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DeepSeekMath Meets Order Book: Group-Aware Policy Optimization for High-Frequency Directional Trading

Machine Learning 2026-05-26 v1 Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science

Abstract

This paper studies reinforcement learning for high-frequency trading on limit order books by pairing an Order-Flow-based state model with policy-gradient methods. Instead of value-based RL techniques like tabular Q-learning, our approach deploys policy-based methods like vanilla PPO and DeepSeekMath-inspired variants like GRPO and GSPO, that use group-normalized updates and downside-aware shaping. On backtests with financial assets AMZN, AAPL, and GOOG under a simplified backtesting setup based on spread-scaled rewards, these new policies improve net average PnL, profitability, and drawdown over the Q-Learning baseline. Our results show that (1) Order-Flow signals are an adequate state for policy RL and (2) group-aware PPO surrogates are preferable over value-based baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.25527,
  title  = {DeepSeekMath Meets Order Book: Group-Aware Policy Optimization for High-Frequency Directional Trading},
  author = {Sayak Charabarty and Souradip Pal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.25527},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:31:58.171Z