Finance-Informed Neural Network: Learning the Geometry of Option Pricing

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Finance-Informed Neural Network: Learning the Geometry of Option Pricing

Amine M. Aboussalah
Xuanze Li
Cheng Chi
Raj Patel
Published on 12/15/2024
Options
Derivatives
Equities
Machine learning
Deep learning
Risk management
Arbitrage
Volatility effect

The paper proposes Finance-Informed Neural Network (FINN), a novel framework for option pricing and hedging that integrates financial theory directly into the learning objective. Instead of training on observed option prices, FINN learns through a self-supervised replication objective based on dynamic hedging, ensuring economic consistency by construction. The authors prove theoretically that minimizing replication error recovers the arbitrage-free pricing operator and yields economically meaningful sensitivities. Empirically, FINN accurately recovers classical Black-Scholes prices and performs robustly in stochastic volatility environments, including the Heston model, while remaining stable in settings where analytical solutions are unavailable. Fundamental pricing relationships such as put-call parity emerge endogenously. When applied to implied-volatility surface reconstruction, FINN produces surfaces that are consistently closer to observed market-implied volatilities than those obtained from Heston calibrations, indicating superior out-of-sample adaptability and reduced structural bias. Importantly, FINN extends beyond liquid option markets: it can be trained directly on historical spot prices to construct coherent option prices and Greeks for assets with no listed options. More broadly, FINN defines a new paradigm for financial pricing, in which prices are learned from replication and risk-control principles rather than inferred from parametric assumptions or direct supervision on option prices. By reframing option pricing as the learning of a pricing operator rather than the fitting of prices, FINN offers practitioners a practical and scalable tool for pricing, hedging, and risk management across both established and emerging financial markets.

Highlights

  • 1Introduces FINN, a self-supervised neural network that learns option prices by minimizing dynamic hedging replication error rather than fitting observed prices.
  • 2Proves theoretically that minimizing replication error recovers the arbitrage-free pricing operator and yields economically consistent Greeks.
  • 3Demonstrates that FINN accurately recovers Black-Scholes prices and performs robustly under stochastic volatility (Heston model) without requiring analytical solutions.
  • 4Shows that fundamental no-arbitrage relationships, such as put-call parity, emerge endogenously from the learned pricing function.
  • 5Extends FINN to implied volatility surface reconstruction, outperforming Heston calibrations on real market data, and enables pricing for assets without listed options.

Methods

  • M
    Self-supervised learning via replication-consistency loss: the neural network is trained to minimize the mean squared deviation of a dynamically hedged portfolio from risk-free growth.
  • M
    Delta-gamma hedging framework: uses both the underlying asset and a second derivative to achieve gamma neutrality, with hedge ratios computed from network sensitivities.
  • M
    Extension to American options via a composite loss that enforces replication only in the continuation region and penalizes violations of the early exercise boundary.
  • M
    Training on simulated paths from geometric Brownian motion and Heston stochastic volatility models, with evaluation on synthetic and real market data.

Results

  • R
    FINN recovers Black-Scholes prices and deltas with low relative errors (RMAD < 0.05 for prices, < 0.06 for deltas) across a range of volatilities and maturities.
  • R
    Under the Heston model, FINN achieves pricing and delta errors comparable to or better than Monte Carlo benchmarks, with RMAD typically below 0.06.
  • R
    Put-call parity holds endogenously with mean absolute deviation below 0.002, demonstrating economic consistency without explicit constraints.
  • R
    Delta-gamma hedging based on FINN reduces hedging error by over 50% compared to delta-only hedging in stochastic volatility environments.
  • R
    Implied volatility surfaces reconstructed by FINN are closer to market-observed volatilities than those from Heston calibrations, with lower root mean squared error.
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