A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Modeling market dynamics with informed and uninformed traders and fads.
problem Optimizing market making in a market with fads, informed, and uninformed traders.
method Characterizing the optimal liquidity provision problem in a market with fads, informed, and uninformed traders, considering both complete and partial information.
result The price of liquidity is a function of the proportion of informed traders, and strategies ignoring fads underperform.
An optimal feedback controller for a given Markov decision process (MDP) can in principle be synthesized by value or policy iteration. However, if the system dynamics and the reward function are unknown, a learning agent must discover an optimal controller via direct interaction with the environment. Such interactive d…
In this paper, we study the convergence of generative adversarial networks (GANs) from the perspective of the informativeness of the gradient of the optimal discriminative function. We show that GANs without restriction on the discriminative function space commonly suffer from the problem that the gradient produced by …
The estimation of probabilities of default (PDs) for low default portfolios by means of upper confidence bounds is a well established procedure in many financial institutions. However, there are often discussions within the institutions or between institutions and supervisors about which confidence level to use for the…
We extend the theory of asymmetric information in mispricing models for stocks following geometric Brownian motion to constant relative risk averse investors. Mispricing follows a continuous mean--reverting Ornstein--Uhlenbeck process. Optimal portfolios and maximum expected log--linear utilities from terminal wealth f…
We propose a new family of optimization criteria for variational auto-encoding models, generalizing the standard evidence lower bound. We provide conditions under which they recover the data distribution and learn latent features, and formally show that common issues such as blurry samples and uninformative latent feat…
This paper studies an optimal trading problem that incorporates the trader's market view on the terminal asset price distribution and uninformative noise embedded in the asset price dynamics. We model the underlying asset price evolution by an exponential randomized Brownian bridge (rBb) and consider various prior dist…
We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with the added twist that the learner is assisted by a helpful teacher. More formally, we tackle the following algorithmic question: How could a teacher provide an informative sequence of demonstrations to an IRL learner to speed up the learning process? We p…
In this paper, the Kyle model of insider trading is extended by characterizing the trading volume with long memory and allowing the noise trading volatility to follow a general stochastic process. Under this newly revised model, the equilibrium conditions are determined, with which the optimal insider trading strategy,…
We consider a one-period Kyle (1985) framework where the insider can be subject to a penalty if she trades. We establish existence and uniqueness of equilibrium for virtually any penalty function when noise is uniform. In equilibrium, the demand of the insider and the price functions are in general non-linear and remai…
We consider trading against a hedge fund or large trader that must liquidate a large position in a risky asset if the market price of the asset crosses a certain threshold. Liquidation occurs in a disorderly manner and negatively impacts the market price of the asset. We consider the perspective of small investors whos…
Recent policy optimization approaches (Schulman et al., 2015a; 2017) have achieved substantial empirical successes by constructing new proxy optimization objectives. These proxy objectives allow stable and low variance policy learning, but require small policy updates to ensure that the proxy objective remains an accur…
Develops an anytime-valid framework for optimal policy identification from logged contextual bandit data.
problem Selecting the optimal policy from a candidate policy class while monitoring evidence continuously.
method Constructs a time-indexed set that retains the true optimal policy set uniformly over time.
result The procedure allows the analyst to monitor policy values, eliminate clearly suboptimal policies, and stop at data-dependent times without invalidating inference.
This paper studies optimal market making for large-tick assets in the presence of latency. We consider a random walk model for the asset price, and formulate the market maker's optimization problem using Markov Decision Processes (MDP). We characterize the value of an order and show that it plays the role of one-period…
Entropy regularization improves policy optimization in reinforcement learning.
problem Improving policy optimization in reinforcement learning.
method Entropy regularization is introduced to soften the greedy policy towards a more diverse softmax policy, leading to a continuously parameterized algorithm that interpolates between policy gradient and Q-learning.
result An intermediate algorithm can improve performance in reinforcement learning.
Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving encouraging empirical success, its underlying mathematical principle on {\em policy-distri…