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The Two-Ledger Model: Transaction-Grain Cost Accounting for Multi-Agent AI Systems Across Clouds, Models, and Systems of Record

arXiv:2611.06989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprises run business transactions through multi-agent AI systems spanning clouds, large language models (LLMs), orchestration harnesses, and systems of record. Finance receives AI cost only at settlement grain, aggregated by SKU and charge period. The business question (what did this order, claim, or case cost in AI?) cannot be answered from billing data, because providers never see enterprise transaction boundaries. The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) gives billing data one schema across providers but remains settlement-grain even as it adds AI token and requester attribution. We formalize this grain mismatch, derive seven requirements, and propose the Two-Ledger Model: a settlement ledger of FOCUS-conformant billing data joined to an attribution ledger of invocation-grain usage records built on OpenTelemetry GenAI telemetry. A layered correlation spine (trace context, A2A/MCP metadata, business-key correlation, probabilistic matching) assigns each record to its business transaction with recorded method and confidence; a versioned rate card prices usage in near real time; period reconciliation ties both ledgers to the invoice, and the unexplained residual identifies shadow AI. Costs are reported per order, claim, or outcome with agentic cost metrics. A simulation with known ground truth shows the spine sustaining cost coverage above 99% as trace propagation falls to zero, the reconciliation residual recovering planted unmetered spend within 0.24 percentage points while flagging provider billing errors, and mid-flight gating cutting p99 transaction cost by up to 61% at a 2-4% false-pause rate. We propose the attribution ledger as an invocation-grain FOCUS profile for standardization.

My therapist thinks I should chuck the Amazon Bee Frontier out a window

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. "How does that make you feel?" I get asked this a lot in therapy. Plenty of life events, big and […]

Show HN: Alternative to Nvidia Auto-Ontology

This repo provides an alternative to the ontology compiling capabilities of NVIDA Auto-Ontology.The main difference is that it builds the ontology from most of your existing data assets (transformation code, dashboards, docs), instead of building it from your warehouse and semantic layer only.It consists in skills and python scripts that ingest the metadata and docs your team already has, and compile them into YAML and Markdown files structured in a file tree that an agent can use as context to query your data.When your existing asset contradict, or reveal a gap in the business context around your data, it writes down questions for you and your team instead of guessing a plausible meaning.It runs locally in any coding agent. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50363667 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

v1.19.0 - Trace Your Workflows, Layer by Layer

Dify 1.19.0 enhances observability with nested workflow tracing, allowing users to follow execution steps inside Workflow Tools, inspect LLM calls, and maintain context across nested invocations. The release also enables portable app packages via App packages, improves Agent file uploads and previews, introduces Skill Hub automation through CLI commands, and upgrades the bundled plugin daemon to version 0.6.14-local. Key changes include support for format v2 app packages, enhanced security, improved editing workflows, and updated environment variables and API endpoints.

Whose startup does the AI back? An algorithm audit of reputation and demographic signals in LLM-assisted crowdfunding

arXiv:2611.03993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) assistants increasingly advise backers on which crowdfunding campaigns to support. LLMs have known race and gender problems, and it is unsettled whether they reproduce, erase, or reverse the discrimination documented in entrepreneurial finance. We ask when, and through which decision process, LLM assistants use founders' gender and ethnicity. In a pre-specified choice-based conjoint experiment, seven LLMs chose among five synthetic campaigns with independently randomized quality signals and founder names, under three backer personas and a persona-free control (40,248 responses). By default, founder names barely matter: under budget-conscious and delivery-focused personas, gender and Black-name effects are statistically equivalent to zero. When the backer wants to support underrepresented creators, the models favor Black-signaled (+8.1 percentage points; positive in all seven models) and female-signaled (+5.1) founders. They do so most strongly among near-tied campaigns and for the founder who alone carries the signal, and they almost never name gender or ethnicity in their reasons. The results fit an agency account of algorithmic discrimination: an aligned assistant takes its demographic preferences from its user rather than from its training data.

Token-as-a-Utility: A Model-Agnostic Architecture for Metering and Provisioning AI Inference Services

arXiv:2611.01371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Token-based subscriptions are emerging as a commercial model for large language model inference, but extending them into interoperable utility services requires comparable consumption accounting. Raw token counts do not consistently measure inference resource use because demand varies with model architecture, context length, tokenisation, and concurrent serving conditions. This paper presents Token-as-a-Utility, a model-agnostic architecture integrating inference metering, service-level-aware provisioning, and inter-operator settlement. We prove that, under batched serving, no per-request meter can be additive, independent of co-resident traffic, and exactly cost-reflective at once. This motivates separating provisioned capacity, metered consumption, and contracted quality into distinct service products. Consumption is expressed in Reference Inference Units (RIUs) derived from prefill and decode demand, while occupancy-indexed operator ratings recover shared serving costs without altering the common unit. Versioned inference records support auditing and re-rating across operators; software-enforced capacity leases and quality-constrained routing enable provisioning on shared accelerators. The resource model is measured on three NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada GPUs, and multi-tenant behaviour is evaluated with a trace-driven model calibrated to them. For the reference model, occupancy-indexed rating limits statement energy error to 9% under measured traffic, compared with up to 70.5% under fixed-occupancy rating. In calibrated multi-tenant experiments, tenant mispricing decreases from 7.36 times under flat token counting to 2.39 times with RIUs and 1.06 times after occupancy-based reconciliation. These findings demonstrate how portable inference accounting can be combined with load-dependent cost recovery and contract-based provisioning to support heterogeneous inference services across operators.

From Writing Advice to Manuscript Governance: A Constrained-Transformation Framework for Academic Revision

arXiv:2610.33001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Academic revision presents a governance problem when legitimate writing objectives conflict. Writing-process and social-science research show that revision is recursive and that wording carries epistemic and disciplinary commitments. Those literatures identify important constraints but do not settle which objective should prevail when concision, outlet form or stylistic variation conflicts with evidence and claim boundaries. This paper models revision as an admissibility problem under ordered constraints. Task-relative invariants, contextual constraints and mutable presentation choices define the admissible space; a claim-preservation contract links evidence and judgement to an authorised claim boundary. Four governance propositions specify p

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Permission to Retry: A Study of Authorization and Recovery in AI Agent Workflows

arXiv:2610.31916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A durable agent can resume a consequential action while its authority changes and the action's external outcome remains uncertain. We study execution-time reliability of tool-using AI agents, isolating recovery decisions from language-model behavior. Checkpoint state, permission to dispatch, evidence of an external effect and permission to reconcile are distinct obligations. We present a finite conformance study that checks these obligations through histories scored against a provider effect ledger hidden from the recovering application. A prospectively frozen campaign executes 336 histories on native LangGraph and Temporal hosts, crossing 14 schedules, three provider contracts and four matched application policies. All 168 paired host cells

Permission to Retry: A Study of Authorization and Recovery in AI Agent Workflows
Timeline and related coverage