Financial AI holds great promise for transforming modern finance, with the potential to support a wide range of tasks such as market forecasting, portfolio management, quantitative trading, and automated analysis. However, existing platforms remain limited in task coverage, lack robust multimodal data integration, and offer insufficient support for the training and deployment of large language models (LLMs). In response to these limitations, we present FinWorld, an all-in-one open-source platform that provides end-to-end support for the entire financial AI workflow, from data acquisition to experimentation and deployment. FinWorld distinguishes itself through native integration of heterogeneous financial data, unified support for diverse AI paradigms, and advanced agent automation, enabling seamless development and deployment. Leveraging data from 2 representative markets, 4 stock pools, and over 800 million financial data points, we conduct comprehensive experiments on 4 key financial AI tasks. These experiments systematically evaluate deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms, with particular emphasis on RL-based finetuning for LLMs and LLM Agents. The empirical results demonstrate that FinWorld significantly enhances reproducibility, supports transparent benchmarking, and streamlines deployment, thereby providing a strong foundation for future research and real-world applications. Code, tutorials, and paper full version are available at Github and Arxiv https://github.com/DVampire/FinWorld. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02292.

In financial trading, factor models are widely used to price assets and capture excess returns from mispricing. Recently, we have witnessed the rise of variational autoencoder-based latent factor models, which learn latent factors self-adaptively. While these models focus on modeling overall market conditions, they often fail to effectively capture the temporal patterns of individual stocks. Additionally, representing multiple factors as single values simplifies the model but limits its ability to capture complex relationships and dependencies. As a result, the learned factors are of low quality and lack diversity, reducing their effectiveness and robustness across different trading periods. To address these issues, we propose a Spatio-Temporal factOR Model based on dual vector quantized variational autoencoders, named STORM, which extracts features of stocks from temporal and spatial perspectives, then fuses and aligns these features at the fine-grained and semantic level, and represents the factors as multi-dimensional embeddings. The discrete codebooks cluster similar factor embeddings, ensuring orthogonality and diversity, which helps distinguish between different factors and enables factor selection in financial trading. To show the performance of the proposed factor model, we apply it to two downstream experiments: portfolio management on two stock datasets and individual trading tasks on six specific stocks. The extensive experiments demonstrate STORM's flexibility in adapting to downstream tasks and superior performance over baseline models.

Despite their success in specific scenarios, existing foundation agents still struggle to generalize across various virtual scenarios, mainly due to the dramatically different encapsulations of environments with manually designed observation and action spaces. To handle this issue, we propose the General Computer Control (GCC) setting to restrict foundation agents to interact with software through the most unified and standardized interface, i.e., using screenshots as input and keyboard and mouse actions as output. We introduce Cradle, a modular and flexible LMM-powered framework, as a preliminary attempt towards GCC. Enhanced by six key modules, Information Gathering, Self-Reflection, Task Inference, Skill Curation, Action Planning, and Memory, Cradle is able to understand input screenshots and output executable code for low-level keyboard and mouse control after high-level planning and information retrieval, so that Cradle can interact with any software and complete long-horizon complex tasks without relying on any built-in APIs. Experimental results show that Cradle exhibits remarkable generalizability and impressive performance across four previously unexplored commercial video games (Red Dead Redemption 2, Cities:Skylines, Stardew Valley and Dealer’s Life 2), five software applications (Chrome, Outlook, Feishu, Meitu and CapCut), and a comprehensive benchmark, OSWorld. With a unified interface to interact with any software, Cradle greatly extends the reach of foundation agents thus paving the way for generalist agents.

High-frequency trading (HFT) is using computer algorithms to make trading decisions in short time scales (e.g., second-level), which is widely used in the Cryptocurrency (Crypto) market, (e.g., Bitcoin). Reinforcement learning (RL) in financial research has shown stellar performance on many quantitative trading tasks. However, most methods focus on low-frequency trading, e.g., day-level, which cannot be directly applied to HFT because of two challenges. First, RL for HFT involves dealing with extremely long trajectories (e.g., 2.4 million steps per month), which is hard to optimize and evaluate. Second, the dramatic price fluctuations and market trend changes of Crypto make existing algorithms fail to maintain satisfactory performances. To tackle these challenges, we propose an Efficient hieArchical Reinforcement learNing method for High Frequency Trading (EarnHFT), a novel three-stage hierarchical RL framework for HFT. In stage I, we compute a Q-teacher, i.e., the optimal action value based on dynamic programming, for enhancing the performance and training efficiency of second level RL agents. In stage II, we construct a pool of diverse RL agents for different market trends, distinguished by return rates, where hundreds of RL agents are trained with different preferences of return rates and only a tiny fraction of them will be selected into the pool based on their profitability. In stage III, we train a minute-level router which dynamically picks a second-level agent from the pool to achieve stable performance across different markets. Through extensive experiments in various market trends on Crypto markets in a high-fidelity simulation trading environment, we demonstrate that EarnHFT significantly outperforms 6 state-of-art baselines in 6 popular financial criteria, exceeding the runner-up by 30% in profitability.

Despite the impressive performance across numerous tasks, large language models (LLMs) often fail in solving simple decision-making tasks due to the misalignment of the knowledge in LLMs with environments. On the contrary, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn policies from scratch, which makes them always align with environments but difficult to incorporate prior knowledge for efficient explorations. To narrow the gap, we propose TWOSOME, a novel general online framework that deploys LLMs as decision-making agents to efficiently interact and align with embodied environments via RL without requiring any prepared datasets or prior knowledge of the environments. Firstly, we query the joint probabilities of each valid action with LLMs to form behavior policies. Then, to enhance the stability and robustness of the policies, we propose two normalization methods and summarize four prompt design principles. Finally, we design a novel parameter-efficient training architecture where the actor and critic share one frozen LLM equipped with low-rank adapters (LoRA) updated by PPO. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate TWOSOME. i) TWOSOME exhibits significantly better sample efficiency and performance compared to the conventional RL method, PPO, and prompt tuning method, SayCan, in both classical decision-making environment, Overcooked, and simulated household environment, VirtualHome. ii) Benefiting from LLMs' open-vocabulary feature, TWOSOME shows superior generalization ability to unseen tasks. iii) Under our framework, there is no significant loss of the LLMs' original ability during online PPO finetuning.

Financial trading is a crucial component of the markets, informed by a multimodal information landscape encompassing news, prices, and Kline charts, and encompasses diverse tasks such as quantitative trading and high-frequency trading with various assets. While advanced AI techniques like deep learning and reinforcement learning are extensively utilized in finance, their application in financial trading tasks often faces challenges due to inadequate handling of multimodal data and limited generalizability across various tasks. To address these challenges, we present FinAgent, a multimodal foundational agent with tool augmentation for financial trading. FinAgent's market intelligence module processes a diverse range of data-numerical, textual, and visual-to accurately analyze the financial market. Its unique dual-level reflection module not only enables rapid adaptation to market dynamics but also incorporates a diversified memory retrieval system, enhancing the agent's ability to learn from historical data and improve decision-making processes. The agent's emphasis on reasoning for actions fosters trust in its financial decisions. Moreover, FinAgent integrates established trading strategies and expert insights, ensuring that its trading approaches are both data-driven and rooted in sound financial principles. With comprehensive experiments on 6 financial datasets, including stocks and Crypto, FinAgent significantly outperforms 12 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of 6 financial metrics with over 36% average improvement on profit. Specifically, a 92.27% return (a 84.39% relative improvement) is achieved on one dataset. Notably, FinAgent is the first advanced multimodal foundation agent designed for financial trading tasks.

Portfolio management (PM) is a fundamental financial trading task, which explores the optimal periodical reallocation of capitals into different stocks to pursue long-term profits. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown its potential to train profitable agents for PM through interacting with financial markets. However, existing work mostly focuses on fixed stock pools, which is inconsistent with investors' practical demand. Specifically, the target stock pool of different investors varies dramatically due to their discrepancy on market states and individual investors may temporally adjust stocks they desire to trade (e.g., adding one popular stocks), which lead to customizable stock pools (CSPs). Existing RL methods require to retrain RL agents even with a tiny change of the stock pool, which leads to high computational cost and unstable performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose EarnMore, a rEinforcement leARNing framework with Maskable stOck REpresentation to handle PM with CSPs through one-shot training in a global stock pool (GSP). Specifically, we first introduce a mechanism to mask out the representation of the stocks outside the target pool. Second, we learn meaningful stock representations through a self-supervised masking and reconstruction process. Third, a re-weighting mechanism is designed to make the portfolio concentrate on favorable stocks and neglect the stocks outside the target pool. Through extensive experiments on 8 subset stock pools of the US stock market, we demonstrate that EarnMore significantly outperforms 14 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of 6 popular financial metrics with over 40% improvement on profit. Code is available in PyTorch1.

The financial markets, which involve over \$90 trillion market capitals, attract the attention of innumerable profit-seeking investors globally. Recent explosion of reinforcement learning in financial trading (RLFT) research has shown stellar performance on many quantitative trading tasks. However, it is still challenging to deploy reinforcement learning (RL) methods into real-world financial markets due to the highly composite nature of this domain, which entails design choices and interactions between components that collect financial data, conduct feature engineering, build market environments, make investment decisions, evaluate model behaviors and offers user interfaces. Despite the availability of abundant financial data and advanced RL techniques, a remarkable gap still exists between the potential and realized utilization of RL in financial trading. In particular, orchestrating an RLFT project lifecycle poses challenges in engineering (i.e. hard to build), benchmarking (i.e. hard to compare) and usability (i.e. hard to optimize, maintain and use). To overcome these challenges, we introduce TradeMaster, a holistic open-source RLFT platform that serves as a i) software toolkit, ii) empirical benchmark, and iii) user interface. Our ultimate goal is to provide infrastructures for transparent and reproducible RLFT research and facilitate their real-world deployment with industry impact. TradeMaster will be updated continuously and welcomes contributions from both RL and finance communities.

Artificial intelligence has once again become the focus of attention in all fields, of which deep learning has brought a series of changes in the field of computer vision. In this paper, we propose the MUNet model, which is a more general convolutional neural network framework for medical image segmentation. The framework proposed in this paper is essentially a fully convolutional encoder-decoder network based on feature pyramids, in which the encoder and decoder are connected by skip connections. Not only is it suitable for image segmentation, but it can also identify categories of regions of interest. The full convolutional neural network architecture can implement multi-scale image input and prediction. We compared the MUNet and UNet models in cervical lymph node localization and benign and malignant diagnosis in ultrasound images. Experiments show that on our dataset, MUNet with multi-scale segmentation has achieved a Dice score improvement of 4.1% and an AUC score improvement of 8.1% compared to U-Net.