History Is Not Enough: An Adaptive Dataflow System for Financial Time-Series Synthesis

In quantitative finance, the gap between training and real-world performance-driven by concept drift and distributional non-stationarity-remains a critical obstacle for building reliable data-driven systems. Models trained on static historical data often overfit, resulting in poor generalization in dynamic markets. The mantra "History Is Not Enough" underscores the need for adaptive data generation that learns to evolve with the market rather than relying solely on past observations. We present a drift-aware dataflow system that integrates machine learning-based adaptive control into the data curation process. The system couples a parameterized data manipulation module comprising single-stock transformations, multi-stock mix-ups, and curation operations, with an adaptive planner-scheduler that employs gradient-based bi-level optimization to control the system. This design unifies data augmentation, curriculum learning, and data workflow management under a single differentiable framework, enabling provenance-aware replay and continuous data quality monitoring. Extensive experiments on forecasting and reinforcement learning trading tasks demonstrate that our framework enhances model robustness and improves risk-adjusted returns. The system provides a generalizable approach to adaptive data management and learning-guided workflow automation for financial data.

Bayesian Robust Financial Trading with Adversarial Synthetic Market Data

Algorithmic trading relies on machine learning models to make trading decisions. Despite strong in-sample performance, these models often degrade when confronted with evolving real-world market regimes, which can shift dramatically due to macroeconomic changes-e.g., monetary policy updates or unanticipated fluctuations in participant behavior. We identify two challenges that perpetuate this mismatch: (1) insufficient robustness in existing policy against uncertainties in high-level market fluctuations, and (2) the absence of a realistic and diverse simulation environment for training, leading to policy overfitting. To address these issues, we propose a Bayesian Robust Framework that systematically integrates a macro-conditioned generative model with robust policy learning. On the data side, to generate realistic and diverse data, we propose a macro-conditioned GAN-based generator that leverages macroeconomic indicators as primary control variables, synthesizing data with faithful temporal, cross-instrument, and macro correlations. On the policy side, to learn robust policy against market fluctuations, we cast the trading process as a two-player zero-sum Bayesian Markov game, wherein an adversarial agent simulates shifting regimes by perturbing macroeconomic indicators in the macro-conditioned generator, while the trading agent-guided by a quantile belief network-maintains and updates its belief over hidden market states. The trading agent seeks a Robust Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium via Bayesian neural fictitious self-play, stabilizing learning under adversarial market perturbations. Extensive experiments on 9 financial instruments demonstrate that our framework outperforms 9 state-of-the-art baselines. In extreme events like the COVID, our method shows improved profitability and risk management, offering a reliable solution for trading under uncertain and shifting market dynamics.

FineFT: Efficient and Risk-Aware Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for Futures Trading

Futures are contracts obligating the exchange of an asset at a predetermined date and price, notable for their high leverage and liquidity and, therefore, thrive in the Crypto market. RL has been widely applied in various quantitative tasks. However, most methods focus on the spot and could not be directly applied to the futures market with high leverage because of 2 challenges. First, high leverage amplifies reward fluctuations, making training stochastic and difficult to converge. Second, prior works lacked self-awareness of capability boundaries, exposing them to the risk of significant loss when encountering new market state (e.g.,a black swan event like COVID-19). To tackle these challenges, we propose the Efficient and Risk-Aware Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for Futures Trading (FineFT), a novel three-stage ensemble RL framework with stable training and proper risk management. In stage I, ensemble Q learners are selectively updated by ensemble TD errors to improve convergence. In stage II, we filter the Q-learners based on their profitabilities and train VAEs on market states to identify the capability boundaries of the learners. In stage III, we choose from the filtered ensemble and a conservative policy, guided by trained VAEs, to maintain profitability and mitigate risk with new market states. Through extensive experiments on crypto futures in a high-frequency trading environment with high fidelity and 5x leverage, we demonstrate that FineFT outperforms 12 SOTA baselines in 6 financial metrics, reducing risk by more than 40% while achieving superior profitability compared to the runner-up. Visualization of the selective update mechanism shows that different agents specialize in distinct market dynamics, and ablation studies certify routing with VAEs reduces maximum drawdown effectively, and selective update improves convergence and performance.

Towards General Computer Control: A Multimodal Agent for Red Dead Redemption II as a Case Study

Despite the success in specific tasks and scenarios, existing foundation agents, empowered by large models (LMs) and advanced tools, still cannot generalize to different scenarios, mainly due to dramatic differences in the observations and actions across scenarios. In this work, we propose the General Computer Control (GCC) setting: building foundation agents that can master any computer task by taking only screen images (and possibly audio) of the computer as input, and producing keyboard and mouse operations as output, similar to human-computer interaction. The main challenges of achieving GCC are: 1) the multimodal observations for decision-making, 2) the requirements of accurate control of keyboard and mouse, 3) the need for long-term memory and reasoning, and 4) the abilities of efficient exploration and self-improvement. To target GCC, we introduce Cradle, an agent framework with six main modules, including: 1) information gathering to extract multi-modality information, 2) self-reflection to rethink past experiences, 3) task inference to choose the best next task, 4) skill curation for generating and updating relevant skills for given tasks, 5) action planning to generate specific operations for keyboard and mouse control, and 6) memory for storage and retrieval of past experiences and known skills. To demonstrate the capabilities of generalization and self-improvement of Cradle, we deploy it in the complex AAA game Red Dead Redemption II, serving as a preliminary attempt towards GCC with a challenging target. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to enable LMM-based agents to follow the main storyline and finish real missions in complex AAA games, with minimal reliance on prior knowledge or resources. The project website is at https://baai-agents.github.io/Cradle/.

A Multimodal Foundation Agent for Financial Trading: Tool-Augmented, Diversified, and Generalist

Financial trading is a crucial component of the markets, informed by a multimodal information landscape encompassing news, prices, and Kline charts, and encompasses diverse tasks such as quantitative trading and high-frequency trading with various assets. While advanced AI techniques like deep learning and reinforcement learning are extensively utilized in finance, their application in financial trading tasks often faces challenges due to inadequate handling of multimodal data and limited generalizability across various tasks. To address these challenges, we present FinAgent, a multimodal foundational agent with tool augmentation for financial trading. FinAgent's market intelligence module processes a diverse range of data-numerical, textual, and visual-to accurately analyze the financial market. Its unique dual-level reflection module not only enables rapid adaptation to market dynamics but also incorporates a diversified memory retrieval system, enhancing the agent's ability to learn from historical data and improve decision-making processes. The agent's emphasis on reasoning for actions fosters trust in its financial decisions. Moreover, FinAgent integrates established trading strategies and expert insights, ensuring that its trading approaches are both data-driven and rooted in sound financial principles. With comprehensive experiments on 6 financial datasets, including stocks and Crypto, FinAgent significantly outperforms 9 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of 6 financial metrics with over 36% average improvement on profit. Specifically, a 92.27% return (a 84.39% relative improvement) is achieved on one dataset. Notably, FinAgent is the first advanced multimodal foundation agent designed for financial trading tasks.

Market-GAN: Adding Control to Financial Market Data Generation with Semantic Context

Financial simulators play an important role in enhancing forecasting accuracy, managing risks, and fostering strategic financial decision-making. Despite the development of financial market simulation methodologies, existing frameworks often struggle with adapting to specialized simulation context. We pinpoint the challenges as i) current financial datasets do not contain context labels; ii) current techniques are not designed to generate financial data with context as control, which demands greater precision compared to other modalities; iii) the inherent difficulties in generating context-aligned, high-fidelity data given the non-stationary, noisy nature of financial data. To address these challenges, our contributions are: i) we proposed the Contextual Market Dataset with market dynamics, stock ticker, and history state as context, leveraging a market dynamics modeling method that combines linear regression and Dynamic Time Warping clustering to extract market dynamics; ii) we present Market-GAN, a novel architecture incorporating a Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for the controllable generation with context, an autoencoder for learning low-dimension features, and supervisors for knowledge transfer; iii) we introduce a two-stage training scheme to ensure that Market-GAN captures the intrinsic market distribution with multiple objectives. In the pertaining stage, with the use of the autoencoder and supervisors, we prepare the generator with a better initialization for the adversarial training stage. We propose a set of holistic evaluation metrics that consider alignment, fidelity, data usability on downstream tasks, and market facts. We evaluate Market-GAN with the Dow Jones Industrial Average data from 2000 to 2023 and showcase superior performance in comparison to 4 state-of-the-art time-series generative models.