[ACT-R-users] Proposal for a Symposium on Artificial Metacognition

[Christian Lebiere]

Our symposium on artificial metacognition has been accepted. We are now
accepting submissions to METACOG-26 at the AAAI Fall Symposium – here is
the submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fss26.  This
will be Nov. 5-7, 2026 in Arlington, VA.

Full papers (up to 8 pages) for oral presentation and short papers or
extended abstracts (up to 4 pages) for posters, in AAAI two-column format,
peer-reviewed by the organizing and program committees. For more
information, check out:
https://metacognition.syracuse.edu/metacog-26-symposium-on-artificial-metacognition/


Christian

On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 4:07 PM Christian Lebiere <cl at cmu.edu> wrote:

> Paulo Shakarian (Syracuse), Nate Bastian (West Point, DARPA), Francesco
> Restuccia (Northeastern), Arslan Basharat (KitWare) and I are preparing a
> proposal for a “Symposium on Artificial Metacognition” at the 2026 AAAI
> Fall Symposium Nov. 5-7.  A draft description is pasted below.
>
>
>
> If you would like to help us with the proposal, please fill out this
> 1-question survey to voice your support:
> https://forms.gle/DuHB7xpGqSScYSPz9
>
>
>
> If you want to get more involved, please send us an email – we would be
> looking for:
>
>
>
>    - Program committee members
>    - Keynote speaker nominations
>    - Sponsorship
>    - Any advice based on our last two METACOG workshops
>
>
>
> Thank you again for your support – and we look forward to getting this
> approved and seeing you all in Arlington in November!
>
>
>
> - Paulo, Nate, Francesco, Arslan and Christian
>
>
>
> *---*
>
>
> *METACOG-26: Symposium on Artificial Metacognition*
>
> *Proposal for the AAAI 2026 Fall Symposium Series*
>
> November 5–7, 2026  •  Westin Arlington, Arlington, VA
>
> *1. Symposium Description*
>
> Artificial Metacognition is the ability for an AI system to reason about
> itself.  The idea is based on a concept in cognitive psychology [1, 2]. In
> the early 2000s, AAAI held several symposia on this topic [3, 4]. Recently,
> due to the advent of the LLM, neurosymbolic AI, and the need for more
> robust AI systems, this topic has re-emerged in a series of small venues
> [5, 6] and most recently an “emerging trends” talk at AAAI-2026 [7].  The
> study of metacognition goes beyond related topics such as
> out-of-distribution detection and uncertainty quantification by not only
> detecting when a model could potentially be in an error mode, but
> determining aspects about security, computational efficiency, power usage,
> explainability, and corrective action in a unified, often cognitively
> inspired, framework.  Recent events have brought together researchers from
> computer science, cognitive psychology, electrical engineering, mechanical
> engineering, systems engineering, and mathematics.  The proposed Symposium
> on Artificial Metacognition will continue this exploration by inviting
> papers featuring a variety of methodologies that have been explored in the
> recent literature, including stress testing of robotic systems, model
> introspection, model certification, performance prediction, critique models
> for LLMs, metacognitive rule learning, and metacognitive extensions to
> cognitive architectures such as ACT-R, SOAR and the Common Model of
> Cognition.
>
> *2. Objectives*
>
> The objectives of the symposium are as follows:
>
>    - Survey and synthesize current approaches to metacognition in AI
>    systems, including monitoring, control, and metareasoning.
>    - Understand the requirements for and trade-offs among various
>    metacognitive approaches.
>    - Identify novel methods for metacognition that improve AI performance
>    in operational, out-of-distribution, and cross-domain settings.
>    - Identify application areas suitable for the deployment of
>    metacognitive methods, including autonomy, cyber, vision, robotics, and
>    decision support.
>    - Foster cross-disciplinary collaboration between AI, cognitive
>    psychology, cognitive modeling, control theory, and systems engineering.
>    - Examine the relationship between AI metacognition and human
>    operators, including trust, calibration, and human-AI teaming.
>
> *3. Topics of Interest*
>
> Specific topics to be covered include, but are not limited to:
>
>    - AI Agents with Metacognition (LLM-based agents, autonomous agents,
>    and embodied agents that self-monitor and self-regulate).
>    - Cognitive model architectures with metacognitive extensions (e.g.,
>    ACT-R, Soar, the Common Model of Cognition).
>    - Metacognitive rule learning (data-driven and neuro-symbolic learning
>    of error-detection and constraint rules).
>    - Critique models (training, evaluation, and deployment of models that
>    produce natural-language feedback on the outputs of other AI systems).
>    - Explainable performance prediction of black-box AI systems.
>    - Stress testing of reinforcement learning and perception systems.
>    - Metacognitive monitoring vs. metacognitive control, including
>    metareasoning and resource regulation.
>    - Neuro-symbolic AI architectures for metacognition.
>    - Self-adaptive, self-healing, and self-repairing AI systems for new
>    domains.
>    - Out-of-distribution detection, abductive inference, and
>    consistency-based verification as metacognitive cues.
>    - Trust calibration, human-in-the-loop metacognition, and human-AI
>    teaming.
>    - Datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation methodology for metacognitive
>    AI.
>    - Applications of metacognitive AI to autonomy, robotics, cyber
>    operations, and decision support.
>
> *4. Symposium Format*
>
> METACOG-26 will be a 2.5-day symposium following the standard AAAI Fall
> Symposium structure. Programming will combine traditional paper sessions
> with extended discussion, a poster session, two invited keynotes, and a
> closing panel. This structure is consistent with the symposium series’
> emphasis on intimate forums and substantive discussion. We anticipate
> accepting up to 14 full papers (oral) and up to 12 posters. Submission will
> be peer-reviewed by the organizing committee and a small program committee
> drawn from the prior workshops. Accepted papers will be published in the
> AAAI Technical Report series.
>
>
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