Is attention truly all we need? An empirical study of asset pricing in pretrained RNN sparse and global attention models

arXiv:2508.19006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This study investigates the pre-trained RNN attention models with the mainstream attention mechanisms, such as additive attention, Luong's three attentions, global self-attention and sliding window sparse attention, for the empirical asset pricing research on the top 420 large-cap US stocks. This is the first paper on the large-scale state-of-the-art (SOTA) attention mechanisms applied in the asset pricing context. They overcome the limitations of the traditional machine learning-based asset pricing, such as mis-capturing the temporal dependency and short memory. Moreover, the enforced causal masks in the attention mechanisms address the future data leaking issue ignored by the more advanced attention-based models, such as the classic Transformer. The proposed attention models also consider the temporal sparsity characteristic of asset pricing data and mitigate potential overfitting issues by deploying the simplified model structures. This provides some insights for future empirical economic research. All models are examined in three periods, which cover pre-COVID-19, COVID-19 and one year post-COVID-19, for testing the stability of these models under extreme market conditions. The study finds that in value-weighted portfolio back testing, the global self-attention model and the sliding window sparse attention model exhibit excellent capabilities in deriving the absolute returns and hedging downside risks, while they achieve an annualized Sortino ratio of 2.0 and 1.80 respectively in the period with COVID-19 in the static transaction cost scenario. Moreover, the sliding window sparse attention model performs more stably than the global self-attention model from the perspective of absolute portfolio returns with respect to the size of stocks' market capitalization.