Propose, Don't Judge: An Anytime-Valid Referee for LLM Agents That Mine Investment Factors
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 this referee and with three deliberately leaky ones, in a synthetic world with planted truth, a pr...
| Authors | Bo Qu, Mingguang Chen, Licheng Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 22 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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