Workshop on Knowledge Discovery, Maintenance and Distributed Intelligence in Multi-Agent Systems
In conjunction with ECML PKDD 2026
The increasing adoption of Agentic AI systems is reshaping how complex tasks are addressed across a wide range of domains. In many emerging applications—such as collaborative information retrieval, distributed data analysis, simulation-based policy modeling, and automated scientific discovery—multiple agents interact, exchange intermediate outputs, and iteratively refine collective decisions over extended interaction cycles. At the same time, deploying these systems in practice requires distributed learning and coordination across heterogeneous sites, edge devices, and organizational boundaries.
While multi-agent systems demonstrate remarkable capabilities, their widespread deployment introduces two deeply intertwined research challenges. On the one hand, fundamental questions arise concerning how knowledge is acquired, shared, validated, and updated through interaction. On the other hand, real-world environments rarely permit centralized training or global data sharing: learning must occur across distributed sites under privacy, regulatory, and communication constraints. At the intersection of these two dimensions, a central and still underexplored question emerges: how can multi-agent systems discover and remain grounded in reliable knowledge while learning and coordinating in a fully distributed manner?
AGENSYS jointly addresses knowledge-grounded multi-agent learning and distributed intelligence, treating them as complementary facets of the same overarching problem. Agents rely on external knowledge sources such as structured databases, knowledge graphs, retrieval systems, scientific corpora, or streaming data while collaborating or competing in dynamic environments. Simultaneously, the underlying training and adaptation processes must be decentralized, communication-efficient, and resilient to data heterogeneity.
How does access to heterogeneous external knowledge affect collaborative strategies among agents operating across distributed sites? How do retrieval-augmented agents coordinate when evidence is partially inconsistent?
In iterative multi-agent pipelines, how can incorrect intermediate outputs spread and amplify across agents? What distributed mechanisms can detect and contain error cascades without a central authority?
How can we formally detect when a multi-agent system progressively diverges from reliable knowledge sources during long-horizon interaction under non-IID data distributions?
Can uncertainty modeling, confidence-weighted voting, or graph-based consistency checks reduce collective errors across knowledge and distributed training dimensions?
Under what conditions can distributed multi-agent interaction lead to discovery of novel hypotheses or synthetic knowledge that is both valid and generalizable?
How can we design communication-efficient, privacy-preserving training pipelines that enable large-scale agentic systems to learn continuously across heterogeneous environments?
We welcome contributions on topics including, but not limited to:
Mark your calendar
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Paper Submission Deadline | June 5, 2026 |
| Acceptance Notification | June 26, 2026 |
| Camera-Ready Deadline | July 10, 2026 |
| Workshop Day | September 7–11, 2026 — Naples, Italy (co-located with ECML PKDD 2026) |

Head of the Applied Intelligence and Data Analysis (AIDA) research group. His research focuses on Multi-Agent Systems, Swarm Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Computational Intelligence. Editor-in-Chief of Expert Systems (Wiley) and the International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence (IJIMAI). His current research explores agentic aerial intelligence, studying how autonomous UAVs integrate reasoning and memory to cooperate in applications such as disaster response and infrastructure inspection.