Paper Detail

XALPHA: A Memory-Driven AI Quant Researcher for Hypothesis-to-Code Alpha Discovery

Fengyuan Liu, Yuchen Fu, Yuqi Wang, Qi Liu

arxiv Score 6.3

Published 2026-07-09 · First seen 2026-07-10

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Abstract

Financial markets are noisy, non-stationary, and high-dimensional, making it difficult to discover predictive and robust trading signals. Alpha discovery has evolved from manual factor design to machine learning, evolutionary search, and recent LLM-based frameworks, improving the efficiency of factor generation, search, and evaluation. However, existing methods still mostly automate isolated steps, rather than functioning as end-to-end quant researchers that can absorb external knowledge, close the hypothesis-to-code validation loop, and learn from accumulated discovery feedback. To fill this gap, we introduce XAlpha, a memory-driven AI Quant Researcher for continuous hypothesis-to-code alpha discovery. XAlpha maintains a multi-source research memory system that integrates report-grounded financial knowledge with discovery feedback from prior generations and research cycles. Guided by this memory system, a Macro Brain plans research themes and selects suitable Archetypes; a Micro Brain transforms the planned hypothesis pool into executable factor code and verifies ex-ante tri-alignment among the hypothesis idea, code logic, and financial plausibility; and a Cross Brain consolidates empirical outcomes into generation-level feedback, cycle-level summaries, and archetype-level research cues for future exploration. In this way, XAlpha turns alpha mining from isolated factor generation into a closed-loop research process that continuously reads, hypothesizes, implements, validates, reflects, and evolves. Experiments on CSI300 show that XAlpha achieves stronger overall alpha discovery performance than representative baselines.

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BibTeX

@article{liu2026xalpha,
  title = {XALPHA: A Memory-Driven AI Quant Researcher for Hypothesis-to-Code Alpha Discovery},
  author = {Fengyuan Liu and Yuchen Fu and Yuqi Wang and Qi Liu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Financial markets are noisy, non-stationary, and high-dimensional, making it difficult to discover predictive and robust trading signals. Alpha discovery has evolved from manual factor design to machine learning, evolutionary search, and recent LLM-based frameworks, improving the efficiency of factor generation, search, and evaluation. However, existing methods still mostly automate isolated steps, rather than functioning as end-to-end quant researchers that can absorb external knowledge, close },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08332},
  keywords = {cs.CL},
  eprint = {2607.08332},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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