arXiv subjects

Adrian de Valois-Franklin

Publications and source records attributed to Adrian de Valois-Franklin.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Get In, Decide, Prove: A Merchant-Side Readiness Benchmark for Agentic Commerce

AI agents now browse and buy on people's behalf, and benchmarks measure how well the agents perform. Far less is known about the other side of the transaction: whether a merchant's website lets an agent in, publishes terms precise enough to decide a purchase, and leaves evidence of what was agreed. This paper presents a merchant-side benchmark built on those three questions and reports a pilot of it. The central measurement, decision sufficiency, rates each criterion of a concrete buyer mandate (total cost, cancellation or return terms, service date, variant identity) as determinate, indeterminate, or unknown from the merchant's own published evidence. Readiness scores carry their evidence coverage and missingness bounds; access is reported separately for a declared bot, a declared headless browser, and a user-present browser; and each observed term is mapped to the RAILS admissibility class of the evidence that could support it in a dispute. Four large merchants received the full assessment: three refused the declared profiles at their offer pages, and no mandate could be confirmed as met, because each merchant left a total or a refund term undetermined. An access census of 555 sites of merchants that two payment processors publicly name as clients found the home page unreadable to both declared profiles at 105 sites (18.9%). A declared assessment of 330 merchants, scored by deterministic rules without a rater, found that evidence coverage rather than the score decides who can be ranked: 115 merchants (35%) reached the ranking threshold, rankable profiles scored a median of 89 to 90, and material terms was the one pillar well below the others, because the all-in total was decidable at 18 merchants. The pilot shows that the measurements can be taken; it does not validate them or rank merchants, and the weights and the projected clearing band await validation against outcomes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

RAILS: Verification-Native Clearing For Agentic Commerce

Autonomous agents negotiate, purchase, deploy code, and move funds, but no neutral mechanism determines whether they met their delegated obligation, who is responsible when they did not, or which settlement action follows. This is the agentic clearing problem. Tool protocols (MCP), inter-agent communication (A2A), payment rails (x402), mandate and network agent protocols (AP2, Visa, Mastercard), and settlement-risk standards each assume that determination and none produce it. Clearing is the missing primitive. Payment is not clearing. Authorization is not clearing. LLM-as-judge evaluation is not clearing. Settlement-risk escrow is not clearing: it consumes clearing decisions. RAILS (Real-Time Agent Integrity & Ledger Settlement) is the integrity and clearing layer for agentic commerce, spanning a per-output reliability score, a published reliability record, and a clearing function that consumes them. The clearing protocol at its core closes that gap. Seven primitives (Obligation Object, Evidence Envelope, Verification Mesh, Clearing Decision, Settlement Instruction, Clearing Passport, Finality Rules), bound by a formal model of admissibility-graded verification, together yield a soundness property: no financially material settlement is supported by evidence below the obligation's admissibility floor. The property is falsifiable against the spec. We are not aware of a prior agent-commerce verification mechanism that states a property of this kind. The approaches nearest to it emit a pass, a delivery guarantee, a bare score, or an equilibrium. This paper specifies that clearing protocol.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Machine Psychometrics: A Mathematical Psychology of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial agents now generate behavior rich enough to invite trust, surprise, and concern, yet our evaluation tools still privilege capability scores over psychological structure. This paper argues that the philosophical impasse between two symmetrical errors (Artificial Mind Blindness, which dismisses psychological organization in non-biological systems, and Artificial Mind Projection, which infers human-like inner life from fluent behavior alone) can be circumvented not by resolving the consciousness question, but by introducing a disciplined measurement layer beneath it. Drawing on Michael Levin's continuum view of cognition as goal-directed competency across substrates, and on the methodological repertoire of mathematical psychology (Item Response Theory, Signal Detection Theory, Bayesian cognitive modeling, calibration analysis, cognitive-bias batteries), the paper develops Machine Psychometrics as a measurement science of latent behavioral, metacognitive, communicative, and self-modeling dispositions in artificial agents. Its operational core is the Machine Mindprint: a multidimensional, domain-bounded, versioned profile spanning calibration, source integrity, suggestibility resistance, context stability, expressive alignment, tool integrity, drift monitoring, and distributional grounding. A complementary Trust Protocol turns Mindprints into deployment decisions through probe batteries, perturbation testing, reliability and validity analysis, and longitudinal monitoring across high-stakes domains. The philosophical contribution is a third stance, Artificial Mind Discipline, that neither anthropomorphizes nor dismisses, neither presupposes consciousness nor forecloses it. The aim is not to humanize artificial agents, but to understand them precisely because they are not human, through measurement before judgment.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

The Surprising Universality of LLM Outputs: A Real-Time Verification Primitive

We report a striking statistical regularity in frontier LLM outputs that enables a CPU-only scoring primitive running at 2.6 microseconds per token, with estimated latency up to 100,000$\times$ (five orders of magnitude) below existing sampling-based detectors. Across six contemporary models from five independent vendors, two generation sizes, and five held-out domains, token rank-frequency distributions converge to the same two-parameter Mandelbrot ranking distribution, with 34 of 36 model-by-domain fits exceeding $R^{2} = 0.94$ and 35 of 36 favoring Mandelbrot over Zipf by AIC. The shared family does not collapse the models into statistical duplicates. Fitted Mandelbrot parameters remain cleanly separable between models: the cross-model spread in $q$ (1.63 to 3.69) exceeds its per-model bootstrap standard deviation (0.03 to 0.10) by more than an order of magnitude, yielding tens of standard deviations of separation per few thousand output tokens. Two capabilities follow. First, statistical model fingerprinting: text from a vendor-delivered LLM can be tested against its claimed model family without cryptographic watermarks or access to model internals, supporting provenance verification and silent-substitution audits. Second, a model-agnostic reference distribution for black-box output assessment, from which we derive a single-pass scoring primitive that composes with model log probabilities when available and degrades to a rank-only mode usable on closed APIs. Pilot results on FRANK, TruthfulQA, and HaluEval map where the primitive helps (lexical anomalies, unsupported entities) and where it structurally cannot (reasoning errors in domain-appropriate vocabulary). We position the primitive as a first-pass triage layer in compound evaluation stacks, not as a replacement for sampling-based or source-conditioned verifiers.

cs.CR↗