IMM: An Imitative Reinforcement Learning Approach with Predictive Representation Learning for Automatic Market Making

IMM: An Imitative Reinforcement Learning Approach with Predictive Representation Learning for Automatic Market Making

Hui Niu, Siyuan Li, Jiahao Zheng, Zhouchi Lin, Bo An, Jian Li, Jian Guo

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 5999-6007. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/663

Market making (MM) via Reinforcement Learning (RL) has attracted significant attention in financial trading. Most existing RL-based MM methods focus on optimizing single-price level strategies which fail at frequent order cancellations and loss of queue priority. By comparison, strategies involving multiple price levels align better with actual trading scenarios. However, given the complexity that multi-price level RL strategies involve a comprehensive trading action space, the challenge of effectively training RL persists. Inspired by the effective workflow of professional human market makers, we propose Imitative Market Maker (IMM), a novel RL framework leveraging knowledge from both suboptimal signal-based experts and direct policy interactions. Our framework starts with introducing effective state and action formulations that well encode information about multiprice level orders. Furthermore, IMM integrates a representation learning unit capable of capturing both short- and long-term market trends to mitigate adverse selection risk. Subsequently, IMM designs an expert strategy based on predictive signals, and trains the agent through the integration of RL and imitation learning techniques to achieve efficient learning. Extensive experimental results on four real-world market datasets demonstrate the superiority of IMM against current RL-based MM strategies.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Finance
Machine Learning: ML: Reinforcement learning
Machine Learning: ML: Representation learning