arXiv subjects

Georgina Curto

Publications and source records attributed to Georgina Curto.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

PolicyMediator: Multi-Regional Policy Learning through Mediation Agents with Evolving Skills in OPC Ecosystems

One-person companies (OPCs) are emerging enterprises operated by individual entrepreneurs through digital platforms and LLM-based AI agents. These highly skilled entrepreneurs are characterized by being digital nomads, with limited reliance on local ecosystems. Governments in China use distinct regional support policies to attract mobile OPCs, turning local support into a cross-regional coordination problem. OPCs compare regions to maximize their own utility, but imperfect policy perceptions may cause them to reject otherwise suitable locations. Existing policy-learning methods optimize resources under fixed perceptions, while consensus-formation methods aggregate views without feeding cognitive changes back into policy learning. This disconnect produces mismatched location choices and inefficient regional policy adjustment. We introduce PolicyMediator, a cognition-constrained leader-multi-follower Stackelberg framework with bilateral mediation. The mediator explains verified policies to OPCs to build awareness and trust, and reports their needs and unresolved concerns to governments for policy learning. Its self-evolving skills retain, revise, or prune strategies using verification, allocation, capacity, and objective trajectories rather than mediation success alone. Across six-region simulations in China with five OPC types, five scenarios, and three OPC-simulator backbones, PolicyMediator ranks first in all 15 OPC-backbone--scenario combinations. Over the eight-baseline mean, it improves the aggregate government objective, combining economic performance, employment benefit, and policy-access equality, by 42.4% and average OPC utility by 40.9%.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

Is AI Widening the Wage Gap? A Hybrid Agentic Simulation for Labor Equity

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping labor markets, yet its effects on wage distribution and the underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. Conventional analytical approaches are limited in their ability to directly examine the dynamic evolution of worker behavior and income distribution under sustained AI shocks and counterfactual policy scenarios. To address this limitation, we present a hybrid agentic framework that aims to challenges of scalability of rule-based models and the limited explainability in LLM-agentic frameworks. Using this framework and sociodemographic data from China, we simulate changes in wage distribution under repeated AI shocks. The results show that both the average-wage ratio between workers in the top and bottom income deciles (T10/B10) and the Gini coefficient increase persistently, suggesting that AI shocks widen the wage gap and exacerbate income inequality. This pattern of a widening wage gap remains robust across alternative large language model decision engines and 30 Monte Carlo simulations. We further conduct counterfactual policy experiments. The results show that education subsidies targeted at low-income workers increase both the number of skill-upgrading attempts and the number of successful upgrades, with particularly pronounced improvements in the upskilling success probability of workers in the bottom income decile. These effects enable the policy to partially mitigate wage inequality. The proposed framework provides an interpretable simulation approach for examining the effects and mechanisms of AI shocks on wage distribution. It also offers policymakers a complementary analytical tool for evaluating policy interventions.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Towards Credible Agent-Based Policy Simulations: Disentangling Opportunities and Preferences in a Financial Inclusion Case Study of Egypt

Credibility is a central topic for agent-based models intended to support policy-making. Simulations must not only represent the target scenarios and their core dynamics but also demonstrate that their assumptions, parameters, and outputs are empirically grounded and sufficiently accurate for their intended use. This paper addresses this challenge by presenting a general modelling framework, aligned with the Capability Approach, for building credible policy simulations that rely on data and domain-expert knowledge. It then demonstrates how it can be contextualised and implemented to study the social challenge of financial inclusion in Egypt, building on an agent-based model that represents heterogeneous individuals and firms behaving according to their financial states, barriers, opportunities, and preferences. The model is fitted to real-world data in two stages, initialisation and calibration, which respectively build representative synthetic populations and estimate behavioural parameters. By fixing the feasibility parameters, which determine agents' opportunities, and calibrating preference parameters across different population groups, we are able to distinguish and analyse the role of institutional and social barriers in the system, as well as the role of agents' motivations and priorities. This calibration stage provides transparent and group-specific hypotheses about the drivers of observed financial-inclusion gaps, which can further be analysed as gaps between agents' opportunities and realised outcomes, a very relevant insight for policy-making. This paper is thus a step towards improving the credibility and usefulness of policy simulations, strengthening the relationship between the model, the real target system, and the stakeholders who will use it. The code is available at: \url{https://www.comses.net/codebase-release/df8383cb-f49b-4f09-8cce-73603b59adcc/}.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

KITA AI: A Multi-Agent LLM System for Pluralistic Policy Deliberation

Public policies addressing urgent social and environmental challenges need to explicitly consider the diverse, often conflicting perspectives of the affected stakeholders. Despite computational decision-support approaches increasingly offering recommendations across diverse human value systems, they still tend to deliver a single consensus-driven outcome. We present KITA AI, a modular system in which multiple large language model agents, each grounded in distinct demographic stakeholder personas and conceptual frameworks, deliberate on policy scenarios. The objective of KITA AI is not merely to inform about a preferred policy proposal, but also to automatically surface who is affected by the scenario and provide decision-makers with the rationales and quantitative indicators behind each position. KITA AI treats non-convergence as a first-class explainable output, enabling policymakers to better understand the trade-offs and human impacts of the policies being discussed.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

OmouAI: Argumentative Human-AI Policy Deliberation with Simulated Personas

Debates amongst agents driven by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated vast potential in various applications, but when these interactions include humans and take place in high-stakes environments, e.g., in public policy deliberations, they are beset with issues such as sycophancy and a lack of faithful explanations. To tackle these issues, we present OmouAI, an interactive and inclusive deliberation system that uses LLMs in combination with computational argumentation, a field which excels in representing and reasoning within debates. OmouAI allows a human user to deliberate policy claims for real-world challenges with simulated personas, e.g., representing stakeholders, domain experts or devil's advocates, towards reducing sycophancy. Each persona generates its own arguments, and the arguments of all parties form a shared argumentation framework. Users can then contest, add and revise arguments, providing crucial human oversight. Then, arguments are evaluated using deterministic argumentative semantics against external goals, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, guaranteeing faithful explanations. The advancement or worsening of the goals thus serve as indicators for the policy recommendations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

"Not in My Backyard": LLMs Uncover Online and Offline Social Biases Against Homelessness

Homelessness is a persistent social challenge, impacting millions worldwide. Over 876,000 people experiencing homelessness (PEH) were recorded in the U.S. in 2025. Social bias is a significant barrier to alleviating homelessness, shaping public perception and influencing policymaking. Because online textual media and offline city council discourse both reflect and influence public opinion, they provide valuable signals for identifying and tracking social biases against PEH. We release the first multi-domain PEH bias corpus with a 16-category multi-label taxonomy: a 1,698-item stratified gold-standard set annotated by partner-trained raters, plus 48,389 GPT-4.1-labeled texts, drawn from Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), news, and council meeting transcripts across ten U.S. cities (2015-2025). We benchmark six prompted LLMs on the gold-standard set and complement F1 with prevalence-gap audits. Moderate F1 coexists with large miscalibration: every model over-tags "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) (+11.5 pp) and under-detects factual claims (-30.5 pp). Error analysis on consensus false positives reveals that models treat housing vocabulary and question form as opposition proxies, producing NIMBY false positives on pro-service text. The corpus and audit protocol support municipal PEH stigma monitoring without treating teacher labels as ground truth.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Agents Trusting Agents? Restoring Lost Capabilities with Inclusive Healthcare

Agent-based simulations have an untapped potential to inform social policies on urgent human development challenges in a non-invasive way, before these are implemented in real-world populations. This paper responds to the request from non-profit and governmental organizations to evaluate policies under discussion to improve equity in health care services for people experiencing homelessness (PEH) in the city of Barcelona. With this goal, we integrate the conceptual framework of the capability approach (CA), which is explicitly designed to promote and assess human well-being, to model and evaluate the behaviour of agents who represent PEH and social workers. We define a reinforcement learning environment where agents aim to restore their central human capabilities, under existing environmental and legal constraints. We use Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to calibrate profile-dependent behavioural parameters in PEH agents, modeling the degree of trust and engagement with social workers, which is reportedly a key element for the success of the policies in scope. Our results open a path to mitigate health inequity by building relationships of trust between social service workers and PEH.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

What Would an LLM Do? Evaluating Large Language Models for Policymaking to Alleviate Homelessness

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in high-stakes domains. Their potential to encode evolving social contexts and to generate plausible scenarios position them as promising tools in social policymaking. This article evaluates whether LLMs are aligned with domain experts (and among themselves) on policy recommendations to alleviate homelessness - a challenge affecting over 150 million people worldwide. We develop a novel benchmark comprised of decision scenarios across four cities, with policy choices that are grounded in the conceptual framework of the Capability Approach for human development. We also present an automated pipeline that connects the policies to an agent-based model in one location, and compare the social impact of the policies recommended by LLMs to those recommended by experts. Our exploratory analysis reveals variation across LLMs in their policy recommendations compared to local experts, yet suggests potential benefits of the use of LLMs to provide insights for policymaking, if paired with responsible guardrails, contextual calibrations, and local domain expertise. Our work operationalizes the Capability Approach in a computational framework and provides new insights on homelessness alleviation policymaking with a focus on human dignity.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Tackling Social Bias against the Poor: A Dataset and Taxonomy on Aporophobia

Eradicating poverty is the first goal in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, aporophobia -- the societal bias against people living in poverty -- constitutes a major obstacle to designing, approving and implementing poverty-mitigation policies. This work presents an initial step towards operationalizing the concept of aporophobia to identify and track harmful beliefs and discriminative actions against poor people on social media. In close collaboration with non-profits and governmental organizations, we conduct data collection and exploration. Then we manually annotate a corpus of English tweets from five world regions for the presence of (1) direct expressions of aporophobia, and (2) statements referring to or criticizing aporophobic views or actions of others, to comprehensively characterize the social media discourse related to bias and discrimination against the poor. Based on the annotated data, we devise a taxonomy of categories of aporophobic attitudes and actions expressed through speech on social media. Finally, we train several classifiers and identify the main challenges for automatic detection of aporophobia in social networks. This work paves the way towards identifying, tracking, and mitigating aporophobic views on social media at scale.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Agent-based Modeling meets the Capability Approach for Human Development: Simulating Homelessness Policy-making

The global rise in homelessness calls for urgent and alternative policy solutions. Non-profits and governmental organizations alert about the many challenges faced by people experiencing homelessness (PEH), which include not only the lack of shelter but also the lack of opportunities for personal development. In this context, the capability approach (CA), which underpins the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), provides a comprehensive framework to assess inequity in terms of real opportunities. This paper explores how the CA can be combined with agent-based modelling and reinforcement learning. The goals are: (1) implementing the CA as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), (2) building on such MDP to develop a rich decision-making model that accounts for more complex motivators of behaviour, such as values and needs, and (3) developing an agent-based simulation framework that allows to assess alternative policies aiming to expand or restore people's capabilities. The framework is developed in a real case study of health inequity and homelessness, working in collaboration with stakeholders, non-profits and domain experts. The ultimate goal of the project is to develop a novel agent-based simulation framework, rooted in the CA, which can be replicated in a diversity of social contexts to assess policies in a non-invasive way.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2024

Structural Group Unfairness: Measurement and Mitigation by means of the Effective Resistance

Social networks contribute to the distribution of social capital, defined as the relationships, norms of trust and reciprocity within a community or society that facilitate cooperation and collective action. Therefore, better positioned members in a social network benefit from faster access to diverse information and higher influence on information dissemination. A variety of methods have been proposed in the literature to measure social capital at an individual level. However, there is a lack of methods to quantify social capital at a group level, which is particularly important when the groups are defined on the grounds of protected attributes. To fill this gap, we propose to measure the social capital of a group of nodes by means of the effective resistance and emphasize the importance of considering the entire network topology. Grounded in spectral graph theory, we introduce three effective resistance-based measures of group social capital, namely group isolation, group diameter and group control, where the groups are defined according to the value of a protected attribute. We denote the social capital disparity among different groups in a network as structural group unfairness, and propose to mitigate it by means of a budgeted edge augmentation heuristic that systematically increases the social capital of the most disadvantaged group. In experiments on real-world networks, we uncover significant levels of structural group unfairness when using gender as the protected attribute, with females being the most disadvantaged group in comparison to males. We also illustrate how our proposed edge augmentation approach is able to not only effectively mitigate the structural group unfairness but also increase the social capital of all groups in the network.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

An Art-centric perspective on AI-based content moderation of nudity

At a time when the influence of generative Artificial Intelligence on visual arts is a highly debated topic, we raise the attention towards a more subtle phenomenon: the algorithmic censorship of artistic nudity online. We analyze the performance of three "Not-Safe-For-Work'' image classifiers on artistic nudity, and empirically uncover the existence of a gender and a stylistic bias, as well as evident technical limitations, especially when only considering visual information. Hence, we propose a multi-modal zero-shot classification approach that improves artistic nudity classification. From our research, we draw several implications that we hope will inform future research on this topic.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Exploring the Boundaries of Content Moderation in Text-to-Image Generation

This paper analyzes the community safety guidelines of five text-to-image (T2I) generation platforms and audits five T2I models, focusing on prompts related to the representation of humans in areas that might lead to societal stigma. While current research primarily focuses on ensuring safety by restricting the generation of harmful content, our study offers a complementary perspective. We argue that the concept of safety is difficult to define and operationalize, reflected in a discrepancy between the officially published safety guidelines and the actual behavior of the T2I models, and leading at times to over-censorship. Our findings call for more transparency and an inclusive dialogue about the platforms' content moderation practices, bearing in mind their global cultural and social impact.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Value-Enriched Population Synthesis: Integrating a Motivational Layer

In recent years, computational improvements have allowed for more nuanced, data-driven and geographically explicit agent-based simulations. So far, simulations have struggled to adequately represent the attributes that motivate the actions of the agents. In fact, existing population synthesis frameworks generate agent profiles limited to socio-demographic attributes. In this paper, we introduce a novel value-enriched population synthesis framework that integrates a motivational layer with the traditional individual and household socio-demographic layers. Our research highlights the significance of extending the profile of agents in synthetic populations by incorporating data on values, ideologies, opinions and vital priorities, which motivate the agents' behaviour. This motivational layer can help us develop a more nuanced decision-making mechanism for the agents in social simulation settings. Our methodology integrates microdata and macrodata within different Bayesian network structures. This contribution allows to generate synthetic populations with integrated value systems that preserve the inherent socio-demographic distributions of the real population in any specific region.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2024

Can Poverty Be Reduced by Acting on Discrimination? An Agent-based Model for Policy Making

In the last decades, there has been a deceleration in the rates of poverty reduction, suggesting that traditional redistributive approaches to poverty mitigation could be losing effectiveness, and alternative insights to advance the number one UN Sustainable Development Goal are required. The criminalization of poor people has been denounced by several NGOs, and an increasing number of voices suggest that discrimination against the poor (a phenomenon known as \emph{aporophobia}) could be an impediment to mitigating poverty. In this paper, we present the novel Aporophobia Agent-Based Model (AABM) to provide evidence of the correlation between aporophobia and poverty computationally. We present our use case built with real-world demographic data and poverty-mitigation public policies (either enforced or under parliamentary discussion) for the city of Barcelona. We classify policies as discriminatory or non-discriminatory against the poor, with the support of specialized NGOs, and we observe the results in the AABM in terms of the impact on wealth inequality. The simulation provides evidence of the relationship between aporophobia and the increase of wealth inequality levels, paving the way for a new generation of poverty reduction policies that act on discrimination and tackle poverty as a societal problem (not only a problem of the poor).

cs.MA↗

arXiv2023

An Agent-Based Model for Poverty and Discrimination Policy-Making

The deceleration of global poverty reduction in the last decades suggests that traditional redistribution policies are losing their effectiveness. Alternative ways to work towards the #1 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (poverty eradication) are required. NGOs have insistingly denounced the criminalization of poverty, and the social science literature suggests that discrimination against the poor (a phenomenon known as aporophobia) could constitute a brake to the fight against poverty. This paper describes a proposal for an agent-based model to examine the impact that aporophobia at the institutional level has on poverty levels. This aporophobia agent-based model (AABM) will first be applied to a case study in the city of Barcelona. The regulatory environment is central to the model, since aporophobia has been identified in the legal framework. The AABM presented in this paper constitutes a cornerstone to obtain empirical evidence, in a non-invasive way, on the causal relationship between aporophobia and poverty levels. The simulations that will be generated based on the AABM have the potential to inform a new generation of poverty reduction policies, which act not only on the redistribution of wealth but also on the discrimination of the poor.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2023

The crime of being poor

The criminalization of poverty has been widely denounced as a collective bias against the most vulnerable. NGOs and international organizations claim that the poor are blamed for their situation, are more often associated with criminal offenses than the wealthy strata of society and even incur criminal offenses simply as a result of being poor. While no evidence has been found in the literature that correlates poverty and overall criminality rates, this paper offers evidence of a collective belief that associates both concepts. This brief report measures the societal bias that correlates criminality with the poor, as compared to the rich, by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in Twitter. The paper quantifies the level of crime-poverty bias in a panel of eight different English-speaking countries. The regional differences in the association between crime and poverty cannot be justified based on different levels of inequality or unemployment, which the literature correlates to property crimes. The variation in the observed rates of crime-poverty bias for different geographic locations could be influenced by cultural factors and the tendency to overestimate the equality of opportunities and social mobility in specific countries. These results have consequences for policy-making and open a new path of research for poverty mitigation with the focus not only on the poor but on society as a whole. Acting on the collective bias against the poor would facilitate the approval of poverty reduction policies, as well as the restoration of the dignity of the persons affected.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Fairness: from the ethical principle to the practice of Machine Learning development as an ongoing agreement with stakeholders

This paper clarifies why bias cannot be completely mitigated in Machine Learning (ML) and proposes an end-to-end methodology to translate the ethical principle of justice and fairness into the practice of ML development as an ongoing agreement with stakeholders. The pro-ethical iterative process presented in the paper aims to challenge asymmetric power dynamics in the fairness decision making within ML design and support ML development teams to identify, mitigate and monitor bias at each step of ML systems development. The process also provides guidance on how to explain the always imperfect trade-offs in terms of bias to users.

cs.CY↗