Synthetic Data

The latest tutorial by Li, Huang, Li, Zhou, Zhang, and Liu surveys how GANs, diffusion models, and LLMs now mass‑produce synthetic text, tables, graphs, time series, and images for data‑mining workloads. That’s the supply side. The demand side—execs asking “will this improve my model and keep us compliant?”—is where most projects stall. This piece extracts a decision framework from the tutorial and extends it with business‑grade evaluation and governance so you can decide when synthetic data is a shortcut—and when it’s a trap. ...

The Takeaway A new paper proposes TradingGroup, a five‑agent, self‑reflective trading team with a dynamic risk module and an automated data‑synthesis pipeline. In backtests on five US stocks, the framework beats rule‑based, ML, RL, and prior LLM agents. The differentiator isn’t a fancier model; it’s the workflow design: agents learn from their own trajectories, and the system continuously distills those trajectories into fine‑tuning data. What’s actually new here? Most “LLM trader” projects look similar: sentiment, fundamentals, a forecaster, and a decider. TradingGroup’s edge comes from three design choices: ...

If you’re tired of classical GANs hallucinating financial time series that look right but behave wrong, you’re not alone. Markets aren’t just stochastic — they’re structured, memory-laced, and irrational in predictable ways. A recent paper, Quantum Generative Modeling for Financial Time Series with Temporal Correlations, dives into whether quantum GANs (QGANs) — once considered an esoteric fantasy — might actually be better suited for this synthetic financial choreography. ...

When large language models (LLMs) learned to think step-by-step, the world took notice. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning breathed new life into multi-step arithmetic, logic, and even moral decision-making. But as multimodal AI evolved, researchers tried to bring this paradigm into the visual world — by editing images step-by-step instead of all at once. And it failed. In the recent benchmark study Complex-Edit: CoT-Like Instruction Generation for Complexity-Controllable Image Editing Benchmark1, the authors show that CoT-style image editing — what they call sequential editing — not only fails to improve results, but often worsens them. Compared to applying a single, complex instruction all at once, breaking it into sub-instructions causes notable drops in instruction-following, identity preservation, and perceptual quality. ...