2026 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI) – Special Session on Games  

Organisers:

  • Xiangyu Wang, University of Science and Technology of China (sa312@mail.ustc.edu.cn)
  • Jialin Liu, Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR (jialin.liu@ln.edu.hk)
  • Georgios N. Yannakakis, University of Malta, Malta (georgios.yannakakis@um.edu.mt)
This special session is organised at the 2026 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI) in association with the IEEE CIS Games Technical Committee (GTC).

  Aim  

Games are an ideal domain to study computational intelligence (CI) methods because they provide affordable, competitive, dynamic, reproducible environments suitable for testing new search algorithms, pattern-based evaluation methods, or learning concepts. Games scale from simple problems for developing algorithms to incredibly hard problems for testing algorithms to the limit. Additionally, there is great potential for CI methods to improve the design and development of computer games as well as tabletop games, board games, and puzzles. This special session aims at gathering leaders and neophytes in games research as well as practitioners in this field who research applications of computational intelligence methods to computer games.

  Scope  

    In general, papers are welcome that consider all kinds of applications of methods (evolutionary computation, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, fuzzy systems, game-tree search, rolling horizon algorithms, MCTS, open-ended learning etc.) to games (card games, board games, mathematical games, action games, strategy games, role-playing games, arcade games, serious games, etc.).
  • Adaptation Automatic game testing
    • Topics include but are not limited to
  • Adaptation in games
  • Automatic game testing
  • Coevolution in games
  • Dynamic difficulty in games
  • Games as AI test-bed
  • Imitating human players
  • Learning to play games
  • Multi-agent and multi-strategy learning
  • Player/opponent modelling
  • Affective game computing
  • Procedural content generation
  • CI for serious games (e.g., games for health, education or training)
  • Results of game-based CI and open competitions
  • Game and puzzle design with computational intelligence
  • Representation of knowledge in player agents
  • Representation learning and computer vision in games
  • LLMs and games

 Important Dates  

Please note that the list below serves as a rough guide. The dates may be changed due to changes by the organizing committee. You can find the latest information at: WCCI2026 website

31 January 2026 Paper Submission Deadline
15 March 2026 Paper Acceptance Notification
15 April 2024 Camera-ready Papers Submission Deadline
21 - 26 June 2026 Conference Dates


  Instructions for authors  

https://attend.ieee.org/wcci-2026/information-for-authors/


  About the organisers  

Xiangyu Wang received his PhD degree in Data Science in 2023 from the University of Science and Technology of China. Currently, he is a Special Associate Researcher at the School of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Science and Technology of China. He has served in various leadership roles for the International Conference on Big Data and Information Analytics (BigDIA), including as a Track Chair, Session Co-Chair, and Registration Chair. His main research interests include Multimodal Learning, Causal Learning, Knowledge Engineering, and Data Mining. He has published over 30 papers in major international academic journals and conferences, such as IEEE TPAMI, TKDE, TNNLS, ICML, and NeurIPS. He serves as a reviewer for several academic journals, including IEEE TNNLS, TETCI, TKDD, and AIJ.


Jialin Liu is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Data Science of Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR, China. She received her Ph.D. from the Université Paris-Saclay in 2016, M.Sc. degree from the École Polytechnique and the Université Paris-Sud in 2013, Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the Polytech'Paris-Sud in 2012, and B.E. degree from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2010. Her research interests include artificial intelligence in games, evolutionary computation, and fair machine learning. She is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Games and Knowledge-Based Systems.

Georgios N. Yannakakis is a Professor at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, and a co-founder of humanfeedback.ai and modl.ai. He does research at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, computational creativity, affective computing, advanced game technology, and human–computer interaction. He has published more than 450 papers in the aforementioned fields, and his work has been cited broadly. Prof. Yannakakis is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Games and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. He is an IEEE Fellow.