AlphaPilot: Multi-Turn Tool-Using LLM Agents for Adaptive Alpha Mining with Reinforcement Learning

Peiqi Jiang, Fan Zhang, Xin Xu, Tianhao Chen, Can Yang

Formulaic alpha mining seeks interpretable expressions that rank assets by future returns. The task is challenging because it demands simultaneous processing of unstructured market descriptions, historical data, and quantitative evaluation of candidate factors, yet most existing methods exploit only a subset of these signals. We introduce AlphaPilot, a reinforcement-learning framework that trains multi-turn tool-using LLM agents for adaptive alpha mining. The agent conditions on market descriptions, proposes factor expressions, queries real-data evaluator feedback, and updates a retained factor pool across turns. This design jointly leverages market text, LLM financial knowledge, real data, and evaluation feedback. At inference time, AlphaPilot performs day-by-day search and pool updates to adapt to shifting market regimes. Across three independent runs in out-of-sample rolling backtests on CSI300 and CSI500, AlphaPilot achieves mean total returns of 42.93% and 54.19%, with mean Sharpe ratios of 2.46 and 2.86, respectively. It attains the highest mean total return, Sharpe, and RankIC among the evaluated methods on both universes.