Janus-Q: End-to-End Event-Driven Trading via Hierarchical-Gated Reward Modeling
Janus-Q: End-to-End Event-Driven Trading via Hierarchical-Gated Reward Modeling
Janus-Q is a two-stage end-to-end event-driven trading framework that elevates financial news events from auxiliary signals to primary decision units. In Stage I, the authors construct a large-scale dataset of 62,400 Chinese financial news articles, each annotated with 10 fine-grained event types, associated stocks, sentiment labels, and cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) computed via market model and risk model neutralization. This dataset addresses the lack of joint modeling of event semantics and market impact magnitude. In Stage II, Janus-Q performs decision-oriented fine-tuning: first, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) establishes a reasoning-aware mapping from event descriptions to expected CAR; then, reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is guided by a Hierarchical Gated Reward Model (HGRM). The HGRM decomposes the trading reward into interpretable components—direction correctness (hard gate), event-type consistency (soft gate), cost-aware profit/loss, magnitude shaping, and process rewards—to align language model reasoning with financially valid trading behavior. Extensive experiments on a test period from November 2024 to February 2025 show that Janus-Q consistently outperforms market indices, time-series-oriented LLMs, financial domain-specific LLMs, and general-purpose LLMs. It achieves a Sharpe Ratio of 1.3088 (102.0% improvement over the runner-up), direction accuracy of 58.69%, and event-type accuracy of 80.09%. Ablation studies confirm the critical role of each component, particularly SFT and the diversified reward objectives, in achieving robust and profitable trading decisions.
Highlights
- 1Constructs a large-scale financial news event dataset of 62,400 articles with 10 fine-grained event types, sentiment labels, and cumulative abnormal returns (CAR).
- 2Proposes Janus-Q, an end-to-end event-driven trading framework that maps news events directly to trading decisions via hierarchical-gated reward modeling.
- 3Introduces a Hierarchical Gated Reward Model (HGRM) that decomposes trading rewards into interpretable components and uses hard/soft gates to align semantic reasoning with market outcomes.
- 4Achieves a Sharpe Ratio improvement of up to 102.0% and direction accuracy increase of over 17.5% compared to the strongest competing strategies.
- 5Demonstrates consistent outperformance against market indices, time-series models, and both vanilla and financial LLM baselines in backtesting.
Methods
- MEvent-to-CAR modeling using market model and risk model neutralization to quantify event-driven abnormal returns.
- MSupervised fine-tuning (SFT) to establish reasoning-aware mapping from event descriptions to expected CAR.
- MGroup Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) guided by a Hierarchical Gated Reward Model (HGRM) with hard direction gate, soft event-type gate, cost-aware PnL, magnitude shaping, and process rewards.
- MEvent-weighted signal aggregation for portfolio-level trading decisions based on historical event-type weights.
Results
- RJanus-Q achieves a Sharpe Ratio of 1.3088, outperforming the runner-up (QwQ-32B) by over 102.0%.
- RDirection accuracy (DA) reaches 58.69%, exceeding the best time-aware, financial, and vanilla LLM baselines by 17.5%, 29.0%, and 22.4% respectively.
- REvent-type accuracy (ETA) reaches 80.09%, improving by 18.2% over the strongest competing methods.
- RAblation studies show that removing SFT causes the most severe performance drop (Sharpe Ratio turns negative), while removing GRPO reduces Sharpe Ratio by ~13%.
- RFull HGRM outperforms variants missing any single reward component, with magnitude and PnL objectives being most critical for Sharpe Ratio.
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