Xiangyu Li

Ruikang Ni, Da Xiao, Qingye Meng et al.

Compositional relational reasoning (CRR) is a hallmark of human intelligence, but we lack a clear understanding of whether and how existing transformer large language models (LLMs) can solve CRR tasks. To enable systematic exploration of the CRR capability of LLMs, we first propose a new synthetic benchmark called Generalized Associative Recall (GAR) by integrating and generalizing the essence of several tasks in mechanistic interpretability (MI) study in a unified framework. Evaluation shows that GAR is challenging enough for existing LLMs, revealing their fundamental deficiency in CRR. Meanwhile, it is easy enough for systematic MI study. Then, to understand how LLMs solve GAR tasks, we use attribution patching to discover the core circuits reused by Vicuna-33B across different tasks and a set of vital attention heads. Intervention experiments show that the correct functioning of these heads significantly impacts task performance. Especially, we identify two classes of heads whose activations represent the abstract notion of true and false in GAR tasks respectively. They play a fundamental role in CRR across various models and tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Caiyun-AI/GAR.

Xiaowen Ma, Shuning Ge, Fan Yang et al.

Transformer-based architectures dominate time series modeling by enabling global attention over all timestamps, yet their rigid 'one-size-fits-all' context aggregation fails to address two critical challenges in real-world data: (1) inherent lag effects, where the relevance of historical timestamps to a query varies dynamically; (2) anomalous segments, which introduce noisy signals that degrade forecasting accuracy. To resolve these problems, we propose the Temporal Mix of Experts (TMOE), a novel attention-level mechanism that reimagines key-value (K-V) pairs as local experts (each specialized in a distinct temporal context) and performs adaptive expert selection for each query via localized filtering of irrelevant timestamps. Complementing this local adaptation, a shared global expert preserves the Transformer's strength in capturing long-range dependencies. We then replace the vanilla attention mechanism in popular time-series Transformer frameworks (i.e., PatchTST and Timer) with TMOE, without extra structural modifications, yielding our specific version TimeExpert and general version TimeExpert-G. Extensive experiments on seven real-world long-term forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that TimeExpert and TimeExpert-G outperform state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/xwmaxwma/TimeExpert.

Xiangyu Li, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing et al.

As automated trading gains traction in the financial market, algorithmic investment strategies are increasingly prominent. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agent-based models exhibit promising potential in real-time market analysis and trading decisions, they still experience a significant -20% loss when confronted with rapid declines or frequent fluctuations, impeding their practical application. Hence, there is an imperative to explore a more robust and resilient framework. This paper introduces an innovative multi-agent system, HedgeAgents, aimed at bolstering system robustness via ``hedging'' strategies. In this well-balanced system, an array of hedging agents has been tailored, where HedgeAgents consist of a central fund manager and multiple hedging experts specializing in various financial asset classes. These agents leverage LLMs' cognitive capabilities to make decisions and coordinate through three types of conferences. Benefiting from the powerful understanding of LLMs, our HedgeAgents attained a 70% annualized return and a 400% total return over a period of 3 years. Moreover, we have observed with delight that HedgeAgents can even formulate investment experience comparable to those of human experts (https://hedgeagents.github.io/).

Xiangyu Li, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing et al.

LLM-based financial agents have attracted widespread excitement for their ability to trade like human experts. However, most systems exhibit a "profit mirage": dazzling back-tested returns evaporate once the model's knowledge window ends, because of the inherent information leakage in LLMs. In this paper, we systematically quantify this leakage issue across four dimensions and release FinLake-Bench, a leakage-robust evaluation benchmark. Furthermore, to mitigate this issue, we introduce FactFin, a framework that applies counterfactual perturbations to compel LLM-based agents to learn causal drivers instead of memorized outcomes. FactFin integrates four core components: Strategy Code Generator, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and Counterfactual Simulator. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses all baselines in out-of-sample generalization, delivering superior risk-adjusted performance.

Xiangyu Li, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing et al.

In this paper, our objective is to develop a multi-agent financial system that incorporates simulated trading, a technique extensively utilized by financial professionals. While current LLM-based agent models demonstrate competitive performance, they still exhibit significant deviations from real-world fund companies. A critical distinction lies in the agents' reliance on ``post-reflection'', particularly in response to adverse outcomes, but lack a distinctly human capability: long-term prediction of future trends. Therefore, we introduce QuantAgents, a multi-agent system integrating simulated trading, to comprehensively evaluate various investment strategies and market scenarios without assuming actual risks. Specifically, QuantAgents comprises four agents: a simulated trading analyst, a risk control analyst, a market news analyst, and a manager, who collaborate through several meetings. Moreover, our system incentivizes agents to receive feedback on two fronts: performance in real-world markets and predictive accuracy in simulated trading. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework excels across all metrics, yielding an overall return of nearly 300% over the three years (https://quantagents.github.io/).