Papers for

algorithmic trading engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Post-training improves foundation models for stock market simulation

Adversarial Post-Training of Foundation Models for High-Frequency Trading

Abstract: While autoregressive foundation models trained on limit order book (LOB) data show state-of-the-art performance for market simulation, pre-training with cross-entropy neither penalizes the compounding of sampling errors over free-running rollouts nor targets desired market properties. We introduce a post-training method for LOB foundation models using a Wasserstein generative adversarial network (GAN) objective. A critic, trained online on rollouts through the true, non-differentiable matching engine, guides updates from evolution strategies over rank-4 LoRA perturbations of the pre-trained generator, under a KL trust region. For efficiency, we use EGGROLL (Evolution Guided GeneRal Optimisation via Low-rank Learning), a memory-efficient variant of evolution strategies. On a held-out panel, adversarial post-training improves LOB-Bench realism by 17.6% (WS-21) and 17.0% (Mean-$L_1$), while selection-matched random-perturbation and compute-matched continued-pre-training controls yield no improvement. Post-training is thus a necessary stage that more pre-training does not replace. Per-position divergence measurements show that it slows error accumulation over 500-message rollouts from $3.1\times$ to $2.3\times$. Adversarial post-training is also inexpensive, requiring under 50M training tokens and 12 GPU-hours per seed, three orders of magnitude below the 48B-token pre-training budget. Ablations over critic inputs, optimizers, and the population-rollout trade-off, together with an analysis of reward hacking, yield practical design guidelines for adversarial post-training.

Mon 19 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Autoregressive models can simulate stock market order data well but struggle with errors building up during longer runs. The authors introduce a way to improve these models after their initial training by using an adversarial method, where a separate network helps guide the improvements. This approach reduces errors over many simulation steps and makes the simulated market data more realistic. It is also efficient, requiring far fewer training resources than original model training.
Open → 2610.25604v1