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Data Science

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40 articles
Data science methods applied to financial datasets and accounting workflows

Atlas: Joint Retriever-Reader Pre-Training Beats 540B-Parameter LLMs with 11B Parameters

Atlas (JMLR 2023) achieves 42.4% accuracy on Natural Questions with only 64 training examples—beating PaLM 540B by 3 points using 11B parameters—by jointly pre-training a Contriever-based dense retriever with a T5 Fusion-in-Decoder reader. Analysis covers retrieval accuracy limits, 587GB index infrastructure costs, and implications for Beancount ledger QA systems.

LLMs Are Not Useful for Time Series Forecasting: What NeurIPS 2024 Means for Finance AI

A NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight paper ablates three LLM-based time series forecasting methods — OneFitsAll, Time-LLM, and CALF — and finds that removing the language model improves accuracy in most cases, with up to a 1,383× training speedup. For finance AI applications like Beancount balance prediction, lightweight purpose-built models consistently beat repurposed LLMs.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks

Lewis et al.'s NeurIPS 2020 paper introduced the hybrid RAG architecture—a BART-large generator paired with a FAISS-indexed retriever over 21 million Wikipedia passages—achieving 44.5 EM on Natural Questions and establishing the parametric/non-parametric split that now underlies most production AI systems. This review covers RAG-Sequence vs. RAG-Token trade-offs, the retrieval collapse failure mode, and what stale indexes mean for financial AI built on append-only Beancount ledgers.