ECE Ph.D. Student Solaleh Mohammadi Awarded ISDG Tom Vincent Best Paper Award

ECE Ph.D. Student Solaleh Mohammadi received the Tom Vincent Best Paper Award at the International Society of Dynamic Games (ISDG) Annual Conference that took place in July 2026 in Istanbul, Turkey. Her paper, Entropic risk-sensitive evolutionary learning and equilibrium selection in coordination games, was co-authored by her advisor, Professor Kaiqing Zhang and Xiang Gao from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Mohammadi’s research interests focus on multi-agent reinforcement learning and evolutionary game theory. Her current work in risk-sensitive reinforcement learning and game theory concentrates on how agents’ risk attitudes affect long-run behavior and social outcomes.

Her paper addresses the theory that in real-life situations, people or AI agents interact and learn from other people or other agents. Such interactions may have several equilibria, meaning several stable outcomes, so an important question is which of these outcomes the agents will eventually coordinate on. The answer can depend not only on the available payoffs, but also on how agents evaluate the uncertainty they face while learning.

Classical and evolutionary learning models typically assume that the evaluation of uncertain payoffs are processed in a risk-neutral format. By incorporating risk attitudes directly into the learning process using an entropic risk measure, they are able to analyze how the model affects learning.

The research documented in the paper shows that more risk-taking agents tend to favor payoff-dominant choices, and risk-averse agents choose better protection against worst-case outcomes. The final outcome demonstrates that risk attitudes can control which direction agents will select through learning, as mirrored in human decision-making behavior.

The ISDG was formed in 1990 to support the development and applications of the theory of dynamic games. The organization defines a dynamic game as “as a paradigm for a decision making situation, competitive or conflict process that involves several agents or decision makers in dynamic interaction.”

The Tom Vincent Award was established in 2019 to recognize research in and outstanding contributions to the field of evolutionary game theory. It is named after renowned game theorist Thomas L. Vincent.

Published September 10, 2026