VitaBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents with Versatile Interactive Tasks in Real-world Applications

As LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed in real-life scenarios, existing benchmarks fail to capture their inherent complexity of handling extensive information, leveraging diverse resources, and managing dynamic user interactions. To address this gap, we introduce VitaBench, a challenging benchmark that evaluates agents on versatile interactive tasks grounded in real-world settings. Drawing from daily applications in food delivery, in-store consumption, and online travel services, VitaBench presents agents with the most complex life-serving simulation environment to date, comprising 66 tools. Through a framework that eliminates domain-specific policies, we enable flexible composition of these scenarios and tools, yielding 100 cross-scenario tasks (main results) and 300 single-scenario tasks. Each task is derived from multiple real user requests and requires agents to reason across temporal and spatial dimensions, utilize complex tool sets, proactively clarify ambiguous instructions, and track shifting user intent throughout multi-turn conversations. Moreover, we propose a rubric-based sliding window evaluator, enabling robust assessment of diverse solution pathways in complex environments and stochastic interactions. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that even the most advanced models achieve only 30% success rate on cross-scenario tasks, and less than 50% success rate on others. Overall, we believe VitaBench will serve as a valuable resource for advancing the development of AI agents in practical real-world applications. The code, dataset, and leaderboard are available at https://vitabench.github.io/

Neural Network-based Automatic Factor Construction

Instead of conducting manual factor construction based on traditional and behavioural finance analysis, academic researchers and quantitative investment managers have leveraged Genetic Programming (GP) as an automatic feature construction tool in recent years, which builds reverse polish mathematical expressions from trading data into new factors. However, with the development of deep learning, more powerful feature extraction tools are available. This paper proposes Neural Network-based Automatic Factor Construction (NNAFC), a tailored neural network framework that can automatically construct diversified financial factors based on financial domain knowledge and a variety of neural network structures. The experiment results show that NNAFC can construct more informative and diversified factors than GP, to effectively enrich the current factor pool. For the current market, both fully connected and recurrent neural network structures are better at extracting information from financial time series than convolution neural network structures. Moreover, new factors constructed by NNAFC can always improve the return, Sharpe ratio, and the max draw-down of a multi-factor quantitative investment strategy due to their introducing more information and diversification to the existing factor pool.

Alpha Discovery Neural Network based on Prior Knowledge

In financial automatic feature construction task, genetic programming is the state-of-the-art-technic. It uses reverse polish expression to represent features and then uses genetic programming to simulate the evolution process. With the development of deep learning, there are more powerful feature extractors for option. And we think that comprehending the relationship between different feature extractors and data shall be the key. In this work, we put prior knowledge into alpha discovery neural network, combined with different kinds of feature extractors to do this task. We find that in the same type of network, simple network structure can produce more informative features than sophisticated network structure, and it costs less training time. However, complex network is good at providing more diversified features. In both experiment and real business environment, fully-connected network and recurrent network are good at extracting information from financial time series, but convolution network structure can not effectively extract this information.