About The Workshop
Most agentic systems today rely on manual design for their training, harnesses, and goals. As models grow more capable, new systems are emerging to automate this. AlphaEvolve writes and tests its own programs; GEPA and Meta-Harness use agents to optimize the trajectories of other agents, beating reinforcement learning at a fraction of the cost. We call these higher-order agents that build, optimize, and supervise other agents meta-agents.
Meta-agents will likely play an increasingly central role in how agentic systems are used and developed. Yet discourse on them stays dispersed across separate communities, from meta-learning to reinforcement learning to systems research. A systematic, interdisciplinary view is needed to address their potential for both use and misuse, convening core figures from these subfields alongside researchers in AI and organizational science.
The shift from manual to automated agent design raises open technical problems. A meta-agent can design the harness, train the agent system, and enable continual learning and self-improvement. When does a discovered or self-improved design actually generalize, and which optimization methods and learning signals improve a meta-agent's capabilities?
As capabilities scale, societal impact needs careful oversight. A meta-agent acts like a manager, decomposing objectives and assigning tasks to worker agents, so a misaligned one can spawn and coordinate swarms of subordinate agents toward the wrong goal. Meta-agents can also manage humans, with risks of economic disruption and eroded autonomy. So every result raises the same question: who evaluates and oversees an agent that builds or improves another agent, or itself? The workshop covers the full lifecycle, design, training, evaluation, deployment, and oversight, and every submission carries a responsible-use statement.
Topics
We invite work across the topics below, capability first, then evaluation, oversight, and governance. Topics include but are not limited to:
Most agent harnesses are still built by hand. We invite work on searching the space of agent architectures, tools, and harnesses (Meta Agent Search, automated harness design), and on telling when a discovered design generalizes past the tasks it was tuned on.
Once an agent is more than one model call, the problem is optimizing the whole program. We seek work on optimizers for multi-module systems (DSPy, GEPA, Trace), credit assignment across modules, post-training of compound systems, inference-time search, and context optimization.
A meta-agent can point at itself. We welcome work on agents that rewrite their own code (the Darwin Gödel Machine, self-taught optimizers), self-play and co-evolution, open-endedness, and honest analyses of how self-improving agents drift or game their own reward.
Does a discovered or self-improved agent actually generalize? We want benchmarks and tests for meta-level methods, the ones that answer this question rather than leaderboards that hide the failure cases.
Making agent execution observable and auditable, red-teaming systems that act on other agents, and detecting reward gaming, over-optimization, and drift before a system acts on other agents at scale.
Rollback and halt controls a deployer can actually trigger, who signs off before a discovered agent ships, and how to govern agents that manage other agents, including perspectives from management science and other fields outside AI.
Call For Papers
Managing Agents that Manage Agents (NeurIPS 2026) invites submissions on architectures, algorithms, theory, empirical studies, benchmarks, and position papers about agents that design, optimize, supervise, train, or improve other agents. Submissions must present original, unpublished work that has not appeared at NeurIPS or other archival machine-learning venues.
Key Dates
- Submission Deadline:
August 29, 20265th Sept, AoE - Notification: on or before September 29, 2026, AoE
- Camera-Ready Deadline: November 20, 2026, AoE
- Workshop Date: December 11, 2026 (Sydney)
Submission Site
Submissions are managed via OpenReview and remain private during review. All authors should maintain up-to-date OpenReview profiles for conflict-of-interest management and paper matching. Submit your paper at the OpenReview submission portal.
Interested in serving as a reviewer or Area Chair (AC)? Self-nominate using this form.
Camera-Ready Instructions
Camera-ready papers are due November 20, 2026, AoE. All accepted papers must use the Meta-Agents Workshop NeurIPS 2026 LaTeX template (ZIP). A compiled example PDF is also available.
The template is configured for camera-ready papers, with the Meta-Agents Workshop notice, author names and affiliations visible, and review line numbers removed. Keep the final option enabled, restore any author-identifying information and acknowledgments removed for review, and include the required responsible-use statement. The NeurIPS main-conference paper checklist is not required. Upload a single PDF, including references and any appendices, through OpenReview.
Full camera-ready papers may contain at most 10 pages of main text, including figures and tables; short camera-ready papers may contain at most 5 pages. References and appendices do not count toward these limits, but the main text must be self-contained. For initial submissions, the page limits below apply.
Scope
We welcome contributions across the topics above. Accepted papers are presented as posters, with a subset selected for oral or spotlight talks, and we give a Best Paper award and a Best Social Impact Paper award for the work that most thoughtfully addresses the societal implications of meta-agents. The workshop is in person at NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney.Submission Guidelines
Formatting
Papers must be in English and use the NeurIPS 2026 LaTeX template customized for the Meta-Agents Workshop. The NeurIPS paper checklist is not required. Papers are submitted as a single PDF:- Full Papers: at most 9 pages (main text)
- Short Papers: at most 4 pages (main text)
- Demo Track: live demonstrations of meta-agent systems and tools, presented alongside the poster sessions.
- Position Papers: on the governance, oversight, and societal impact of meta-agents.
- References and appendices do not count toward the page limit, but the main text must be self-contained.
Responsible-Use Statement
Every submission also includes a short responsible-use statement covering the potential societal impacts of the proposed work and suggested mitigations. It is reviewed with the paper, and a missing one is grounds for desk rejection.
Review-Stage Anonymity
The workshop uses double-blind review for initial submissions, with author names, affiliations, and acknowledgments removed and prior work cited in the third person. Accepted camera-ready papers must include author names and affiliations, as described in the camera-ready instructions above.Non-Archival Policy
The workshop is non-archival. Papers under review elsewhere are welcome, and accepted papers may be published at other venues afterward. Work already published at NeurIPS or other archival ML venues should not be submitted.
Contact
Email meta-agents-workshop@googlegroups.com.Speakers & Panelists
Eleven invited speakers and panelists.
Schedule
All invited talks include a Q&A session. The schedule may shift slightly before the workshop day.
| Time (AEDT) | Session | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 – 09:10 | Opening Remarks | Organizers |
| 09:10 – 09:40 | Invited Talk 1 | Graham Neubig (CMU, online) |
| 09:40 – 10:25 | Oral Session 1 | Selected authors |
| 10:25 – 10:55 | Invited Talk 2 | Ying Liu (Scale AI) |
| 10:55 – 11:25 | Invited Talk 3 | Chelsea Finn (Stanford, online) |
| 11:25 – 11:30 | Break | |
| 11:30 – 12:30 | Poster & Demo Session 1 | |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Lunch Window | |
| 13:00 – 13:45 | Oral Session 2 | Selected authors |
| 13:45 – 14:15 | Invited Talk 4 | Bo Li (UIUC) |
| 14:15 – 14:45 | Invited Talk 5 | Yuandong Tian (Recursive) |
| 14:45 – 15:30 | Panel Discussion | Oversight of Meta-Agents (Jenny Zhang, Chen Sun, Jess Bergs, and Rishi Bommasani) As meta-agents build and manage other agents, what role remains for humans, and who stays accountable when something goes wrong? |
| 15:30 – 16:30 | Poster & Demo Session 2 | |
| 16:30 – 17:00 | Awards & Closing Remarks | Christopher D. Manning & organizers |
Organizers
This workshop is organized and advised by
Sponsors
We gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsors.
Meta AI
E2B
Scale AI
