Discovering effective predictive signals, or ``alphas,'' from financial data with high dimensionality and extremely low signal-to-noise ratio remains a difficult open problem. Despite progress in deep learning, genetic programming, and, more recently, large language model (LLM)--based factor generation, existing approaches still explore only a narrow region of the vast alpha search space. Neural models tend to produce opaque and fragile patterns, while symbolic or formula-based methods often yield redundant or economically ungrounded expressions that generalize poorly. Although different in form, these paradigms share a key limitation: none can conduct broad, structured, and human-like exploration that balances logical consistency with creative leaps. To address this gap, we introduce the Cognitive Alpha Mining Framework (CogAlpha), which combines code-level alpha representation with LLM-driven reasoning and evolutionary search. Treating LLMs as adaptive cognitive agents, our framework iteratively refines, mutates, and recombines alpha candidates through multi-stage prompts and financial feedback. This synergistic design enables deeper thinking, richer structural diversity, and economically interpretable alpha discovery, while greatly expanding the effective search space. Experiments on A-share equities demonstrate that CogAlpha consistently discovers alphas with superior predictive accuracy, robustness, and generalization over existing methods. Our results highlight the promise of aligning evolutionary optimization with LLM-based reasoning for automated and explainable alpha discovery. All source code will be released.

Alpha factor mining is pivotal in quantitative investment for identifying predictive signals from complex financial data. While traditional formulaic alpha mining relies on human expertise, contemporary automated methods, such as those based on genetic programming or reinforcement learning, often struggle with search inefficiency or yield alpha factors that are difficult to interpret. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to overcome these limitations. Our framework leverages the LLM's instruction-following and reasoning capability to iteratively generate and refine symbolic alpha formulas within an MCTS-driven exploration. A key innovation is the guidance of MCTS exploration by rich, quantitative feedback from financial backtesting of each candidate factor, enabling efficient navigation of the vast search space. Furthermore, a frequent subtree avoidance mechanism is introduced to enhance search diversity and prevent formulaic homogenization, further improving performance. Experimental results on real-world stock market data demonstrate that our LLM-based framework outperforms existing methods by mining alphas with superior predictive accuracy and trading performance. The resulting formulas are also more amenable to human interpretation, establishing a more effective and efficient paradigm for formulaic alpha mining.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has successfully automated the complex process of mining formulaic alpha factors, for creating interpretable and profitable investment strategies. However, existing methods are hampered by the sparse rewards given the underlying Markov Decision Process. This inefficiency limits the exploration of the vast symbolic search space and destabilizes the training process. To address this, Trajectory-level Reward Shaping (TLRS), a novel reward shaping method, is proposed. TLRS provides dense, intermediate rewards by measuring the subsequence-level similarity between partially generated expressions and a set of expert-designed formulas. Furthermore, a reward centering mechanism is introduced to reduce training variance. Extensive experiments on six major Chinese and U.S. stock indices show that TLRS significantly improves the predictive power of mined factors, boosting the Rank Information Coefficient by 9.29% over existing potential-based shaping algorithms. Notably, TLRS achieves a major leap in computational efficiency by reducing its time complexity with respect to the feature dimension from linear to constant, which is a significant improvement over distance-based baselines.

Alpha mining, a critical component in quantitative investment, focuses on discovering predictive signals for future asset returns in increasingly complex financial markets. However, the pervasive issue of alpha decay, where factors lose their predictive power over time, poses a significant challenge for alpha mining. Traditional methods like genetic programming face rapid alpha decay from overfitting and complexity, while approaches driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their promise, often rely too heavily on existing knowledge, creating homogeneous factors that worsen crowding and accelerate decay. To address this challenge, we propose AlphaAgent, an autonomous framework that effectively integrates LLM agents with ad hoc regularizations for mining decay-resistant alpha factors. AlphaAgent employs three key mechanisms: (i) originality enforcement through a similarity measure based on abstract syntax trees (ASTs) against existing alphas, (ii) hypothesis-factor alignment via LLM-evaluated semantic consistency between market hypotheses and generated factors, and (iii) complexity control via AST-based structural constraints, preventing over-engineered constructions that are prone to overfitting. These mechanisms collectively guide the alpha generation process to balance originality, financial rationale, and adaptability to evolving market conditions, mitigating the risk of alpha decay. Extensive evaluations show that AlphaAgent outperforms traditional and LLM-based methods in mitigating alpha decay across bull and bear markets, consistently delivering significant alpha in Chinese CSI 500 and US S&P 500 markets over the past four years. Notably, AlphaAgent showcases remarkable resistance to alpha decay, elevating the potential for yielding powerful factors.

With the increasing maturity and expansion of the cryptocurrency market, understanding and predicting its price fluctuations has become an important issue in the field of financial engineering. This article introduces an innovative Genetic Algorithm-generated Alpha Sentiment (GAS) blending ensemble model specifically designed to predict Bitcoin market trends. The model integrates advanced ensemble learning methods, feature selection algorithms, and in-depth sentiment analysis to effectively capture the complexity and variability of daily Bitcoin trading data. The GAS framework combines 34 Alpha factors with 8 news economic sentiment factors to provide deep insights into Bitcoin price fluctuations by accurately analyzing market sentiment and technical indicators. The core of this study is using a stacked model (including LightGBM, XGBoost, and Random Forest Classifier) for trend prediction which demonstrates excellent performance in traditional buy-and-hold strategies. In addition, this article also explores the effectiveness of using genetic algorithms to automate alpha factor construction as well as enhancing predictive models through sentiment analysis. Experimental results show that the GAS model performs competitively in daily Bitcoin trend prediction especially when analyzing highly volatile financial assets with rich data.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the financial domain has opened new avenues for quantitative trading, particularly through the use of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the challenge of effectively synthesizing insights from diverse data sources and integrating both structured and unstructured data persists. This paper presents TradeExpert, a novel framework that employs a mix of experts (MoE) approach, using four specialized LLMs, each analyzing distinct sources of financial data, including news articles, market data, alpha factors, and fundamental data. The insights of these expert LLMs are further synthesized by a General Expert LLM to make a final prediction or decision. With specific prompts, TradeExpert can be switched between the prediction mode and the ranking mode for stock movement prediction and quantitative stock trading, respectively. In addition to existing benchmarks, we also release a large-scale financial dataset to comprehensively evaluate TradeExpert's effectiveness. Our experimental results demonstrate TradeExpert's superior performance across all trading scenarios.

Despite significant progress in deep learning for financial trading, existing models often face instability and high uncertainty, hindering their practical application. Leveraging advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-agent architectures, we propose a novel framework for quantitative stock investment in portfolio management and alpha mining. Our framework addresses these issues by integrating LLMs to generate diversified alphas and employing a multi-agent approach to dynamically evaluate market conditions. This paper proposes a framework where large language models (LLMs) mine alpha factors from multimodal financial data, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of market dynamics. The first module extracts predictive signals by integrating numerical data, research papers, and visual charts. The second module uses ensemble learning to construct a diverse pool of trading agents with varying risk preferences, enhancing strategy performance through a broader market analysis. In the third module, a dynamic weight-gating mechanism selects and assigns weights to the most relevant agents based on real-time market conditions, enabling the creation of an adaptive and context-aware composite alpha formula. Extensive experiments on the Chinese stock markets demonstrate that this framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple financial metrics. The results underscore the efficacy of combining LLM-generated alphas with a multi-agent architecture to achieve superior trading performance and stability. This work highlights the potential of AI-driven approaches in enhancing quantitative investment strategies and sets a new benchmark for integrating advanced machine learning techniques in financial trading can also be applied on diverse markets.

The goal of alpha factor mining is to discover indicative signals of investment opportunities from the historical financial market data of assets. Deep learning based alpha factor mining methods have shown to be powerful, which, however, lack of the interpretability, making them unacceptable in the risk-sensitive real markets. Alpha factors in formulaic forms are more interpretable and therefore favored by market participants, while the search space is complex and powerful explorative methods are urged. Recently, a promising framework is proposed for generating formulaic alpha factors using deep reinforcement learning, and quickly gained research focuses from both academia and industries. This paper first argues that the originally employed policy training method, i.e., Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), faces several important issues in the context of alpha factors mining, making it ineffective to explore the search space of the formula. Herein, a novel reinforcement learning based on the well-known REINFORCE algorithm is proposed. Given that the underlying state transition function adheres to the Dirac distribution, the Markov Decision Process within this framework exhibit minimal environmental variability, making REINFORCE algorithm more appropriate than PPO. A new dedicated baseline is designed to theoretically reduce the commonly suffered high variance of REINFORCE. Moreover, the information ratio is introduced as a reward shaping mechanism to encourage the generation of steady alpha factors that can better adapt to changes in market volatility. Experimental evaluations on various real assets data show that the proposed algorithm can increase the correlation with asset returns by 3.83%, and a stronger ability to obtain excess returns compared to the latest alpha factors mining methods, which meets the theoretical results well.

The variability and low signal-to-noise ratio in financial data, combined with the necessity for interpretability, make the alpha factor mining workflow a crucial component of quantitative investment. Transitioning from early manual extraction to genetic programming, the most advanced approach in this domain currently employs reinforcement learning to mine a set of combination factors with fixed weights. However, the performance of resultant alpha factors exhibits inconsistency, and the inflexibility of fixed factor weights proves insufficient in adapting to the dynamic nature of financial markets. To address this issue, this paper proposes a two-stage formulaic alpha generating framework AlphaForge, for alpha factor mining and factor combination. This framework employs a generative-predictive neural network to generate factors, leveraging the robust spatial exploration capabilities inherent in deep learning while concurrently preserving diversity. The combination model within the framework incorporates the temporal performance of factors for selection and dynamically adjusts the weights assigned to each component alpha factor. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms contemporary benchmarks in formulaic alpha factor mining. Furthermore, our model exhibits a notable enhancement in portfolio returns within the realm of quantitative investment.

Recently, we introduced a new paradigm for alpha mining in the realm of quantitative investment, developing a new interactive alpha mining system framework, Alpha-GPT. This system is centered on iterative Human-AI interaction based on large language models, introducing a Human-in-the-Loop approach to alpha discovery. In this paper, we present the next-generation Alpha-GPT 2.0 \footnote{Draft. Work in progress}, a quantitative investment framework that further encompasses crucial modeling and analysis phases in quantitative investment. This framework emphasizes the iterative, interactive research between humans and AI, embodying a Human-in-the-Loop strategy throughout the entire quantitative investment pipeline. By assimilating the insights of human researchers into the systematic alpha research process, we effectively leverage the Human-in-the-Loop approach, enhancing the efficiency and precision of quantitative investment research.