Call for Papers
We invite submissions to the NeurIPS Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action (ACA). This workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and community stakeholders to explore how coordinated actions of participants can shape and improve AI systems.
We look forward to your submissions and to building a vibrant community around algorithmic collective action!
Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: August 29, 2025
August 22, 2025(Anywhere on Earth) - Notification: September 19, 2025
- Workshop: December 6/7 2025
Submission Information
We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions that advance our understanding of algorithmic collective action. Publications are non-archival; we explicitly encourage work in progress and contributions from other fields. If you submit work on related machine learning topics, please make explicit how your insights are relevant for the workshop; fit is an important selection criterion.
- Submission portal: OpenReview
Papers should be 3-6 content pages and formatted according to the following style file neurips_ACA_2025. Submissions should be anonymized to ensure a double-blind peer review process. Authors are encouraged to work through the NeurIPS paper checklist but it is not mandatory to include the checklist with the workshop submission.
For non-standard workshop contributions, that do not fit with the above format (e.g., software tools, experience reports, grassroots initiatives, or non-academic participation), we engourage authors to reach out to us at acaworkshop2025@gmail.com and we will find an appropriate format for these cases individually.
Topics of Interest
We welcome contributions that explore the mechanisms, challenges, opportunities, and impacts of collective efforts to influence algorithmic systems. Submissions may include technical insights, interdisciplinary perspectives, lived experiences, or original ideas that help advance and shape the future of the emerging field of algorithmic collective action.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
- Collective goals and strategies: Strategies for purposefully interacting with algorithmic systems to achieve socially beneficial outcomes. Examples include data obfuscation for protecting user privacy, conscious data contributions to promote market competition, data strikes to resist surveillance and data manipulation to achieve fairness. This could also mean to revisit ideas from data poisoning and adversarial machine learning or to repurpose optimization algorithms for the collective good.
- Attack surfaces of AI systems: What are the levers that a collective can exploit in the age of AI?
- Success bounds: What kinds of collective goals are realistically achievable? This includes statistical bounds, learning-theoretic insights, and optimization-based results.
- Coordination: What are the challenges of organizing large-scale collective action? Examples include information sharing, tools for participant orchestration, strategies for coordination and other practical considerations.
- Economic aspects: Mechanism design for incentivizing participation, analysis of strategic behavior, competing incentives, and equilibrium outcomes.
- Countermeasures: Robust learning under coordinated data manipulation; trade-offs in defending against collective strategies.
- AI Governance and Advocacy, Participatory AI: Community-driven approaches to AI design, regulation and oversight. How can stakeholders participate meaningfully in shaping AI systems?
- Power dynamics on online platforms: How platform design and control affect collective efforts and user agency.
We also welcome case studies, community perspectives as well as insights from application domains, including content creation, social media, creative work, and the gig economy more broadly.
Reviewer Volunteer Form
If you would like to help as a reviewer, please fill out the form below.
Contact Information
For questions about submissions or the workshop, please contact the organizers at acaworkshop2025@gmail.com.