Abstract:Agentic stock prediction systems make sequences of interdependent decisions (regime detection, pathway routing, reinforcement learning control) whose individual quality is hidden by aggregate metrics such as mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) or directional accuracy. We present a behavioral evaluation framework that addresses this gap. Behavioral traces logged at every autonomous decision point are grouped into five-day episodes and scored along six domain-specific dimensions (regime detection, routing, adaptation, risk calibration, strategy coherence, error recovery) by an ensemble of three large language model (LLM) judges (GPT 5.4, Claude 4.6 Opus, Gemini 3.1 Pro). Perturbation-based validation on 420 episodes yields targeted score drops of $-1.6$ to $-2.4$ on intended dimensions versus an average of $-0.32$ on the remaining five, with cross-model agreement up to Krippendorff's $α= 0.85$. The composite behavioral score, used here only for cross-episode reporting, correlates at $ρ= 0.72$ with realized 20-day Sharpe ratio from offline backtesting. Closing the loop, the framework converts deficient per-dimension scores into a credit-assigned penalty term added to the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) reward. Three short fine-tuning cycles, all confined to the validation period, produce on the held-out 2017-2025 test period a one-day MAPE reduction from 0.61% to 0.54% (an 11.5% relative reduction; $p<0.001$, Cohen's $d=0.31$), a directional accuracy increase from 71% to 74%, and an 18% Sharpe ratio improvement (95% bootstrap CI [8.2%, 27.4%]), with gains concentrated in high-volatility episodes where the original system was most behaviorally deficient. Results are from offline backtesting and do not address effects specific to live deployment.
Abstract:Stock markets exhibit regime-dependent behavior where prediction models optimized for stable conditions often fail during volatile periods. Existing approaches typically treat all market states uniformly or require manual regime labeling, which is expensive and quickly becomes stale as market dynamics evolve. This paper introduces an adaptive prediction framework that adaptively identifies deviations from normal market conditions and routes data through specialized prediction pathways. The architecture consists of three components: (1) an autoencoder trained on normal market conditions that identifies anomalous regimes through reconstruction error, (2) dual node transformer networks specialized for stable and event-driven market conditions respectively, and (3) a Soft Actor-Critic reinforcement learning controller that adaptively tunes the regime detection threshold and pathway blending weights based on prediction performance feedback. The reinforcement learning component enables the system to learn adaptive regime boundaries, defining anomalies as market states where standard prediction approaches fail. Experiments on 20 S&P 500 stocks spanning 1982 to 2025 demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves 0.68% MAPE for one-day predictions without the reinforcement controller and 0.59% MAPE with the full adaptive system, compared to 0.80% for the baseline integrated node transformer. Directional accuracy reaches 72% with the complete framework. The system maintains robust performance during high-volatility periods, with MAPE below 0.85% when baseline models exceed 1.5%. Ablation studies confirm that each component contributes meaningfully: autoencoder routing accounts for 36% relative MAPE degradation upon removal, followed by the SAC controller at 15% and the dual-path architecture at 7%.