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FAQ: Submitting to AAMAS 2025

On this page we, the program chairs of AAMAS 2025, respond to many frequently asked questions by the authors. If you have a question not (yet) addressed here, in the Call for Papers, or Submission Instructions, then you are welcome to contact us: [email protected]. 

Basic Logistics

  1. Where can I find the latest version of the timeline with the important dates?

You can find these on the AAMAS 2025 website, as well as in the Call for Papers.

  1. Where can I find the submission site for AAMAS 2025?

Here you go: https://openreview.net/group?id=ifaamas.org/AAMAS/2025/Conference

General Questions Regarding Submission

  1. Can I resubmit revised papers not accepted to AAAI for submission to AAMAS?

AAAI 2025 has two decision phases: summary reject and final decision. The summary reject date is before AAMAS 2025 submission due date, and revisions of these papers can be submitted to AAMAS 2025 as regular papers.  Because final AAAI decisions are well after the AAMAS 2025 due date, we will have an independent AAAI 2025 resubmission track.  More information about this track will be on the AAMAS 2025 website.  Papers accepted in the AAAI 2025 resubmission track will appear as regular papers at AAMAS 2025.

  1. Will I be able to revise papers not accepted to AAMAS for submission to IJCAI?

Yes.

  1. What does it mean ‘to submit an abstract’? Do I have to do this?

For AAMAS we review full papers of up to 8 pages (references not included). Your paper should start with a short abstract of roughly 100-300 words. A good abstract will indicate the broader research area you are contributing to, outline the research question you are addressing or the problem you are trying to solve, sketch the results obtained, and mention the methods used. It should allow a potential reviewer to assess whether they want to read the full paper and would be qualified to evaluate it.

You are required to submit a copy of this abstract (in plain text) one week before the main paper submission deadline. That’s the abstract submission deadline. We need this information to be able to begin the process of matching papers with program committee members, so that we can start the actual reviewing process shortly after the main paper deadline in a timely manner. For this reason, you should not make significant changes to the abstract of your paper after the abstract submission deadline. Minor reformulations are fine.

We recommend that you try to essentially finish your paper by the abstract submission deadline and use the days between the two deadlines for a few final rounds of polishing and proof-reading.

  1. Which Track should I submit to and who will review my paper?

Many of the papers submitted to AAMAS will be relevant to more than one track. Please choose the track you deem most relevant. This choice of area will determine which area chairs will be handling your paper. But independently from the area you submit to, every regular and senior PC member (except those you have a conflict of interest with) will be able to bid to review/handle your paper.

The rationale for this approach is the following. First, you have a guarantee that someone familiar with the conventions of your own field will be ultimately responsible for the handling of your paper. That’s the reason for having area chairs. Second, when assigning the people who will engage with your paper in depth (the regular and senior PC members), we can choose from the largest possible pool of experts, thereby maximizing chances that there is a good match between papers and evaluators.

Please note that, while we reserve the right to assign a paper to a different area in case we believe that doing so will improve the quality of the reviewing process, we do not expect to make much use of those powers.

  1. What are the topics associated with the 10 submission tracks listed on the OpenReview submission site?

Please see the Call for Papers for the topics and descriptions of each of the tracks.

  1. None of the Tracks on the submission form seems to closely fit my paper. Can I still submit?

Probably. The list of tracks is an attempt to categorize most of the submissions we expect to receive for AAMAS, but of course no such list can ever be exhaustive. If, after having read a number of papers published in the proceedings of AAMAS in recent years, as well as considering the topic areas and descriptions associated with each track in the Call for Papers you feel that your paper is a good fit for the conference, then please submit.

If you do not find a track in the list that is an obvious fit for your paper, the best strategy is to pick the one that you think will attract the attention of the kind of people you would like to review your paper.

  1. Can I update my submission?

Yes, you can update your paper (and the supplementary material, if applicable) as many times as you like before the paper submission deadline. Similarly, you can update the abstract of your paper as many times as you like before the abstract submission deadline.

  1. As an area chair (or Senior Area Chair, as OpenReview calls it), can I submit a paper to the area I’m co-chairing?

Yes.

  1. What’s the deal with Extended Abstracts?

There are two ways that a paper may be accepted to, and presented at, AAMAS 2025.  The first is as a full (regular) paper, which will appear in the proceedings, and will be allocated an oral presentation slot, along with a poster presentation slot, at the conference if at least one of the authors is there in person.  All submitted papers will be considered for acceptance as full papers.

In addition, if a paper is not deemed by the program committee to be quite ready for publication and presentation as a full paper, it can be considered for acceptance as an extended abstract.  An extended abstract is allocated 2 pages in the conference proceedings, and is also a poster presentation slot at the conference. It is not considered as a full archival publication, and thus it should not prevent the paper to be published in its full form elsewhere.  If the authors do not wish their paper to be considered for acceptance as an extended abstract, the should check the “I *do not* wish for the paper to be considered for acceptance as an extended abstract.”  checkbox on the submission form.

Anonymity of Submissions

  1. Why does AAMAS use double-blind reviewing?

Double-blind reviewing means that reviewers should not be aware of the identity of the authors of the papers they review (on top of authors not being aware of the identity of their reviewers).

The idea is that double-blind reviewing will make it less likely that the work of well-known authors (or authors from well-known institutions) will be treated more favorably than everyone else’s submissions. More generally, double-blind reviewing is intended to reduce the impact of the various unconscious biases most reviewers will be subject to. This not only makes the system fairer but it also improves the quality of the research we publish as a community.

Of course, the system is not perfect and it is important that everybody is aware of its imperfections. Reviewers may still, in some cases, guess whose paper they are reviewing—even if they are professional about it and try to resist the temptation to do so. And, of course, double-blind reviewing is not a panacea circumventing all and every kind of bias a reviewer might harbor (e.g., against people who aren’t native speakers of English). Reviewers will be instructed to ensure that such potential bias should be avoided as much as possible.

  1. Can I cite myself or would that violate the double-blind reviewing policy?

Yes, you can cite yourself. To decide whether doing so would be appropriate, the following thought experiment might help. Imagine another researcher were to write the paper you are working on. Then, would an expert in your field say that this other researcher should cite your prior work? If yes (and only then), you should cite it as well.

Of course, to guarantee anonymity, you must use the third person rather than the first person when referring to your prior work (thus, “X et al. [42] showed …” rather than “We showed … [42]”). If your paper gets accepted, then you may want to reformulate this again (it can sound a bit weird if you are referring to yourself in the third person in a published paper!).

  1. My submission is a more mature version of an earlier workshop paper / is available as a technical report / contains results from my thesis. How should I deal with this?

Provided the earlier work has not been published (or is due to be published) in an archival forum, this is ok.

If the paper you are submitting is a variant of a paper previously presented at an informal workshop, then do not cite that earlier paper. Doing so would make it impossible to maintain anonymity. The same applies in case a variant of your paper is available as a technical report or preprint, or in case your paper is based on your thesis.

If your paper gets accepted, then you can cite those earlier versions of your work in the camera-ready version of your paper, and it is up to you to decide what would be appropriate in that case.

If the earlier version of your paper is publicly available at the time of submission, then you must enter that information in the submission form. This information will be visible only to us (the program chairs). In case one of your reviewers happens to be aware of that earlier work and worries that the anonymously submitted paper may be someone else’s attempt to plagiarize your earlier work, we will be in a position to clear up that misunderstanding.

Supplementary Material

  1. Can I submit code or data together with my paper?

Yes, you can submit such supplementary material together with your paper. Put everything in a single ZIP file and upload it separately from your paper (which must be uploaded as an unzipped PDF). Make sure that all of it is fully anonymized. 

  1. Can I submit an appendix to my paper?

First of all, provided you do not go beyond 8 pages (plus references) you of course are free to call one of the sections of your paper an ‘appendix’.

In addition, yes, uploading a separate document as supplementary material is possible in principle. There are no formal restrictions on length or style. Make sure everything is fully anonymized. If you are submitting supplementary material including more than one file (say, a document and some code), then put everything in a single ZIP container before uploading it.

You must make sure that any supplementary material you submit really is supplementary in nature: any information that is essential for understanding or evaluating your paper must be included in the paper itself.

When working on a paper for a conference, it is common that your first complete draft is too long, given the page limit imposed by the conference organizers. These limits are there, first and foremost, to protect the time of the reviewers (and in the old days to save paper), but in our experience, being forced to revise (and revise again and again) a paper to make it fit can also greatly improve the quality of your writing. Explanations have to be formulated more carefully, easier proofs have to be found, tables with less exciting experimental results have to be omitted or replaced by more insightful prose, and so forth. So please do not interpret the availability of the supplementary-material option as a license to circumvent this crucial stage in the research process and simply cut off the last few pages just before the deadline and declare them ‘supplementary material’. This almost certainly will result in a poorly presented submission that will have little chance of getting accepted.

We recommend that you work under the assumption that your reviewers will not actually look at the supplementary material you submit.

  1. Given that submitting an appendix is possible, does that mean that proof sketches are not acceptable?

No, it does not mean that. Including a proof sketch in a full paper can be perfectly reasonable. If you are able to provide enough information so that an expert would be able to fill in the missing details and verify the correctness of your claimed result, then this is absolutely fine. Indeed, sometimes leaving out certain details can greatly improve readability without really affecting reproducibility of the results.

A common situation in which a proof sketch is perfectly acceptable is one where you are using the same technique several times in a row to obtain similar results. If you illustrate your approach properly in the context of the first such proof, then it will often be perfectly acceptable to reduce the remaining proofs to very short sketches that only hint at the main difference relative to the first proof.

  1. Can I submit my supplementary material in the form of an anonymised link?

No.

  1. What are my obligations if I did choose to submit supplementary material and my paper gets accepted?

The basic principle at work here is that the readers of your published paper should have access to the same information as the reviewers of your submission.

So you should make your (de-anonymised and suitably revised) supplementary material openly available in archival form at the time of publication of your paper. For code or data you may wish to use a service such as github or Zenodo. For a technical appendix with additional proof details or similar, you may wish to use an archival preprint server such as arXiv. Try to find a place for your supplementary material where you can be reasonably sure that it will still be available, say, 50 years from today.

We recommend that you include a reference to the supplementary material in the camera-ready version of your paper (listed as an item in your bibliography). It should be possible for people to cite your supplementary material independently from citing your paper.

Rebuttal

  1. How do I write an effective rebuttal to the preliminary reviews of my paper?

Be brief. Be polite. Try to answer all concrete questions raised in the reviews. Try to make it very clear which point you are responding to (this should be clear also for, say, an area chair or a senior PC member who did not read your paper in any depth).

Avoid the temptation to argue with your reviewers about matters that are subjective in nature (such as the importance of a result). You are unlikely to convince them with just a short paragraph of text. But do try to correct factual misunderstandings of your contribution.

If you can indicate a couple of very concrete changes you plan to make to your paper to address the concerns of reviewers, then do. But avoid making vague or far-reaching promises. Keep in mind that we need to evaluate the paper you submitted, not the paper you promise to write in the future.

Of course, make sure you do not compromise the anonymity of your submission. Never include a link to additional supplementary material. Naturally, including a link to publicly available information is fine (say, to a paper disproving a factually wrong claim by a reviewer). In case this is one of your own publications, do not reveal your identity.

  1. What should I do if a review raises doubts about originality relative to one of my own earlier publications?

If a reviewer raises doubts about whether your work is sufficiently original for publication relative to some other paper in the literature and that other paper is actually one of your own papers, then it can be tricky to respond to this without breaking anonymity.

If the other paper is a formally published paper reporting different (but related) results, then you should respond to it in the same way as you would if the other paper were somebody else’s work. Once your prior work has become part of the literature, your new work needs to distinguish itself from that prior work in the same way as it has to distinguish itself from prior work by others.

If the other paper is an earlier version of your submitted paper that you presented at a workshop (without formal proceedings) or that you made available as a preprint (at least four weeks before the abstract submission deadline), then please send us (the program chairs) an email to notify us of the misunderstanding. We will then be able to clear up the misunderstanding in a manner that preserves anonymity as best as possible. The same applies in case the overlap in contribution noted by a reviewer concerns work in a Master’s or PhD thesis of yours.

  1. What should I do if I receive an unprofessional review for my paper?

We really hope you won’t, and we have put mechanisms in place we believe will make it very unlikely that you will (such as carefully selecting PC members, providing clear instructions for less experienced reviewers, giving them sufficient time to write their reviews, and asking senior PC members to read all reviews before you receive them). But no system is entirely foolproof and most of us will receive a couple of unprofessional reviews at some point in our career. 

These are typical signs for unprofessional reviews:

  • The review includes rude or otherwise inappropriate language.
  • The review is extremely short (just a few lines of text).
  • The review does not focus on the content of your paper but immediately drifts off into only vaguely related territory.

Please note that the following cases do not qualify as unprofessional reviews:

  • The reviewer does not seem to grasp parts of your paper that you consider very basic.
  • The reviewer asks a question already answered in the paper or laments the omission of information that in fact is there already.
  • The reviewer makes a suggestion for a technical improvement that you already know to be wrong or unfruitful.
  • The review has grammatical mistakes or looks messy.
  • The reviewer disagrees with you about the significance of one of your findings.
  • The reviewer shares a negative opinion about the timeliness or importance of the entire research area you are contributing to. They might feel they are giving good advice, so please take it in good faith. We won’t reject papers on such grounds.

Please also note that (of course!) different reviewers will sometimes disagree amongst themselves about the merits of your paper. This also is not a sign of lack of professionalism.

So, what do you do if you receive a review that really is unprofessional? In most cases, the best thing to do will be to politely address the issue in your rebuttal. The other reviewers and the senior PC member assigned to your submission will get to see all reviews and your rebuttal. If you highlight a specific problem with one of the reviews, then they will get to discuss that point and, if appropriate, disregard the issue when making the final decision on your paper. The general advice for writing rebuttals applies also here: make it very easy for people to understand what you are referring to. 

If you feel the situation is too delicate to address in your rebuttal, then you can submit a comment and restrict its visibility to “Area Chairs”, “Senior Area Chairs”, and “Program Chairs” only (i.e., not reviewers). Before you do this, discuss the situation with all your coauthors (if any) and recall that in such a situation it is always a good idea to take time to reflect and wait for 24 hours before doing this. Please keep your comment short and explain your concern in a way that allows us to assess the situation without reading your paper (but only the offending review). This comment will be taken into consideration by the program committee in making the final decision about your paper.  Note, however, that the program committee may ultimately disagree with your judgment on the matter.

  1. What are the ranges of review scores?

Review scores are provided for 5 categories:

  • Technical Quality
    • 5: Exceptional
    • 4: Strong
    • 3: Solid
    • 2: Weak
    • 1: Significant technical errors
  • Significance
    • 5: Groundbreaking
    • 4: Broadly significant
    • 3: Significant for an important subfield
    • 2: Unclear significance
    • 1: No significance
    • Presentation Quality
      • 5: Exceptional; crystal clear
      • 4: Good; clear presentation
      • 3: Acceptable
      • 2: Poor, difficult to understand
      • 1: Impossible to understand
    • Overall Rating
      • 10: Among the best papers I have ever read
      • 9: Terrific paper, candidate for an award
      • 8: Clear accept
      • 7: Good paper
      • 6: High borderline
      • 5: Low borderline
      • 4: OK, but probably not good enough
      • 3: Weak paper
      • 2: Clear rejection
      • 1: Trivial or wrong
    • Confidence
      • 5: The reviewer is absolutely certain that the evaluation is correct and is very familiar with the relevant literature
      • 4: The reviewer is confident but not absolutely certain that the evaluation is correct
      • 3: The reviewer is fairly confident that the evaluation is correct
      • 2: The reviewer is willing to defend the evaluation, but it is quite likely that the reviewer did not understand central parts of the paper
      • 1: The reviewer is unfamiliar with this area; evaluation is an educated guess
    1. Can I upload a new draft of the paper?

    No, you may not upload a new draft of the paper during the rebuttals.

    1. Can I use an external link in the rebuttals?

    No.

    1. Can I include new results in my rebuttal?

    Yes, but they have to be included in the rebuttal text.  In OpenReview, your rebuttal text is in markdown, allowing you to include result tables (but not figures). Of course, your text including such tables should still abide by the length constraint of 2500 characters.

    Getting Ready for the Conference

    1. Now that my paper has been accepted, can I put it on my homepage or an arXiv?

    Yes, of course, you can (and should!) put your paper on your homepage as soon as you have produced a carefully proof-read revision that takes the feedback received from your reviewers into account. You can also post that version to a preprint server such as arXiv.

    However, if you put a version of you paper online that includes the official AAMAS copyright statement and/or reference format block, then it must be exactly the version of the paper that has been accepted at AAMAS (i.e., the 8-page version for full papers and the 2-page version for extended abstracts).

    In particular, if your paper has been accepted as an extended abstract, you still are welcome to put the full version of the paper online as well. But if you do, it is important that you reformat the full paper using a neutral style and that you remove the AAMAS copyright statement and reference format block. The reason is that it should be clear to everyone that the full version of the extended abstract is not a paper that has been accepted by the AAMAS programme committee. Only the extended abstract has.

    Similarly, if you want to put an extended version of your full paper online (e.g., a version that includes an additional appendix), then this is also fine, but once again, you should remove the official AAMAS copyright statement and reference format block, because the paper you are putting online is not the paper that will appear in the proceedings (which is what you would be claiming if you were to forget to remove those official markers).

    If you want to use the AAMAS LaTeX style without the  copyright block, simply use the ‘nonacm’ option: \documentclass[sigconf,nonacm]{aamas}

    1. Are extended abstracts part of the official proceedings?

    Yes. Papers that have been accepted as extended abstracts will be published in the official proceedings of AAMAS 2025 alongside the full papers. The only difference is that they are shorter (2 pages plus references) and that they must include the subtitle “Extended Abstract” (which should be mentioned whenever someone is citing the paper).

    Note that presenting the core idea of your work in an extended abstract does not bar you from publishing a full paper on the same topic at a later point. AAMAS explicitly permits this and many other conferences (though possibly not all of them) will treat such cases similarly.