Call for Papers — GenAI4SG @ CIKM 2026

1st Workshop on Generative AI for Social Good and Vulnerable Populations

Generative AI now functions as a general-purpose engine for producing text, images, code, and grounded explanations across knowledge-intensive tasks. That capability lands hardest where it has been needed longest — in domains where expertise, data, and resources have always run thin, from rare-disease diagnosis and low-resource education to accessibility, crisis response, and public-service access. In these settings, generative systems can extend expert capacity into rooms it never reached before, turning scarce specialist knowledge into something a frontline worker, a teacher, or a patient can actually use.

The same conditions that make GenAI valuable for social good also make its failures dangerous. Hallucination, linguistic and cultural bias, privacy leakage, and computational costs that price out under-resourced organizations compound quickly in these high-stakes settings, and the populations meant to benefit often end up carrying the risk. Responsible design is what turns this technology's promise into something deployable — the two have to be built together.

This workshop brings together interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to interrogate both sides of that equation: how retrieval-augmented, agentic, multimodal, and knowledge-grounded generative AI systems can be built, evaluated, and deployed in service of underserved and vulnerable communities, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The workshop draws on the CIKM community's core strengths — information retrieval, knowledge management, data mining, machine learning, NLP, and recommender systems — to retrieve evidence, build and maintain knowledge bases, generate grounded explanations, evaluate information quality, and deploy systems over heterogeneous data.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Retrieval-augmented generation and evidence-grounded GenAI for high-impact domains
• Knowledge-graph integration, semantic grounding, fact-checking, and source verification
• LLM agents and agentic workflows for social-good applications
• Multimodal GenAI for health, education, accessibility, crisis response, and sustainability
• Synthetic data generation, data-centric GenAI, and low-resource adaptation
• Benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation protocols for societal benefit and deployment risk
• Fairness, robustness, privacy, explainability, and human-centered assessment
• Efficient, sustainable, and practical deployment for public-interest organizations
• Applications supporting vulnerable and underserved populations
• Information integrity, misinformation detection, and coordinated manipulation analysis

Deployment & Impact Focus: Submissions are especially encouraged to demonstrate real-world deployability — including low-resource and efficient methods, human-centered evaluation, and explicit attention to risks and benefits for vulnerable or underserved populations — alongside technical effectiveness.

Instructions for submission

The workshop welcomes full papers presenting mature technical or empirical contributions; short and position papers presenting preliminary results or research agendas; and dataset, benchmark, and demo papers presenting reusable resources or systems. Submitted papers will undergo peer review coordinated by the workshop's Program Committee, with each submission receiving at least two reviews. Evaluation criteria include relevance to the workshop, technical quality, novelty, clarity, methodological soundness, potential societal benefit, and awareness of risks for vulnerable or underserved populations.

Papers should be prepared in the ACM two-column format. Submissions will be handled electronically through EasyChair or a similar system (submission link to be announced). Workshop papers will not be included in the ACM proceedings by default; archival publication options will be announced in accordance with CIKM policies. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to register for CIKM 2026 and present the work on-site in Rome.

Key dates (11:59 PM AoE unless noted):

• Tentative paper submission deadline: August 24, 2026
• Tentative acceptance notification: September 23, 2026
• Camera-ready papers: TBD
• Workshop day: November 8, 2026, held with CIKM 2026, Rome, Italy