A Modular LLM Framework for Explainable Price Outlier Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sartipi, Shadi, Wu, John, Ghotbi, Sina, Vedula, Nikhita, Malmasi, Shervin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sartipi, Shadi
Wu, John
Ghotbi, Sina
Vedula, Nikhita
Malmasi, Shervin
author_facet Sartipi, Shadi
Wu, John
Ghotbi, Sina
Vedula, Nikhita
Malmasi, Shervin
contents Detecting product price outliers is important for retail and e-commerce stores as erroneous or unexpectedly high prices adversely affect competitiveness, revenue, and consumer trust. Classical techniques offer simple thresholds while ignoring the rich semantic relationships among product attributes. We propose an agentic Large Language Model (LLM) framework that treats outlier price flagging as a reasoning task grounded in related product detection and comparison. The system processes the prices of target products in three stages: (i) relevance classification selects price-relevant similar products using product descriptions and attributes; (ii) relative utility assessment evaluates the target product against each similar product along price influencing dimensions (e.g., brand, size, features); (iii) reasoning-based decision aggregates these justifications into an explainable price outlier judgment. The framework attains over 75% agreement with human auditors on a test dataset, and outperforms zero-shot and retrieval based LLM techniques. Ablation studies show the sensitivity of the method to key hyper-parameters and testify on its flexibility to be applied to cases with different accuracy requirement and auditor agreements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Modular LLM Framework for Explainable Price Outlier Detection
Sartipi, Shadi
Wu, John
Ghotbi, Sina
Vedula, Nikhita
Malmasi, Shervin
Computation and Language
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Detecting product price outliers is important for retail and e-commerce stores as erroneous or unexpectedly high prices adversely affect competitiveness, revenue, and consumer trust. Classical techniques offer simple thresholds while ignoring the rich semantic relationships among product attributes. We propose an agentic Large Language Model (LLM) framework that treats outlier price flagging as a reasoning task grounded in related product detection and comparison. The system processes the prices of target products in three stages: (i) relevance classification selects price-relevant similar products using product descriptions and attributes; (ii) relative utility assessment evaluates the target product against each similar product along price influencing dimensions (e.g., brand, size, features); (iii) reasoning-based decision aggregates these justifications into an explainable price outlier judgment. The framework attains over 75% agreement with human auditors on a test dataset, and outperforms zero-shot and retrieval based LLM techniques. Ablation studies show the sensitivity of the method to key hyper-parameters and testify on its flexibility to be applied to cases with different accuracy requirement and auditor agreements.
title A Modular LLM Framework for Explainable Price Outlier Detection
topic Computation and Language
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20636