outstanding Student Paper Award
The Option-Critic Architecture
Pierre-Luc Bacon, Jean Harb, and Doina Precup
2016
AAAI-16 Outstanding Paper Award
Bidirectional Search That Is Guaranteed to Meet in the Middle
Robert C. Holte, Ariel Felner, Guni Sharon, and Nathan R. Sturtevant
AAAI-16 Outstanding Student Paper Award
Toward a Taxonomy and Computational Models of Abnormalities in Images
Babak Saleh, Ahmed Elgammal, Jacob Feldman, and Ali Farhadi
2015
AAAI-15 Outstanding Paper Awards
From Non-Negative to General Operator Cost Partitioning
Florian Pommerening, Malte Helmert, Gabriele Röger and Jendrik Seipp
Honorable Mention:
Predicting the Demographics of Twitter Users from Website Traffic Data
Aron Culotta, Nirmal Kumar Ravi, Jennifer Cutler
AAAI-15 Outstanding Student Paper Award
Surpassing Human-Level Face Verification Performance on LFW with GaussianFace
Chaochao Lu and Xiaoou Tang
Honorable Mention:
Sparse Bayesian Multiview Learning for Simultaneous Association Discovery and Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease
Shandian Zhe, Zenglin Xu, Yuan Qi and Peng Yu
2014
AAAI-14 Outstanding Paper Awards
Recovering from Selection Bias in Causal and Statistical Inference
Elias Bareinboim, Jin Tian, Judea Pearl
Honorable Mention:
Placement of Loading Stations for Electric Vehicles: No Detours Necessary!
Stefan Funke, André Nusser, Sabine Storandt
Honorable Mention:
Manifold Learning for Jointly Modeling Topic and Visualization
Tuan M. V. Le, Hady W. Lauw
Honorable Mention:
Tractability through Exchangeability: A New Perspective on Efficient Probabilistic Inference
Mathias Niepert, Guy Van den Broeck
Honorable Mention:
Generalized Label Reduction for Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics
Silvan Sievers, Martin Wehrle, Malte Helmert
2013
AAAI-13 Outstanding Paper Awards
SMILe: Shuffled Multiple-Instance Learning
Gary Doran and Soumya Ray
HC-Search: Learning Heuristics and Cost Functions for Structured Prediction
Janardhan Rao Doppa, Alan Fern, and Prasad Tadepalli
Honorable Mention:
On the Value of Using Group Discounts under Price Competition
Reshef Meir, Tyler Lu, Moshe Tennenholtz, and Craig Boutilier
For Outstanding Technical Quality and Clarity of Presentation
Honorable Mention:
PAC Optimal Exploration in Continuous Space Markov Decision Processes
Jason Pazis and Ronald Parr
For Outstanding Formal Analysis
Honorable Mention:
Sensitivity of Diffusion Dynamics to Network Uncertainty
Abhijin Adiga, Chris Kuhlman, Henning S. Mortveit, and Anil Kumar S. Vullikanti
For Outstanding Novelty of Research Question
Honorable Mention:
Effective Bilingual Constraints for Semi-supervised Learning of Named Entity Recognizers
Mengqiu Wang, Wanxiang Che, and Christopher D. Manning
For Outstanding Engineering Design
2012
AAAI-12 Outstanding Paper Awards
Learning SVM Classifiers with Indefinite Kernels
Suicheng Gu, Yuhong Guo
Document Summarization Based on Data Reconstruction
Zhanying He, Chun Chen, Jiajun Bu, Can Wang, Lijun Zhang, Deng Cai, Xiaofei He
Honorable Mention:
Knapsack Based Optimal Policies for Budget-Limited Multi-Armed Bandits
Long Tran-Thanh, Archie Chapman, Alex Rogers, Nicholas R. Jennings
Honorable Mention:
Predicting Disease Transmission from Geo-Tagged Micro-Blog Data
Adam Sadilek, Henry Kautz, Vincent Silenzio
2011
AAAI-11 Outstanding Paper Awards
Complexity of and Algorithms for Borda Manipulation
Jessica Davies, George Katsirelos, Nina Narodytska, Toby Walsh
Computational Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence Track: Dynamic Resource Allocation in Conservation Planning
Daniel Golovin, Andreas Krause, Beth Gardner, Sarah J. Converse, Steve Morey
2010
AAAI-10 Outstanding Paper Awards
A Novel Transition Based Encoding Scheme for Planning as Satisfiability
Ruoyun Huang, Yixin Chen, Weixiong Zhang (Washington University in St. Louis)
AI and the Web Track:
How Incomplete Is Your Semantic Web Reasoner? Systematic Analysis of the Completeness of Query Answering Systems
Giorgos Stoilos, Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Ian Horrocks (Oxford University)
2008
AAAI-08 Outstanding Paper Awards
Optimal False-Name-Proof Voting Rules with Costly Voting
Liad Wagman and Vincent Conitzer (Duke University)
How Good is Almost Perfect?
Malte Helmert and Gabriele Röger (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
Honorable Mention:
On the Progression of Situation Calculus Basic Action Theories: Resolving a 10-year-old Conjecture
Stavros Vassos and Hector J. Levesque (University of Toronto)
2007
AAAI-07 Outstanding Paper Awards
PLOW: A Collaborative Task Learning Agent
James Allen (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition), Nathanael Chambers (Stanford University), George Ferguson (University of Rochester), Lucian Galescu and Hyuckchul Jung (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition), Mary Swift (University of Rochester), and William Taysom (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition)
Thresholded Rewards: Acting Optimally in Timed, Zero-Sum Games
Colin McMillen and Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)
2006
AAAI-06 Outstanding Paper Awards
Model Counting: A New Strategy for Obtaining Good Bounds
Carla P. Gomes, Ashish Sabharwal, and Bart Selman (Cornell University)
Towards an Axiom System for Default Logic
Gerhard Lakemeyer (Aachen University of Technology), and Hector J. Levesque (University of Toronto)
2005
AAAI-05 Outstanding Paper Award
The Max K- Armed Bandit: A New Model of Exploration Applied to Search Heuristic Selection
Vincent A. Cicirello, Drexel University, and Stephen F. Smith, Carnegie Mellon University
2004
AAAI-04 Outstanding Paper Awards
Learning and Inferring Transportation Routines
Lin Liao, Dieter Fox, and Henry Kautz, University of Washington
Honorable Mention:
Interactive Information Extraction with Constrained Conditional Random Fields
Trausti Krisjansson, Microsoft Research; Aron Culotta, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Paul Viola, Microsoft Research; and Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Honorable Mention:
Loop Formulas for Circumscription
Joohyung Lee, University of Texas Austin and Fangzhen Lin, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2002
AAAI-02 Outstanding Paper Awards
On Computing All Abductive Explanations
Thomas Eiter, Technische Universität Wien; and Kazuhisa Makino, Osaka University
2000
AAAI-2000 Outstanding Paper Awards
The Game of Hex: An Automatic Theorem-Proving Approach to Game Programming
Vadim V. Anshelevich, Vanshel Consulting
Automatic Invention of Integer Sequences
Simon Colton and Alan Bundy, University of Edinburgh; Toby Walsh, University of York
Statistics-Based Summarization — Step One: Sentence Compression
Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu, University of Southern California
Local Search Characteristics of Incomplete SAT Procedures
Dale Schuurmans and Finnegan Southey, University of Waterloo
1999
AAAI-99 Outstanding Paper Award
PROVERB: The Probabilistic Cruciverbalist
Greg A. Keim, Noam M. Shazeer, Michael L. Littman, Sushant Agarwal, Catherine M. Cheves, Joseph Fitzgerald, Jason Grosland, Fan Jiang, Shannon Pollard and Karl Weinmeister, Duke University
1998
AAAI-98 Outstanding Paper Awards
Learning Evaluation Functions for Global Optimization and Boolean Satisfiability
Justin A. Boyan and Andrew W. Moore, Carnegie Mellon University
The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot
Wolfram Burgard, Armin B. Cremers, Dieter Fox and Dirk Hähnel, University of Bonn; Gerhard Lakemeyer, Aachen University of Technology; Dirk Schulz and Walter Steiner, University of Bonn; Sebastian Thrun, Carnegie Mellon University
Acceleration Methods for Numeric CSPs
Yahia Lebbah and Olivier Lhomme, Ecole des Mines de Nantes – La Chantrerie
1997
AAAI-97 Best Paper Awards
Statistical Parsing with a Context-Free Grammar and Word Statistics
Eugene Charniak, Brown University
Building Concept Representations from Reusable Components
Peter Clark, The Boeing Company and Bruce Porter, University of Texas at Austin
Fast Context Switching in Real-Time Propositional Reasoning
P. Pandurang Nayak and Brian C. Williams, NASA Ames Research Center
A Practical Algorithm for Finding Optimal Triangulations
Kirill Shoikhet and Dan Geiger, Technion, Israel
1996
AAAI-96 Best Paper Awards
A Novel Application of Theory Refinement to Student Modeling
Paul T. Baffes, SciComp, Inc. and Raymond J. Mooney, University of Texas at Austin
Pushing the Envelope: Planning, Propositional Logic, and Stochastic Search
Henry Kautz and Bart Selman, AT&T Laboratories
Verification of Knowledge Bases Based on Containment Checking
Alon Y. Levy, AT&T Research and Marie-Christine Rousset, University of Paris-Sud
1994
AAAI-94 Outstanding Paper Award
A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens
Jack Mostow, Steven F. Roth, Alexander G. Hauptmann and Matthew Kane, Carnegie Mellon University
1993
AAAI-93 Best Written Paper Award
Equations for Part-of-Speech Tagging
Eugene Charniak, Curtis Hendrickson, Neil Jacobson and Mike Perkowitz, Brown University
Honorable Mentions
Planning With Deadlines in Stochastic Domains
Thomas Dean, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Jak Kirman and Ann Nicholson, Brown University
Reasoning With Characteristic Models
Henry A. Kautz, Michael J. Kearns and Bart Selman, AT&T Bell Laboratories
The Paradoxical Success of Fuzzy Logic
Charles Elkan, UC San Diego
1992
AAAI-92 Best Written Paper Award
Hard and Easy Distribution of SAT Problems
David Mitchell, Bart Selman, and Hector Levesque
Honorable Mention
On the Minimality and Decomposability of Constraint Networks
Peter van Beek
1991
AAAI-91 Best Written Paper Award
Improving Rule-Based Systems through Case-Based Reasoning
Andrew R. Golding and Paul S. Rosenbloom
Honorable Mentions
Learning with Many Irrelevant Features
Hussein Almuallim and Thomas Dietterich
A Cognitively Plausible Approach to Understanding Complex Syntax
Claire Cardie and Wendy Lehnert
Complexity Results for Blocks-World Planning
Naresh Gupta and Dana S. Nau
1988
1988 Best Paper Awards
Qualitative Results Concerning the Utility of Explanation-Based Learning
Steven Minton, Carnegie Mellon University
Approach to Qualitative Algebraic Reasoning
Brian C. Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1987
1987 Best Paper Awards
Incremental Causal Reasoning
Thomas Dean and Mark Boddy, Brown University
An Approach to Default Reasoning Based on a First-Order Conditional Logic
James P. Delgrande, Simon Fraser University
PROMPT: An Innovative Design Tool
Seshashayee S. Murthy and Sanjaya Addanki, IBM T. J . Watson Research Center
Curing Anomalous Extensions
Paul Morris, IntelliCorp
Non-Deterministic Lisp with Dependency-directed Backtracking
Ramin Zabih, David McAllester, and David Chapman, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Defining Operationality for Explanation-based Learning
Richard M. Keller, Rutgers University
Word-Order Variation in Natural Language Generation
Aravind K. Joshi, University of Pennsylvania
Energy Constraints on Deformable Models: Recovering Shape and Non-Rigid Motion
Demetri Terzopoulos, Andrew Witkin, and Michael Kass, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
1986
1986 Publisher’s Prize
Default Reasoning, Nonmonotonic Logics, and the Frame Problem
Steve Hanks and Drew McDermott, Yale University
Generating Tests by Exploiting Designed Behavior
Mark Harper Shirley, MIT AI Laboratory
1984
1984 Publisher’s Prize
The Tractability of Subsumption in Frame-Based Description Languages
Ronald J. Brachman and Hector J. Levesque, Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research
Choices without Backtracking
Johan de Kleer, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
A Logic of Implicit and Explicit Belief
Hector J. Levesque, Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research
Shading into Texture
Alex P. Pentland, SRI International