FineFT: Efficient and Risk-Aware Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for Futures Trading

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qin, Molei, Cai, Xinyu, Li, Yewen, Xia, Haochong, Zong, Chuqiao, Sun, Shuo, Wang, Xinrun, An, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Qin, Molei
Cai, Xinyu
Li, Yewen
Xia, Haochong
Zong, Chuqiao
Sun, Shuo
Wang, Xinrun
An, Bo
author_facet Qin, Molei
Cai, Xinyu
Li, Yewen
Xia, Haochong
Zong, Chuqiao
Sun, Shuo
Wang, Xinrun
An, Bo
contents Futures are contracts obligating the exchange of an asset at a predetermined date and price, notable for their high leverage and liquidity and, therefore, thrive in the Crypto market. RL has been widely applied in various quantitative tasks. However, most methods focus on the spot and could not be directly applied to the futures market with high leverage because of 2 challenges. First, high leverage amplifies reward fluctuations, making training stochastic and difficult to converge. Second, prior works lacked self-awareness of capability boundaries, exposing them to the risk of significant loss when encountering new market state (e.g.,a black swan event like COVID-19). To tackle these challenges, we propose the Efficient and Risk-Aware Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for Futures Trading (FineFT), a novel three-stage ensemble RL framework with stable training and proper risk management. In stage I, ensemble Q learners are selectively updated by ensemble TD errors to improve convergence. In stage II, we filter the Q-learners based on their profitabilities and train VAEs on market states to identify the capability boundaries of the learners. In stage III, we choose from the filtered ensemble and a conservative policy, guided by trained VAEs, to maintain profitability and mitigate risk with new market states. Through extensive experiments on crypto futures in a high-frequency trading environment with high fidelity and 5x leverage, we demonstrate that FineFT outperforms 12 SOTA baselines in 6 financial metrics, reducing risk by more than 40% while achieving superior profitability compared to the runner-up. Visualization of the selective update mechanism shows that different agents specialize in distinct market dynamics, and ablation studies certify routing with VAEs reduces maximum drawdown effectively, and selective update improves convergence and performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23773
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FineFT: Efficient and Risk-Aware Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for Futures Trading
Qin, Molei
Cai, Xinyu
Li, Yewen
Xia, Haochong
Zong, Chuqiao
Sun, Shuo
Wang, Xinrun
An, Bo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Futures are contracts obligating the exchange of an asset at a predetermined date and price, notable for their high leverage and liquidity and, therefore, thrive in the Crypto market. RL has been widely applied in various quantitative tasks. However, most methods focus on the spot and could not be directly applied to the futures market with high leverage because of 2 challenges. First, high leverage amplifies reward fluctuations, making training stochastic and difficult to converge. Second, prior works lacked self-awareness of capability boundaries, exposing them to the risk of significant loss when encountering new market state (e.g.,a black swan event like COVID-19). To tackle these challenges, we propose the Efficient and Risk-Aware Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for Futures Trading (FineFT), a novel three-stage ensemble RL framework with stable training and proper risk management. In stage I, ensemble Q learners are selectively updated by ensemble TD errors to improve convergence. In stage II, we filter the Q-learners based on their profitabilities and train VAEs on market states to identify the capability boundaries of the learners. In stage III, we choose from the filtered ensemble and a conservative policy, guided by trained VAEs, to maintain profitability and mitigate risk with new market states. Through extensive experiments on crypto futures in a high-frequency trading environment with high fidelity and 5x leverage, we demonstrate that FineFT outperforms 12 SOTA baselines in 6 financial metrics, reducing risk by more than 40% while achieving superior profitability compared to the runner-up. Visualization of the selective update mechanism shows that different agents specialize in distinct market dynamics, and ablation studies certify routing with VAEs reduces maximum drawdown effectively, and selective update improves convergence and performance.
title FineFT: Efficient and Risk-Aware Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for Futures Trading
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23773