The Alpha Illusion: Reported Alpha from LLM Trading Agents Should Not Be Treated as Deployment EvidenceYuxuan Ye, Jun Han, Ao Hu et al.
End-to-end LLM trading agents have moved quickly from research curiosity to a small ecosystem of named systems, including FinCon, FinMem, TradingAgents, FinAgent, QuantAgent, and FLAG-Trader. Several of these report headline Sharpe ratios that would be material if read at face value on a deployment desk, and associated benchmarks such as FinBen report trading-task Sharpe statistics in the same range. The gap between architecture research and deployment claim has been crossed too freely on both sides of the academia--industry divide. We take a position on that gap: reported alpha from end-to-end LLM trading agents should not be treated as deployment evidence. Before such returns can support claims of deployable trading capability, they must survive structural validity tests for temporal integrity, real-world frictions, counterfactual robustness, predictive calibration, numerical execution, and multi-agent disaggregation. Current public evidence cannot yet distinguish robust predictive ability from temporal contamination, unmodeled frictions, short-window Sharpe uncertainty, narrative fitting, and parametric priors. The problem is not only evaluative but structural. Language confidence is not tradable probability, narrative reasoning is not numerical execution, and model priors may become undisclosed implicit factor exposures. We contribute a minimum reporting protocol suite, P1--P6, with tiered applicability by claim strength, and a conservative modular alternative that uses LLMs as auditable information interfaces upstream of independent calibration, risk, and execution modules. Code and reproduction harness: \url{https://github.com/hj1650782738/Trading}.
Reason Analogically via Cross-domain Prior Knowledge: An Empirical Study of Cross-domain Knowledge Transfer for In-Context LearningLe Liu, Zhiming Li, Jianzhi Yan et al.
Despite its success, existing in-context learning (ICL) relies on in-domain expert demonstrations, limiting its applicability when expert annotations are scarce. We posit that different domains may share underlying reasoning structures, enabling source-domain demonstrations to improve target-domain inference despite semantic mismatch. To test this hypothesis, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study of different retrieval methods to validate the feasibility of achieving cross-domain knowledge transfer under the in-context learning setting. Our results demonstrate conditional positive transfer in cross-domain ICL. We identify a clear example absorption threshold: beyond it, positive transfer becomes more likely, and additional demonstrations yield larger gains. Further analysis suggests that these gains stem from reasoning structure repair by retrieved cross-domain examples, rather than semantic cues. Overall, our study validates the feasibility of leveraging cross-domain knowledge transfer to improve cross-domain ICL performance, motivating the community to explore designing more effective retrieval approaches for this novel direction.\footnote{Our implementation is available at https://github.com/littlelaska/ICL-TF4LR}
Towards Effective In-context Cross-domain Knowledge Transfer via Domain-invariant-neurons-based RetrievalJianzhi Yan, Zhiming Li, Le Liu et al.
Large language models (LLMs) have made notable progress in logical reasoning, yet still fall short of human-level performance. Current boosting strategies rely on expert-crafted in-domain demonstrations, limiting their applicability in expertise-scarce domains, such as specialized mathematical reasoning, formal logic, or legal analysis. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of leveraging cross-domain demonstrating examples to boost the LLMs' reasoning performance. Despite substantial domain differences, many reusable implicit logical structures are shared across domains. In order to effectively retrieve cross-domain examples for unseen domains under investigation, in this work, we further propose an effective retrieval method, called domain-invariant neurons-based retrieval (\textbf{DIN-Retrieval}). Concisely, DIN-Retrieval first summarizes a hidden representation that is universal across different domains. Then, during the inference stage, we use the DIN vector to retrieve structurally compatible cross-domain demonstrations for the in-context learning. Experimental results in multiple settings for the transfer of mathematical and logical reasoning demonstrate that our method achieves an average improvement of 1.8 over the state-of-the-art methods \footnote{Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Leon221220/DIN-Retrieval}.
6.4LGNov 3, 2024
PSformer: Parameter-efficient Transformer with Segment Attention for Time Series ForecastingYanlong Wang, Jian Xu, Fei Ma et al.
Time series forecasting remains a critical challenge across various domains, often complicated by high-dimensional data and long-term dependencies. This paper presents a novel transformer architecture for time series forecasting, incorporating two key innovations: parameter sharing (PS) and Spatial-Temporal Segment Attention (SegAtt). We also define the time series segment as the concatenation of sequence patches from the same positions across different variables. The proposed model, PSformer, reduces the number of training parameters through the parameter sharing mechanism, thereby improving model efficiency and scalability. The introduction of SegAtt could enhance the capability of capturing local spatio-temporal dependencies by computing attention over the segments, and improve global representation by integrating information across segments. The combination of parameter sharing and SegAtt significantly improves the forecasting performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PSformer outperforms popular baselines and other transformer-based approaches in terms of accuracy and scalability, establishing itself as an accurate and scalable tool for time series forecasting.
3.3CPSep 10, 2025
FinZero: Launching Multi-modal Financial Time Series Forecast with Large Reasoning ModelYanlong Wang, Jian Xu, Fei Ma et al.
Financial time series forecasting is both highly significant and challenging. Previous approaches typically standardized time series data before feeding it into forecasting models, but this encoding process inherently leads to a loss of important information. Moreover, past time series models generally require fixed numbers of variables or lookback window lengths, which further limits the scalability of time series forecasting. Besides, the interpretability and the uncertainty in forecasting remain areas requiring further research, as these factors directly impact the reliability and practical value of predictions. To address these issues, we first construct a diverse financial image-text dataset (FVLDB) and develop the Uncertainty-adjusted Group Relative Policy Optimization (UARPO) method to enable the model not only output predictions but also analyze the uncertainty of those predictions. We then proposed FinZero, a multimodal pre-trained model finetuned by UARPO to perform reasoning, prediction, and analytical understanding on the FVLDB financial time series. Extensive experiments validate that FinZero exhibits strong adaptability and scalability. After fine-tuning with UARPO, FinZero achieves an approximate 13.48\% improvement in prediction accuracy over GPT-4o in the high-confidence group, demonstrating the effectiveness of reinforcement learning fine-tuning in multimodal large model, including in financial time series forecasting tasks.
4.1LGSep 25, 2025
VIFO: Visual Feature Empowered Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Cross-Modal FusionYanlong Wang, Hang Yu, Jian Xu et al.
Large time series foundation models often adopt channel-independent architectures to handle varying data dimensions, but this design ignores crucial cross-channel dependencies. Concurrently, existing multimodal approaches have not fully exploited the power of large vision models (LVMs) to interpret spatiotemporal data. Additionally, there remains significant unexplored potential in leveraging the advantages of information extraction from different modalities to enhance time series forecasting performance. To address these gaps, we propose the VIFO, a cross-modal forecasting model. VIFO uniquely renders multivariate time series into image, enabling pre-trained LVM to extract complex cross-channel patterns that are invisible to channel-independent models. These visual features are then aligned and fused with representations from the time series modality. By freezing the LVM and training only 7.45% of its parameters, VIFO achieves competitive performance on multiple benchmarks, offering an efficient and effective solution for capturing cross-variable relationships in