aamas-writing-style

AAMAS Writing Style

Use this when revising the main paper. AAMAS papers need a compact statement of why an

interaction result matters and enough detail for a game theorist and an empiricist to both

validate it.

Revision rules

• Put the interaction contribution on the first page: the multiagent problem, why single-agent

or centralized fixes fail, the mechanism or learning rule, the strategic property, and the

evidence.

• Name the solution concept or incentive property (Nash, correlated, coarse-correlated,

no-regret, dominant-strategy truthful, Pareto); an unnamed "equilibrium" is a review flag.

• Make the game legible: agents, actions, information structure, and payoffs stated once and

clearly.

• Pair every major claim with a proof sketch, a self-play or population experiment, or a

deployment result.

• Use the 8-page body for the core argument and push long proofs, extra opponents, and extended

ablations to the appendix (references are unlimited, so cite generously).

• Keep double-blind wording in self-citations, prior-system references, acknowledgements, and

artifact descriptions.

Interaction-first discipline

• State early why the result is genuinely multiagent - what breaks if the other agents are

frozen into a static environment. If nothing breaks, the AAMAS framing does not hold.

• Give each theorem a body-level proof sketch; the appendix proof supports the sketch but never

replaces it.

• Keep the game's information structure visible; who knows what and when is where multiagent

proofs live or die.

• Separate a proved strategic property from an observed one; mixing "is truthful" and

"appears cooperative" in one paragraph is a credibility leak here.

Sentence-level rewrites

| Draft pattern | AAMAS-safe rewrite |

|---|---|

| "Our agents outperform the baselines..." | "reduce social cost by X (SE Y) over Z seeds against held-out opponents" |

| "The agents reach equilibrium..." | "converge to a coarse-correlated equilibrium (Def. 2) under Assumptions 1-3" |

| "The mechanism is fair and efficient..." | "is dominant-strategy truthful (Thm. 1) with efficiency loss bounded by ... (Thm. 2)" |

| "In a multiagent setting..." | Name the game, the number of agents, and the information structure |

Vignette: compressing into eight two-column pages

A draft with two theorems, a mechanism, six figures, and a sprawling related-work section: keep

both theorem statements with one sketch each, the mechanism definition, and the two

decision-critical figures (truthfulness-under-learning and the efficiency gap); compress related

work into precise contrasts; move secondary lemmas and four figures to the appendix with forward

references. The test of a good cut: a reviewer reconstructs the whole interaction argument

without opening the supplement.

Output format

[Writing diagnosis] clear / interaction-buried / concept-unnamed / overloaded
[First-page fix] <new interaction framing>
[Claim discipline] <claim -> proof / experiment / limitation>
[Compression cuts] <move / delete / merge>
[Anonymity edits] <phrases to rewrite>