Frontier LLMs are optimised around high-resource assumptions about language, knowledge, devices, and connectivity. Whilst widely accessible, they often misfit conditions in the Global South. As a result, users must often perform additional work to make these systems usable. We term this alignment debt: the user-side burden that arises when AI systems fail to align with cultural, linguistic, infrastructural, or epistemic contexts. We develop and validate a four-part taxonomy of alignment debt through a survey of 411 AI users in Kenya and Nigeria. Among respondents measurable on this taxonomy (n = 385), prevalence is: Cultural and Linguistic (51.9%), Infrastructural (43.1%), Epistemic (33.8%), and Interaction (14.0%). Country comparisons show a divergence in Infrastructural and Interaction debt, challenging one-size-fits-Africa assumptions. Alignment debt is associated with compensatory labour, but responses vary by debt type: users facing Epistemic challenges verify outputs at significantly higher rates (91.5% vs. 80.8%; p = 0.037), and verification intensity correlates with cumulative debt burden (Spearmans rho = 0.147, p = 0.004). In contrast, Infrastructural and Interaction debts show weak or null associations with verification, indicating that some forms of misalignment cannot be resolved through verification alone. These findings show that fairness must be judged not only by model metrics but also by the burden imposed on users at the margins, compelling context-aware safeguards that alleviate alignment debt in Global South settings. The alignment debt framework provides an empirically grounded way to measure user burden, informing both design practice and emerging African AI governance efforts.

Graph-based Active Learning (AL) leverages the structure of graphs to efficiently prioritize label queries, reducing labeling costs and user burden in applications like health monitoring, human behavior analysis, and sensor networks. By identifying strategically positioned nodes, graph AL minimizes data collection demands while maintaining model performance, making it a valuable tool for dynamic environments. Despite its potential, existing graph AL methods are often evaluated on static graph datasets and primarily focus on prediction accuracy, neglecting user-centric considerations such as sampling diversity, query fairness, and adaptability to dynamic settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce GRAIL, a novel benchmarking framework designed to evaluate graph AL strategies in dynamic, real-world environments. GRAIL introduces novel metrics to assess sustained effectiveness, diversity, and user burden, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of AL methods under varying conditions. Extensive experiments on datasets featuring dynamic, real-life human sensor data reveal trade-offs between prediction performance and user burden, highlighting limitations in existing AL strategies. GRAIL demonstrates the importance of balancing node importance, query diversity, and network topology, providing an evaluation mechanism for graph AL solutions in dynamic environments.

In this study, we explore the proactive ability of LLMs to seek user support, using text-to-SQL generation as a case study. We propose metrics to evaluate the trade-off between performance improvements and user burden, and investigate whether LLMs can determine when to request help and examine their performance with varying levels of information availability. Our experiments reveal that without external feedback, many LLMs struggle to recognize their need for additional support. Our findings highlight the importance of external signals and provide insights for future research on improving support-seeking strategies.

During the diagnostic process, doctors incorporate multimodal information including imaging and the medical history - and similarly medical AI development has increasingly become multimodal. In this paper we tackle a more subtle challenge: doctors take a targeted medical history to obtain only the most pertinent pieces of information; how do we enable AI to do the same? We develop a wrapper method named MINT (Make your model INTeractive) that automatically determines what pieces of information are most valuable at each step, and ask for only the most useful information. We demonstrate the efficacy of MINT wrapping a skin disease prediction model, where multiple images and a set of optional answers to $25$ standard metadata questions (i.e., structured medical history) are used by a multi-modal deep network to provide a differential diagnosis. We show that MINT can identify whether metadata inputs are needed and if so, which question to ask next. We also demonstrate that when collecting multiple images, MINT can identify if an additional image would be beneficial, and if so, which type of image to capture. We showed that MINT reduces the number of metadata and image inputs needed by 82% and 36.2% respectively, while maintaining predictive performance. Using real-world AI dermatology system data, we show that needing fewer inputs can retain users that may otherwise fail to complete the system submission and drop off without a diagnosis. Qualitative examples show MINT can closely mimic the step-by-step decision making process of a clinical workflow and how this is different for straight forward cases versus more difficult, ambiguous cases. Finally we demonstrate how MINT is robust to different underlying multi-model classifiers and can be easily adapted to user requirements without significant model re-training.

The rapid evolution of the web has led to an exponential growth in content. Recommender systems play a crucial role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by tailoring content based on individual preferences. Despite their importance, challenges persist in balancing recommendation accuracy with user satisfaction, addressing biases while preserving user privacy, and solving cold-start problems in cross-domain situations. This research argues that addressing these issues is not solely the recommender systems' responsibility, and a human-centered approach is vital. We introduce the RAH Recommender system, Assistant, and Human) framework, an innovative solution with LLM-based agents such as Perceive, Learn, Act, Critic, and Reflect, emphasizing the alignment with user personalities. The framework utilizes the Learn-Act-Critic loop and a reflection mechanism for improving user alignment. Using the real-world data, our experiments demonstrate the RAH framework's efficacy in various recommendation domains, from reducing human burden to mitigating biases and enhancing user control. Notably, our contributions provide a human-centered recommendation framework that partners effectively with various recommendation models.