Robust Market Making via Adversarial Reinforcement Learning
This addresses the challenge of robustness in financial market-making for traders and institutions, offering an incremental advance by adapting existing models with ARL.
The paper tackled the problem of creating robust market-making agents by using adversarial reinforcement learning (ARL) to handle adversarial market conditions, resulting in risk-averse behavior without constraints and significant performance improvements across standard metrics.
We show that adversarial reinforcement learning (ARL) can be used to produce market marking agents that are robust to adversarial and adaptively-chosen market conditions. To apply ARL, we turn the well-studied single-agent model of Avellaneda and Stoikov [2008] into a discrete-time zero-sum game between a market maker and adversary. The adversary acts as a proxy for other market participants that would like to profit at the market maker's expense. We empirically compare two conventional single-agent RL agents with ARL, and show that our ARL approach leads to: 1) the emergence of risk-averse behaviour without constraints or domain-specific penalties; 2) significant improvements in performance across a set of standard metrics, evaluated with or without an adversary in the test environment, and; 3) improved robustness to model uncertainty. We empirically demonstrate that our ARL method consistently converges, and we prove for several special cases that the profiles that we converge to correspond to Nash equilibria in a simplified single-stage game.