arXiv AI By Paul Bouchaud, Pedro Ramaciotti

Recommender system in X inadvertently profiles ideological positions of users

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

Toward Collective-Centric Evaluation of Preference Inference for Participatory Democracy

The paper examines how Preference Inference (PI) models used in large-scale participatory democracy platforms can alter the perceived consensus and minority support by predicting missing votes. It introduces a collective‑centric evaluation framework that assesses whether inferred votes maintain key properties of the overall preference landscape, rather than focusing solely on individual prediction accuracy. Using the largest multilingual dataset to date—four consultations with over 90,000 participants, 1 million votes, and 22 languages—the study finds that models with similar predictive accuracy can differ markedly in how well they preserve the collective structure, underscoring that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating PI in democratic contexts.

By Pierre-Antoine Lequeu, Salim Hafid, Paul Lerner, Nazanin Shafiabadi, Laur\`ene Cave, David Mas, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Benjamin Piwowarski, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Making Political Text Scaling Comparable: Infrastructure and Hyperparameter Sensitivity for 17 Algorithms

The paper argues that computational text‑based ideal point estimation (CT‑IPE) methods should be viewed as configurable measurement pipelines rather than fixed estimators. It presents a large‑scale comparative experiment involving 17 CT‑IPE algorithms, 5,537 runs, and about 4.25 million left‑right position estimates, and describes shared infrastructure that enables joint execution of these heterogeneous methods. Sensitivity analyses reveal that most algorithms exhibit low hyperparameter sensitivity (ICC < .10), with any remaining sensitivity concentrated in a few key researcher choices such as the language or embedding model, seed keyword lists, and number of topics.

By Patrick Parschan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Against Political Polarization: A Unified Framework for Tracing Evolving Political Ideologies on Social Media

The paper introduces TSN4PI, a unified framework for tracking the evolution of political ideologies on social media. It combines a PIDN module that uses large language models, style transfer, and unsupervised domain adaptation to detect ideologies and filter noise, with a PIPN module that employs temporal graph neural networks to predict future ideological shifts. The authors release two large-scale datasets and validate the approach on platforms such as X and Truth Social, offering empirical insights into political polarization and ideology evolution.