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Jan 8

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Dynamic Portfolio Optimization: Evidence from China's Stock Market

Artificial intelligence is transforming financial investment decision-making frameworks, with deep reinforcement learning demonstrating substantial potential in robo-advisory applications. This paper addresses the limitations of traditional portfolio optimization methods in dynamic asset weight adjustment through the development of a deep reinforcement learning-based dynamic optimization model grounded in practical trading processes. The research advances two key innovations: first, the introduction of a novel Sharpe ratio reward function engineered for Actor-Critic deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which ensures stable convergence during training while consistently achieving positive average Sharpe ratios; second, the development of an innovative comprehensive approach to portfolio optimization utilizing deep reinforcement learning, which significantly enhances model optimization capability through the integration of random sampling strategies during training with image-based deep neural network architectures for multi-dimensional financial time series data processing, average Sharpe ratio reward functions, and deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The empirical analysis validates the model using randomly selected constituent stocks from the CSI 300 Index, benchmarking against established financial econometric optimization models. Backtesting results demonstrate the model's efficacy in optimizing portfolio allocation and mitigating investment risk, yielding superior comprehensive performance metrics.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 24, 2024

Stock Performance Evaluation for Portfolio Design from Different Sectors of the Indian Stock Market

The stock market offers a platform where people buy and sell shares of publicly listed companies. Generally, stock prices are quite volatile; hence predicting them is a daunting task. There is still much research going to develop more accuracy in stock price prediction. Portfolio construction refers to the allocation of different sector stocks optimally to achieve a maximum return by taking a minimum risk. A good portfolio can help investors earn maximum profit by taking a minimum risk. Beginning with Dow Jones Theory a lot of advancement has happened in the area of building efficient portfolios. In this project, we have tried to predict the future value of a few stocks from six important sectors of the Indian economy and also built a portfolio. As part of the project, our team has conducted a study of the performance of various Time series, machine learning, and deep learning models in stock price prediction on selected stocks from the chosen six important sectors of the economy. As part of building an efficient portfolio, we have studied multiple portfolio optimization theories beginning with the Modern Portfolio theory. We have built a minimum variance portfolio and optimal risk portfolio for all the six chosen sectors by using the daily stock prices over the past five years as training data and have also conducted back testing to check the performance of the portfolio. We look forward to continuing our study in the area of stock price prediction and asset allocation and consider this project as the first stepping stone.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 1, 2022

Pre-training Time Series Models with Stock Data Customization

Stock selection, which aims to predict stock prices and identify the most profitable ones, is a crucial task in finance. While existing methods primarily focus on developing model structures and building graphs for improved selection, pre-training strategies remain underexplored in this domain. Current stock series pre-training follows methods from other areas without adapting to the unique characteristics of financial data, particularly overlooking stock-specific contextual information and the non-stationary nature of stock prices. Consequently, the latent statistical features inherent in stock data are underutilized. In this paper, we propose three novel pre-training tasks tailored to stock data characteristics: stock code classification, stock sector classification, and moving average prediction. We develop the Stock Specialized Pre-trained Transformer (SSPT) based on a two-layer transformer architecture. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our pre-training methods and provide detailed guidance on their application. Evaluations on five stock datasets, including four markets and two time periods, demonstrate that SSPT consistently outperforms the market and existing methods in terms of both cumulative investment return ratio and Sharpe ratio. Additionally, our experiments on simulated data investigate the underlying mechanisms of our methods, providing insights into understanding price series. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/astudentuser/Pre-training-Time-Series-Models-with-Stock-Data-Customization.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 20, 2025

Hedging Properties of Algorithmic Investment Strategies using Long Short-Term Memory and Time Series models for Equity Indices

This paper proposes a novel approach to hedging portfolios of risky assets when financial markets are affected by financial turmoils. We introduce a completely novel approach to diversification activity not on the level of single assets but on the level of ensemble algorithmic investment strategies (AIS) built based on the prices of these assets. We employ four types of diverse theoretical models (LSTM - Long Short-Term Memory, ARIMA-GARCH - Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average - Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity, momentum, and contrarian) to generate price forecasts, which are then used to produce investment signals in single and complex AIS. In such a way, we are able to verify the diversification potential of different types of investment strategies consisting of various assets (energy commodities, precious metals, cryptocurrencies, or soft commodities) in hedging ensemble AIS built for equity indices (S&P 500 index). Empirical data used in this study cover the period between 2004 and 2022. Our main conclusion is that LSTM-based strategies outperform the other models and that the best diversifier for the AIS built for the S&P 500 index is the AIS built for Bitcoin. Finally, we test the LSTM model for a higher frequency of data (1 hour). We conclude that it outperforms the results obtained using daily data.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 27, 2023

Deep Reinforcement Learning for ESG financial portfolio management

This paper investigates the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) financial portfolio management, with a specific focus on the potential benefits of ESG score-based market regulation. We leveraged an Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) agent and conducted our experiments using environments encoded within the OpenAI Gym, adapted from the FinRL platform. The study includes a comparative analysis of DRL agent performance under standard Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) market conditions and a scenario where returns are regulated in line with company ESG scores. In the ESG-regulated market, grants were proportionally allotted to portfolios based on their returns and ESG scores, while taxes were assigned to portfolios below the mean ESG score of the index. The results intriguingly reveal that the DRL agent within the ESG-regulated market outperforms the standard DJIA market setup. Furthermore, we considered the inclusion of ESG variables in the agent state space, and compared this with scenarios where such data were excluded. This comparison adds to the understanding of the role of ESG factors in portfolio management decision-making. We also analyze the behaviour of the DRL agent in IBEX 35 and NASDAQ-100 indexes. Both the A2C and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithms were applied to these additional markets, providing a broader perspective on the generalization of our findings. This work contributes to the evolving field of ESG investing, suggesting that market regulation based on ESG scoring can potentially improve DRL-based portfolio management, with significant implications for sustainable investing strategies.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 19, 2023

Trading-R1: Financial Trading with LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Developing professional, structured reasoning on par with human financial analysts and traders remains a central challenge in AI for finance, where markets demand interpretability and trust. Traditional time-series models lack explainability, while LLMs face challenges in turning natural-language analysis into disciplined, executable trades. Although reasoning LLMs have advanced in step-by-step planning and verification, their application to risk-sensitive financial decisions is underexplored. We present Trading-R1, a financially-aware model that incorporates strategic thinking and planning for comprehensive thesis composition, facts-grounded analysis, and volatility-adjusted decision making. Trading-R1 aligns reasoning with trading principles through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with a three-stage easy-to-hard curriculum. Training uses Tauric-TR1-DB, a 100k-sample corpus spanning 18 months, 14 equities, and five heterogeneous financial data sources. Evaluated on six major equities and ETFs, Trading-R1 demonstrates improved risk-adjusted returns and lower drawdowns compared to both open-source and proprietary instruction-following models as well as reasoning models. The system generates structured, evidence-based investment theses that support disciplined and interpretable trading decisions. Trading-R1 Terminal will be released at https://github.com/TauricResearch/Trading-R1.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 14, 2025

A Time Series Analysis-Based Stock Price Prediction Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models

Prediction of future movement of stock prices has always been a challenging task for the researchers. While the advocates of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) believe that it is impossible to design any predictive framework that can accurately predict the movement of stock prices, there are seminal work in the literature that have clearly demonstrated that the seemingly random movement patterns in the time series of a stock price can be predicted with a high level of accuracy. Design of such predictive models requires choice of appropriate variables, right transformation methods of the variables, and tuning of the parameters of the models. In this work, we present a very robust and accurate framework of stock price prediction that consists of an agglomeration of statistical, machine learning and deep learning models. We use the daily stock price data, collected at five minutes interval of time, of a very well known company that is listed in the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India. The granular data is aggregated into three slots in a day, and the aggregated data is used for building and training the forecasting models. We contend that the agglomerative approach of model building that uses a combination of statistical, machine learning, and deep learning approaches, can very effectively learn from the volatile and random movement patterns in a stock price data. We build eight classification and eight regression models based on statistical and machine learning approaches. In addition to these models, a deep learning regression model using a long-and-short-term memory (LSTM) network is also built. Extensive results have been presented on the performance of these models, and the results are critically analyzed.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 17, 2020

Feature Learning for Stock Price Prediction Shows a Significant Role of Analyst Rating

To reject the Efficient Market Hypothesis a set of 5 technical indicators and 23 fundamental indicators was identified to establish the possibility of generating excess returns on the stock market. Leveraging these data points and various classification machine learning models, trading data of the 505 equities on the US S&P500 over the past 20 years was analysed to develop a classifier effective for our cause. From any given day, we were able to predict the direction of change in price by 1% up to 10 days in the future. The predictions had an overall accuracy of 83.62% with a precision of 85% for buy signals and a recall of 100% for sell signals. Moreover, we grouped equities by their sector and repeated the experiment to see if grouping similar assets together positively effected the results but concluded that it showed no significant improvements in the performance rejecting the idea of sector-based analysis. Also, using feature ranking we could identify an even smaller set of 6 indicators while maintaining similar accuracies as that from the original 28 features and also uncovered the importance of buy, hold and sell analyst ratings as they came out to be the top contributors in the model. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of the classifier in real-life situations, it was backtested on FAANG equities using a modest trading strategy where it generated high returns of above 60% over the term of the testing dataset. In conclusion, our proposed methodology with the combination of purposefully picked features shows an improvement over the previous studies, and our model predicts the direction of 1% price changes on the 10th day with high confidence and with enough buffer to even build a robotic trading system.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 12, 2021

Sentiment-Aware Mean-Variance Portfolio Optimization for Cryptocurrencies

This paper presents a dynamic cryptocurrency portfolio optimization strategy that integrates technical indicators and sentiment analysis to enhance investment decision-making. The proposed method employs the 14-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) and 14-day Simple Moving Average (SMA) to capture market momentum, while sentiment scores are extracted from news articles using the VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) model, with compound scores quantifying overall market tone. The large language model Google Gemini is used to further verify the sentiment scores predicted by VADER and give investment decisions. These technical indicator and sentiment signals are incorporated into the expected return estimates before applying mean-variance optimization with constraints on asset weights. The strategy is evaluated through a rolling-window backtest over cryptocurrency market data, with Bitcoin (BTC) and an equal-weighted portfolio of selected cryptocurrencies serving as benchmarks. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves a cumulative return of 38.72, substantially exceeding Bitcoin's 8.85 and the equal-weighted portfolio's 21.65 over the same period, and delivers a higher Sharpe ratio (1.1093 vs. 0.8853 and 1.0194, respectively). However, the strategy exhibits a larger maximum drawdown (-18.52%) compared to Bitcoin (-4.48%) and the equal-weighted portfolio (-11.02%), indicating higher short-term downside risk. These results highlight the potential of combining sentiment and technical signals to improve cryptocurrency portfolio performance, while also emphasizing the need to address risk exposure in volatile markets.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 22, 2025

Generating Synergistic Formulaic Alpha Collections via Reinforcement Learning

In the field of quantitative trading, it is common practice to transform raw historical stock data into indicative signals for the market trend. Such signals are called alpha factors. Alphas in formula forms are more interpretable and thus favored by practitioners concerned with risk. In practice, a set of formulaic alphas is often used together for better modeling precision, so we need to find synergistic formulaic alpha sets that work well together. However, most traditional alpha generators mine alphas one by one separately, overlooking the fact that the alphas would be combined later. In this paper, we propose a new alpha-mining framework that prioritizes mining a synergistic set of alphas, i.e., it directly uses the performance of the downstream combination model to optimize the alpha generator. Our framework also leverages the strong exploratory capabilities of reinforcement learning~(RL) to better explore the vast search space of formulaic alphas. The contribution to the combination models' performance is assigned to be the return used in the RL process, driving the alpha generator to find better alphas that improve upon the current set. Experimental evaluations on real-world stock market data demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our framework for stock trend forecasting. The investment simulation results show that our framework is able to achieve higher returns compared to previous approaches.

  • 7 authors
·
May 25, 2023

Harnessing Earnings Reports for Stock Predictions: A QLoRA-Enhanced LLM Approach

Accurate stock market predictions following earnings reports are crucial for investors. Traditional methods, particularly classical machine learning models, struggle with these predictions because they cannot effectively process and interpret extensive textual data contained in earnings reports and often overlook nuances that influence market movements. This paper introduces an advanced approach by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) instruction fine-tuned with a novel combination of instruction-based techniques and quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) compression. Our methodology integrates 'base factors', such as financial metric growth and earnings transcripts, with 'external factors', including recent market indices performances and analyst grades, to create a rich, supervised dataset. This comprehensive dataset enables our models to achieve superior predictive performance in terms of accuracy, weighted F1, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), especially evident in the comparison with benchmarks such as GPT-4. We specifically highlight the efficacy of the llama-3-8b-Instruct-4bit model, which showcases significant improvements over baseline models. The paper also discusses the potential of expanding the output capabilities to include a 'Hold' option and extending the prediction horizon, aiming to accommodate various investment styles and time frames. This study not only demonstrates the power of integrating cutting-edge AI with fine-tuned financial data but also paves the way for future research in enhancing AI-driven financial analysis tools.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

Predicting Stock Market Time-Series Data using CNN-LSTM Neural Network Model

Stock market is often important as it represents the ownership claims on businesses. Without sufficient stocks, a company cannot perform well in finance. Predicting a stock market performance of a company is nearly hard because every time the prices of a company stock keeps changing and not constant. So, its complex to determine the stock data. But if the previous performance of a company in stock market is known, then we can track the data and provide predictions to stockholders in order to wisely take decisions on handling the stocks to a company. To handle this, many machine learning models have been invented but they didn't succeed due to many reasons like absence of advanced libraries, inaccuracy of model when made to train with real time data and much more. So, to track the patterns and the features of data, a CNN-LSTM Neural Network can be made. Recently, CNN is now used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) based applications, so by identifying the features from stock data and converting them into tensors, we can obtain the features and then send it to LSTM neural network to find the patterns and thereby predicting the stock market for given period of time. The accuracy of the CNN-LSTM NN model is found to be high even when allowed to train on real-time stock market data. This paper describes about the features of the custom CNN-LSTM model, experiments we made with the model (like training with stock market datasets, performance comparison with other models) and the end product we obtained at final stage.

  • 4 authors
·
May 21, 2023 1

Ensembling Portfolio Strategies for Long-Term Investments: A Distribution-Free Preference Framework for Decision-Making and Algorithms

This paper investigates the problem of ensembling multiple strategies for sequential portfolios to outperform individual strategies in terms of long-term wealth. Due to the uncertainty of strategies' performances in the future market, which are often based on specific models and statistical assumptions, investors often mitigate risk and enhance robustness by combining multiple strategies, akin to common approaches in collective learning prediction. However, the absence of a distribution-free and consistent preference framework complicates decisions of combination due to the ambiguous objective. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework for decision-making in combining strategies, irrespective of market conditions, by establishing the investor's preference between decisions and then forming a clear objective. Through this framework, we propose a combinatorial strategy construction, free from statistical assumptions, for any scale of component strategies, even infinite, such that it meets the determined criterion. Finally, we test the proposed strategy along with its accelerated variant and some other multi-strategies. The numerical experiments show results in favor of the proposed strategies, albeit with small tradeoffs in their Sharpe ratios, in which their cumulative wealths eventually exceed those of the best component strategies while the accelerated strategy significantly improves performance.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 5, 2024

EmTract: Investor Emotions and Market Behavior

We develop a tool that extracts emotions from social media text data. Our methodology has three main advantages. First, it is tailored for financial context; second, it incorporates key aspects of social media data, such as non-standard phrases, emojis and emoticons; and third, it operates by sequentially learning a latent representation that includes features such as word order, word usage, and local context. This tool, along with a user guide is available at: https://github.com/dvamossy/EmTract. Using EmTract, we explore the relationship between investor emotions expressed on social media and asset prices. We document a number of interesting insights. First, we confirm some of the findings of controlled laboratory experiments relating investor emotions to asset price movements. Second, we show that investor emotions are predictive of daily price movements. These impacts are larger when volatility or short interest are higher, and when institutional ownership or liquidity are lower. Third, increased investor enthusiasm prior to the IPO contributes to the large first-day return and long-run underperformance of IPO stocks. To corroborate our results, we provide a number of robustness checks, including using an alternative emotion model. Our findings reinforce the intuition that emotions and market dynamics are closely related, and highlight the importance of considering investor emotions when assessing a stock's short-term value.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 7, 2021

Short-term Volatility Estimation for High Frequency Trades using Gaussian processes (GPs)

The fundamental theorem behind financial markets is that stock prices are intrinsically complex and stochastic. One of the complexities is the volatility associated with stock prices. Volatility is a tendency for prices to change unexpectedly [1]. Price volatility is often detrimental to the return economics, and thus, investors should factor it in whenever making investment decisions, choices, and temporal or permanent moves. It is, therefore, crucial to make necessary and regular short and long-term stock price volatility forecasts for the safety and economics of investors returns. These forecasts should be accurate and not misleading. Different models and methods, such as ARCH GARCH models, have been intuitively implemented to make such forecasts. However, such traditional means fail to capture the short-term volatility forecasts effectively. This paper, therefore, investigates and implements a combination of numeric and probabilistic models for short-term volatility and return forecasting for high-frequency trades. The essence is that one-day-ahead volatility forecasts were made with Gaussian Processes (GPs) applied to the outputs of a Numerical market prediction (NMP) model. Firstly, the stock price data from NMP was corrected by a GP. Since it is not easy to set price limits in a market due to its free nature and randomness, a Censored GP was used to model the relationship between the corrected stock prices and returns. Forecasting errors were evaluated using the implied and estimated data.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 17, 2023

RETuning: Upgrading Inference-Time Scaling for Stock Movement Prediction with Large Language Models

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding reasoning capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks. However, their application to financial tasks-especially the most fundamental task of stock movement prediction-remains underexplored. We study a three-class classification problem (up, hold, down) and, by analyzing existing reasoning responses, observe that: (1) LLMs follow analysts' opinions rather than exhibit a systematic, independent analytical logic (CoTs). (2) LLMs list summaries from different sources without weighing adversarial evidence, yet such counterevidence is crucial for reliable prediction. It shows that the model does not make good use of its reasoning ability to complete the task. To address this, we propose Reflective Evidence Tuning (RETuning), a cold-start method prior to reinforcement learning, to enhance prediction ability. While generating CoT, RETuning encourages dynamically constructing an analytical framework from diverse information sources, organizing and scoring evidence for price up or down based on that framework-rather than on contextual viewpoints-and finally reflecting to derive the prediction. This approach maximally aligns the model with its learned analytical framework, ensuring independent logical reasoning and reducing undue influence from context. We also build a large-scale dataset spanning all of 2024 for 5,123 A-share stocks, with long contexts (32K tokens) and over 200K samples. In addition to price and news, it incorporates analysts' opinions, quantitative reports, fundamental data, macroeconomic indicators, and similar stocks. Experiments show that RETuning successfully unlocks the model's reasoning ability in the financial domain. Inference-time scaling still works even after 6 months or on out-of-distribution stocks, since the models gain valuable insights about stock movement prediction.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 24, 2025

Universal features of price formation in financial markets: perspectives from Deep Learning

Using a large-scale Deep Learning approach applied to a high-frequency database containing billions of electronic market quotes and transactions for US equities, we uncover nonparametric evidence for the existence of a universal and stationary price formation mechanism relating the dynamics of supply and demand for a stock, as revealed through the order book, to subsequent variations in its market price. We assess the model by testing its out-of-sample predictions for the direction of price moves given the history of price and order flow, across a wide range of stocks and time periods. The universal price formation model is shown to exhibit a remarkably stable out-of-sample prediction accuracy across time, for a wide range of stocks from different sectors. Interestingly, these results also hold for stocks which are not part of the training sample, showing that the relations captured by the model are universal and not asset-specific. The universal model --- trained on data from all stocks --- outperforms, in terms of out-of-sample prediction accuracy, asset-specific linear and nonlinear models trained on time series of any given stock, showing that the universal nature of price formation weighs in favour of pooling together financial data from various stocks, rather than designing asset- or sector-specific models as commonly done. Standard data normalizations based on volatility, price level or average spread, or partitioning the training data into sectors or categories such as large/small tick stocks, do not improve training results. On the other hand, inclusion of price and order flow history over many past observations is shown to improve forecasting performance, showing evidence of path-dependence in price dynamics.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 19, 2018

LiveTradeBench: Seeking Real-World Alpha with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across benchmarks--from knowledge quizzes and math reasoning to web-agent tasks--but these tests occur in static settings, lacking real dynamics and uncertainty. Consequently, they evaluate isolated reasoning or problem-solving rather than decision-making under uncertainty. To address this, we introduce LiveTradeBench, a live trading environment for evaluating LLM agents in realistic and evolving markets. LiveTradeBench follows three design principles: (i) Live data streaming of market prices and news, eliminating dependence on offline backtesting and preventing information leakage while capturing real-time uncertainty; (ii) a portfolio-management abstraction that extends control from single-asset actions to multi-asset allocation, integrating risk management and cross-asset reasoning; and (iii) multi-market evaluation across structurally distinct environments--U.S. stocks and Polymarket prediction markets--differing in volatility, liquidity, and information flow. At each step, an agent observes prices, news, and its portfolio, then outputs percentage allocations that balance risk and return. Using LiveTradeBench, we run 50-day live evaluations of 21 LLMs across families. Results show that (1) high LMArena scores do not imply superior trading outcomes; (2) models display distinct portfolio styles reflecting risk appetite and reasoning dynamics; and (3) some LLMs effectively leverage live signals to adapt decisions. These findings expose a gap between static evaluation and real-world competence, motivating benchmarks that test sequential decision making and consistency under live uncertainty.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 5, 2025 2

Solving the optimal stopping problem with reinforcement learning: an application in financial option exercise

The optimal stopping problem is a category of decision problems with a specific constrained configuration. It is relevant to various real-world applications such as finance and management. To solve the optimal stopping problem, state-of-the-art algorithms in dynamic programming, such as the least-squares Monte Carlo (LSMC), are employed. This type of algorithm relies on path simulations using only the last price of the underlying asset as a state representation. Also, the LSMC was thinking for option valuation where risk-neutral probabilities can be employed to account for uncertainty. However, the general optimal stopping problem goals may not fit the requirements of the LSMC showing auto-correlated prices. We employ a data-driven method that uses Monte Carlo simulation to train and test artificial neural networks (ANN) to solve the optimal stopping problem. Using ANN to solve decision problems is not entirely new. We propose a different architecture that uses convolutional neural networks (CNN) to deal with the dimensionality problem that arises when we transform the whole history of prices into a Markovian state. We present experiments that indicate that our proposed architecture improves results over the previous implementations under specific simulated time series function sets. Lastly, we employ our proposed method to compare the optimal exercise of the financial options problem with the LSMC algorithm. Our experiments show that our method can capture more accurate exercise opportunities when compared to the LSMC. We have outstandingly higher (above 974\% improvement) expected payoff from these exercise policies under the many Monte Carlo simulations that used the real-world return database on the out-of-sample (test) data.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 21, 2022

When AI Meets Finance (StockAgent): Large Language Model-based Stock Trading in Simulated Real-world Environments

Can AI Agents simulate real-world trading environments to investigate the impact of external factors on stock trading activities (e.g., macroeconomics, policy changes, company fundamentals, and global events)? These factors, which frequently influence trading behaviors, are critical elements in the quest for maximizing investors' profits. Our work attempts to solve this problem through large language model based agents. We have developed a multi-agent AI system called StockAgent, driven by LLMs, designed to simulate investors' trading behaviors in response to the real stock market. The StockAgent allows users to evaluate the impact of different external factors on investor trading and to analyze trading behavior and profitability effects. Additionally, StockAgent avoids the test set leakage issue present in existing trading simulation systems based on AI Agents. Specifically, it prevents the model from leveraging prior knowledge it may have acquired related to the test data. We evaluate different LLMs under the framework of StockAgent in a stock trading environment that closely resembles real-world conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the impact of key external factors on stock market trading, including trading behavior and stock price fluctuation rules. This research explores the study of agents' free trading gaps in the context of no prior knowledge related to market data. The patterns identified through StockAgent simulations provide valuable insights for LLM-based investment advice and stock recommendation. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Stockagent.

  • 13 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024

Quantitative Risk Management in Volatile Markets with an Expectile-Based Framework for the FTSE Index

This research presents a framework for quantitative risk management in volatile markets, specifically focusing on expectile-based methodologies applied to the FTSE 100 index. Traditional risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) have demonstrated significant limitations during periods of market stress, as evidenced during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent volatile periods. This study develops an advanced expectile-based framework that addresses the shortcomings of conventional quantile-based approaches by providing greater sensitivity to tail losses and improved stability in extreme market conditions. The research employs a dataset spanning two decades of FTSE 100 returns, incorporating periods of high volatility, market crashes, and recovery phases. Our methodology introduces novel mathematical formulations for expectile regression models, enhanced threshold determination techniques using time series analysis, and robust backtesting procedures. The empirical results demonstrate that expectile-based Value-at-Risk (EVaR) consistently outperforms traditional VaR measures across various confidence levels and market conditions. The framework exhibits superior performance during volatile periods, with reduced model risk and enhanced predictive accuracy. Furthermore, the study establishes practical implementation guidelines for financial institutions and provides evidence-based recommendations for regulatory compliance and portfolio management. The findings contribute significantly to the literature on financial risk management and offer practical tools for practitioners dealing with volatile market environments.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 16, 2025 1

Dynamic Factor Analysis of Price Movements in the Philippine Stock Exchange

The intricate dynamics of stock markets have led to extensive research on models that are able to effectively explain their inherent complexities. This study leverages the econometrics literature to explore the dynamic factor model as an interpretable model with sufficient predictive capabilities for capturing essential market phenomena. Although the model has been extensively applied for predictive purposes, this study focuses on analyzing the extracted loadings and common factors as an alternative framework for understanding stock price dynamics. The results reveal novel insights into traditional market theories when applied to the Philippine Stock Exchange using the Kalman method and maximum likelihood estimation, with subsequent validation against the capital asset pricing model. Notably, a one-factor model extracts a common factor representing systematic or market dynamics similar to the composite index, whereas a two-factor model extracts common factors representing market trends and volatility. Furthermore, an application of the model for nowcasting the growth rates of the Philippine gross domestic product highlights the potential of the extracted common factors as viable real-time market indicators, yielding over a 34% decrease in the out-of-sample prediction error. Overall, the results underscore the value of dynamic factor analysis in gaining a deeper understanding of market price movement dynamics.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

StockBench: Can LLM Agents Trade Stocks Profitably In Real-world Markets?

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents, showing promise in reasoning, tool use, and sequential decision-making. While prior benchmarks have evaluated LLM agents in domains such as software engineering and scientific discovery, the finance domain remains underexplored, despite its direct relevance to economic value and high-stakes decision-making. Existing financial benchmarks primarily test static knowledge through question answering, but they fall short of capturing the dynamic and iterative nature of trading. To address this gap, we introduce StockBench, a contamination-free benchmark designed to evaluate LLM agents in realistic, multi-month stock trading environments. Agents receive daily market signals -- including prices, fundamentals, and news -- and must make sequential buy, sell, or hold decisions. Performance is assessed using financial metrics such as cumulative return, maximum drawdown, and the Sortino ratio. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art proprietary (e.g., GPT-5, Claude-4) and open-weight (e.g., Qwen3, Kimi-K2, GLM-4.5) models shows that while most LLM agents struggle to outperform the simple buy-and-hold baseline, several models demonstrate the potential to deliver higher returns and manage risk more effectively. These findings highlight both the challenges and opportunities in developing LLM-powered financial agents, showing that excelling at static financial knowledge tasks does not necessarily translate into successful trading strategies. We release StockBench as an open-source resource to support reproducibility and advance future research in this domain.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025 4

Empirical Study of Market Impact Conditional on Order-Flow Imbalance

In this research, we have empirically investigated the key drivers affecting liquidity in equity markets. We illustrated how theoretical models, such as Kyle's model, of agents' interplay in the financial markets, are aligned with the phenomena observed in publicly available trades and quotes data. Specifically, we confirmed that for small signed order-flows, the price impact grows linearly with increase in the order-flow imbalance. We have, further, implemented a machine learning algorithm to forecast market impact given a signed order-flow. Our findings suggest that machine learning models can be used in estimation of financial variables; and predictive accuracy of such learning algorithms can surpass the performance of traditional statistical approaches. Understanding the determinants of price impact is crucial for several reasons. From a theoretical stance, modelling the impact provides a statistical measure of liquidity. Practitioners adopt impact models as a pre-trade tool to estimate expected transaction costs and optimize the execution of their strategies. This further serves as a post-trade valuation benchmark as suboptimal execution can significantly deteriorate a portfolio performance. More broadly, the price impact reflects the balance of liquidity across markets. This is of central importance to regulators as it provides an all-encompassing explanation of the correlation between market design and systemic risk, enabling regulators to design more stable and efficient markets.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 17, 2020

A Robust Predictive Model for Stock Price Prediction Using Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing

Prediction of future movement of stock prices has been a subject matter of many research work. There is a gamut of literature of technical analysis of stock prices where the objective is to identify patterns in stock price movements and derive profit from it. Improving the prediction accuracy remains the single most challenge in this area of research. We propose a hybrid approach for stock price movement prediction using machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. We select the NIFTY 50 index values of the National Stock Exchange of India, and collect its daily price movement over a period of three years (2015 to 2017). Based on the data of 2015 to 2017, we build various predictive models using machine learning, and then use those models to predict the closing value of NIFTY 50 for the period January 2018 till June 2019 with a prediction horizon of one week. For predicting the price movement patterns, we use a number of classification techniques, while for predicting the actual closing price of the stock, various regression models have been used. We also build a Long and Short-Term Memory - based deep learning network for predicting the closing price of the stocks and compare the prediction accuracies of the machine learning models with the LSTM model. We further augment the predictive model by integrating a sentiment analysis module on twitter data to correlate the public sentiment of stock prices with the market sentiment. This has been done using twitter sentiment and previous week closing values to predict stock price movement for the next week. We tested our proposed scheme using a cross validation method based on Self Organizing Fuzzy Neural Networks and found extremely interesting results.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 9, 2019

Forecasting S&P 500 Using LSTM Models

With the volatile and complex nature of financial data influenced by external factors, forecasting the stock market is challenging. Traditional models such as ARIMA and GARCH perform well with linear data but struggle with non-linear dependencies. Machine learning and deep learning models, particularly Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, address these challenges by capturing intricate patterns and long-term dependencies. This report compares ARIMA and LSTM models in predicting the S&P 500 index, a major financial benchmark. Using historical price data and technical indicators, we evaluated these models using Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). The ARIMA model showed reasonable performance with an MAE of 462.1, RMSE of 614, and 89.8 percent accuracy, effectively capturing short-term trends but limited by its linear assumptions. The LSTM model, leveraging sequential processing capabilities, outperformed ARIMA with an MAE of 369.32, RMSE of 412.84, and 92.46 percent accuracy, capturing both short- and long-term dependencies. Notably, the LSTM model without additional features performed best, achieving an MAE of 175.9, RMSE of 207.34, and 96.41 percent accuracy, showcasing its ability to handle market data efficiently. Accurately predicting stock movements is crucial for investment strategies, risk assessments, and market stability. Our findings confirm the potential of deep learning models in handling volatile financial data compared to traditional ones. The results highlight the effectiveness of LSTM and suggest avenues for further improvements. This study provides insights into financial forecasting, offering a comparative analysis of ARIMA and LSTM while outlining their strengths and limitations.

  • 2 authors
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Jan 28, 2025

Stock Price Prediction Using Convolutional Neural Networks on a Multivariate Timeseries

Prediction of future movement of stock prices has been a subject matter of many research work. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach for stock price prediction using machine learning and deep learning-based methods. We select the NIFTY 50 index values of the National Stock Exchange of India, over a period of four years, from January 2015 till December 2019. Based on the NIFTY data during the said period, we build various predictive models using machine learning approaches, and then use those models to predict the Close value of NIFTY 50 for the year 2019, with a forecast horizon of one week. For predicting the NIFTY index movement patterns, we use a number of classification methods, while for forecasting the actual Close values of NIFTY index, various regression models are built. We, then, augment our predictive power of the models by building a deep learning-based regression model using Convolutional Neural Network with a walk-forward validation. The CNN model is fine-tuned for its parameters so that the validation loss stabilizes with increasing number of iterations, and the training and validation accuracies converge. We exploit the power of CNN in forecasting the future NIFTY index values using three approaches which differ in number of variables used in forecasting, number of sub-models used in the overall models and, size of the input data for training the models. Extensive results are presented on various metrics for all classification and regression models. The results clearly indicate that CNN-based multivariate forecasting model is the most effective and accurate in predicting the movement of NIFTY index values with a weekly forecast horizon.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 9, 2020

MiMIC: Multi-Modal Indian Earnings Calls Dataset to Predict Stock Prices

Predicting stock market prices following corporate earnings calls remains a significant challenge for investors and researchers alike, requiring innovative approaches that can process diverse information sources. This study investigates the impact of corporate earnings calls on stock prices by introducing a multi-modal predictive model. We leverage textual data from earnings call transcripts, along with images and tables from accompanying presentations, to forecast stock price movements on the trading day immediately following these calls. To facilitate this research, we developed the MiMIC (Multi-Modal Indian Earnings Calls) dataset, encompassing companies representing the Nifty 50, Nifty MidCap 50, and Nifty Small 50 indices. The dataset includes earnings call transcripts, presentations, fundamentals, technical indicators, and subsequent stock prices. We present a multimodal analytical framework that integrates quantitative variables with predictive signals derived from textual and visual modalities, thereby enabling a holistic approach to feature representation and analysis. This multi-modal approach demonstrates the potential for integrating diverse information sources to enhance financial forecasting accuracy. To promote further research in computational economics, we have made the MiMIC dataset publicly available under the CC-NC-SA-4.0 licence. Our work contributes to the growing body of literature on market reactions to corporate communications and highlights the efficacy of multi-modal machine learning techniques in financial analysis.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 12, 2025

Research on the Impact of Executive Shareholding on New Investment in Enterprises Based on Multivariable Linear Regression Model

Based on principal-agent theory and optimal contract theory, companies use the method of increasing executives' shareholding to stimulate collaborative innovation. However, from the aspect of agency costs between management and shareholders (i.e. the first type) and between major shareholders and minority shareholders (i.e. the second type), the interests of management, shareholders and creditors will be unbalanced with the change of the marginal utility of executive equity incentives.In order to establish the correlation between the proportion of shares held by executives and investments in corporate innovation, we have chosen a range of publicly listed companies within China's A-share market as the focus of our study. Employing a multi-variable linear regression model, we aim to analyze this relationship thoroughly.The following models were developed: (1) the impact model of executive shareholding on corporate innovation investment; (2) the impact model of executive shareholding on two types of agency costs; (3)The model is employed to examine the mediating influence of the two categories of agency costs. Following both correlation and regression analyses, the findings confirm a meaningful and positive correlation between executives' shareholding and the augmentation of corporate innovation investments. Additionally, the results indicate that executive shareholding contributes to the reduction of the first type of agency cost, thereby fostering corporate innovation investment. However, simultaneously, it leads to an escalation in the second type of agency cost, thus impeding corporate innovation investment.

  • 10 authors
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Sep 19, 2023

Stockformer: A Price-Volume Factor Stock Selection Model Based on Wavelet Transform and Multi-Task Self-Attention Networks

As the Chinese stock market continues to evolve and its market structure grows increasingly complex, traditional quantitative trading methods are facing escalating challenges. Particularly, due to policy uncertainty and the frequent market fluctuations triggered by sudden economic events, existing models often struggle to accurately predict market dynamics. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Stockformer, a price-volume factor stock selection model that integrates wavelet transformation and a multitask self-attention network, aimed at enhancing responsiveness and predictive accuracy regarding market instabilities. Through discrete wavelet transform, Stockformer decomposes stock returns into high and low frequencies, meticulously capturing long-term market trends and short-term fluctuations, including abrupt events. Moreover, the model incorporates a Dual-Frequency Spatiotemporal Encoder and graph embedding techniques to effectively capture complex temporal and spatial relationships among stocks. Employing a multitask learning strategy, it simultaneously predicts stock returns and directional trends. Experimental results show that Stockformer outperforms existing advanced methods on multiple real stock market datasets. In strategy backtesting, Stockformer consistently demonstrates exceptional stability and reliability across market conditions-whether rising, falling, or fluctuating-particularly maintaining high performance during downturns or volatile periods, indicating a high adaptability to market fluctuations. To foster innovation and collaboration in the financial analysis sector, the Stockformer model's code has been open-sourced and is available on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Eric991005/Multitask-Stockformer.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 22, 2023

Advancing Investment Frontiers: Industry-grade Deep Reinforcement Learning for Portfolio Optimization

This research paper delves into the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in asset-class agnostic portfolio optimization, integrating industry-grade methodologies with quantitative finance. At the heart of this integration is our robust framework that not only merges advanced DRL algorithms with modern computational techniques but also emphasizes stringent statistical analysis, software engineering and regulatory compliance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study integrating financial Reinforcement Learning with sim-to-real methodologies from robotics and mathematical physics, thus enriching our frameworks and arguments with this unique perspective. Our research culminates with the introduction of AlphaOptimizerNet, a proprietary Reinforcement Learning agent (and corresponding library). Developed from a synthesis of state-of-the-art (SOTA) literature and our unique interdisciplinary methodology, AlphaOptimizerNet demonstrates encouraging risk-return optimization across various asset classes with realistic constraints. These preliminary results underscore the practical efficacy of our frameworks. As the finance sector increasingly gravitates towards advanced algorithmic solutions, our study bridges theoretical advancements with real-world applicability, offering a template for ensuring safety and robust standards in this technologically driven future.

  • 2 authors
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Feb 27, 2024

Risk forecasting using Long Short-Term Memory Mixture Density Networks

This work aims to implement Long Short-Term Memory mixture density networks (LSTM-MDNs) for Value-at-Risk forecasting and compare their performance with established models (historical simulation, CMM, and GARCH) using a defined backtesting procedure. The focus was on the neural network's ability to capture volatility clustering and its real-world applicability. Three architectures were tested: a 2-component mixture density network, a regularized 2-component model (Arimond et al., 2020), and a 3-component mixture model, the latter being tested for the first time in Value-at-Risk forecasting. Backtesting was performed on three stock indices (FTSE 100, S&P 500, EURO STOXX 50) over two distinct two-year periods (2017-2018 as a calm period, 2021-2022 as turbulent). Model performance was assessed through unconditional coverage and independence assumption tests. The neural network's ability to handle volatility clustering was validated via correlation analysis and graphical evaluation. Results show limited success for the neural network approach. LSTM-MDNs performed poorly for 2017/2018 but outperformed benchmark models in 2021/2022. The LSTM mechanism allowed the neural network to capture volatility clustering similarly to GARCH models. However, several issues were identified: the need for proper model initialization and reliance on large datasets for effective learning. The findings suggest that while LSTM-MDNs provide adequate risk forecasts, further research and adjustments are necessary for stable performance.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 2, 2025

FNSPID: A Comprehensive Financial News Dataset in Time Series

Financial market predictions utilize historical data to anticipate future stock prices and market trends. Traditionally, these predictions have focused on the statistical analysis of quantitative factors, such as stock prices, trading volumes, inflation rates, and changes in industrial production. Recent advancements in large language models motivate the integrated financial analysis of both sentiment data, particularly market news, and numerical factors. Nonetheless, this methodology frequently encounters constraints due to the paucity of extensive datasets that amalgamate both quantitative and qualitative sentiment analyses. To address this challenge, we introduce a large-scale financial dataset, namely, Financial News and Stock Price Integration Dataset (FNSPID). It comprises 29.7 million stock prices and 15.7 million time-aligned financial news records for 4,775 S&P500 companies, covering the period from 1999 to 2023, sourced from 4 stock market news websites. We demonstrate that FNSPID excels existing stock market datasets in scale and diversity while uniquely incorporating sentiment information. Through financial analysis experiments on FNSPID, we propose: (1) the dataset's size and quality significantly boost market prediction accuracy; (2) adding sentiment scores modestly enhances performance on the transformer-based model; (3) a reproducible procedure that can update the dataset. Completed work, code, documentation, and examples are available at github.com/Zdong104/FNSPID. FNSPID offers unprecedented opportunities for the financial research community to advance predictive modeling and analysis.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 8, 2024

ResNLS: An Improved Model for Stock Price Forecasting

Stock prices forecasting has always been a challenging task. Although many research projects adopt machine learning and deep learning algorithms to address the problem, few of them pay attention to the varying degrees of dependencies between stock prices. In this paper we introduce a hybrid model that improves stock price prediction by emphasizing the dependencies between adjacent stock prices. The proposed model, ResNLS, is mainly composed of two neural architectures, ResNet and LSTM. ResNet serves as a feature extractor to identify dependencies between stock prices across time windows, while LSTM analyses the initial time-series data with the combination of dependencies which considered as residuals. In predicting the SSE Composite Index, our experiment reveals that when the closing price data for the previous 5 consecutive trading days is used as the input, the performance of the model (ResNLS-5) is optimal compared to those with other inputs. Furthermore, ResNLS-5 outperforms vanilla CNN, RNN, LSTM, and BiLSTM models in terms of prediction accuracy. It also demonstrates at least a 20% improvement over the current state-of-the-art baselines. To verify whether ResNLS-5 can help clients effectively avoid risks and earn profits in the stock market, we construct a quantitative trading framework for back testing. The experimental results show that the trading strategy based on predictions from ResNLS-5 can successfully mitigate losses during declining stock prices and generate profits in the periods of rising stock prices.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 1, 2023

Stock Price Prediction Using CNN and LSTM-Based Deep Learning Models

Designing robust and accurate predictive models for stock price prediction has been an active area of research for a long time. While on one side, the supporters of the efficient market hypothesis claim that it is impossible to forecast stock prices accurately, many researchers believe otherwise. There exist propositions in the literature that have demonstrated that if properly designed and optimized, predictive models can very accurately and reliably predict future values of stock prices. This paper presents a suite of deep learning based models for stock price prediction. We use the historical records of the NIFTY 50 index listed in the National Stock Exchange of India, during the period from December 29, 2008 to July 31, 2020, for training and testing the models. Our proposition includes two regression models built on convolutional neural networks and three long and short term memory network based predictive models. To forecast the open values of the NIFTY 50 index records, we adopted a multi step prediction technique with walk forward validation. In this approach, the open values of the NIFTY 50 index are predicted on a time horizon of one week, and once a week is over, the actual index values are included in the training set before the model is trained again, and the forecasts for the next week are made. We present detailed results on the forecasting accuracies for all our proposed models. The results show that while all the models are very accurate in forecasting the NIFTY 50 open values, the univariate encoder decoder convolutional LSTM with the previous two weeks data as the input is the most accurate model. On the other hand, a univariate CNN model with previous one week data as the input is found to be the fastest model in terms of its execution speed.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 21, 2020

An Investigation of the Structural Characteristics of the Indian IT Sector and the Capital Goods Sector: An Application of the R Programming in Time Series Decomposition and Forecasting

Time series analysis and forecasting of stock market prices has been a very active area of research over the last two decades. Availability of extremely fast and parallel architecture of computing and sophisticated algorithms has made it possible to extract, store, process and analyze high volume stock market time series data very efficiently. In this paper, we have used time series data of the two sectors of the Indian economy: Information Technology and Capital Goods for the period January 2009 till April 2016 and have studied the relationships of these two time series with the time series of DJIA index, NIFTY index and the US Dollar to Indian Rupee exchange rate. We establish by graphical and statistical tests that while the IT sector of India has a strong association with DJIA index and the Dollar to Rupee exchange rate, the Indian CG sector exhibits a strong association with the NIFTY index. We contend that these observations corroborate our hypotheses that the Indian IT sector is strongly coupled with the world economy whereas the CG sector of India reflects internal economic growth of India. We also present several models of regression between the time series which exhibit strong association among them. The effectiveness of these models have been demonstrated by very low values of their forecasting errors.

  • 2 authors
·
May 14, 2017

On Creating a Causally Grounded Usable Rating Method for Assessing the Robustness of Foundation Models Supporting Time Series

Foundation Models (FMs) have improved time series forecasting in various sectors, such as finance, but their vulnerability to input disturbances can hinder their adoption by stakeholders, such as investors and analysts. To address this, we propose a causally grounded rating framework to study the robustness of Foundational Models for Time Series (FMTS) with respect to input perturbations. We evaluate our approach to the stock price prediction problem, a well-studied problem with easily accessible public data, evaluating six state-of-the-art (some multi-modal) FMTS across six prominent stocks spanning three industries. The ratings proposed by our framework effectively assess the robustness of FMTS and also offer actionable insights for model selection and deployment. Within the scope of our study, we find that (1) multi-modal FMTS exhibit better robustness and accuracy compared to their uni-modal versions and, (2) FMTS pre-trained on time series forecasting task exhibit better robustness and forecasting accuracy compared to general-purpose FMTS pre-trained across diverse settings. Further, to validate our framework's usability, we conduct a user study showcasing FMTS prediction errors along with our computed ratings. The study confirmed that our ratings reduced the difficulty for users in comparing the robustness of different systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 17, 2025

MTMD: Multi-Scale Temporal Memory Learning and Efficient Debiasing Framework for Stock Trend Forecasting

The endeavor of stock trend forecasting is principally focused on predicting the future trajectory of the stock market, utilizing either manual or technical methodologies to optimize profitability. Recent advancements in machine learning technologies have showcased their efficacy in discerning authentic profit signals within the realm of stock trend forecasting, predominantly employing temporal data derived from historical stock price patterns. Nevertheless, the inherently volatile and dynamic characteristics of the stock market render the learning and capture of multi-scale temporal dependencies and stable trading opportunities a formidable challenge. This predicament is primarily attributed to the difficulty in distinguishing real profit signal patterns amidst a plethora of mixed, noisy data. In response to these complexities, we propose a Multi-Scale Temporal Memory Learning and Efficient Debiasing (MTMD) model. This innovative approach encompasses the creation of a learnable embedding coupled with external attention, serving as a memory module through self-similarity. It aims to mitigate noise interference and bolster temporal consistency within the model. The MTMD model adeptly amalgamates comprehensive local data at each timestamp while concurrently focusing on salient historical patterns on a global scale. Furthermore, the incorporation of a graph network, tailored to assimilate global and local information, facilitates the adaptive fusion of heterogeneous multi-scale data. Rigorous ablation studies and experimental evaluations affirm that the MTMD model surpasses contemporary state-of-the-art methodologies by a substantial margin in benchmark datasets. The source code can be found at https://github.com/MingjieWang0606/MDMT-Public.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 7, 2022