Agentic Framework for Epidemiological Modeling

Epidemic modeling is essential for public health planning, yet traditional approaches rely on fixed model classes that require manual redesign as pathogens, policies, and scenario assumptions evolve. We introduce EPIAGENT, an agentic framework that automatically synthesizes, calibrates, verifies, and refines epidemiological simulators by modeling disease progression as an iterative program synthesis problem. A central design choice is an explicit epidemiological flow graph intermediate representation that links scenario specifications to model structure and enables strong, modular correctness checks before code is generated. Verified flow graphs are then compiled into mechanistic models supporting interpretable parameter learning under physical and epidemiological constraints. Evaluation on epidemiological scenario case studies demonstrates that EPIAGENT captures complex growth dynamics and produces epidemiologically consistent counterfactual projections across varying vaccination and immune escape assumptions. Our results show that the agentic feedback loop prevents degeneration and significantly accelerates convergence toward valid models by mimicking professional expert workflows.

ArguMentor: Augmenting User Experiences with Counter-Perspectives

Opinion pieces often represent only one side of any story, which can influence users and make them susceptible to confirmation bias and echo chambers in society. Moreover, humans are also bad at reading long articles -- often indulging in idle reading and re-reading. To solve this, we design ArguMentor, an end-to-end system that highlights claims in opinion pieces, generates counter-arguments for them using an LLM, and generates a context-based summary of the passage based on current events. It further enhances user interaction and understanding through additional features like Q&A bot, DebateMe and highlighting trigger windows. Our survey and results show that users can generate more counterarguments and on an average have more neutralized views after engaging with the system.