Adversarial News and Lost Profits: Manipulating Headlines in LLM-Driven Algorithmic Trading

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in the financial domain. Their exceptional capabilities to analyse textual data make them well-suited for inferring the sentiment of finance-related news. Such feedback can be leveraged by algorithmic trading systems (ATS) to guide buy/sell decisions. However, this practice bears the risk that a threat actor may craft "adversarial news" intended to mislead an LLM. In particular, the news headline may include "malicious" content that remains invisible to human readers but which is still ingested by the LLM. Although prior work has studied textual adversarial examples, their system-wide impact on LLM-supported ATS has not yet been quantified in terms of monetary risk. To address this threat, we consider an adversary with no direct access to an ATS but able to alter stock-related news headlines on a single day. We evaluate two human-imperceptible manipulations in a financial context: Unicode homoglyph substitutions that misroute models during stock-name recognition, and hidden-text clauses that alter the sentiment of the news headline. We implement a realistic ATS in Backtrader that fuses an LSTM-based price forecast with LLM-derived sentiment (FinBERT, FinGPT, FinLLaMA, and six general-purpose LLMs), and quantify monetary impact using portfolio metrics. Experiments on real-world data show that manipulating a one-day attack over 14 months can reliably mislead LLMs and reduce annual returns by up to 17.7 percentage points. To assess real-world feasibility, we analyze popular scraping libraries and trading platforms and survey 27 FinTech practitioners, confirming our hypotheses. We notified trading platform owners of this security issue.

A BERTology View of LLM Orchestrations: Token- and Layer-Selective Probes for Efficient Single-Pass Classification

Production LLM systems often rely on separate models for safety and other classification-heavy steps, increasing latency, VRAM footprint, and operational complexity. We instead reuse computation already paid for by the serving LLM: we train lightweight probes on its hidden states and predict labels in the same forward pass used for generation. We frame classification as representation selection over the full token-layer hidden-state tensor, rather than committing to a fixed token or fixed layer (e.g., first-token logits or final-layer pooling). To implement this, we introduce a two-stage aggregator that (i) summarizes tokens within each layer and (ii) aggregates across layer summaries to form a single representation for classification. We instantiate this template with direct pooling, a 100K-parameter scoring-attention gate, and a downcast multi-head self-attention (MHA) probe with up to 35M trainable parameters. Across safety and sentiment benchmarks our probes improve over logit-only reuse (e.g., MULI) and are competitive with substantially larger task-specific baselines, while preserving near-serving latency and avoiding the VRAM and latency costs of a separate guard-model pipeline.

EmoKGEdit: Training-free Affective Injection via Visual Cue Transformation

Existing image emotion editing methods struggle to disentangle emotional cues from latent content representations, often yielding weak emotional expression and distorted visual structures. To bridge this gap, we propose EmoKGEdit, a novel training-free framework for precise and structure-preserving image emotion editing. Specifically, we construct a Multimodal Sentiment Association Knowledge Graph (MSA-KG) to disentangle the intricate relationships among objects, scenes, attributes, visual clues and emotion. MSA-KG explicitly encode the causal chain among object-attribute-emotion, and as external knowledge to support chain of thought reasoning, guiding the multimodal large model to infer plausible emotion-related visual cues and generate coherent instructions. In addition, based on MSA-KG, we design a disentangled structure-emotion editing module that explicitly separates emotional attributes from layout features within the latent space, which ensures that the target emotion is effectively injected while strictly maintaining visual spatial coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EmoKGEdit achieves excellent performance in both emotion fidelity and content preservation, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Stablecoin Design with Adversarial-Robust Multi-Agent Systems via Trust-Weighted Signal Aggregation

Algorithmic stablecoins promise decentralized monetary stability by maintaining a target peg through programmatic reserve management. Yet, their reserve controllers remain vulnerable to regime-blind optimization, calibrating risk parameters on fair-weather data while ignoring tail events that precipitate cascading failures. The March 2020 Black Thursday collapse, wherein MakerDAO's collateral auctions yielded $8.3M in losses and a 15% peg deviation, exposed a critical gap: existing models like SAS systematically omit extreme volatility regimes from covariance estimates, producing allocations optimal in expectation but catastrophic under adversarial stress. We present MVF-Composer, a trust-weighted Mean-Variance Frontier reserve controller incorporating a novel Stress Harness for risk-state estimation. Our key insight is deploying multi-agent simulations as adversarial stress-testers: heterogeneous agents (traders, liquidity providers, attackers) execute protocol actions under crisis scenarios, exposing reserve vulnerabilities before they manifest on-chain. We formalize a trust-scoring mechanism T: A -> [0,1] that down-weights signals from agents exhibiting manipulative behavior, ensuring the risk-state estimator remains robust to signal injection and Sybil attacks. Across 1,200 randomized scenarios with injected Black-Swan shocks (10% collateral drawdown, 50% sentiment collapse, coordinated redemption attacks), MVF-Composer reduces peak peg deviation by 57% and mean recovery time by 3.1x relative to SAS baselines. Ablation studies confirm the trust layer accounts for 23% of stability gains under adversarial conditions, achieving 72% adversarial agent detection. Our system runs on commodity hardware, requires no on-chain oracles beyond standard price feeds, and provides a reproducible framework for stress-testing DeFi reserve policies.

MemeLens: Multilingual Multitask VLMs for Memes

Memes are a dominant medium for online communication and manipulation because meaning emerges from interactions between embedded text, imagery, and cultural context. Existing meme research is distributed across tasks (hate, misogyny, propaganda, sentiment, humour) and languages, which limits cross-domain generalization. To address this gap we propose MemeLens, a unified multilingual and multitask explanation-enhanced Vision Language Model (VLM) for meme understanding. We consolidate 38 public meme datasets, filter and map dataset-specific labels into a shared taxonomy of $20$ tasks spanning harm, targets, figurative/pragmatic intent, and affect. We present a comprehensive empirical analysis across modeling paradigms, task categories, and datasets. Our findings suggest that robust meme understanding requires multimodal training, exhibits substantial variation across semantic categories, and remains sensitive to over-specialization when models are fine-tuned on individual datasets rather than trained in a unified setting. We will make the experimental resources and datasets publicly available for the community.

A Multi-Agent System for Generating Actionable Business Advice

Customer reviews contain rich signals about product weaknesses and unmet user needs, yet existing analytic methods rarely move beyond descriptive tasks such as sentiment analysis or aspect extraction. While large language models (LLMs) can generate free-form suggestions, their outputs often lack accuracy and depth of reasoning. In this paper, we present a multi-agent, LLM-based framework for prescriptive decision support, which transforms large scale review corpora into actionable business advice. The framework integrates four components: clustering to select representative reviews, generation of advices, iterative evaluation, and feasibility based ranking. This design couples corpus distillation with feedback driven advice refinement to produce outputs that are specific, actionable, and practical. Experiments across three service domains and multiple model families show that our framework consistently outperform single model baselines on actionability, specificity, and non-redundancy, with medium sized models approaching the performance of large model frameworks.

A Unified Masked Jigsaw Puzzle Framework for Vision and Language Models

In federated learning, Transformer, as a popular architecture, faces critical challenges in defending against gradient attacks and improving model performance in both Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. It has been revealed that the gradient of Position Embeddings (PEs) in Transformer contains sufficient information, which can be used to reconstruct the input data. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a Masked Jigsaw Puzzle (MJP) framework. MJP starts with random token shuffling to break the token order, and then a learnable \textit{unknown (unk)} position embedding is used to mask out the PEs of the shuffled tokens. In this manner, the local spatial information which is encoded in the position embeddings is disrupted, and the models are forced to learn feature representations that are less reliant on the local spatial information. Notably, with the careful use of MJP, we can not only improve models' robustness against gradient attacks, but also boost their performance in both vision and text application scenarios, such as classification for images (\textit{e.g.,} ImageNet-1K) and sentiment analysis for text (\textit{e.g.,} Yelp and Amazon). Experimental results suggest that MJP is a unified framework for different Transformer-based models in both vision and language tasks. Code is publicly available via https://github.com/ywxsuperstar/transformerattack

EmoLat: Text-driven Image Sentiment Transfer via Emotion Latent Space

We propose EmoLat, a novel emotion latent space that enables fine-grained, text-driven image sentiment transfer by modeling cross-modal correlations between textual semantics and visual emotion features. Within EmoLat, an emotion semantic graph is constructed to capture the relational structure among emotions, objects, and visual attributes. To enhance the discriminability and transferability of emotion representations, we employ adversarial regularization, aligning the latent emotion distributions across modalities. Building upon EmoLat, a cross-modal sentiment transfer framework is proposed to manipulate image sentiment via joint embedding of text and EmoLat features. The network is optimized using a multi-objective loss incorporating semantic consistency, emotion alignment, and adversarial regularization. To support effective modeling, we construct EmoSpace Set, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising images with dense annotations on emotions, object semantics, and visual attributes. Extensive experiments on EmoSpace Set demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative transfer fidelity, establishing a new paradigm for controllable image sentiment editing guided by textual input. The EmoSpace Set and all the code are available at http://github.com/JingVIPLab/EmoLat.

Regret-Driven Portfolios: LLM-Guided Smart Clustering for Optimal Allocation

We attempt to mitigate the persistent tradeoff between risk and return in medium- to long-term portfolio management. This paper proposes a novel LLM-guided no-regret portfolio allocation framework that integrates online learning dynamics, market sentiment indicators, and large language model (LLM)-based hedging to construct high-Sharpe ratio portfolios tailored for risk-averse investors and institutional fund managers. Our approach builds on a follow-the-leader approach, enriched with sentiment-based trade filtering and LLM-driven downside protection. Empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms a SPY buy-and-hold baseline by 69% in annualized returns and 119% in Sharpe ratio.

Early Linguistic Pattern of Anxiety from Social Media Using Interpretable Linguistic Features: A Multi-Faceted Validation Study with Author-Disjoint Evaluation

Anxiety affects hundreds of millions of individuals globally, yet large-scale screening remains limited. Social media language provides an opportunity for scalable detection, but current models often lack interpretability, keyword-robustness validation, and rigorous user-level data integrity. This work presents a transparent approach to social media-based anxiety detection through linguistically interpretable feature-grounded modeling and cross-domain validation. Using a substantial dataset of Reddit posts, we trained a logistic regression classifier on carefully curated subreddits for training, validation, and test splits. Comprehensive evaluation included feature ablation, keyword masking experiments, and varying-density difference analyses comparing anxious and control groups, along with external validation using clinically interviewed participants with diagnosed anxiety disorders. The model achieved strong performance while maintaining high accuracy even after sentiment removal or keyword masking. Early detection using minimal post history significantly outperformed random classification, and cross-domain analysis demonstrated strong consistency with clinical interview data. Results indicate that transparent linguistic features can support reliable, generalizable, and keyword-robust anxiety detection. The proposed framework provides a reproducible baseline for interpretable mental health screening across diverse online contexts.