Cities are not monolithic; they are arenas of negotiation among groups that hold varying needs, values, and experiences. Conventional methods of urban assessment -- from standardized surveys to AI-driven evaluations -- frequently rely on a single consensus metric (e.g., an average measure of inclusivity or safety). Although such aggregations simplify design decisions, they risk obscuring the distinct perspectives of marginalized populations. In this paper, we present findings from a community-centered study in Montreal involving 35 residents with diverse demographic and social identities, particularly wheelchair users, seniors, and LGBTQIA2+ individuals. Using rating and ranking tasks on 20 urban sites, we observe that disagreements are systematic rather than random, reflecting structural inequalities, differing cultural values, and personal experiences of safety and accessibility. Based on these empirical insights, we propose negotiative alignment, an AI framework that treats disagreement as an essential input to be preserved, analyzed, and addressed. Negotiative alignment builds on pluralistic models by dynamically updating stakeholder preferences through multi-agent negotiation mechanisms, ensuring no single perspective is marginalized. We outline how this framework can be integrated into urban analytics -- and other decision-making contexts -- to retain minority viewpoints, adapt to changing stakeholder concerns, and enhance fairness and accountability. The study demonstrates that preserving and engaging with disagreement, rather than striving for an artificial consensus, can produce more equitable and responsive AI-driven outcomes in urban design.

We introduce the Local Intersectional Visual Spaces (LIVS) dataset, a benchmark for multi-criteria alignment of text-to-image (T2I) models in inclusive urban planning. Developed through a two-year participatory process with 30 community organizations, LIVS encodes diverse spatial preferences across 634 initial concepts, consolidated into six core criteria: Accessibility, Safety, Comfort, Invitingness, Inclusivity, and Diversity, through 37,710 pairwise comparisons. Using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to fine-tune Stable Diffusion XL, we observed a measurable increase in alignment with community preferences, though a significant proportion of neutral ratings highlights the complexity of modeling intersectional needs. Additionally, as annotation volume increases, accuracy shifts further toward the DPO-tuned model, suggesting that larger-scale preference data enhances fine-tuning effectiveness. LIVS underscores the necessity of integrating context-specific, stakeholder-driven criteria into generative modeling and provides a resource for evaluating AI alignment methodologies across diverse socio-spatial contexts.

This paper proposes a Right to AI, which asserts that individuals and communities should meaningfully participate in the development and governance of the AI systems that shape their lives. Motivated by the increasing deployment of AI in critical domains and inspired by Henri Lefebvre's concept of the Right to the City, we reconceptualize AI as a societal infrastructure, rather than merely a product of expert design. In this paper, we critically evaluate how generative agents, large-scale data extraction, and diverse cultural values bring new complexities to AI oversight. The paper proposes that grassroots participatory methodologies can mitigate biased outcomes and enhance social responsiveness. It asserts that data is socially produced and should be managed and owned collectively. Drawing on Sherry Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation and analyzing nine case studies, the paper develops a four-tier model for the Right to AI that situates the current paradigm and envisions an aspirational future. It proposes recommendations for inclusive data ownership, transparent design processes, and stakeholder-driven oversight. We also discuss market-led and state-centric alternatives and argue that participatory approaches offer a better balance between technical efficiency and democratic legitimacy.

However, Moreover, the failure to acknowledge the socio-cultural concerns persist regarding the transparency and context context within which data is produced can introduce biases of data collection methodologies, especially when sourced into datasets. For example, algorithms trained on datasets through crowdsourcing platforms. Crowdsourcing often devoid of the historical context of segregation may inadvertently employs low-wage workers with poor working conditions perpetuate biases against certain minority groups and lacks consideration for the representativeness of annotators, [12]. Furthermore, the identities of workers involved in annotations leading to algorithms that fail to represent diverse are frequently overlooked, leading to a lack of diversity views and perpetuate biases against certain groups. To address in viewpoints captured within datasets. This bias is these limitations, we propose a methodology involving compounded by the common practice of aggregating annotations a co-design model that actively engages stakeholders at key through majority voting [5].

As AI systems, particularly generative models, increasingly influence decision-making, ensuring that they are able to fairly represent diverse human preferences becomes crucial. This paper introduces a novel framework for evaluating epistemic fairness in preference learning models inspired by economic theories of inequality and Rawlsian justice. We propose metrics adapted from the Gini Coefficient, Atkinson Index, and Kuznets Ratio to quantify fairness in these models. We validate our approach using two datasets: a custom visual preference dataset (AI-EDI-Space) and the Jester Jokes dataset. Our analysis reveals variations in model performance across users, highlighting potential epistemic injustices. We explore pre-processing and in-processing techniques to mitigate these inequalities, demonstrating a complex relationship between model efficiency and fairness. This work contributes to AI ethics by providing a framework for evaluating and improving epistemic fairness in preference learning models, offering insights for developing more inclusive AI systems in contexts where diverse human preferences are crucial.

Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) is one of the most prominent algorithms for solving min-max optimization and variational inequalities problems (VIP) appearing in various machine learning tasks. The success of the method led to several advanced extensions of the classical SGDA, including variants with arbitrary sampling, variance reduction, coordinate randomization, and distributed variants with compression, which were extensively studied in the literature, especially during the last few years. In this paper, we propose a unified convergence analysis that covers a large variety of stochastic gradient descent-ascent methods, which so far have required different intuitions, have different applications and have been developed separately in various communities. A key to our unified framework is a parametric assumption on the stochastic estimates. Via our general theoretical framework, we either recover the sharpest known rates for the known special cases or tighten them. Moreover, to illustrate the flexibility of our approach we develop several new variants of SGDA such as a new variance-reduced method (L-SVRGDA), new distributed methods with compression (QSGDA, DIANA-SGDA, VR-DIANA-SGDA), and a new method with coordinate randomization (SEGA-SGDA). Although variants of the new methods are known for solving minimization problems, they were never considered or analyzed for solving min-max problems and VIPs. We also demonstrate the most important properties of the new methods through extensive numerical experiments.

Two of the most prominent algorithms for solving unconstrained smooth games are the classical stochastic gradient descent-ascent (SGDA) and the recently introduced stochastic consensus optimization (SCO) (Mescheder et al., 2017). SGDA is known to converge to a stationary point for specific classes of games, but current convergence analyses require a bounded variance assumption. SCO is used successfully for solving large-scale adversarial problems, but its convergence guarantees are limited to its deterministic variant. In this work, we introduce the expected co-coercivity condition, explain its benefits, and provide the first last-iterate convergence guarantees of SGDA and SCO under this condition for solving a class of stochastic variational inequality problems that are potentially non-monotone. We prove linear convergence of both methods to a neighborhood of the solution when they use constant step-size, and we propose insightful stepsize-switching rules to guarantee convergence to the exact solution. In addition, our convergence guarantees hold under the arbitrary sampling paradigm, and as such, we give insights into the complexity of minibatching.

The success of adversarial formulations in machine learning has brought renewed motivation for smooth games. In this work, we focus on the class of stochastic Hamiltonian methods and provide the first convergence guarantees for certain classes of stochastic smooth games. We propose a novel unbiased estimator for the stochastic Hamiltonian gradient descent (SHGD) and highlight its benefits. Using tools from the optimization literature we show that SHGD converges linearly to the neighbourhood of a stationary point. To guarantee convergence to the exact solution, we analyze SHGD with a decreasing step-size and we also present the first stochastic variance reduced Hamiltonian method. Our results provide the first global non-asymptotic last-iterate convergence guarantees for the class of stochastic unconstrained bilinear games and for the more general class of stochastic games that satisfy a "sufficiently bilinear" condition, notably including some non-convex non-concave problems. We supplement our analysis with experiments on stochastic bilinear and sufficiently bilinear games, where our theory is shown to be tight, and on simple adversarial machine learning formulations.

Generative adversarial networks have been very successful in generative modeling, however they remain relatively hard to optimize compared to standard deep neural networks. In this paper, we try to gain insight into the optimization of GANs by looking at the game vector field resulting from the concatenation of the gradient of both players. Based on this point of view, we propose visualization techniques that allow us to make the following empirical observations. First, the training of GANs suffers from rotational behavior around locally stable stationary points, which, as we show, corresponds to the presence of imaginary components in the eigenvalues of the Jacobian of the game. Secondly, GAN training seems to converge to a stable stationary point which is a saddle point for the generator loss, not a minimum, while still achieving excellent performance. This counter-intuitive yet persistent observation questions whether we actually need a Nash equilibrium to get good performance in GANs.

Generative modeling of high dimensional data like images is a notoriously difficult and ill-defined problem. In particular, how to evaluate a learned generative model is unclear. In this position paper, we argue that adversarial learning, pioneered with generative adversarial networks (GANs), provides an interesting framework to implicitly define more meaningful task losses for generative modeling tasks, such as for generating "visually realistic" images. We refer to those task losses as parametric adversarial divergences and we give two main reasons why we think parametric divergences are good learning objectives for generative modeling. Additionally, we unify the processes of choosing a good structured loss (in structured prediction) and choosing a discriminator architecture (in generative modeling) using statistical decision theory; we are then able to formalize and quantify the intuition that "weaker" losses are easier to learn from, in a specific setting. Finally, we propose two new challenging tasks to evaluate parametric and nonparametric divergences: a qualitative task of generating very high-resolution digits, and a quantitative task of learning data that satisfies high-level algebraic constraints. We use two common divergences to train a generator and show that the parametric divergence outperforms the nonparametric divergence on both the qualitative and the quantitative task.