FinPILOT is a plugin inference‑time policy optimization framework that enhances pretrained reinforcement‑learning trading agents by leveraging a multi‑step price forecaster to generate imagined market trajectories. At each decision point, it optimizes the pretrained policy using the forecaster’s predicted price path before executing a trade, without altering the original training pipeline. Across five pretrained policies and multiple market settings, FinPILOT consistently improves total return and Sharpe ratio, with gains increasing as forecast accuracy improves.
arXiv:2605.28853v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Portfolio optimization in real-world financial markets is notoriously difficult due to non-stationarity, noisy data, and high transaction cos...
arXiv:2609.36914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training has been shown to significantly improve language models' performance on tasks with verifiable outcomes, including mathematical reasoning,...
PPO‑HRAP introduces a hybrid regime‑aware policy that blends Proximal Policy Optimization with a volatility‑conditioned regime prior to balance upside participation and drawdown control in trading. The agent uses market and portfolio features, rewards that combine log return, VIX‑conditioned drawdown penalty, exposure deviation, and turnover cost, and outputs a blended action between the PPO actor and the regime‑derived target exposure. In backtests on SPY (2020‑2022) it achieved a 27.62% total return, 8.48% annualized return, and reduced maximum drawdown from 34.10% to 18.47%, while maintaining stable performance across multiple seeds and ranking first on total return and Sharpe ratio in single‑run cross‑asset tests on QQQ and DIA.
arXiv:2608. 09880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Financial prediction typically relies on task-specific regression, ranking, or policy heads, separating the language model from the numerical object ultimately evaluated.
arXiv:2606. 08379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study addresses the optimal execution of large stock sell programs by introducing TT-DAC-PS (Twin-Target Deterministic Actor-Critic with Policy Smoothing), a deterministic actor-critic architecture that combines twin exponential-moving-average critic targets with pessimistic min backup, TD3-style target policy smoothing noise, delayed actor updates, and conservative Q regularisation to curb overestimation.
arXiv:2606. 00143v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Financial markets are inherently non-stationary, exhibiting frequent regime shifts and structural changes that render traditional Portfolio Management (PM) approaches ineffective.
The paper investigates whether a proximal policy optimisation (PPO) agent can learn to act as a broker in a continuous‑time broker‑trader game that has an analytically solved optimal strategy. By discretising the continuous‑time reward and validating the implementation, the authors show that a PPO agent with a feed‑forward neural network can approximate the reference action when there is no uninformed order flow, but struggles under stochastic uninformed flow, with critics failing to rank actions reliably. The study further demonstrates that a causal certainty‑equivalent controller based on observable history outperforms PPO under partial information, and that freezing the analytical policy and fine‑tuning PPO after a change in execution cost yields a measurable improvement. whyItMatters:"The analytical solution serves both as a diagnostic benchmark for RL performance and as a practical starting policy that can be adapted to changing market conditions, illustrating how theoretical finance models can guide and improve reinforcement learning in complex financial control tasks."
arXiv:2606. 09104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) frameworks for portfolio optimization have shown promise for their ability to learn allocation rules dynamically from market data.
The paper introduces a decision‑focused learning framework for mean‑variance portfolio optimization that embeds the Karush‑Kuhn‑Tucker optimality conditions of the lower‑level optimization into a single‑level learning problem. This approach preserves budget and short‑sale constraints while remaining tractable for standard nonlinear solvers. Experiments on real‑world ETF data across two asset universes demonstrate superior performance on multiple investment metrics and highlight the benefits of the proposed regularization.
arXiv:2607. 16028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents our system for Task 3 of the CLEF 2026 FinMMEval Lab, which requires daily long, flat, or short trading decisions for Bitcoin (BTC) and Tesla (TSLA) using news and historical market data.
arXiv:2607. 06121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate whether a model-free RL agent can identify and exploit price manipulation opportunities more effectively than a traditional model-based approach that assumes correct specification of the data-generating process but relies on noisy parameter estimates.
arXiv:2606. 04574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study aims to determine whether the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) as a specialized execution overlay can enhance pair trading in highly volatile cryptocurrency markets.