Multimodal Financial Foundation Models - A Paper Review

Expanding Frontiers: An Alternative Investments & Machine Learning Podcast

This episode provides an overview of multimodal Financial Foundation Models (MFFMs), exploring their progress, potential applications, and associated challenges. It emphasizes the ubiquitous nature of multimodal financial data—including text, audio, images, and tabular information—in various financial applications like search, robo-advising, and trading. The paper review also addresses the development lifecycle of MFFMs, from pre-training to fine-tuning and alignment, while highlighting the need for robust benchmarks. Crucially, it discusses significant challenges such as data privacy, the risk of misinformation and hallucination, and the need for ethical AI readiness and governance within the financial sector.

References

Liu, Xiao-Yang and Cao, Yupeng and Deng, Li, Multimodal Financial Foundation Models (MFFMs): Progress, Prospects, and Challenges (May 31, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5277657 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5277657

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