Propose, Don't Judge: An Anytime-Valid Referee for LLM Agents That Mine Investment Factors

Bo Qu, Mingguang Chen, Licheng Wang · 2026 · arXiv

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2609.27051 · open-access PDF

Abstract

Language-model agents now run the whole of quantitative factor research: they propose investment factors, backtest them, select the survivors and retire them. We ask which of those jobs an agent should keep. Our answer is governed self-evolution: the agent may propose, and a frozen statistical referee that the agent cannot touch must judge. The referee scores each candidate only on market outcomes revealed after submission, by betting, so its false-discovery guarantee holds at every stopping time for any proposal policy. We cross three proposers (a script, a bandit and a language model) with t

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