Agentic Trading: When LLM Agents Meet Financial Markets

A growing body of work explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be embedded in trading systems as agents that perceive market information, retrieve context, reason about decisions, emit tradable actions, and adapt under market feedback. This paper reframes LLM-based trading agents as expert-system decision pipelines and presents an audit-oriented evidence map of 77 included studies in a protocol-coded snapshot screened through 2026-03-09. A primary empirical subset (n=19) satisfies the minimum boundary of Action Output plus Closed-Loop Evaluation; the remaining 58 included studies are retained as background and design context. The central empirical finding is protocol incomparability: within the primary subset, only 2/19 studies report extractable time-consistent split protocols, 1/19 reports an explicit transaction-cost model, 1/19 documents universe or survivorship handling, 11/19 report execution timing or semantics, 15/19 are coded as R0, and no study reaches R3 reproducibility. We therefore use Architecture-Capability-Adaptation as a working analytical lens rather than a validated taxonomy, and we foreground the evidence ledger, reproducibility audit, and reporting checklist as the main contributions. The resulting survey shows that architectural experimentation is expanding rapidly, while comparable evaluation protocols, execution semantics, and reproducible artifacts remain the field's immediate bottlenecks.

MemLens: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Memory in Large Vision-Language Models

Memory is essential for large vision-language models (LVLMs) to handle long, multimodal interactions, with two method directions providing this capability: long-context LVLMs and memory-augmented agents. However, no existing benchmark conducts a systematic comparison of the two on questions that genuinely require multimodal evidence. To close this gap, we introduce MEMLENS, a comprehensive benchmark for memory in multimodal multi-session conversations, comprising 789 questions across five memory abilities (information extraction, multi-session reasoning, temporal reasoning, knowledge update, and answer refusal) at four standard context lengths (32K-256K tokens) under a cross-modal token-counting scheme. An image-ablation study confirms that solving MEMLENS requires visual evidence: removing evidence images drops two frontier LVLMs below 2% accuracy on the 80.4% of questions whose evidence includes images. Evaluating 27 LVLMs and 7 memory-augmented agents, we find that long-context LVLMs achieve high short-context accuracy through direct visual grounding but degrade as conversations grow, whereas memory agents are length-stable but lose visual fidelity under storage-time compression. Multi-session reasoning caps most systems below 30%, and neither approach alone solves the task. These results motivate hybrid architectures that combine long-context attention with structured multimodal retrieval. Our code is available at https://github.com/xrenaf/MEMLENS.

Code-as-Room: Generating 3D Rooms from Top-Down View Images via Agentic Code Synthesis

Designing realistic and functional 3D indoor rooms is essential for a wide range of applications, including interior design, virtual reality, gaming, and embodied AI. While recent MLLM-based approaches have shown great potential for 3D room synthesis from textual descriptions or reference images, text-based methods struggle to capture precise spatial information, and existing image-conditioned agents suffer from instability and infinite looping when tasked with holistic room generation from top-down views. To address these limitations, we propose Code-as-Room, an MLLM-based agentic framework equipped with a structured execution harness, which represents 3D rooms with Blender codes. Given a top-down room image, the framework parses the reference image to extract scene elements and their spatial relationships, and synthesizes executable Blender code for geometry, materials, and lighting in a principled, multi-stage pipeline. A cross-stage memory module is maintained throughout to mitigate context forgetting inherent to existing agent-based frameworks. We further introduce a dedicated benchmark for code-based 3D room synthesis, encompassing various evaluation protocols. Based on our benchmark, comprehensive comparisons against existing agent-based methods are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed execution harness.

CMAG: Concept-Scaffolded Retrieval for Marketplace Avatar Generation

Metaverse platforms rely on creator-driven marketplaces where avatars are assembled from discrete, taxonomy-labeled 3D assets (e.g., tops, bottoms, shoes, accessories) under strict category and topology constraints. While users increasingly expect free-form text control, text-only retrieval is brittle: natural language is ambiguous with respect to platform taxonomies, metadata is often noisy or informal, and independently retrieved components can be stylistically inconsistent or geometrically incompatible. We propose \textbf{CMAG}, a concept-scaffolded retrieval and verified composition framework for marketplace avatar generation. Given a prompt, CMAG first synthesizes an intermediate 3D concept scaffold that disambiguates intent beyond text by providing global spatial and stylistic context. In parallel, a view-aware part discovery module extracts localized visual evidence via prompt decomposition and text-grounded segmentation. A prompt-conditioned taxonomy router enforces category coverage and resolves semantic-to-taxonomic mismatch, after which a hybrid category-wise retriever combines part-based fusion with a concept-residual fallback using feature suppression. Finally, an agentic vision--language model filters and re-ranks candidates across categories and drives an iterative verification loop to assemble prompt-faithful, topologically consistent avatars from catalog assets. We evaluate CMAG on diverse compositional prompts and demonstrate improved retrieval robustness and compositional correctness compared to strong baselines, highlighting the importance of 3D concept scaffolding under prompt ambiguity.

View-Aware Semantic Alignment for Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification

Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification (AGPReID) remains highly challenging due to drastic viewpoint variations between drones and fixed cameras. Existing methods typically follow a view-invariant paradigm, aligning shared features across views to achieve robustness. However, view-invariant inherently enforces part-level alignment, which ignores view-specific cues and discriminative identity information. To this end, this work proposes ViSA (View-aware Semantic Alignment), a view-aware framework that achieves cross-view semantic consistency containing an Expert-driven Token Generation Module (ETGM) and a Dual-branch Local Fusion Module (DLFM). Technically, the former constructs a set of view-aware experts to generate adaptive semantic queries that perceive viewpoint-specific patterns, while the latter leverages graph reasoning to extract and align local regions responsive to different experts. Extensive experiments on three AGPReID benchmarks including AG-ReID.v2, CARGO and LAGPeR demonstrate that ViSA consistently achieves superior performance, with a notable 10.06\% mAP improvement on the challenging CARGO cross-view protocol. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/Cat-Zero/ViSA}{https://github.com/Cat-Zero/ViSA}.

Dual Hierarchical Dialogue Policy Learning for Legal Inquisitive Conversational Agents

Most existing dialogue systems are user-driven, primarily designed to fulfill user requests. However, in many critical real-world scenarios, a conversational agent must proactively extract information to achieve its own objectives rather than merely respond. To address this gap, we introduce \emph{Inquisitive Conversational Agents (ICAs)} and develop an ICA specifically tailored to U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments. We propose a Dual Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning framework featuring two cooperating RL agents, each with its own policy, to coordinate strategic dialogue management and fine-grained utterance generation. By learning when and how to ask probing questions, the agent emulates judicial questioning patterns and systematically uncovers crucial information to fulfill its legal objectives. Evaluations on a U.S. Supreme Court dataset show that our method outperforms various baselines across multiple metrics. It represents an important first step toward broader high-stakes, domain-specific applications.

FAGER: Factually Grounded Evaluation and Refinement of Text-to-Image Models

Existing text-to-image (T2I) evaluation metrics mainly assess whether generated images align with information explicitly stated in the prompt, but often fail to capture factual requirements that are implicit, externally grounded, or identity-defining. As a result, they are not well suited for evaluating factual correctness in prompts involving scientific knowledge, historical facts, products, or culture-specific concepts. We propose FActually Grounded Evaluation and Refinement (FAGER), an agentic framework that evaluates whether generated images correctly reflect visually verifiable facts grounded in or implied by the prompt, while also providing actionable feedback for improvement. FAGER first constructs a structured factual rubric by combining LLM-based fact proposal with reference-guided visual fact extraction and verification, then converts the rubric into question-answer pairs for VLM-based evaluation. To validate FAGER as a factuality metric, we introduce a Factual A/B test, which measures whether a metric prefers factual reference images over corresponding generated images. Across five datasets spanning science, history, products, culture, and knowledge-intensive concepts, FAGER consistently outperforms prior metrics on this test. We further show that FAGER can be used to refine T2I outputs in a fully training-free manner, yielding substantial factuality gains across datasets.

Local Spatiotemporal Convolutional Network for Robust Gait Recognition

Gait recognition, as a promising biometric technology, identifies individuals through their unique walking patterns and offers distinctive advantages including non-invasiveness, long-range applicability, and resistance to deliberate disguise. Despite these merits, capturing the intrinsic motion patterns concealed within consecutive video frames remains challenging due to the complexity of video data and the interference of external covariates such as viewpoint changes, clothing variations, and carrying conditions. Existing approaches predominantly rely on either static appearance features extracted from individual silhouette frames or employ complex sequential models (\eg, LSTM, 3D convolutions) that demand substantial computational resources and sophisticated training strategies. To address these limitations, we propose a Local Spatiotemporal Convolutional Network (LSTCN), a structurally simple yet highly effective dual-branch architecture that endows standard two-dimensional convolutional networks with the capacity to extract temporal information. Specifically, we introduce a Global Bidirectional Spatial Pooling (GBSP) mechanism that reduces the dimensionality of gait tensors by decomposing spatial features into horizontal and vertical strip-based local representations, enabling the temporal dimension to participate in standard 2D convolution operations. Building upon this, we design a Local Spatiotemporal Convolutional (LSTC) layer that jointly processes temporal and spatial dimensions, allowing the network to adaptively learn strip-based gait motion patterns. We further extend this formulation with asymmetric convolution kernels that independently attend to the temporal, spatial, and joint spatiotemporal domains, thereby enriching the extracted feature representations.

Compositional Sparsity as an Inductive Bias for Neural Architecture Design

Identifying the structural priors that enable Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to overcome the curse of dimensionality is a fundamental challenge in machine learning theory. Existing literature suggests that effective high-dimensional learning is driven by compositional sparsity, where target functions decompose into constituents supported on low-dimensional variable subsets. To investigate this hypothesis, we combine Information Filtering Networks (IFNs), which extract sparse dependency structures via constrained information maximisation, with Homological Neural Networks (HNNs), which map the inferred topology into fixed-wiring sparse neural graphs. We formalise the design principles underlying this construction and present an interpretable pipeline in which abstraction emerges through hierarchical composition. HNNs are orders of magnitude sparser than standard DNNs and require only minimal hyperparameter tuning. On synthetic tasks with known sparse hierarchies, HNNs recover the underlying compositional structure and remain stable in regimes where dense alternatives degrade as dimensionality increases. Across a broad suite of real-world datasets, HNNs consistently match or outperform dense baselines while using far fewer parameters, exhibiting lower variance and showing reduced sensitivity to hyperparameters.

Concordance Comparison as a Means of Assembling Local Grammars

Named Entity Recognition for person names is an important but non-trivial task in information extraction. This article uses a tool that compares the concordances obtained from two local grammars (LG) and highlights the differences. We used the results as an aid to select the best of a set of LGs. By analyzing the comparisons, we observed relationships of inclusion, intersection and disjunction within each pair of LGs, which helped us to assemble those that yielded the best results. This approach was used in a case study on extraction of person names from texts written in Portuguese. We applied the enhanced grammar to the Gold Collection of the Second HAREM. The F-Measure obtained was 76.86, representing a gain of 6 points in relation to the state-of-the-art for Portuguese.