About the GenAI4Finance workshop
Trading and investments in financial markets are useful mechanisms for wealth creation and poverty alleviation. Financial forecasting is an essential task that helps investors make sound investment decisions. It can assist users in better predicting price changes in stocks and currencies along with managing risk to reduce chances of adverse losses and bankruptcies. The world of finance is characterized by millions of people trading numerous assets in complex transactions, giving rise to an overwhelming amount of data that can indicate the future direction of stocks, equities, bonds, currencies, crypto coins, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Traditional statistical techniques have been extensively studied for stock market trading in developed economies. However, these techniques hold less relevance with rising automation in trading, the interconnected nature of the economies, and the advent of high-risk, high-reward cryptocurrencies and decentralized financial products like NFTs. Today, the world of finance has been brought ever closer to technology as technological innovations become a core part of financial systems. Hence, there is a need to systematically analyze how advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Modeling can help citizen investors, professional investment companies and novice enthusiasts better understand the financial markets.
Relevance of Multimodal LLMs and Generative AI in Finance
The biggest hurdle in processing unstructured data through LLMs like ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, Multimodal GPT-4, PaLM, and others is their opaque nature that they learn from large internet-sized corpora. Lack of understanding of what, when, and how these models can be utilized for financial applications remains an unsolved problem. While these models have shown tremendous success in NLP and document processing tasks, their study on financial knowledge has been very limited. The difficulty in automatically capturing real-time stock market information by these LLMs impedes their successful application for traders and finance practitioners. The learning abilities of LLMs on streaming news sentiment expressed through different multimedia has been barely touched upon by researchers in finance.
Artificial Intelligence based methods can help bridge that gap between the two domains through inter-sectional studies. Even though there have been scattered studies in understanding these challenges, there is a lack of a unified forum to focus on the umbrella theme of generative AI + multimodal language modeling for financial forecasting. We expect this workshop to attract researchers from various perspectives to foster research on the intersection of multimodal AI and financial forecasting. We also plan to organize one shared task to encourage practitioners and researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the problems and come up with novel solutions.