AI Research Papers

Model Optimization & Quantization7/9/2026

XALPHA: A Memory-Driven AI Quant Researcher for Hypothesis-to-Code Alpha Discovery

Financial markets are noisy, non-stationary, and high-dimensional, making it difficult to discover predictive and robust trading signals. Alpha discovery has evolved from manual factor design to machine learning, evolutionary search, and recent LLM-based frameworks, improving the efficiency of factor generation, search, and evaluation. However, existing methods still mostly automate isolated steps, rather than functioning as end-to-end quant researchers that can absorb external knowledge, close the hypothesis-to-code validation loop, and learn from accumulated discovery feedback. To fill this gap, we introduce XAlpha, a memory-driven AI Quant Researcher for continuous hypothesis-to-code alpha discovery. XAlpha maintains a multi-source research memory system that integrates report-grounded financial knowledge with discovery feedback from prior generations and research cycles. Guided by this memory system, a Macro Brain plans research themes and selects suitable Archetypes; a Micro Brain transforms the planned hypothesis pool into executable factor code and verifies ex-ante tri-alignment among the hypothesis idea, code logic, and financial plausibility; and a Cross Brain consolidates empirical outcomes into generation-level feedback, cycle-level summaries, and archetype-level research cues for future exploration. In this way, XAlpha turns alpha mining from isolated factor generation into a closed-loop research process that continuously reads, hypothesizes, implements, validates, reflects, and evolves. Experiments on CSI300 show that XAlpha achieves stronger overall alpha discovery performance than representative baselines.

AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

XALPHA: A Memory-Driven AI Quant Researcher for Hypothesis-to-Code Alpha Discovery

Financial markets are noisy, non-stationary, and high-dimensional, making it difficult to discover predictive and robust trading signals. Alpha discovery has evolved from manual factor design to machine learning, evolutionary search, and recent LLM-based frameworks, improving the efficiency of factor generation, search, and evaluation. However, existing methods still mostly automate isolated steps, rather than functioning as end-to-end quant researchers that can absorb external knowledge, close the hypothesis-to-code validation loop, and learn from accumulated discovery feedback. To fill this gap, we introduce XAlpha, a memory-driven AI Quant Researcher for continuous hypothesis-to-code alpha discovery. XAlpha maintains a multi-source research memory system that integrates report-grounded financial knowledge with discovery feedback from prior generations and research cycles. Guided by this memory system, a Macro Brain plans research themes and selects suitable Archetypes; a Micro Brain transforms the planned hypothesis pool into executable factor code and verifies ex-ante tri-alignment among the hypothesis idea, code logic, and financial plausibility; and a Cross Brain consolidates empirical outcomes into generation-level feedback, cycle-level summaries, and archetype-level research cues for future exploration. In this way, XAlpha turns alpha mining from isolated factor generation into a closed-loop research process that continuously reads, hypothesizes, implements, validates, reflects, and evolves. Experiments on CSI300 show that XAlpha achieves stronger overall alpha discovery performance than representative baselines.

AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

ArtMine: Discovering and Formalizing Artistic Processes

Understanding how artworks are created requires reasoning about the iterative decisions, material operations, and contextual influences that shape artistic production. While recent generative AI systems can synthesize artworks with high fidelity, they primarily model distributions over finished artifacts rather than the creative processes underlying their creation. In practice, artistic workflows are only partially documented through fragmented sources such as archival records, preparatory studies, correspondence, etc., making process-level understanding difficult to formalize computationally. In this work, we introduce ArtMine, a framework for discovering and formalizing artistic processes from heterogeneous historical evidence. Our approach synthesizes heterogeneous artwork evidence into a structured repository, from which a Peircean abductive agent infers evidence-grounded production steps. These steps are converted into a compositional graph and rendering prompt, then optimized through self-reflection over deviations between the generated and reference artworks. We provide a preliminary proof-of-concept case study using open-domain historical sources across multiple artists and artistic movements, demonstrating that fragmented documentary evidence can support coherent, interpretable, and auditable representations of artistic workflows. By modeling creative processes rather than only final artifacts, our work moves toward process-centred human-AI co-creativity systems that can support artistic interpretation, creative education, reflective collaboration, and computational studies of cultural production.

AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

ArtMine: Discovering and Formalizing Artistic Processes

Understanding how artworks are created requires reasoning about the iterative decisions, material operations, and contextual influences that shape artistic production. While recent generative AI systems can synthesize artworks with high fidelity, they primarily model distributions over finished artifacts rather than the creative processes underlying their creation. In practice, artistic workflows are only partially documented through fragmented sources such as archival records, preparatory studies, correspondence, etc., making process-level understanding difficult to formalize computationally. In this work, we introduce ArtMine, a framework for discovering and formalizing artistic processes from heterogeneous historical evidence. Our approach synthesizes heterogeneous artwork evidence into a structured repository, from which a Peircean abductive agent infers evidence-grounded production steps. These steps are converted into a compositional graph and rendering prompt, then optimized through self-reflection over deviations between the generated and reference artworks. We provide a preliminary proof-of-concept case study using open-domain historical sources across multiple artists and artistic movements, demonstrating that fragmented documentary evidence can support coherent, interpretable, and auditable representations of artistic workflows. By modeling creative processes rather than only final artifacts, our work moves toward process-centred human-AI co-creativity systems that can support artistic interpretation, creative education, reflective collaboration, and computational studies of cultural production.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

Texture Representations in Deep Vision Models: Comparing CNNs, Vision Transformers, and Human Perception

In computational vision science, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as a popular model of biological vision because of the alignment they can exhibit with neural and behavioral data in humans and animals. However, it remains unclear to what extent this alignment persists for visual tasks that extend beyond the canonical object recognition paradigm based on well defined semantic content. In this study, we diverge from the common object-centric view by focusing on another aspect of vision: texture perception. We consider textures of different complexity generated with three different algorithms from the same source images. Using a rank-based statistic, we quantify the information encoded in the internal representations of a CNN and three Vision Transformers (ViTs), and we compare the similarity of these representations to those inferred from human psychophysics data. We find that the representation of textures is aligned in different ViTs, but not between the ViTs and the CNN; that ViTs form similar representations for textures of different complexity; that human performance in recognizing textures can be better predicted from ViTs representations rather than CNN representations. Taken together, these results suggest that ViTs may capture more faithfully than CNNs how texture patterns are visually processed by humans, and that the representations of texture stimuli in computational models may be driven by the network architecture.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

Texture Representations in Deep Vision Models: Comparing CNNs, Vision Transformers, and Human Perception

In computational vision science, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as a popular model of biological vision because of the alignment they can exhibit with neural and behavioral data in humans and animals. However, it remains unclear to what extent this alignment persists for visual tasks that extend beyond the canonical object recognition paradigm based on well defined semantic content. In this study, we diverge from the common object-centric view by focusing on another aspect of vision: texture perception. We consider textures of different complexity generated with three different algorithms from the same source images. Using a rank-based statistic, we quantify the information encoded in the internal representations of a CNN and three Vision Transformers (ViTs), and we compare the similarity of these representations to those inferred from human psychophysics data. We find that the representation of textures is aligned in different ViTs, but not between the ViTs and the CNN; that ViTs form similar representations for textures of different complexity; that human performance in recognizing textures can be better predicted from ViTs representations rather than CNN representations. Taken together, these results suggest that ViTs may capture more faithfully than CNNs how texture patterns are visually processed by humans, and that the representations of texture stimuli in computational models may be driven by the network architecture.