Srikanth Jagabathula

Zijian Liu, Srikanth Jagabathula, Zhengyuan Zhou

The generalized smooth condition, $(L_{0},L_{1})$-smoothness, has triggered people's interest since it is more realistic in many optimization problems shown by both empirical and theoretical evidence. Two recent works established the $O(ε^{-3})$ sample complexity to obtain an $O(ε)$-stationary point. However, both require a large batch size on the order of $\mathrm{ploy}(ε^{-1})$, which is not only computationally burdensome but also unsuitable for streaming applications. Additionally, these existing convergence bounds are established only for the expected rate, which is inadequate as they do not supply a useful performance guarantee on a single run. In this work, we solve the prior two problems simultaneously by revisiting a simple variant of the STORM algorithm. Specifically, under the $(L_{0},L_{1})$-smoothness and affine-type noises, we establish the first near-optimal $O(\log(1/(δε))ε^{-3})$ high-probability sample complexity where $δ\in(0,1)$ is the failure probability. Besides, for the same algorithm, we also recover the optimal $O(ε^{-3})$ sample complexity for the expected convergence with improved dependence on the problem-dependent parameter. More importantly, our convergence results only require a constant batch size in contrast to the previous works.

Pranam Shetty, Abhisek Upadhayaya, Parth Mitesh Shah et al.

As financial institutions increasingly adopt Large Language Models (LLMs), rigorous domain-specific evaluation becomes critical for responsible deployment. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmark evaluating 23 state-of-the-art LLMs on the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level III exam - the gold standard for advanced financial reasoning. We assess both multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and essay-style responses using multiple prompting strategies including Chain-of-Thought and Self-Discover. Our evaluation reveals that leading models demonstrate strong capabilities, with composite scores such as 79.1% (o4-mini) and 77.3% (Gemini 2.5 Flash) on CFA Level III. These results, achieved under a revised, stricter essay grading methodology, indicate significant progress in LLM capabilities for high-stakes financial applications. Our findings provide crucial guidance for practitioners on model selection and highlight remaining challenges in cost-effective deployment and the need for nuanced interpretation of performance against professional benchmarks.

Srikanth Jagabathula, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Ashwin Venkataraman

We consider the problem of segmenting a large population of customers into non-overlapping groups with similar preferences, using diverse preference observations such as purchases, ratings, clicks, etc. over subsets of items. We focus on the setting where the universe of items is large (ranging from thousands to millions) and unstructured (lacking well-defined attributes) and each customer provides observations for only a few items. These data characteristics limit the applicability of existing techniques in marketing and machine learning. To overcome these limitations, we propose a model-based projection technique, which transforms the diverse set of observations into a more comparable scale and deals with missing data by projecting the transformed data onto a low-dimensional space. We then cluster the projected data to obtain the customer segments. Theoretically, we derive precise necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee asymptotic recovery of the true customer segments. Empirically, we demonstrate the speed and performance of our method in two real-world case studies: (a) 84% improvement in the accuracy of new movie recommendations on the MovieLens data set and (b) 6% improvement in the performance of similar item recommendations algorithm on an offline dataset at eBay. We show that our method outperforms standard latent-class and demographic-based techniques.