A retiree's appetite for risk is a common input into the lifetime utility models that are traditionally used to find optimal strategies for the decumulation of retirement savings. In this work, we consider a retiree with potentially differing appetites for the key financial risks of decumulation: liquidity risk and investment risk. We set out to determine whether these differing risk appetites have a significant impact on the retiree's optimal choice of decumulation strategy. To do so, we design and implement a framework which selects the optimal decumulation strategy from a general set of admissible strategies in line with a retiree's goals, and under differing appetites for the key risks of decumulation. Overall, we find significant evidence to suggest that a retiree's differing appetites for different decumulation risks will impact their optimal choice of strategy at retirement. Through an illustrative example calibrated to the Australian context, we find results which are consistent with actual behaviours in this jurisdiction (in particular, a shallow market for annuities), which lends support to our framework and may provide some new insight into the so-called annuity puzzle.
This study develops a Bayesian semi-parametric model to examine the longitudinal growth and appetite phenotypes in children from the GUSTO cohort, with a focus on understanding the relationship between eating behaviours and growth outcomes over time. While eating behaviours, such as picky eating, have been shown to influence future weight and obesity risk, their developmental patterns and associations with growth trajectories remain under-explored. This work addresses these gaps by modelling longitudinal data, including both growth metrics (e.g., BMI) and eating behaviours (e.g., Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire, CEBQ), across multiple time points. We extend the Partial Credit Model, commonly used for questionnaire data analysis, to accommodate repeated measurements and incorporate covariates. The growth outcomes are modelled using flexible splines regression. The two components of the model are linked through a shared Bayesian nonparametric prior distribution, specifically a Normalized Generalized Gamma process, allowing to identify clinically relevant subgroups. This joint modelling approach offers a more nuanced understanding of how early eating behaviours relate to growth p
Food communities on online platforms enjoy great popularity among social media users. Due to the far-reaching consequences of food-related content on user eating behavior, recent research has studied the factors that drive user online engagement with food. While most of these studies have focused on visual aspects of food content in social media, only a few initial studies have explored the impact of nutritional content on user engagement. In this paper, we set out to close this gap and analyze food-related posts on Reddit, focusing on the association between the calories and macronutrients of a meal and engagement levels, particularly the number of comments. To that end, we collect and analyze almost half a million food-related posts and uncover differences in nutritional content between engaging and non-engaging posts. Moreover, we train a series of XGBoost models, and evaluate the importance of nutritional content while predicting user engagement and how posts will resonate with the community. We find that nutritional features improve the baseline model's accuracy by almost 5%, with a positive contribution of calorie density towards the prediction of engagement, suggesting that
Potential Future Exposure (PFE) is a standard risk metric for managing business unit counterparty credit risk but there is debate on how it should be calculated. The debate has been whether to use one of many historical ("physical") measures (one per calibration setup), or one of many risk-neutral measures (one per numeraire). However, we argue that limits should be based on the bank's own risk appetite provided that this is consistent with regulatory backtesting and that whichever measure is used it should behave (in a sense made precise) like a historical measure. Backtesting is only required by regulators for banks with IMM approval but we expect that similar methods are part of limit maintenance generally. We provide three methods for computing the bank price of risk from readily available business unit data, i.e. business unit budgets (rate of return) and limits (e.g. exposure percentiles). Hence we define and propose a Risk Appetite Measure, A, for PFE and suggest that this is uniquely consistent with the bank's Risk Appetite Framework as required by sound governance.
Let $Ξ$ be a set of centers chosen according to a Poisson point process in $\mathbb R^d$. Consider the allocation of $\mathbb R^d$ to $Ξ$ which is stable in the sense of the Gale-Shapley marriage problem, with the additional feature that every center $ξ\inΞ$ has a random appetite $αV$, where $α$ is a nonnegative scale constant and $V$ is a nonnegative random variable. Generalizing previous results by Freire, Popov and Vachkovskaia (\cite{FPV}), we show the absence of percolation when $α$ is small enough, depending on certain characteristics of the moment of $V$.
This paper develops a general framework for analyzing multi-agent systems with feedback loops between agents actions and collective observations. The framework is built on two fundamental agent-level variables: power, which measures agent influence on collective outcomes, and response functions, which determine how agents react to observations. We derive how macroscopic properties, including total power, useful power, entropy, order, fragility, and mobility, emerge from these two variables of heterogeneous agents. To study the trade off between growth and resilience, we introduce a system-level utility function parameterized by a risk-appetite coefficient and derive an optimal degree of order that balances productivity, stability, and adaptability. The analysis suggests that stronger synchronization can increase collective output but may also increase systemic fragility and reduce mobility. We further argue that order, entropy, information, and useful energy are task-dependent and system-relative concepts whose meanings depend on the objectives of the system. By measuring and designing agent power distributions and response functions, it may be possible to better understand, predic
In this article we model chaotic dynamics in financial markets by treating the market price, and market makers' inventory, as anharmonic oscillators with a nonlinear coupling. The market makers' risk appetite being the key parameter that determines the degree of chaos in the system. The article demonstrates that whilst external shocks and random noise are important in the treatment of financial time-series, they are not necessary in order to generate unpredictable price changes.
In this paper, we present the principles of designing new self-organising and autonomous management protocol to govern the dynamics of bio-inspired decentralized firewall architecture based on Biological Regularity Networks. The new architecture called Firewall Regulatory Networks (FRN) exhibits the following features (1) automatic rule policy configuration with provable utility-risk appetite guarantee, (2) resilient response for changing risks or new service requirements, and (3) globally optimized access control policy reconciliation. We present the FRN protocol and formalize the constraints to synthesize the undetermined components in the protocol to produce interactions that can achieve these objectives. We illustrate the feasibility of the FRN architecture in multiple case studies.
This study emphasizes how crucial it is to visualize machine learning models, especially for the banking industry, in order to improve interpretability and support predictions in high stakes financial settings. Visual tools enable performance improvements and support the creation of innovative financial models by offering crucial insights into the algorithmic decision-making processes. Within a financial machine learning framework, the research uses visually guided experiments to make important concepts, such risk assessment and portfolio allocation, more understandable. The study also examines variations in trading tactics and how they relate to risk appetite, coming to the conclusion that the frequency of portfolio rebalancing is negatively correlated with risk tolerance. Finding these ideas is made possible in large part by visualization. The study concludes by presenting a novel method of locally stochastic asset weighing, where visualization facilitates data extraction and validation. This highlights the usefulness of these methods in furthering the field of financial machine learning research.
The insatiable appetite of Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads for computing power is pushing the industry to develop faster and more efficient accelerators. The rigidity of custom hardware, however, conflicts with the need for scalable and versatile architectures capable of catering to the needs of the evolving and heterogeneous pool of Machine Learning (ML) models in the literature. In this context, multi-chiplet architectures assembling multiple (perhaps heterogeneous) accelerators are an appealing option that is unfortunately hindered by the still rigid and inefficient chip-to-chip interconnects. In this paper, we explore the potential of wireless technology as a complement to existing wired interconnects in this multi-chiplet approach. Using an evaluation framework from the state-of-the-art, we show that wireless interconnects can lead to speedups of 10% on average and 20% maximum. We also highlight the importance of load balancing between the wired and wireless interconnects, which will be further explored in future work.
This paper provides robust, new evidence on the causal drivers of market troughs. We demonstrate that conclusions about these triggers are critically sensitive to model specification, moving beyond restrictive linear models with a flexible DML average partial effect causal machine learning framework. Our robust estimates identify the volatility of options-implied risk appetite and market liquidity as key causal drivers, relationships misrepresented or obscured by simpler models. These findings provide high-frequency empirical support for intermediary asset pricing theories. This causal analysis is enabled by a high-performance nowcasting model that accurately identifies capitulation events in real-time.
As the FX markets continue to evolve, many institutions have started offering passive access to their internal liquidity pools. Market makers act as principal and have the opportunity to fill those orders as part of their risk management, or they may choose to adjust pricing to their external OTC franchise to facilitate the matching flow. It is, a priori, unclear how the strategies managing internal liquidity should depend on market condions, the market maker's risk appetite, and the placement algorithms deployed by participating clients. The market maker's actions in the presence of passive orders are relevant not only for their own objectives, but also for those liquidity providers who have certain expectations of the execution speed. In this work, we investigate the optimal multi-objective strategy of a market maker with an option to take liquidity on an internal exchange, and draw important qualitative insights for real-world trading.
Personalized fashion recommendation is a difficult task because 1) the decisions are highly correlated with users' aesthetic appetite, which previous work frequently overlooks, and 2) many new items are constantly rolling out that cause strict cold-start problems in the popular identity (ID)-based recommendation methods. These new items are critical to recommend because of trend-driven consumerism. In this work, we aim to provide more accurate personalized fashion recommendations and solve the cold-start problem by converting available information, especially images, into two attribute graphs focusing on optimized image utilization and noise-reducing user modeling. Compared with previous methods that separate image and text as two components, the proposed method combines image and text information to create a richer attributes graph. Capitalizing on the advancement of large language and vision models, we experiment with extracting fine-grained attributes efficiently and as desired using two different prompts. Preliminary experiments on the IQON3000 dataset have shown that the proposed method achieves competitive accuracy compared with baselines.
We develop a formalism for insurance profit optimisation for the in-force business constraint by regulatory and risk policy related requirements. This approach is applicable to Life, P&C and Reinsurance businesses and applies in all regulatory frameworks with a solvency requirement defined in the form of a solvency ratio, notably Solvency II and the Swiss Solvency Test. We identify the optimal asset allocation for profit maximisation within a pre-defined risk appetite and deduce the annual opportunity cost faced by the insurance company.
We develop a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for insurance loss reserving that formulates reserve setting as a finite-horizon sequential decision problem under claim development uncertainty, macroeconomic stress, and solvency governance. The reserving process is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which reserve adjustments influence future reserve adequacy, capital efficiency, and solvency outcomes. A Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent is trained using a risk-sensitive reward that penalizes reserve shortfall, capital inefficiency, and breaches of a volatility-adjusted solvency floor, with tail risk explicitly controlled through Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). To reflect regulatory stress-testing practice, the agent is trained under a regime-aware curriculum and evaluated using both regime-stratified simulations and fixed-shock stress scenarios. Empirical results for Workers Compensation and Other Liability illustrate how the proposed RL-CVaR policy improves tail-risk control and reduces solvency violations relative to classical actuarial reserving methods, while maintaining comparable capital efficiency. We further discuss calibration and governance consider
The identification and validation of therapeutic antibodies is critical for developing effective treatments for many diseases. We present a computational approach for identifying antibodies targeting GFRAL-specific receptors, receptors implicated in appetite regulation. Using humanized Trianni mice, we conducted a longitudinal study with repeated blood sampling and splenic analysis. We applied the STAR computational method for antibody discovery on bulk antibody repertoire data sampled at key time points. By mapping the output from STAR to single-cell data taken at the last time point, we successfully identified a pool of antibodies, of which 50% demonstrated binding capabilities. We observed convergent selection, where responding sequences with identical amino acid complementarity determining regions 3 (CDR3) were found in different mice. We provide a catalog of 67 experimentally validated antibodies against GFRAL. The potential of these antibodies as antagonists or agonists against GFRAL suggests therapeutic solutions for conditions like cancer cachexia, anorexia, obesity, and diabetes. This study underscores the utility of integrating computational methods and experimental valid
This dataset provides responses to a standardized, bilingual (English-Hindi) Prakriti Assessment Questionnaire designed to evaluate the physical, physiological, and psychological characteristics of individuals according to classical Ayurvedic principles. The questionnaire consists of 24 multiple-choice items covering body features, appetite, sleep patterns, energy levels, and temperament. It was developed following AYUSH/CCRAS guidelines to ensure comprehensive and accurate data collection. All questions are mandatory and neutrally phrased to minimize bias, and dosha labels (Vata, Pitta, Kapha) are hidden from participants. Data were collected via a Google Forms deployment, enabling automated scoring of responses to map individual traits to dosha-specific scores. The resulting dataset provides a structured platform for research in computational intelligence, Ayurvedic studies, and personalized health analytics, supporting analysis of trait distributions, correlations, and predictive modeling. It can also serve as a reference for future Prakriti-based studies and the development of intelligent health applications.
With rapid transformation of technologies, the fusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in finance is disrupting the entire ecosystem and operations which were followed for decades. The current landscape is where decisions are increasingly data-driven by financial institutions with an appetite for automation while mitigating risks. The segments of financial institutions which are getting heavily influenced are retail banking, wealth management, corporate banking & payment ecosystem. The solution ranges from onboarding the customers all the way fraud detection & prevention to enhancing the customer services. Financial Institutes are leap frogging with integration of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in mainstream applications and enhancing operational efficiency through advanced predictive analytics, extending personalized customer experiences, and automation to minimize risk with fraud detection techniques. However, with Adoption of AI & ML, it is imperative that the financial institute also needs to address ethical and regulatory challenges, by putting in place robust governance frameworks and responsible AI practices.
Markowitz's criterion aims to balance expected return and risk when optimizing the portfolio. The expected return level is usually fixed according to the risk appetite of an investor, then the risk is minimized at this fixed return level. However, the investor may not know which return level is suitable for her/him and the current financial circumstance. It motivates us to find a novel approach that adaptively optimizes this return level and the portfolio at the same time. It not only relieves the trouble of deciding the return level during an investment but also gets more adaptive to the ever-changing financial market than a subjective return level. In order to solve the new model, we propose an exact, convergent, and efficient Krasnoselskii-Mann Proximity Algorithm based on the proximity operator and Krasnoselskii-Mann momentum technique. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in portfolio optimization. This finding may contribute a new perspective on the relationship between return and risk in portfolio optimization.
The remarkable growth of digital assets, starting from the inception of Bitcoin in 2009 into a 1 trillion market in 2024, underscores the momentum behind disruptive technologies and the global appetite for digital assets. This paper develops a framework to enhance actuaries' understanding of the cyber risks associated with the developing digital asset ecosystem, as well as their measurement methods in the context of digital asset insurance. By integrating actuarial perspectives, we aim to enhance understanding and modeling of cyber risks at both the micro and systemic levels. The qualitative examination sheds light on blockchain technology and its associated risks, while our quantitative framework offers a rigorous approach to modeling cyber risks in digital asset insurance portfolios. This multifaceted approach serves three primary objectives: i) offer a clear and accessible education on the evolving digital asset ecosystem and the diverse spectrum of cyber risks it entails; ii) develop a scientifically rigorous framework for quantifying cyber risks in the digital asset ecosystem; iii) provide practical applications, including pricing strategies and tail risk management. Particula