arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Temporal Leakage in Financial News NLP: A Multi-Architecture Audit with a Regime-Specific M&A Signal

The paper audits the impact of temporal leakage on financial-news direction prediction across 49,799 articles and 16 feature-model combinations, including TF‑IDF, MiniLM, FinBERT, and fine‑tuned RoBERTa‑large / DeBERTa‑v3‑large, as well as zero/few‑shot and LoRA probes of Llama‑3 and Qwen2.5. Random train‑test splits inflate MCC scores by 1.1× to 6.5×, with larger models and richer features showing greater gains, while end‑to‑end FinBERT fine‑tuning actually increases the gap. Only the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) category shows a positive locked‑test signal under near‑temporal chronological evaluation, with the signal localized to 2024‑2025 European‑tilted M&A semantics and not transferring to a 2009‑2020 U.S. corpus.

By Chenhao Xue, Raslen Guesmi, Siwei Feng, Yucheng Gong, Jacob Xavier Sundram, Jordan Pang, Lan Wang, Julian Kaljuvee
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

Can Language Models Learn to Forecast Stock Prices

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,...

By Jiacheng Guo, Suozhi Huang, Shuzhen Li, Yunlong Gao, Zerui Cheng, Jason Ge, Shushu Liang, Zihao Li, Hao Lu, Ming Yin, Shilong Liu, Jiashuo Liu, Xu Kuang, Mengdi Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Shortcut Learning in Legal Judgment Prediction: Empirical Evidence from the UK Employment Tribunal

arXiv:2607. 04261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is constrained by its reliance on post-hoc judicial materials, increasing the likelihood that models perform retrospective classification rather than true forecasting.

By Joe Watson, Joana Ribeiro de Faria, Marcus Tomalin, M{\aa}ns Magnusson, Huiyuan Xie, Hao Tian Yeung, Felix Steffek
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

When Does "Post-Call" Begin? An Availability Contract for Earnings-Call NLP Benchmarks

The paper introduces an Availability Contract to address timing mismatches in financial NLP benchmarks, requiring explicit declaration of input boundaries, evidence of availability, outcome start, and supported claims. Applying this framework to 552 earnings calls, the authors show that shifting from a call‑start proxy to a completion proxy changes return signs in 9.4% of calls and alters quintile rankings in 28.3%. In a volatility benchmark, moving target windows forward by one session increases mean squared error by 18.1‑21.4% while leaving point rankings unchanged, illustrating that labels and losses can be sensitive to the declared outcome clock.

By Xiaoyu Ma, Kelvin J. L. Koa, Yuncong Liu, Ke-Wei Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

TradingMoE: Routing the Right Experts in Evolving Markets

arXiv:2608. 11785v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for financial analysis and trading, but direct trading remains challenging because the predictive capabilities required can vary across assets, decision fields, and market conditions.

By Chang Zhou, Xingtong Yu, Minbin Huang, Zhennan Wu, Yuan Fang, Hong Cheng, Xinming Zhang