Proceedings 17th International Conference on Automata and Formal Languages

The 17th International Conference on Automata and Formal Languages (AFL 2026) was held in Košice, September 7-10, 2026. It was organized by the Faculty of Science, P. J. Šafárik University in Košice and the Mathematical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. This volume contains the texts of the three invited lectures and the 18 papers selected by the Program Committee from a total of 27 submissions. The accepted papers, submitted by authors from 14 countries, cover all important areas of automata and formal language theory and their applications such as grammars and acceptors for strings, trees, and graphs, algebraic theories and algorithms for automata and languages, decision problems, relations to complexity theory, picture description and analysis, and other fields.