You are invited to submit a negotiating agent to the **Human-Agent
Negotiation (HAN) League** of the
International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) as part of
the IJCAI 2026
official competition track. Please see:
ANAC has been running since 2010 in conjunction with AAMAS/IJCAI. The HAN
league focuses
on the specific challenges facing an agent negotiating with a human partner
instead of
another agent.
### The Challenge
The participants are challenged to build a negotiation strategy that uses
the alternating
offers protocol (AOP) augmented with text input/output to effectively
negotiate with human
subjects. Strategies should be compatible with standard AOP but may use
multi-modal
communication to influence or inform the human negotiator.
### Negotiation Protocol
Agents act as negotiators in a bilateral setting. The protocol follows
these rules:
* **Alternating Offers**: Negotiators take turns making offers. On each
turn, the negotiator (human or agent) can Accept, Reject (and counter), or
End the negotiation.
* **Multi-modal Communication**: Agents can return Markdown-formatted text
to provide context/offer or persuasion to the human partner. Moreover, the
human partner can use free text for communication with the agent.
* **Scenario**: Different scenarios will be evaluated including
Procurement, Resource Distribution, etc. Evaluation scenarios can differ
from the examples provided in the submission template.
### Platform
The league is built on NegMAS (https://negmas.readthedocs.io/en/latest/),
the same platform used for all ANAC 2026 leagues.
**Development**: Please download the template from
https://anac.cs.brown.edu/files/han/y2026/han.zip and follow the
installation steps in `README.md`
**API**: We provide multiple APIs that can be used to implement your agent:
* You can implement a single `__call__()` method that receives an offer
(containing text
and/or proposal) and responds to it with a decision (accept/reject/end)
and an
optional counter offer (in case of rejection) with optional text.
* You can modify the prompts used by an LLM to implement the negotiation
strategy.
* You can build your agent by combining existing or new offering
strategies, acceptance
strategies and opponent modeling methods.
A simple tutorial of how to implement and submit your agent can be found at
https://anac.cs.brown.edu/files/han/y2026/template2026.pdf
### Competition Flow
The competition runs the following way:
An *LLM round* will be conducted in which the participating agents
negotiate against personality-adjusted
verified LLM negotiators simulating human negotiators. Selected agents
from the LLM round will then be evaluated against crowd-sourced human
negotiators to select the finalists and then the winner(s).
### Evaluation
Agents are ranked based on the utility they achieve against a variety of
human subjects. We will also evaluate agents based on the perception of
human partners using questionnaires.
### Submission and Live Competition
- To participate in the competition, please register at
https://anac.cs.brown.edu/register and download the official template from
https://anac.cs.brown.edu/files/han/y2026/han.zip
- You can resubmit your agent as many times as you want until the deadline
(with
the same ID). Submitted agents will be used to run online tournaments
which gives
you feedback about the performance of your agent. Submitted code is never
shared until the announcement of the winners.
- All submitted agents will be made publicly available after the
announcement of the
winners as per ANAC rules.
- You must accompany your final submission with a 2-pages academic report
describing your agent which will also be made publicly available after the
announcement of the winners.
### Organizing Committee
* **Yasser Mohammad**, NEC CORPORATION (main contact)
* **Reyhan Aydogan**, Özyeğin University & Delft University of Technology
* **Rafik Hadfi**, Kyoto University
### Important Dates
* **Registration on the competition website (Recommended)**: April 25th,
2026
* **Submission deadline**: June 1st, 2026
* **Academic Report submission deadline**: June 5th, 2026
### Sponsors
NEC CORPORATION
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