Temporal Generalization

Look-Ahead-Bench: a Standardized Benchmark of Look-ahead Bias in Point-in-Time LLMs for Finance ArXiv ID: 2601.13770 “View on arXiv” Authors: Mostapha Benhenda Abstract We introduce Look-Ahead-Bench, a standardized benchmark measuring look-ahead bias in Point-in-Time (PiT) Large Language Models (LLMs) within realistic and practical financial workflows. Unlike most existing approaches that primarily test inner lookahead knowledge via Q\&A, our benchmark evaluates model behavior in practical scenarios. To distinguish genuine predictive capability from memorization-based performance, we analyze performance decay across temporally distinct market regimes, incorporating several quantitative baselines to establish performance thresholds. We evaluate prominent open-source LLMs – Llama 3.1 (8B and 70B) and DeepSeek 3.2 – against a family of Point-in-Time LLMs (Pitinf-Small, Pitinf-Medium, and frontier-level model Pitinf-Large) from PiT-Inference. Results reveal significant lookahead bias in standard LLMs, as measured with alpha decay, unlike Pitinf models, which demonstrate improved generalization and reasoning abilities as they scale in size. This work establishes a foundation for the standardized evaluation of temporal bias in financial LLMs and provides a practical framework for identifying models suitable for real-world deployment. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/benstaf/lookaheadbench ...

Temporal Representation Learning for Stock Similarities and Its Applications in Investment Management ArXiv ID: 2407.13751 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In the era of rapid globalization and digitalization, accurate identification of similar stocks has become increasingly challenging due to the non-stationary nature of financial markets and the ambiguity in conventional regional and sector classifications. To address these challenges, we examine SimStock, a novel temporal self-supervised learning framework that combines techniques from self-supervised learning (SSL) and temporal domain generalization to learn robust and informative representations of financial time series data. The primary focus of our study is to understand the similarities between stocks from a broader perspective, considering the complex dynamics of the global financial landscape. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets with thousands of stocks and demonstrate the effectiveness of SimStock in finding similar stocks, outperforming existing methods. The practical utility of SimStock is showcased through its application to various investment strategies, such as pairs trading, index tracking, and portfolio optimization, where it leads to superior performance compared to conventional methods. Our findings empirically examine the potential of data-driven approach to enhance investment decision-making and risk management practices by leveraging the power of temporal self-supervised learning in the face of the ever-changing global financial landscape. ...