Abstract:Economic World Models (EWMs) are generative economic models that simulate how economies evolve from within by modeling heterogeneous agents, their beliefs and actions, and the market and institutional mechanisms through which their interactions produce aggregate outcomes. This paper develops an implementation roadmap for building economic world models as generative engines in which heterogeneous agents act, interact, adapt, and co-evolve with markets and institutions, thereby producing economic dynamics from the inside. We organize EWM systems into a six-level capability ladder, from fixed rule-based agent worlds to adaptive and LLM-based agent worlds, self-evolving agents, evolving institutional worlds, and sim-to-real economic twins aligned with real observations. A systematic literature survey across these levels reveals that existing work remains concentrated in lower-level agent and simulation environments, while systems with self-evolving agents, endogenous institutions, persistent empirical alignment, and validated economic mechanisms remain rare. By translating the EWM agenda into an implementation blueprint, this paper aims to accelerate the development of the next generation of economic simulation environments that can serve as high-fidelity sandboxes for human decision-makers and as training, planning, evaluation, and safety substrates for AI agents. We release a curated paper list and related resources to support future research.
Abstract:Despite the impressive capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), they remain susceptible to hallucination, generating content inconsistent with the input image. Recent studies attribute this to the dominance of language priors over visual inputs and employ contrastive decoding methods to mitigate this dominance, but the mechanistic origin remains unexplored. We investigate the information flow through each transformer layer and find that attention modules consistently aggregate visual evidence, while FFN modules at critical layers act as the source of language priors. These priors can override visual evidence, causing correct predictions in intermediate layers to drift toward incorrect outputs. Based on this insight, we propose FADE (FFN Attenuation for DEcoding), a training-free method that attenuates FFN outputs to reduce language-prior dominance. Evaluations on POPE, CHAIR, and MME benchmarks across LLaVA-1.5, mPLUG-Owl2, and InstructBLIP show that FADE effectively mitigates hallucinations while preserving inference efficiency.
Abstract:Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their efficiency is limited by the large number of visual tokens, which introduces substantial computational overhead. Visual token pruning offers a natural solution, yet existing methods are imperfect: attention-based criteria tend to retain redundant tokens, while diversity-based criteria are often agnostic to user instructions. Even methods that combine multiple criteria still lack a principled formulation of the intrinsic objective of token pruning. In this paper, we revisit visual token pruning from a first-principles perspective and formulate it as constructing Token Optimal Preservation Sets. Through a top-down information-theoretic analysis, we identify three fundamental principles for effective token selection: Task Relevance, Information Coverage, and Semantic Diversity. Based on these principles, we propose TOPS, a training-free and model-agnostic pruning module that can be applied to various MLLMs. Extensive experiments on 7 MLLM backbones and 14 benchmarks demonstrate that TOPS outperforms prior methods under diverse pruning settings. Notably, on LLaVA-NeXT, TOPS removes 77.8% of visual tokens while preserving 100.0% and 100.6% performance on its 7B and 13B models, respectively, suggesting that pruning redundant visual tokens can sometimes mitigate hallucination and inspire future lightweight MLLM design.
Abstract:Prediction markets are markets for trading claims on future events, such as presidential elections, and their prices provide continuously updated signals of collective beliefs. In decentralized platforms such as Polymarket, the market lifecycle spans market creation, token registration, trading, oracle interaction, dispute, and final settlement, yet the corresponding data are fragmented across heterogeneous off-chain and on-chain sources. We present the first continuously maintained dataset suite for the full lifecycle of decentralized prediction markets, built on Polymarket. To address the challenges of large-scale cross-source integration, incomplete linkage, and continuous synchronization, we build a unified relational data system that integrates three canonical layers: market metadata, fill-level trading records, and oracle-resolution events, through identifier resolution, on-chain recovery, and incremental updates. The resulting dataset spans October 2020 to March 2026 and comprises more than 770 thousand market records, over 943 million fill records, and nearly 2 million oracle events. We describe the data model, collection pipeline, and consistency mechanisms that make the dataset reproducible and extensible, and we demonstrate its utility through descriptive analyses of market activity and two downstream case studies: NBA outcome calibration and CPI expectation reconstruction.
Abstract:We develop Structured-Knowledge-Informed Neural Networks (SKINNs), a unified estimation framework that embeds theoretical, simulated, previously learned, or cross-domain insights as differentiable constraints within flexible neural function approximation. SKINNs jointly estimate neural network parameters and economically meaningful structural parameters in a single optimization problem, enforcing theoretical consistency not only on observed data but over a broader input domain through collocation, and therefore nesting approaches such as functional GMM, Bayesian updating, transfer learning, PINNs, and surrogate modeling. SKINNs define a class of M-estimators that are consistent and asymptotically normal with root-N convergence, sandwich covariance, and recovery of pseudo-true parameters under misspecification. We establish identification of structural parameters under joint flexibility, derive generalization and target-risk bounds under distributional shift in a convex proxy, and provide a restricted-optimal characterization of the weighting parameter that governs the bias-variance tradeoff. In an illustrative financial application to option pricing, SKINNs improve out-of-sample valuation and hedging performance, particularly at longer horizons and during high-volatility regimes, while recovering economically interpretable structural parameters with improved stability relative to conventional calibration. More broadly, SKINNs provide a general econometric framework for combining model-based reasoning with high-dimensional, data-driven estimation.
Abstract:Do generative AI models, particularly large language models (LLMs), exhibit systematic behavioral biases in economic and financial decisions? If so, how can these biases be mitigated? Drawing on the cognitive psychology and experimental economics literatures, we conduct the most comprehensive set of experiments to date$-$originally designed to document human biases$-$on prominent LLM families across model versions and scales. We document systematic patterns in LLM behavior. In preference-based tasks, responses become more human-like as models become more advanced or larger, while in belief-based tasks, advanced large-scale models frequently generate rational responses. Prompting LLMs to make rational decisions reduces biases.




Abstract:We introduce a new class of tree-based models, P-Trees, for analyzing (unbalanced) panel of individual asset returns, generalizing high-dimensional sorting with economic guidance and interpretability. Under the mean-variance efficient framework, P-Trees construct test assets that significantly advance the efficient frontier compared to commonly used test assets, with alphas unexplained by benchmark pricing models. P-Tree tangency portfolios also constitute traded factors, recovering the pricing kernel and outperforming popular observable and latent factor models for investments and cross-sectional pricing. Finally, P-Trees capture the complexity of asset returns with sparsity, achieving out-of-sample Sharpe ratios close to those attained only by over-parameterized large models.
Abstract:We predict asset returns and measure risk premia using a prominent technique from artificial intelligence -- deep sequence modeling. Because asset returns often exhibit sequential dependence that may not be effectively captured by conventional time series models, sequence modeling offers a promising path with its data-driven approach and superior performance. In this paper, we first overview the development of deep sequence models, introduce their applications in asset pricing, and discuss their advantages and limitations. We then perform a comparative analysis of these methods using data on U.S. equities. We demonstrate how sequence modeling benefits investors in general through incorporating complex historical path dependence, and that Long- and Short-term Memory (LSTM) based models tend to have the best out-of-sample performance.