The financial industry leverages machine learning in more ways than just finding the right alpha signal. It grapples with supply chains, business processes, marketing, churn, fraud, and money laundering, all while maintaining compliance with the various regulatory frameworks it is beholden to. Due to the sheer volume of wealth being handled by the financial industry and its critical role in everyday life, it has been a lucrative target for a wide spectrum of ever-evolving bad actors. With each successive iteration of this workshop, we have attempted to capture the breadth of these actors - fraudsters, money launderers, market manipulators, and potentially nation-state-level risks. The emerging advances in Generative AI make this a particularly exciting time to host this workshop. GenAI offers groundbreaking approaches to handling the various data types prevalent in the financial sector. From a security point of view, bad actors are actively using Generative AI creatively to thwart conventional defenses (e.g. voice cloning, better synthetic identities), and this workshop's audience would benefit from commonly applicable defenses & best practices against such threats. Last but not the least, there is now an increasing willingness from the financial industry towards deeper engagement and data sharing with academia.

This workshop aims to explore the intersection of Generative AI with the rich tapestry of financial data types, seeking to uncover new methodologies and techniques that can enhance predictive analytics, fraud detection, and customer insights across the sector. By harnessing these advancements in AI, we can pave the way to not only understand customer behavior but also anticipate their needs more effectively, leading to superior customer outcomes and more personalized services. Our objective is to shed light on the challenges and opportunities presented by the diverse data formats in finance. We aim to bridge the gap between the dominance of traditional models for tabular data analysis and the emerging potential of Generative AI to revolutionize the treatment of time series, click streams, and other unstructured data forms.

The finance industry is constantly faced with an ever evolving set of challenges including credit card fraud, identity theft, network intrusion, money laundering, human trafficking, and illegal sales of firearms. There are also newly emerging threats such as fake news in financial media that can lead to distortions in trading strategies and investment decisions. In addition, traditional problems such as customer analytics, forecasting, and recommendations take on a unique flavor when applied to financial data. A number of new ideas are emerging to tackle all these problems including semi-supervised learning methods, deep learning algorithms, network/graph based solutions as well as linguistic approaches. These methods must often be able to work in real-time and be able handle large volumes of data. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss both the problems faced by the financial industry and potential solutions. We have invited regular papers, positional papers and extended abstracts of work in progress. We have also encouraged short papers from financial industry practitioners that introduce domain specific problems and challenges to academic researchers. This event is the fourth in a sequence of finance related workshops we have organized at KDD since 2017.

The Fisher kernel is a generic framework which combines the benefits of generative and discriminative approaches to pattern classification. In this contribution, we propose to apply this framework to handwritten word-spotting. Given a word image and a keyword generative model, the idea is to generate a vector which describes how the parameters of the keyword model should be modified to best fit the word image.This vector can then be used as the input of a discriminative classifier. We compare the performance of the proposed approach with that of a generative baseline on a challenging real-world dataset of customer letters. When the kernel used by the classifier is linear, the performance improvement is marginal but the proposed system is approximately 15 times faster than the baseline. If we use a non-linear kernel devised for this task, we obtain a 15% relative reduction of the error but the detector is approximately 15 times slower.

We propose a new method for handwritten word-spotting which does not require prior training or gathering examples for querying. More precisely, a model is trained “on the fly” with images rendered from the searched words in one or multiple computer fonts. To reduce the mismatch between the typed-text prototypes and the candidate handwritten images, we make use of: (i) local gradient histogram(LGH) features, which were shown to model word shapes robustly, and (ii) semi-continuous hidden Markov models(SC-HMM), in which the typed-text models are constrained to a “vocabulary” of handwritten shapes, thus learning a link between both types of data. Experiments show that the proposed method is effective in retrieving handwritten words, and the comparison to alternative methods reveals that the contribution of both the LGH features and the SCHMM is crucial. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work to address this issue in a non-trivial manner.