RNN

Is attention truly all we need? An empirical study of asset pricing in pretrained RNN sparse and global attention models ArXiv ID: 2508.19006 “View on arXiv” Authors: Shanyan Lai Abstract This study investigates the pretrained RNN attention models with the mainstream attention mechanisms such as additive attention, Luong’s three attentions, global self-attention (Self-att) and sliding window sparse attention (Sparse-att) for the empirical asset pricing research on top 420 large-cap US stocks. This is the first paper on the large-scale state-of-the-art (SOTA) attention mechanisms applied in the asset pricing context. They overcome the limitations of the traditional machine learning (ML) based asset pricing, such as mis-capturing the temporal dependency and short memory. Moreover, the enforced causal masks in the attention mechanisms address the future data leaking issue ignored by the more advanced attention-based models, such as the classic Transformer. The proposed attention models also consider the temporal sparsity characteristic of asset pricing data and mitigate potential overfitting issues by deploying the simplified model structures. This provides some insights for future empirical economic research. All models are examined in three periods, which cover pre-COVID-19 (mild uptrend), COVID-19 (steep uptrend with a large drawdown) and one year post-COVID-19 (sideways movement with high fluctuations), for testing the stability of these models under extreme market conditions. The study finds that in value-weighted portfolio back testing, Model Self-att and Model Sparse-att exhibit great capabilities in deriving the absolute returns and hedging downside risks, while they achieve an annualized Sortino ratio of 2.0 and 1.80 respectively in the period with COVID-19. And Model Sparse-att performs more stably than Model Self-att from the perspective of absolute portfolio returns with respect to the size of stocks’ market capitalization. ...

Multimodal Deep Reinforcement Learning for Portfolio Optimization ArXiv ID: 2412.17293 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that leverages multimodal data including historical stock prices, sentiment analysis, and topic embeddings from news articles, to optimize trading strategies for SP100 stocks. Building upon recent advancements in financial reinforcement learning, we aim to enhance the state space representation by integrating financial sentiment data from SEC filings and news headlines and refining the reward function to better align with portfolio performance metrics. Our methodology includes deep reinforcement learning with state tensors comprising price data, sentiment scores, and news embeddings, processed through advanced feature extraction models like CNNs and RNNs. By benchmarking against traditional portfolio optimization techniques and advanced strategies, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in delivering superior portfolio performance. Empirical results showcase the potential of our agent to outperform standard benchmarks, especially when utilizing combined data sources under profit-based reward functions. ...

Critical comparisons on deep learning approaches for foreign exchange rate prediction ArXiv ID: 2307.06600 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In a natural market environment, the price prediction model needs to be updated in real time according to the data obtained by the system to ensure the accuracy of the prediction. In order to improve the user experience of the system, the price prediction function needs to use the fastest training model and the model prediction fitting effect of the best network as a predictive model. We conduct research on the fundamental theories of RNN, LSTM, and BP neural networks, analyse their respective characteristics, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages to provide a reference for the selection of price-prediction models. ...