Payment Networks

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A weekly snapshot of new work published in Payment Networks.

23 papers

Latest in Payment Networks

Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

CARD: Controlled Agentic Reddit Discussions for Credit Card Simulation

Online credit card discussions provide a natural setting for studying how consumers communicate about financial products. Simulating these discussions requires more than just generating individual comments, the generated threads should also match how real users express themselves and interact with others. We introduce CARD, a framework for generating realistic credit card discussion threads. Given a credit card post and its matched real thread, CARD uses non-verbatim guidance on reply structure, comment function, stance, tone, and conversational variation. A planner organizes these controls, a writer generates the discussion, and a calibration loop updates comments' populations that contribute to differences between the generated and real thread distributions. We evaluate CARD on real Reddit credit card discussions using lexical, semantic, behavioral, and structural metrics. CARD matches the distributions of real credit card discussions better than simulation baselines across multiple LLMs and also demonstrates smaller effect sizes and distribution distances across metrics. These results show that structured planning and targeted revision can generate the realism of simulated credit card discussions.
Yaoning Yu, Kai-Min Chang, Ye Yu +3
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

Guixu: Valuation-Driven Data Discovery for Autonomous AI Agents with On-Chain Attestation

Autonomous agents increasingly rely on external data to complete downstream tasks such as model training and decision support. However, existing data discovery systems remain largely retrieval-oriented: they surface candidate datasets from heterogeneous sources, but provide limited support for estimating task-specific utility, selecting cost-effective datasets under budget constraints, or incorporating trustworthy feedback from prior usage. This paper presents Guixu, a valuation-driven data discovery system for autonomous agents. Guixu employs a three-phase valuation pipeline with proxy-label propagation and multi-round knapsack optimization for task-aware data valuation. Guixu integrates agentic payment protocol to enable budget-constrained data procurement workflows. Guixu leverages on-chain data market and attestation signals for verifiable data discovery. Our demonstration highlights how Guixu enables an agent to move beyond keyword-based dataset retrieval toward task- and budget-aware, trustworthy data discovery and procurement. Attendees can interactively explore the full workflow, from NL task specification and multi-source search to data valuation and verifiable transaction feedback.
Yifan Wu, Yuchen Peng, Jiaqi Chai +4
Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

SeqLLM: Augmenting LLMs with Behavioral-Sequence Modeling for High-Stakes Decisions at WeChat Pay

Merchant risk control at large payment platforms screens tens of millions of merchants daily, where false positives harm legitimate merchants and false negatives leave harmful activity undetected. The hardest cases require jointly understanding a merchant's textual profile and long behavioral sequence. Large language models (LLMs) excel at text but cannot natively model such sequences, while adapting them often causes catastrophic forgetting. We present SeqLLM, a framework that adds behavioral-sequence modeling to a pretrained LLM while preserving its language ability. SeqLLM combines three components: a compact discrete vocabulary that represents behavioral events as native tokens; a lightweight projector, trained with a two-stage alignment curriculum, that grounds these tokens in the LLM's semantic space; and prefix-guided capability injection, which acquires sequence-modeling ability through task-prefixed supervised fine-tuning rather than continual pre-training. SeqLLM is deployed at WeChat Pay, screening millions of merchants daily. Against the production DeepSeek-based LLM baseline, it raises screening precision from 92.0% to 97.5%. Its pretrained behavior-token embeddings also improve Precision@Top-0.01% by 26.8 percentage points in a production fraud detector serving billion-scale transaction traffic. Beyond payments, SeqLLM achieves state-of-the-art results on public recommendation benchmarks. On MovieLens and Amazon, it surpasses the strong User-LLM baseline by up to 32% relative Recall@5 while retaining markedly stronger language ability. On RecIF, it improves Pass@32 by 14.2% over the full OneRec-8B pipeline using only one-fifth of its GPU-days.
Guilin Li, Jiaxing Zhang, Matthias Hwai Yong Tan +2
Aug 3, 2026cs.LG

Empowering Credit Risk Detection in Weixin Pay with Billion-Scale Deep Graph Learning

Credit risk detection, particularly mitigating individual fraud, is crucial for maintaining the stability of digital financial ecosystems. Accurately identifying credit fraud among billions of users is critical for minimizing financial losses and safeguarding the sustainability of inclusive financial services. Given that credit fraud risks are often concealed within heterogeneous user-risk graphs, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as an effective tool for risk mining by capturing complex dependencies. To address the scalability bottleneck of industrial GNNs, distributed training based on subgraphs is indispensable. However, existing strategies often compromise topological integrity for load balancing. This can be catastrophic for risk detection, as it indiscriminately severs the long-tail evidence chains essential for risk propagation. Overlapping subgraphs can restore severed risk contexts but inevitably introduce redundancy and noise, while overlooking the representation alignment across different local subgraphs. In this paper, we propose a risk-aware overlapping subgraph learning framework for large-scale credit risk detection. We first construct base partitions to ensure load balance. Then, we perform budget-constrained sampling that selects informative long-tail nodes, thereby preserving critical risk diffusion patterns while filtering out noise. To mitigate representation inconsistency, we design a cross-subgraph consistency alignment mechanism. By enforcing alignment constraints on the overlapping nodes, we harmonize the local representations into a globally consistent latent space. Extensive experiments on Weixin Pay's production dataset demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing strategies for risk detection, offering a scalable and effective solution for industrial graph learning.
Xin Liu, Xiyuan Chen, Chenglong Wu +3
Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

402Pilot: An x402 Decision Layer for Autonomous Agent Micropayments

Programmable-payment protocols such as x402 enable per-request micropayments, but they do not determine which payable service an autonomous agent should buy under a finite wallet. We formulate this buyer-side problem as agent-native payment decision-making: contextual provider selection under wallet pressure, chosen-only paid feedback, and changing market conditions. We propose 402Pilot, a protocol-agnostic buyer-side decision layer between autonomous agents and payment execution that implements purchasing policies for selecting among payable providers. We instantiate it with PA-DCT, a payment-aware discounted contextual Thompson-sampling policy that adapts purchasing decisions under wallet pressure while learning from post-payment feedback. To evaluate buyer-side payment policies, we introduce 402Pilot-Bench, a frozen-replay benchmark spanning 823 tasks, five heterogeneous provider pipelines, and three market regimes, each evaluated over 30 paired seeds. PA-DCT achieves the strongest fixed-wallet adaptive trade-off among non-oracle policies: it maintains competitive service quality while spending only 39 to 43 percent of the wallet and reallocates spending as market conditions change. It attains the best non-oracle PA-gap/T under the price shock and the best mean and worst-case ranks across the nine scenario-metric combinations of quality, ROI, and PA-gap/T. Comparisons with learning baselines and component ablations further support the effectiveness and design of the proposed decision policy. These results suggest that programmable payment must be complemented by buyer-side decision-making capable of learning service value and adapting purchasing decisions accordingly.
Yin Li, Yanbo He, Boo-Ho Yang +5
Jul 29, 2026cs.CL

Credit Cards, Confusion, Computation, and Consequences: What Can We Uncover About Language Model Reasoning?

We introduce CreditCardQA, the first financial literacy benchmark for numerical reasoning derived from real credit card agreements. The dataset contains 1,800 questions, including first-person variants that reflect how consumers naturally ask about fees, interest, and payments. We evaluate a range of large language and reasoning models under Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Program-of-Thought (PoT) prompting. Overall, PoT yields consistent performance gains, particularly for models with weaker baseline reasoning, and narrows gaps between open- and closed-source systems. Through error analysis, we show that failures arise less from arithmetic and more from misapplied financial rules, missed conditions, and misunderstandings of contractual terms. We further analyze question difficulty and find that comparisons, conditional logic, and monetary constraints are especially challenging. We also find that errors often arise in edge cases such as late-payment penalties or small-balance scenarios that are more likely to affect lower-income or financially vulnerable individuals.
Arnav Hiray, Agam Shah, Caleb Lu +3
Jul 20, 2026cs.SE

A Decision-Centered Reference Architecture for Trustworthy Agentic Commerce

Agentic commerce extends agentic shopping into software agents that interpret policy, prepare checkout, generate transaction-facing language, and act under delegated payment authority. Protocols standardize external exchanges, but merchants still need one authoritative representation of commercial eligibility, actor authority, checkout validity, payment dispatch, generated claims, and evidence. This design-science study presents a protocol-agnostic architecture built around a canonical envelope, protected dependency and result hashes, Ed25519 or HMAC authentication, live-request rebinding, a seven-axis generated-claim gate, execution-time dependency revalidation, and eleven semantic invariants. Evaluation used an open-source JavaScript implementation, eight deterministic ecommerce scenarios, and five controlled ablations. Seven initially valid actions were permitted. After protected state changed, none could proceed without a fresh decision; a hostile-accessor case also remained blocked. Action status was consistent across configured surface-bound envelopes, and each scenario contained the three protected hashes and its targeted dependency reference. Each ablation produced the predicted unsafe regression when one safeguard was bypassed, while the protected path contained the same failure. The hostile accessor was read once, and the suite passed 66/66 tests, schema validation, and committed examples. Results support protected-dependency change detection, bounded outcome derivation, stale-decision prevention, surface-bound status consistency, refusal propagation, and verified-state identity under synthetic fixtures, but do not establish rule completeness, production security, performance, legal compliance, live interoperability, population error rates, or independent replication.
Dimitrios S. Sfiris
Jul 19, 2026cs.SE

A RFID Based Campus Wide Payment System

This work titled "RFID Based Campuswide Payment System" introduces an innovative cashless payment solution for educational institutions. It uses RFID cards and a Raspberry Pi to enable hassle free payments for various campus services, such as cafeteria purchases, tuition fees, and library fines. A centralized database ensures real-time updates on transactions and account balances, accessible through a simple and user-friendly web interface. This work is involved in designing a secure system with object-oriented principles, setting up databases, and integrating hardware like RFID readers with a Raspberry Pi. The systems are proved to be a cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional payment methods, enhancing convenience and security for students and administrators. The study also explored similar RFID applications, like smart parking and attendance systems, to identify challenges and improvements. Looking ahead, it envisions features like wearable RFID devices, voice-activated payments, and blockchain integration to boost security and usability. Results show that this system simplifies campus payments and has the potential for broader adoption in similar environments.
Miraj Uddin Chowdhury, MD Khairul Islam Prime
Jul 16, 2026cs.AI

Alipay-PIBench: A Realistic Payment Integration Benchmark for Coding Agents

Payment integration is a demanding repository-level software task: agents must select a suitable product, implement coordinated client-server flows, verify payment outcomes, and preserve consistency between transaction and business states. We introduce Alipay-PIBench, a benchmark for evaluating coding agents on realistic Alipay payment integration. It contains nine product-specific projects and 18 task instances, each organized into Basic functional-completion and Advanced risk-aware hardening scenarios. Scenario-specific rubrics support deterministic static, unit, integration, and end-to-end checks, supplemented by LLM-assisted assessment for semantic requirements. We evaluate six coding-agent models and report rubric pass rate (RPR). Under the with-skill condition, mean RPR ranges from 68.58% to 91.37%. Access to the alipay-payment-integration skill improves mean RPR by 10.31 percentage points on average relative to the without-skill condition, with gains varying across models, products, and scenarios. Method-level results distinguish source-level completion, executable payment behavior, and payment-domain requirements. Alipay-PIBench provides a controlled setting for diagnosing model capability and evaluating structured guidance in payment integration.
Shiyu Ying, Xuejie Cao, Yingfan Ma +4
Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Mnemosyne: Agentic Transaction Processing for Validating and Repairing AI-generated Workflows

LLMs increasingly generate workflow actions and repairs that may be well formed yet stale, infeasible, conflicting, or destructive of their own evidence. We introduce Agentic Transaction Processing (ATP), which treats generated actions as untrusted proposals until deterministic admission accepts them under an executable constraint set C. Its two-sided principle is: a proposal is not truth, and no proposal foresees every disruption. Anything may propose, but only the runtime admits and commits; unforeseen disruptions trigger bounded reactive repair whose output re-enters admission. Mnemosyne realizes ATP with an append-only transition log, effective-state projection, dependency-safe compensation, and active contract records. Under stated assumptions and relative to C, we prove four safety properties (authority separation, serial-equivalent generative admission, evidence-preserving repair, and obligation containment) and establish bounded reactive repair. Across nine safety benchmarks and a four-case Temporal SDK comparison, ATP rejects every targeted violation while admitting valid work. A matched data-size sweep measures 5.2-6.6% incremental throughput cost over the same local durable commit path and exposes local saturation. In a companion scheduling harness, local repair edits nearly an order of magnitude fewer operations than global recompute; a 12-scenario interruption stress test rejects every stale recovery candidate without losing observations or producing invalid commits. Two bounded pilots route 80 proposals from four heterogeneous LLMs through the same gate with zero invalid commits; 24 of 40 mid-execution proposals are admitted and 16 are rejected, including four explicit safety rejections.
Edward Y. Chang, Longling Geng
Jun 23, 2026cs.CL

Paying to Know: Micro-Transaction Markets for Verified Product Information in Agentic E-Commerce

Commercial NLP treats the shopping chatbot as a recommender or a conversion tool: its job is to match a user to a catalogue entry and close a sale. We argue that the arrival of agent-native micro-payment rails (e.g., x402, AP2) changes what is scarce. When the buyer is an autonomous agent that can investigate exhaustively, the bottleneck is no longer matching products but acquiring trustworthy, decision-relevant information about them. We envision agentic e-commerce as a micro-transaction market for verified information: buyer agents spend fractions of a cent to progressively unlock seller- and reviewer-supplied data -- service histories, third-party test reports, bills of materials, audited sales and support metrics -- paid for a la carte under a freemium model, with reviewer trust scored reputationally. We sketch the architecture of such a market and argue that it rewards genuine product quality and yields truer competition than ranking-based storefronts. We then translate the vision into concrete NLP problems -- cost-optimal information acquisition, data pricing and negotiation, real-time entity resolution, grounded value exchange, and privacy-preserving persona modelling -- and argue that these, not chat fluency, deserve the field's attention.
Filippos Ventirozos, Matthew Shardlow
Jun 3, 2026cs.AI

Knowledge Index of Noah's Ark

Knowledge benchmarks for LLMs face three issues: scaling-driven designs that do not operationalize disciplinary representativeness; flat-payment annotation that permits lazy consensus; and unaudited ranking instability under bounded test budgets. We introduce KINA, an 899-item benchmark across 261 fine-grained disciplines, with two formal results. First, we cast representativeness as a coverage-style objective over expert-elicited anchors and operationalize disciplinary representativeness through a proxy, yielding a (1-1/e) greedy approximation (Proposition 1); the guarantee applies to the proxy, not to population representativeness. Second, we prove a bonus-on-bar tournament weakly FOSD-dominates flat payment in released-review quality, with incentive-compatibility threshold B > Delta C / Delta p_min (Theorem 1). Evaluating 42 models from 13 labs, the top model, Gemini-3.1-Pro-Preview, reaches 53.17%, followed by Claude-Opus-4.6 at 49.92% and GPT-5.4 at 48.55%, leaving substantial headroom below saturation. The full leaderboard shows a tiered structure rather than a smooth total order: a small frontier tier lies above 48%, a dense strong-model tier spans roughly 38-45%, and low-performing models remain only modestly above the 10% chance baseline. Tool augmentation adds up to 5.17 points across the five tool-use evaluations, with gains varying substantially across models. We report bootstrap ranking-stability statistics to make bounded-budget variance explicit and to discourage over-interpretation of adjacent ranks.
Sheng Jin, Minghao Liu, Yunze Xiao +24
Jun 1, 2026cs.DC

Compliance-Scored Best-of-N Guardrail Orchestration for Multimodal Document Generation in Payments Dispute Defense

High-stakes enterprise document generation, including financial dispute narratives, compliance notices, and audit summaries, demands schema correctness, policy compliance, and low-latency operation at scale. Prior to a unified guardrail layer, production systems often stitched together separate PII redaction, content moderation, and format validation steps, leading to fragmented logic, slower request paths, and higher operational cost. We present a guardrail orchestration layer for text and image inputs that couples multi-candidate generation with an explicit compliance score used for early exit. The framework runs configurable parallel generation heads, scores candidates against weighted guardrails including PII detection, content moderation, schema constraints, and domain rules, and returns the best-scoring output with selection metadata. The available operational readout reports 5 attempts within 20 seconds and 91 percent compliance. For payments dispute defense summaries, we analyze aggregate operational scenario readouts rather than a randomized A/B test. Variable cohorts show higher count win rates than controls overall, 301/659 versus 536/1548, corresponding to +11.0 percentage points with 95 percent confidence interval [6.6, 15.5] and p < 0.001, and for adjusted item-not-received cases, +7.5 percentage points with 95 percent confidence interval [0.2, 15.7] and p = 0.045. Fraud and local evidence-ranking deltas are directionally positive but not statistically significant from the aggregate count data. We also report reviewer-calibrated Responsible-AI evidence-quality signals from 770 generated-evidence reviews and a 70-case OCR slice, and document the reproducibility boundary through the request interface, scoring logic, pseudocode, and operational evidence boundary.
Nataraj Agaram Sundar, Tejas Morabia
May 29, 2026cs.LG

Fraud Type Decomposition and the Observation-Mechanism Taxonomy:Class-Specific Detection Limits in Payment Networks

Fraud detection in payment networks relies on labels generated through heterogeneous and imperfect observation processes, yet existing approaches treat fraud as a homogeneous binary variable. We show that this assumption is structurally incorrect and leads to provable inefficiency. We introduce an observation-mechanism taxonomy that partitions fraud into five classes, each defined by a distinct censorship and labeling pipeline. We prove that estimating fraud rates separately by class and aggregating strictly dominates pooled estimation, with the efficiency gap characterized as a Jensen penalty arising from heterogeneous observation rates. For each class, we derive the binding theoretical constraint on detection, including endogenous label corruption, structural non-observability, and feature non-informativeness. These results establish that fraud detection is fundamentally a collection of distinct estimation problems, each governed by its own observation structure and detection limit.
Gaurav Dhama
May 28, 2026cs.LG

Causal Label Recovery in Payment Networks

Fraud detection models in payment networks train on chargeback labels that are systematically biased. Every label must survive three sequential gates: authorization (declined transactions generate no labels), issuer reporting (unreported fraud is invisible), and delay (pending chargebacks are missing at training time). Labels that do arrive may be corrupted by first-party misuse or issuer misclassification. A companion paper [arXiv:2605.27557] proved that these four impairments impose a minimax lower bound on detection performance. This paper asks: can that bound be achieved? We formalize the observation pipeline as a sequential missing-data problem with three propensity stages and a corruption layer, and construct the Sequential Triply Robust (STR) estimator. The STR corrects for all four impairments simultaneously and achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound -- no estimator can have lower asymptotic variance. It is sequentially triply robust: at each gate, consistency requires only that either the propensity model or the outcome regression is correctly specified, not both. We provide corruption correction via noise-rate-adjusted pseudo-labels, empirical Bayes shrinkage to stabilize inverse-propensity weights for small issuers, a plug-in variance estimator yielding valid confidence intervals, and a Bernstein concentration inequality for finite-sample guarantees. On the operational side, we derive the optimal training delay -- the maturity window that minimizes the sum of label-quality loss and model staleness -- and prove that the STR permits training on data that is days old rather than months old, decoupling model freshness from the chargeback maturity cycle. The STR provably dominates naive chargeback-based training in mean squared error for any sample size.
Gaurav Dhama
May 26, 2026cs.LG

The Fundamental Limits of Fraud Detection in Card Payment Networks

Card payment fraud detection is usually framed as a supervised classification problem. Although this approach has generated practical progress, improvement has remained incremental despite major advances in model architecture. We argue that this is not mainly a failure of function approximation or optimization, but a consequence of structural information impairments inherent to the payment ecosystem. We formalize card authorization as a sequential decision problem with delayed, censored, corrupted, and counterfactually missing feedback. We derive a minimax regret lower bound showing that these impairments enter multiplicatively in the denominator of the achievable learning rate. The bound implies that improving issuer reporting quality or reducing censorship can yield larger reductions in the regret floor than increasing model complexity. We also show that heterogeneity across issuers worsens learnability beyond what average impairment rates suggest. The paper contributes a theory of why fraud detection in payment networks is fundamentally harder than in standard online learning settings, identifies ecosystem information quality as the key bottleneck, and provides a theoretical basis for prioritizing investments in reporting infrastructure, dispute process quality, and selective exploration. The paper is theory-first and does not rely on proprietary transaction data.
Gaurav Dhama
May 26, 2026cs.AI

Modeling Agentic Technical Debt and Stochastic Tax: A Standalone Framework for Measurement, Simulation, and Dashboarding

Agentic AI systems combine probabilistic reasoning with delegated action through tools, context, memory, orchestration, and external workflow integration. This note develops a formal and managerially usable model that distinguishes Agentic Technical Debt from Stochastic Tax. Agentic Technical Debt is a stock of accumulated design and governance liability. Stochastic Tax is a recurring flow of operating burden that arises when stochastic agents are used in business workflows. The two constructs are related, but they are not the same: debt can amplify the tax, while the tax can remain positive even when debt is minimized. The note starts from a compact dashboard expression, expands it into a fuller structural model, defines all variables and parameters, shows how each cost category can be estimated from operational data, and illustrates the framework with an accounts-payable simulation and companion spreadsheet.
Muhammad Zia Hydari, Raja Iqbal, Narayan Ramasubbu
May 25, 2026cs.SE

Meta-Engineering Harnesses for AI-Native Software Production: A Contract-Driven Adversarial Verification Architecture with Early Deployment Report

AI-native software development is often evaluated at the level of individual models, prompts, or generated artifacts. This framing is insufficient for production environments where software must be continuously produced, verified, deployed, maintained, and adapted across many operational contexts and long time horizons. We present a meta-engineering harness: a software-production architecture that transforms operational and product feature requirements into explicit contracts, routes work through role-specialized AI agents, performs independent and adversarial verification, and continuously improves itself through structured failure classification and outer-loop calibration. The harness is designed for settings in which software delivery is not a one-time project but an ongoing operating function. In our motivating application, CTO-as-a-service for small service firms, the system manages websites, booking flows, payment systems, backoffice workflow automations, and AI-agent interfaces as continuously evolving technical infrastructure rather than one-off deliverables. We describe the layered architecture, including two-pass contract compilation, persistent markdown memory with specialization records, attention-based and independence-based verifications, a four-way failure arbiter, and outer-loop calibration. We report results from an early production deployment spanning 17 features over several weeks, including a detailed in-app payments case study that revealed contract incompleteness and verification-boundary issues. These observations directly drove targeted improvements to the harness. The contribution is an implemented, measurable, and extensible verification architecture for making AI-native service-as-a-software production reliable, auditable, and improvable over time.
Satadru Sengupta, Tamunokorite Briggs, Ivan Myshakivskyi
May 11, 2026cs.CV

iPay: Integrated Payment Action Recognition via Multimodal Networks and Adaptive Spatial Prior Learning

Automated transit payment analysis is vital for scalable fare auditing and passenger analytics, yet practice still relies on limited manual inspection. Prior vision- and skeleton-based methods remain brittle under noisy onboard surveillance and often depend on poorly generalizable handcrafted features. Building on the success of graph convolutional networks in human action recognition, we observe that skeleton features excel at modeling global spatiotemporal dependencies but tend to underemphasize the subtle local relative motions that distinguish payment actions. In contrast, RGB features preserve fine-grained spatial details yet often lack reliable temporal continuity in surveillance footage. To bridge both system-level deployment needs and model-level design challenges, we present iPay, an integrated payment action recognition framework for onboard transit surveillance system. iPay adopts a multimodal mixture-of-experts architecture with four tightly coupled streams: (1) an RGB expert stream emphasizing local evidence via region-focused computation; (2) a skeleton expert stream modeling articulated motion with a graph convolutional backbone; (3) a dual-attention fusion stream enabling skeleton-to-RGB temporal transfer and RGB-to-skeleton spatial enhancement; and (4) a prior-driven Spatial Difference Discriminator (SDD) that explicitly models hand-to-anchor relative motion to improve task-specific discriminability. We also collaborate with local transit agencies to collect over 55 hours of real onboard surveillance footage, yielding 500+ payment clips. Experiments show that iPay outperforms prior methods and achieves 83.45% recognition accuracy with competitive computational efficiency, making it suitable for edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/ccoopq/iPay.
Kaicong Huang, Weiheng Oh, Thomas Guggisberg +1
May 9, 2026econ.EM

The Payment Heterogeneity Index: An Integrated Unsupervised Framework for High-Volume Procurement Oversight and Decision Support

Public procurement is vulnerable to error, fraud, and corruption, particularly as high transaction volumes overwhelm oversight. While research often focuses on tender-stage anomalies, post-award payment monitoring remains underexplored. Since labelled datasets are rare and methods like Benford's Law face restrictive assumptions, there is a need for interpretable, unsupervised frameworks for high-volume procurement oversight and decision support. This paper introduces the Structural Heterogeneity Index (SHI), a composite statistic for one-dimensional samples, and its payment-specific instantiation, the Payment Heterogeneity Index (PHI), characterising payment structure and latent regimes. It incorporates Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) parameters alongside non-parametric statistics, integrating four interpretable components: modality, asymmetry, tail behaviour, and structural dispersion. Uniquely, the tail-behaviour component captures both distributional heaviness and extreme-value concentration, while structural-dispersion combines the variability, prevalence, and separation of latent payment regimes. Applied to UK municipal procurement data, PHI identifies a financially significant cohort (0.6% of suppliers; 10.1% of high-volume vendors) with structurally distinct payment patterns. Statistical testing further supports these differences, and targeted human verification confirms the plausibility of prioritised cases. Comparative analysis shows PHI reveals regime separation obscured by the Coefficient of Variation (ρ=0.310ρ= 0.310). PHI provides a transparent, decomposable, and computationally lightweight framework for procurement integrity oversight and targeted audit prioritisation.
Kyriakos Christodoulides
May 7, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Task Success: Measuring Workflow Fidelity in LLM-Based Agentic Payment Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed for payment workflows, yet prevailing metrics, Task Success Rate (TSR) and Agent Handoff F1-Score (HF1), capture only final outcomes or unordered routing decisions. We introduce the Agentic Success Rate (ASR), a trajectory-fidelity metric that compares observed and expected agent execution sequences at the transition level, decomposing performance into Transition Recall and Transition Precision. Applied to the Hierarchical Multi-Agent System for Payments (HMASP) across 18 LLMs and 90,000 task instances, ASR reveals that 10 of 18 models systematically skip a confirmation checkpoint during payment checkout, a deviation invisible to both TSR and HF1, while 8 models enforce the checkpoint perfectly. Notably, GPT-4.1 exhibits hidden workflow shortcuts despite achieving perfect TSR and HF1, while GPT-5.2 achieves perfect ASR. Prompt refinements and deterministic routing guards guided by ASR diagnostics yield substantial TSR improvements, with gains up to +93.8 percentage points for previously struggling models, demonstrating that trajectory-level evaluation is essential in regulated domains.
Donghao Huang, Joon Kiat Chua, Zhaoxia Wang
Apr 30, 2026cs.CR

Compliance-Aware Agentic Payments on Stablecoin Rails

Agentic payment systems extend delegated action to financial transfers, but scaling them on stablecoin rails in regulated settings requires safeguards that remain effective when humans are not continuously in the loop. We present a compliance-aware architecture that combines x402-style, signature-based payment authorisation and relayed execution with programmable compliance embedded as an on-chain guardrail via a policy wrapper and policy manager coordinating modular checks. By enforcing compliance at the point of execution, rather than as a separate off-chain workflow, the approach preserves low-friction settlement when conditions are satisfied, records transaction-linked on-chain attestations, and supports structured resolution when requirements are pending.
Kenneth See, Xue Wen Tan
Apr 13, 2026cs.CR

Hardening x402: PII-Safe Agentic Payments via Pre-Execution Metadata Filtering

AI agents that pay for resources via the x402 protocol embed payment metadata - resource URLs, descriptions, and reason strings - in every HTTP payment request. This metadata is transmitted to the payment server and to the centralised facilitator API before any on-chain settlement occurs; neither party is typically bound by a data processing agreement. We present presidio-hardened-x402, the first open-source middleware that intercepts x402 payment requests before transmission to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII), enforce declarative spending policies, and block duplicate replay attempts. To evaluate the PII filter, we construct a labeled synthetic corpus of 2,000 x402 metadata triples spanning seven use-case categories, and run a 42-configuration precision/recall sweep across two detection modes (regex, NLP) and five confidence thresholds. The recommended configuration (mode=nlp, min_score=0.4, all entity types) achieves micro-F1 = 0.894 with precision 0.972, at a p99 latency of 5.73ms - well within the 50ms overhead budget. The middleware, corpus, and all experiment code are publicly available at https://github.com/presidio-v/presidio-hardened-x402.
Vladimir Stantchev