Focus Session: Complexity of AI

Introduction

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) models, specifically artificial neural networks, are typical complex systems that consist of a large number of interactions. With accelerating progress in the capabilities of AI, it calls for a better understanding of their working principles. Complexity science, a field behind the 2021 Nobel prizes in physics awarded to Giorgio Parisi, builds some key theoretical foundations for the 2024 Nobel prizes awarded to AI contributions by John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, and is receiving increasing attention in the pursuit of understanding AI models.

As complex systems, AI models exhibit the typical phenomena of phase transition, emergence (of intelligence), multiple meta-stabilities, chaos, self-organization, etc. Studying and analyzing AI models through the perspective of complexity science can pave the way for a deeper understanding of how AI processes information, carrying out logic reasoning, and generating new data like images or texts. Such findings can potentially help us improve the capabilities, safety, and efficiency of AI models through untangling their complexities.

This Focused Session on "Complexity of AI" is held in conjunction with the Asia-Pacific Summer School and Conference on Networks and Complex Systems (APCNCS) 2026, held in Singapore from 9-12 Jun 2026. Participants at this focus session will also be invited to contribute to a joint special issue in MDPI Entropy and MDPI Complexities.

Call for Abstracts

We welcome abstracts for contributed talks on original research exploring the complexity of AI models from diverse perspectives, including methods, theories, applications, and empirical studies on the following topics related to (but not limited to):

Submission and Registration

Participants already registered for APCNCS 2026 have up till 30 Apr 2026 to submit abstracts to:

The programme for the focus session will be posted, and contributors notified, on 15 May 2026. All contributors must be registered for APCNCS 2026 to participate in the focus session.