The performance of participatory systems will depend on individual reporting decisions. Thus, flat and sequential systems will perform better than a minimal system. The best-case performance of any participatory system will exceed the performance of any of its components. Given a participatory system, we can conduct this evaluation by simulating the parameters in the individual disclosure model shown above. The sequential system outperforms static personalized systems when all group attributes are reported.

Machine learning models are often personalized based on information that is protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire. These models use information about people, but do not facilitate nor inform their . Individuals cannot opt out of reporting information that a model needs to personalize their predictions nor tell if they benefit from personalization in the first place. We introduce a new family of prediction models, called participatory systems, that let individuals opt into personalization at prediction time. We present a model-agnostic algorithm to learn participatory systems for supervised learning tasks where models are personalized with categorical group attributes. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of participatory systems in clinical prediction tasks, comparing them to common approaches for personalization and imputation. Our results show that participatory systems can facilitate and inform consent in a way that improves performance and privacy across all groups who report personal data.

The performance of participatory systems will depend on individual reporting decisions. Thus, flat and sequential systems will perform better than a minimal system. The best-case performance of any participatory system will exceed the performance of any of its components. Given a participatory system, we can conduct this evaluation by simulating the parameters in the individual disclosure model shown above. The sequential system outperforms static personalized systems when all group attributes are reported.

We present a model-agnostic algorithm to learn participatory systems for personalization with categorical group attributes.

Machine learning models are often personalized based on information that is protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire. These models use information about people, but do not facilitate nor inform their consent. Individuals cannot opt out of reporting information that a model needs to personalize their predictions nor tell if they benefit from personalization in the first place. We introduce a new family of prediction models, called participatory systems, that let individuals opt into personalization at prediction time. We present a model-agnostic algorithm to learn participatory systems for supervised learning tasks where models are personalized with categorical group attributes.

Understanding citizens' values in participatory systems is crucial for citizen-centric policy-making. We envision a hybrid participatory system where participants make choices and provide motivations for those choices, and AI agents estimate their value preferences by interacting with them. We focus on situations where a conflict is detected between participants' choices and motivations, and propose methods for estimating value preferences while addressing detected inconsistencies by interacting with the participants. We operationalize the philosophical stance that "valuing is deliberatively consequential." That is, if a participant's choice is based on a deliberation of value preferences, the value preferences can be observed in the motivation the participant provides for the choice. Thus, we propose and compare value estimation methods that prioritize the values estimated from motivations over the values estimated from choices alone. Then, we introduce a disambiguation strategy that addresses the detected inconsistencies between choices and motivations by directly interacting with the participants. We evaluate the proposed methods on a dataset of a large-scale survey on energy transition. The results show that explicitly addressing inconsistencies between choices and motivations improves the estimation of an individual's value preferences. The disambiguation strategy does not show substantial improvements when compared to similar baselines--however, we discuss how the novelty of the approach can open new research avenues and propose improvements to address the current limitations.