Papers for

financial model developers

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.

Financial market model explains continued presence of irrational traders

Persistence of Bounded Rationality in Financial Markets: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Model

Abstract: Classical theory predicts that irrational traders lose money to rational traders and are eventually driven out of the market. Yet noise trading, herding, and heuristic trading persist even in highly developed markets. We model a financial market as an ecology of two trading-behavior types, relatively rational (R) and boundedly rational (N), whose composition evolves under replicator dynamics according to relative performance. Each type's fitness depends on the share of the other type and on frictions. When the interaction is complementary, that is, rational traders profit from the mispricing created by boundedly rational traders while the latter benefit from the liquidity and price correction supplied by the former, and when the difference in frictions is moderate, a unique interior composition exists and is globally asymptotically stable: bounded rationality persists endogenously. When the interaction is antagonistic, the same point becomes a tipping threshold between two one-type regimes. Comparative statics show that lowering the costs of disciplined trading, as algorithmic and AI-based trading does, shifts the composition toward rational trading continuously but does not eliminate bounded rationality unless the cost advantage exceeds an explicit threshold.

Thu 29 OctComputer Science and Game Theory
The gist
Markets often have both rational traders and others who use simpler, less accurate decision rules, but classical ideas say the rational ones should take over. The authors model how these types interact like species in an ecosystem, with each type’s success depending on the other’s presence and certain trading costs. They find that both types can persist together when their interactions help each other, and that improving trading technology favors rational traders but doesn’t eliminate the others unless advantages are large. This helps explain why less-than-perfect trading behavior remains common in real markets.
Open → 2610.39198v1

Separator tokens improve efficiency of language model reasoning

Sep-Latent: Separator Tokens as Natural Compression Anchors for Implicit Reasoning

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in complex reasoning through explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but the associated computational overhead and token verbosity remain significant barriers to efficiency. While implicit reasoning in continuous latent spaces offers a promising alternative, existing methods like Coconut and CODI often rely on fixed-length latent sequences and suffer from representational collapse. In this paper, we propose Sep-Latent, an adaptive implicit reasoning framework that utilizes separator tokens as structural semantic anchors. By introducing an Attention-Decay mechanism, we force the model to aggregate and compress reasoning logic into these anchors during training. We then align explicit and implicit pathways through multi-level distillation across all layers to ensure logical consistency. Crucially, Sep-Latent enables dynamic reasoning depth by adaptively terminating the latent thinking phase based on query complexity. Experimental results on the GSM8k-Aug benchmark show that Sep-Latent achieves an accuracy of 56.8\% with an average of only 5.4 tokens, significantly outperforming prior fixed-length implicit models in efficiency while narrowing the performance gap with explicit CoT. Further analysis via PCA and symbolic variant testing confirms that our method ensures semantic grounding and exhibits superior robustness to perturbations.

Fri 16 OctArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Complex thinking by large language models usually takes a lot of computing power and long text steps, which slows things down. The authors developed a new way called Sep-Latent that uses special marker tokens to hold important thoughts and make reasoning shorter and faster. This method adapts to how hard a question is and stops thinking when it's done, saving effort. Tests show Sep-Latent is more efficient than past short-thinking approaches and nearly matches longer step-by-step methods in accuracy. The approach also proves to be more stable when the input is changed a bit.
Open → 2610.22924v1

Certified approximation improves training landmark rankings in AI models

Certified Approximation for Interpretable Representer Landmarks

Abstract: Representer explanations rank the training landmarks that most influence a self-supervised representation. At scale, this ranking rests on up to four stacked approximations of the empirical neural tangent kernel (eNTK). These are random output heads, a parameter sketch, landmark sampling and a coefficient fit. Existing analyses bound each approximation separately, but none certifies the top-$K$ set against their combined error. We introduce CAIRN (Certified Approximation for Interpretable Representer laNdmarks), a framework that carries this error through to the ranking. We derive the exact variance of the sketched multi-head eNTK, which matches measurement within $4\%$ where Johnson-Lindenstrauss bounds err by up to $2.5\times$. This yields a high-probability top-$K$ certificate for a fixed coefficient fit, alongside exact residual-trace certificates for discarded spectral mass. An exact product-variance identity separates kernel error from fit variability and identifies when a larger kernel budget can still sharpen a ranking. Stochastic Lanczos Quadrature (SLQ) estimates the effective dimension within $0.72\%$ and guides the landmark budget without dense eigendecomposition. We show that residual mass does not control class coverage, and residual-greedy selection cuts the worst coverage excess of $k$-means++ from $8.5\times$ to $1.55\times$ ($4\times$ on the sketched eNTK). Cross-view initializers outperform principal-component initialization in five (AUI) to all six (CSI) settings. Against the KREPES Gauss-Newton solver, CAIRN converges $2.5$ to $11.3\times$ faster, trails by at most $0.31$ points and gains up to $3.14$ points on MNIST. Together, these results make the reliability of representer explanations measurable and show where approximation budgets are best spent.

Wed 30 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Explaining how AI models make decisions often involves identifying key data points that influence their internal understanding. The authors developed a new method called CAIRN that more accurately tracks errors in approximations used to find these important data points, ensuring the top choices are reliably identified. Their approach measures uncertainty better than previous techniques and shows faster and more precise results on standard datasets. This makes it easier to trust explanations for AI behavior and guides where to focus computing effort.
Open → 2609.38901v1

Multi-agent system discovers interpretable finance valuation equations

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Symbolic Discovery for Financial Fundamental Analysis

Abstract: While symbolic regression (SR) has been successfully used in science to discover new equations, its use in financial valuation is hindered by several limitations. Whereas the natural sciences provide objectively correct relationships, financial valuation constitutes a distinct class of symbolic discovery problems, as it admits multiple valid perspectives, operates under non-stationary market conditions, and involves noisy, continuous performance signals. In this work, we propose Multi-Agent Fundamental Analysis with Symbolic Adaptive learning (MUFASA), a hierarchical multi-agent framework for symbolic discovery in finance. MUFASA introduces (1) disentangled equation discovery via specialized agents representing distinct valuation perspectives, (2) a meta-coordinator that performs hierarchical-level reasoning over market context information, and (3) a memory mechanism that reasons over statistical performance summaries (e.g., accuracy, stability, and tail risk) to guide learning under noisy feedback. Experiments across datasets from multiple countries show that MUFASA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the valuation task compared to classical finance methods, financial large language models, and SR approaches, while simultaneously producing interpretable equations, which we share with the community. We also make publicly available the distilled learnings across evolution iterations and context-dependent strategy weights, which might offer useful insights for future research on financial fundamental analysis.

Sat 26 SeptMultiagent SystemsArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Figuring out how much a company is worth is tricky because there are many ways to look at it and the market keeps changing. The researchers created MUFASA, a system where many specialized agents each try to find useful formulas from different angles, and another part helps pick the best ones based on market trends and performance. Their system also remembers how well different formulas did over time to keep improving under noisy data. Tests showed that MUFASA performs better than traditional methods and some AI tools, while providing clear and understandable formulas for valuing companies.
Open → 2609.32746v1

Time series models train faster using new synthetic data loss method

Distillation of Synthetic Data for Time Series Foundation Models

Abstract: Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly pre-trained on synthetically generated time series trajectories, where the data generating process is known. Current pre-training recipes are based on loss objectives which compare TSFM outputs to realized future values of each trajectory. We instead propose loss objectives which compare TSFM outputs to the conditional forecast distribution of each trajectory, a procedure we call synthetic data distillation (SDD). SDD corresponds to a Rao-Blackwellization of the training objective, in that it leaves the expectation of stochastic gradients unchanged while provably reducing the covariance of the stochastic gradient under the Loewner partial ordering. We empirically validate SDD on a TSFM model family of sizes from $4$M to $2.5$B parameters, and observe faster convergence of validation loss at every model size: on Gaussian Process data, SDD attains or improves upon the Status Quo loss whilst requiring $10\%-40\%$ less training iterations.

Wed 9 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Training computer models to predict data over time usually involves comparing their guesses to exact future values. The authors suggest instead comparing model outputs to the full range of possible future values based on known data patterns. This new training approach called synthetic data distillation helps models learn faster and more efficiently. They tested this on many model sizes and saw quicker improvement in accuracy.
Open → 2609.09586v1