Research & policy
Academic papers, official research, regulatory material, patents, and standards are grouped together with their evidence labels intact.
arXiv cs.AI
Aug 20, 2026
ReguSim: Evaluating LLM Agent Rule Grounding in Financial Compliance
ReguSim separates an agent's stated reasoning, attempted trade, execution-layer enforcement, and the evidence available to a compliance monitor. In experiments with two named models, visible rules reduce but do not eliminate rejected actions, rationales can mislead a monitor when enforcement evidence is absent, and simple structured monitoring baselines match or beat prompt-only LLMs.
- Visible rules reduced but did not eliminate rejected actions in the reported trader-agent experiments.
- Structured monitoring baselines matched or exceeded prompt-only LLM monitors in the reported benchmark.
Why it mattersFinancial-agent compliance should be evaluated at the action and control layers, not from persuasive rationales or a single compliance score. The paper offers a useful audit design, but its model-specific results are controlled preprint experiments rather than evidence from live markets.
arXiv cs.AI
Aug 20, 2026
AI4AI-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents in Algorithmic Design for Recursive Self-Improvement
The authors introduce ten frozen research repositories that test whether coding agents can improve training algorithms rather than merely tune hyperparameters or gather data. Across 29 configurations of six systems, the reported mean normalized score is 0.166 and the best reaches 0.250; most submissions do not change the learning algorithm itself, while greater reasoning effort increases how often they attempt such changes.
- The authors report a mean normalized score of 0.166 across 29 configurations and a best score of 0.250.
- Increasing reasoning effort raises the share of submissions that alter the learning algorithm from 8% to 64% in the reported experiments.
Why it mattersThe benchmark turns recursive self-improvement into a more concrete, repeatable evaluation and finds substantial headroom under its tested compute budget. Results are author-run preprint evidence on a new benchmark, not proof that current agents can autonomously improve frontier training systems.
arXiv cs.AI
Aug 20, 2026
Phantom Gains: Auditing Self-Improvement Against a Measured Null
The authors audit three rounds of LoRA self-training on Qwen3-8B against a frozen control passed through the same pipeline. They report seven measurement failures capable of producing apparent capability transitions in an untrained model, and propose per-problem exact tests against pooled baseline replicates with false-discovery-rate control.
- A single greedy decode produced apparent capability changes in the frozen control in the authors' audit.
- The proposed exact-test procedure detected no transition-level gains on held-out frozen-control replicates.
Why it mattersClaims of model self-improvement can be artifacts of noisy decoding, batching, thresholds, and multiple comparisons. A measured null is a practical quality-control requirement for research and investment conclusions drawn from small transition-level gains; the findings remain preprint-level and tied to the tested setup.
arXiv q-fin
Aug 20, 2026
Calibration-Induced Degeneracy in LLM Financial Forecasting: An Audit-Trailed Case Study on Next-Day Market Risk
In a two-fund next-day risk case study, calibration set all four LLM-feature weights to zero, so 856 later scores could not affect the evaluation. Signed weights reactivated the mappings but none improved forecasts after familywise correction, while a low-cost headline-count baseline reduced SPY variance-forecast loss in the reported test.
- Calibration assigned zero weights to all four LLM mappings in the reported case study.
- After signed weights reactivated the mappings, none improved forecasts after familywise correction.
Why it mattersBefore paying for large-scale LLM inference in finance, teams should verify that calibration leaves the feature capable of changing the forecast and compare it with cheap baselines. This is a narrow single-author preprint case study, so the diagnostic is more decision-useful than any broad conclusion about LLM forecasting.