This study investigates large language model (LLM) -based multi-agent systems (MASs) as a promising approach to inventory management, which is a key component of supply chain management. Although these systems have gained considerable attention for their potential to address the challenges associated with typical inventory management methods, key uncertainties regarding their effectiveness persist. Specifically, it is unclear whether LLM-based MASs can consistently derive optimal ordering policies and adapt to diverse supply chain scenarios. To address these questions, we examine an LLM-based MAS with a fixed-ordering strategy prompt that encodes the stepwise processes of the problem setting and a safe-stock strategy commonly used in inventory management. Our empirical results demonstrate that, even without detailed prompt adjustments, an LLM-based MAS can determine optimal ordering decisions in a restricted scenario. To enhance adaptability, we propose a novel agent called AIM-RM, which leverages similar historical experiences through similarity matching. Our results show that AIM-RM outperforms benchmark methods across various supply chain scenarios, highlighting its robustness and adaptability.
We study non-stationary single-item, periodic-review inventory control problems in which the demand distribution is unknown and may change over time. We analyze how demand non-stationarity affects learning performance across inventory models, including systems with demand backlogging or lost-sales, both with and without lead times. For each setting, we propose an adaptive online algorithm that optimizes over the class of base-stock policies and establish performance guarantees in terms of dynamic regret relative to the optimal base-stock policy at each time step. Our results reveal a sharp separation across inventory models. In backlogging systems and lost-sales models with zero lead time, we show that it is possible to adapt to demand changes without incurring additional performance loss in stationary environments, even without prior knowledge of the demand distributions or the number of demand shifts. In contrast, for lost-sales systems with positive lead times, we establish weaker guarantees that reflect fundamental limitations imposed by delayed replenishment in combination with censored feedback. Our algorithms leverage the convexity and one-sided feedback structure of inventory costs to enable counterfactual policy evaluation despite demand censoring. We complement the theoretical analysis with simulation results showing that our methods significantly outperform existing benchmarks.
This paper proposes a machine learning-based framework for asset selection and portfolio construction, termed the Best-Path Algorithm Sparse Graphical Model (BPASGM). The method extends the Best-Path Algorithm (BPA) by mapping linear and non-linear dependencies among a large set of financial assets into a sparse graphical model satisfying a structural Markov property. Based on this representation, BPASGM performs a dependence-driven screening that removes positively or redundantly connected assets, isolating subsets that are conditionally independent or negatively correlated. This step is designed to enhance diversification and reduce estimation error in high-dimensional portfolio settings. Portfolio optimization is then conducted on the selected subset using standard mean-variance techniques. BPASGM does not aim to improve the theoretical mean-variance optimum under known population parameters, but rather to enhance realized performance in finite samples, where sample-based Markowitz portfolios are highly sensitive to estimation error. Monte Carlo simulations show that BPASGM-based portfolios achieve more stable risk-return profiles, lower realized volatility, and superior risk-adjusted performance compared to standard mean-variance portfolios. Empirical results for U.S. equities, global stock indices, and foreign exchange rates over 1990-2025 confirm these findings and demonstrate a substantial reduction in portfolio cardinality. Overall, BPASGM offers a statistically grounded and computationally efficient framework that integrates sparse graphical modeling with portfolio theory for dependence-aware asset selection.
Model soups are strange and strangely effective combinations of parameters. They take a model (the stock), fine-tune it into multiple models (the ingredients), and then mix their parameters back into one model (the soup) to improve predictions. While all known soups require supervised learning, and optimize the same loss on labeled data, our recipes for Self-\emph{Soup}ervision generalize soups to self-supervised learning (SSL). Our Self-Souping lets us flavor ingredients on new data sources, e.g. from unlabeled data from a task for transfer or from a shift for robustness. We show that Self-Souping on corrupted test data, then fine-tuning back on uncorrupted train data, boosts robustness by +3.5\% (ImageNet-C) and +7\% (LAION-C). Self-\emph{Soup}ervision also unlocks countless SSL algorithms to cook the diverse ingredients needed for more robust soups. We show for the first time that ingredients can differ in their SSL hyperparameters -- and more surprisingly, in their SSL algorithms. We cook soups of MAE, MoCoV3, and MMCR ingredients that are more accurate than any one single SSL ingredient.
The advent of the web has led to a paradigm shift in the financial relations, with the real-time dissemination of news, social discourse, and financial filings contributing significantly to the reshaping of financial forecasting. The existing methods rely on establishing relations a priori, i.e. predefining graphs to capture inter-stock relationships. However, the stock-related web signals are characterised by high levels of noise, asynchrony, and challenging to obtain, resulting in poor generalisability and non-alignment between the predefined graphs and the downstream tasks. To address this, we propose GAPNet, a Graph Adaptation Plug-in Network that jointly learns task-specific topology and representations in an end-to-end manner. GAPNet attaches to existing pairwise graph or hypergraph backbone models, enabling the dynamic adaptation and rewiring of edge topologies via two complementary components: a Spatial Perception Layer that captures short-term co-movements across assets, and a Temporal Perception Layer that maintains long-term dependency under distribution shift. Across two real-world stock datasets, GAPNet has been shown to consistently enhance the profitability and stability in comparision to the state-of-the-art models, yielding annualised cumulative returns of up to 0.47 for RT-GCN and 0.63 for CI-STHPAN, with peak Sharpe Ratio of 2.20 and 2.12 respectively. The plug-and-play design of GAPNet ensures its broad applicability to diverse GNN-based architectures. Our results underscore that jointly learning graph structures and representations is essential for task-specific relational modeling.
Forecasting future events is highly valuable in decision-making and is a robust measure of general intelligence. As forecasting is probabilistic, developing and evaluating AI forecasters requires generating large numbers of diverse and difficult questions, and accurately resolving them. Previous efforts to automate this laborious work relied on recurring data sources (e.g., weather, stocks), limiting diversity and utility. In this work, we present a system for generating and resolving high-quality forecasting questions automatically and at scale using LLM-powered web research agents. We use this system to generate 1499 diverse, real-world forecasting questions, and to resolve them several months later. We estimate that our system produces verifiable, unambiguous questions approximately 96% of the time, exceeding the rate of Metaculus, a leading human-curated forecasting platform. We also find that our system resolves questions at approximately 95% accuracy. We verify that forecasting agents powered by more intelligent LLMs perform better on these questions (Brier score of 0.134 for Gemini 3 Pro, 0.149 for GPT-5, and 0.179 for Gemini 2.5 Flash). Finally, we demonstrate how our system can be leveraged to directly improve forecasting, by evaluating a question decomposition strategy on a generated question set, yielding a significant improvement in Brier scores (0.132 vs. 0.141).
Automatically discovering formulaic alpha factors is a central problem in quantitative finance. Existing methods often ignore syntactic and semantic constraints, relying on exhaustive search over unstructured and unbounded spaces. We present AlphaCFG, a grammar-based framework for defining and discovering alpha factors that are syntactically valid, financially interpretable, and computationally efficient. AlphaCFG uses an alpha-oriented context-free grammar to define a tree-structured, size-controlled search space, and formulates alpha discovery as a tree-structured linguistic Markov decision process, which is then solved using a grammar-aware Monte Carlo Tree Search guided by syntax-sensitive value and policy networks. Experiments on Chinese and U.S. stock market datasets show that AlphaCFG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both search efficiency and trading profitability. Beyond trading strategies, AlphaCFG serves as a general framework for symbolic factor discovery and refinement across quantitative finance, including asset pricing and portfolio construction.
Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made significant progress in the past few years but have only been loosely inter-connected. Based on a workshop held in August 2025, we identify current and future areas of synergism between these two fields. We focus on the subareas of embodiment, language and communication, robotics, learning in humans and machines and Neuromorphic engineering to take stock of the progress made so far, and possible promising new future avenues. Overall, we advocate for the development of NeuroAI, a type of Neuroscience-informed Artificial Intelligence that, we argue, has the potential for significantly improving the scope and efficiency of AI algorithms while simultaneously changing the way we understand biological neural computations. We include personal statements from several leading researchers on their diverse views of NeuroAI. Two Strength-Weakness-Opportunities-Threat (SWOT) analyses by researchers and trainees are appended that describe the benefits and risks offered by NeuroAI.
Inventory planning for retail chains requires translating demand forecasts into ordering decisions, including asymmetric shortages and holding costs. The VN2 Inventory Planning Challenge formalizes this setting as a weekly decision-making cycle with a two-week product delivery lead time, where the total cost is defined as the shortage cost plus the holding cost. This report presents the winning VN2 solution: a two-stage predict-then-optimize pipeline that combines a single global multi-horizon forecasting model with a cost-aware ordering policy. The forecasting model is trained in a global paradigm, jointly using all available time series. A gradient-boosted decision tree (GBDT) model implemented in CatBoost is used as the base learner. The model incorporates stockout-aware feature engineering to address censored demand during out-of-stock periods, per-series scaling to focus learning on time-series patterns rather than absolute levels, and time-based observation weights to reflect shifts in demand patterns. In the decision stage, inventory is projected to the start of the delivery week, and a target stock level is calculated that explicitly trades off shortage and holding costs. Evaluated by the official competition simulation in six rounds, the solution achieved first place by combining a strong global forecasting model with a lightweight cost-aware policy. Although developed for the VN2 setting, the proposed approach can be extended to real-world applications and additional operational constraints.
The construction of function calling agents has emerged as a promising avenue for extending model capabilities. A major challenge for this task is obtaining high quality diverse data for training. Prior work emphasizes diversity in functions, invocation patterns, and interaction turns, yet linguistic diversity of requests and coverage of arguments (e.g., \texttt{city\_name}, \texttt{stock\_ticker}) remain underexplored. We propose a method that generates synthetic datasets via optimizing general-purpose diversity metrics across both queries and arguments, without relying on hand-crafted rules or taxonomies, making it robust to different usecases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique via both intrinsic and extrinsic testing, comparing it to SoTA data generation methods. We show a superiority over baselines in terms of diversity, while keeping comparable correctness. Additionally, when used as a training set, the model resulting from our dataset exhibits superior performance compared to analogous models based on the baseline data generation methods in out-of-distribution performance. In particular, we achieve an $7.4\%$ increase in accuracy on the BFCL benchmark compared to similar counterparts.