Zhizhong Tan

Min Hu, Zhizhong Tan, Bin Liu et al.

This study aims to address the challenges of futures price prediction in high-frequency trading (HFT) by proposing a continuous learning factor predictor based on graph neural networks. The model integrates multi-factor pricing theories with real-time market dynamics, effectively bypassing the limitations of existing methods that lack financial theory guidance and ignore various trend signals and their interactions. We propose three heterogeneous tasks, including price moving average regression, price gap regression and change-point detection to trace the short-, intermediate-, and long-term trend factors present in the data. In addition, this study also considers the cross-sectional correlation characteristics of future contracts, where prices of different futures often show strong dynamic correlations. Each variable (future contract) depends not only on its historical values (temporal) but also on the observation of other variables (cross-sectional). To capture these dynamic relationships more accurately, we resort to the spatio-temporal graph neural network (STGNN) to enhance the predictive power of the model. The model employs a continuous learning strategy to simultaneously consider these tasks (factors). Additionally, due to the heterogeneity of the tasks, we propose to calculate parameter importance with mutual information between original observations and the extracted features to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting (CF) problem. Empirical tests on 49 commodity futures in China's futures market demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art models in terms of prediction accuracy. Not only does this research promote the integration of financial theory and deep learning, but it also provides a scientific basis for actual trading decisions.

Ningning Zhang, Chi Zhang, Zhizhong Tan et al.

Multi-hop question answering (QA) presents significant challenges for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), particularly in decomposing complex queries into reliable reasoning paths and managing error propagation. Existing RAG methods often suffer from deviations in reasoning paths and cumulative errors in intermediate steps, reducing the fidelity of the final answer. To address these limitations, we propose PAR-RAG (Plan-then-Act-and-Review RAG), a novel framework inspired by the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, to enhance both the accuracy and factual consistency in multi-hop question answering. Specifically, PAR-RAG selects exemplars matched by the semantic complexity of the current question to guide complexity-aware top-down planning, resulting in more precise and coherent multi-step reasoning trajectories. This design mitigates reasoning drift and reduces the risk of suboptimal path convergence, a common issue in existing RAG approaches. Furthermore, a dual-verification mechanism evaluates and corrects intermediate errors, ensuring that the reasoning process remains factually grounded. Experimental results on various QA benchmarks demonstrate that PAR-RAG outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness in both performance and reasoning robustness.

Zhizhong Tan, Jiexin Zheng, Xingxing Yang et al.

Due to the highly sensitive nature of certain data in cross-border sharing, collaborative cross-border recommendations and data sharing are often subject to stringent privacy protection regulations, resulting in insufficient data for model training. Consequently, achieving efficient cross-border business recommendations while ensuring privacy security poses a significant challenge. Although federated learning has demonstrated broad potential in collaborative training without exposing raw data, most existing federated learning-based GNN training methods still rely on federated averaging strategies, which perform suboptimally on highly heterogeneous graph data. To address this issue, we propose FedGRec, a privacy-preserving federated graph learning method for cross-border recommendations. FedGRec captures user preferences from distributed multi-domain data to enhance recommendation performance across all domains without privacy leakage. Specifically, FedGRec leverages collaborative signals from local subgraphs associated with users or items to enrich their representation learning. Additionally, it employs dynamic spatiotemporal modeling to integrate global and local user preferences in real time based on business recommendation states, thereby deriving the final representations of target users and candidate items. By automatically filtering relevant behaviors, FedGRec effectively mitigates noise interference from unreliable neighbors. Furthermore, through a personalized federated aggregation strategy, FedGRec adapts global preferences to heterogeneous domain data, enabling collaborative learning of user preferences across multiple domains. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that FedGRec consistently outperforms competitive single-domain and cross-domain baselines while effectively preserving data privacy in cross-border recommendations.

Zhizhong Tan, Jiexin Zheng, Kevin Qi Zhang et al.

The sharing of external data has become a strong demand of financial institutions, but the privacy issue has led to the difficulty of interconnecting different platforms and the low degree of data openness. To effectively solve the privacy problem of financial data in trans-border flow and sharing, to ensure that the data is available but not visible, to realize the joint portrait of all kinds of heterogeneous data of business organizations in different industries, we propose a Heterogeneous Federated Graph Neural Network (HFGNN) approach. In this method, the distribution of heterogeneous business data of trans-border organizations is taken as subgraphs, and the sharing and circulation process among subgraphs is constructed as a statistically heterogeneous global graph through a central server. Each subgraph learns the corresponding personalized service model through local training to select and update the relevant subset of subgraphs with aggregated parameters, and effectively separates and combines topological and feature information among subgraphs. Finally, our simulation experimental results show that the proposed method has higher accuracy performance and faster convergence speed than existing methods.