Invited talk by Bogdan Kulynych

Who Owns Robustness? Repurposing Adversarial Tools for Human Agency

Five years ago, we introduced Protective Optimization Technologies (POTs), a proposal that—alongside a wave of theoretical and practical work on algorithmic collective action—reflected a broader ambition to leverage adversarial tools for good, equipping collectives to contest optimization systems from the outside. Such interventions, however, face fundamental limitations, as the defensive arms race structurally favors the system owner. To bypass these limits, we argue that an effective path forward for purely technical adversarial approaches is to repurpose the toolbox from evasion to audit. We demonstrate how to build practical tools that enable external parties to verify whether systems preclude access or lack the responsiveness necessary for human agency—detecting, for instance, when a credit scoring system inevitably denies an applicant, or when an organ transplant risk model fails to prioritize a patient regardless of their deterioration.