Improving Financial Forecasting with a Synergistic LLM-Transformer Architecture: A Hybrid Approach to Stock Price Prediction
Improving Financial Forecasting with a Synergistic LLM-Transformer Architecture: A Hybrid Approach to Stock Price Prediction
This paper presents a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates a Large Language Model (LLM) with a Transformer architecture for stock price prediction. The authors address a theoretical gap in prior work that combines textual and numerical data empirically without formalizing their interaction. They conceptualize a prompt-based LLM as a mathematically defined signal generator that extracts directional market sentiment and an associated confidence score from financial news. These signals are dynamically fused with historical price features through a noise-robust gating mechanism, enabling the Transformer to adaptively weigh semantic and quantitative information. The proposed approach is evaluated on stock price forecasting tasks, demonstrating a 5.28% reduction in Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) over a Vanilla Transformer baseline, with statistical significance (p=0.003). Ablation studies confirm the critical role of the gating mechanism and LLM signals, while robustness analysis shows the model's stability under noisy conditions. Additionally, the confidence-weighted attention mechanism provides interpretability by highlighting influential news and price features. The findings support a paradigm shift from empirical observation to formalized modeling of LLM-Transformer interactions, paving the way toward explainable, noise-resilient, and semantically enriched financial forecasting systems.
Highlights
- 1Proposes a novel hybrid LLM-Transformer architecture for stock price prediction that formally models the interaction between textual and numerical data.
- 2Conceptualizes a prompt-based LLM as a mathematically defined signal generator producing directional sentiment and confidence scores.
- 3Introduces a noise-robust gating mechanism to dynamically fuse LLM-generated signals with historical price features.
- 4Achieves a 5.28% reduction in RMSE over a Vanilla Transformer baseline with statistical significance (p=0.003).
- 5Demonstrates model interpretability through confidence-weighted attention and robustness under noisy conditions.
Methods
- MLLM as signal generator: Uses a prompt-based LLM to extract directional market sentiment and confidence scores from financial news.
- MNoise-robust gating mechanism: Dynamically fuses LLM signals with historical price features, allowing the Transformer to adaptively weigh semantic and quantitative information.
- MTransformer architecture: Employs a standard Transformer encoder-decoder for time-series forecasting, augmented with gated fusion of LLM outputs.
- MAblation and robustness analysis: Evaluates model components and performance under noisy input conditions.
Results
- RHybrid LLM-Transformer reduces RMSE by 5.28% compared to Vanilla Transformer (p=0.003).
- RAblation studies confirm the importance of the gating mechanism and LLM signals for performance gains.
- RRobustness analysis shows the model maintains stability under noisy conditions.
- RConfidence-weighted attention provides interpretability by highlighting influential news and price features.
- RThe hybrid model outperforms baselines in directional accuracy and risk-adjusted returns.
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