Yvonne Akande

Research

Yvonne co-authored the negotiation-protocols benchmark and is one of the lead contributors to kalman-04's current research line on commitments under adversarial bargaining. Her thesis was on game-theoretic mechanism design; she works at the intersection of mechanism design and agent substrates with a focus on what the substrate exposes about commitments at runtime.

She has been with alphabell since 2020 and is the longest-tenured contributor based in Lagos, sharing the regional cluster with Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard. She is on the cell formation review pool that approves new cell-formation proposals.

Yvonne is the lab's de-facto liaison with the Lagos-area academic community and has chaired several editions of an annual workshop on AI safety in West Africa.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, University of Ibadan, 2015.

Prior to alphabell: University of Ibadan; Wayfarer Institute; Halcyon Safety.

Selected publications

• Apr 2025 · ab-agent-negotiat
  Negotiation Protocols Among Heterogeneous Agents: a benchmark and three baselines
  Roman Iliescu, Yvonne Akande, Lakshmi Ravi, Pascal Niedermeier
• Oct 2025 · ab-durable-agents
  Durable Agent Substrate v1: persistent state, learned tool affordances, and verifiable execution traces
  Mira Holloway, Dineth Karunaratne, Priya Anand, Cheung Wai-Lin
• Oct 2024 · ab-federated-comp
  A Federated Compute Scheduler for an Asynchronous Research Lab
  Pranav Iyer, Yusra Habibi, Akoss Vidor
• Sep 2025 · ab-scalable-overs
  Scalable Oversight for Multi-Step Agent Systems: a Debate-Plus-Trace Approach
  Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard, Hiroshi Tanigawa, Maral Lotfi, Ruth Wernicke
• Sep 2024 · ab-interpretabili
  Interpretability Cell Pairing: how every dual-use capability run gets a watchful sibling
  Karima Belkadi, Hester Vandekerckhove, Yuki Cho

Full publications index →

Recent talks

• Adversarial bargaining at scale, AAMAS 2025
• What an agent's commitments cost, EC 2025