In multimodal representation learning, synergistic interactions between modalities not only provide complementary information but also create unique outcomes through specific interaction patterns that no single modality could achieve alone. Existing methods may struggle to effectively capture the full spectrum of synergistic information, leading to suboptimal performance in tasks where such interactions are critical. This is particularly problematic because synergistic information constitutes the fundamental value proposition of multimodal representation. To address this challenge, we introduce InfMasking, a contrastive synergistic information extraction method designed to enhance synergistic information through an Infinite Masking strategy. InfMasking stochastically occludes most features from each modality during fusion, preserving only partial information to create representations with varied synergistic patterns. Unmasked fused representations are then aligned with masked ones through mutual information maximization to encode comprehensive synergistic information. This infinite masking strategy enables capturing richer interactions by exposing the model to diverse partial modality combinations during training. As computing mutual information estimates with infinite masking is computationally prohibitive, we derive an InfMasking loss to approximate this calculation. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that InfMasking effectively enhances synergistic information between modalities. In evaluations on large-scale real-world datasets, InfMasking achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven benchmarks. Code is released at https://github.com/brightest66/InfMasking.

Optimizing stock selection through stock ranking is one of the critical but intricate tasks in quantitative trading areas because of the non-stationary dynamics and complicated interdependencies behind stock markets. Recent studies have made efforts to model historical market movements to enhance stock selection. However, they primarily borrowed the spirit of time series modeling and sought to build a deterministic paradigm without considering the uncertain fluctuations. In addition, some of these studies tailor to explore stock correlations from a predefined (e.g., binary) graph structure and use explicitly simple relations (such as first-order relations) to guide evolving interactions. Nevertheless, aggregating predefined but shallow relationships to collaborate with stock movements may affect selection generalizability and increase the risk of portfolio failure. This study introduces a novelRelational stock selection framework via probabilisticStateSpaceLearning (orRSSL) for stock selection. Specifically, RSSL first attempts to build a tree-based structure to explicitly expose higher-order relations in the stock market, primarily by discovering a hierarchical delineation of ties between stocks. Whereafter, it couples with time-varying movements via an attention mechanism to smoothly explore the interactive correlations among different stocks. Inspired by recent state space models (SSM) in probabilistic Bayesian learning, we devise a Probabilistic Kalman Network (PKNet) with uncertainty estimates to recursively simulate ever-changing stock volatility, enabling more promising return-risk trade-offs. The experimental results on several real-world stock market datasets demonstrate that RSSL outperforms several representative baseline methods by a significant margin.

Latent multi-view subspace clustering has been demonstrated to have desirable clustering performance. However, the original latent representation method vertically concatenates the data matrices from multiple views into a single matrix along the direction of dimensionality to recover the latent representation matrix, which may result in an incomplete information recovery. To fully recover the latent space representation, we in this paper propose an Enhanced Latent Multi-view Subspace Clustering (ELMSC) method. The ELMSC method involves constructing an augmented data matrix that enhances the representation of multi-view data. Specifically, we stack the data matrices from various views into the block-diagonal locations of the augmented matrix to exploit the complementary information. Meanwhile, the non-block-diagonal entries are composed based on the similarity between different views to capture the consistent information. In addition, we enforce a sparse regularization for the non-diagonal blocks of the augmented self-representation matrix to avoid redundant calculations of consistency information. Finally, a novel iterative algorithm based on the framework of Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is developed to solve the optimization problem for ELMSC. Particularly, we theoretically analyze the convergence of ELMSC in detail. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our proposed ELMSC is able to achieve higher clustering performance than some state-of-art multi-view clustering methods. Moreover, our experiments show that our method remains effective with randomly chosen parameters, demonstrating ELMSC’s practical potential.

In finance, it is believed that market information, namely, fundamentals and news information, affects stock movements. Such media-aware stock movements essentially comprise a multimodal problem. Two unique challenges arise in processing these multimodal data. First, information from one data mode will interact with information from other data modes. A common strategy is to concatenate various data modes into one compound vector; however, this strategy ignores the interactions among different modes. The second challenge is the heterogeneity of the data in terms of sampling time. Specifically, fundamental data consist of continuous values sampled at fixed time intervals, whereas news information emerges randomly. This heterogeneity can cause valuable information to be partially missing or can distort the feature spaces. In addition, the study of media-aware stock movements in previous work has focused on the one-to-one problem, in which it is assumed that news affects only the performance of the stocks mentioned in the reports. However, news articles also impact related stocks and cause stock co-movements. In this article, we propose a tensor-based event-driven LSTM model to address these challenges. Experiments performed on the China securities market demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art algorithms, including AZFinText, eMAQT, and TeSIA.

Stock market volatility is influenced by information release, dissemination, and public acceptance. With the increasing volume and speed of social media, the effects of Web information on stock markets are becoming increasingly salient. However, studies of the effects of Web media on stock markets lack both depth and breadth due to the challenges in automatically acquiring and analyzing massive amounts of relevant information. In this study, we systematically reviewed 229 research articles on quantifying the interplay between Web media and stock markets from the fields of Finance, Management Information Systems, and Computer Science. In particular, we first categorized the representative works in terms of media type and then summarized the core techniques for converting textual information into machine-friendly forms. Finally, we compared the analysis models used to capture the hidden relationships between Web media and stock movements. Our goal is to clarify current cutting-edge research and its possible future directions to fully understand the mechanisms of Web information percolation and its impact on stock markets from the perspectives of investors cognitive behaviors, corporate governance, and stock market regulation.

As an important category of clustering methods, subspace clustering algorithms have arisen particular attention during the last decade. Most subspace clustering algorithms are designed by first constructing a similarity matrix and then using spectral clustering algorithms to perform clustering. How to learn a suitable representation matrix to construct the similarity matrix is essential to the clustering performance. In most existing algorithms, the representation matrix is solved by norm-minimization, which commonly enforces the error matrix with nuclear norm or sparsity norm. However, these methods may fail to achieve satisfactory performance for real data contaminated by complex noise. To this end, we propose a novel robust subspace clustering method based on the Logarithmic Hyperbolic Cosine Function (LHCF). We theoretically analyze the grouping effect, as well as the convergence behavior, which illustrates that highly correlated samples can be grouped into the same cluster. Experimental results conducted on the Extended Yale B dataset show that the newly proposed algorithm yields better clustering performance compared with some advanced methods.