PCN-Rec: Agentic Proof-Carrying Negotiation for Reliable Governance-Constrained Recommendation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09771v1
• Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:00:00 GMT
• Title: PCN-Rec: Agentic Proof-Carrying Negotiation for Reliable Governance-Constrained Recommendation
• Authors: Aradhya Dixit, Shreem Dixit,
• Abstract summary: PCN-Rec is a proof-carrying negotiation pipeline that separates natural-language reasoning from deterministic enforcement.<n>On MovieLens-100K with governance constraints, PCN-Rec achieves a 98.55% pass rate on feasible users.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Modern LLM-based recommenders can generate compelling ranked lists, but they struggle to reliably satisfy governance constraints such as minimum long-tail exposure or diversity requirements. We present PCN-Rec, a proof-carrying negotiation pipeline that separates natural-language reasoning from deterministic enforcement. A base recommender (MF/CF) produces a candidate window of size W, which is negotiated by two agents: a User Advocate optimizing relevance and a Policy Agent enforcing constraints. A mediator LLM synthesizes a top-N slate together with a structured certificate (JSON) describing the claimed constraint satisfaction. A deterministic verifier recomputes all constraints from the slate and accepts only verifier-checked certificates; if verification fails, a deterministic constrained-greedy repair produces a compliant slate for re-verification, yielding an auditable trace. On MovieLens-100K with governance constraints, PCN-Rec achieves a 98.55% pass rate on feasible users (n = 551, W = 80) versus a one-shot single-LLM baseline without verification/repair, while preserving utility with only a 0.021 absolute drop in NDCG@10 (0.403 vs. 0.424); differences are statistically significant (p < 0.05).

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