Applied AI Research Group

Where machine learning meets financial markets.

AIthena is an independent research group building rigorous AI methods for quantitative finance, economic modeling, and AI accountability in regulated systems. We publish. We build. We go deep.

Quantitative Finance Economic World Models AI Accountability Trustworthy ML Computational Neuroscience
9+
Published Works
6
Venues in 2026
4
Active Researchers
3
Econ & Finance Papers
Research Focus

Three problems worth solving.

Our work sits at the boundary of ML methodology and economic consequence. We care about whether models work when it actually matters.

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Quantitative Finance & Economic Modeling

Building ML methods that surface structure in financial and macroeconomic data: asset pricing, world models, access distortion, and decision quality under realistic information asymmetry.

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AI Accountability & Trustworthy ML

Formalizing why model evaluation frameworks have structural blind spots, and what it takes to build AI systems whose outputs can be audited, justified, and trusted in regulated environments.

Computational Neuroscience

Applying ML to biological systems: modeling Alzheimer's pathology, MRI reconstruction failure modes, and the structural limits of evaluation in high-stakes medical AI.

Publications

The work, as it stands.

Accepted and under review across venues in quantitative finance, economic policy, trustworthy ML, and medical AI.

Quantitative Finance & Economic AI
Chicago Booth WM 2026
Access Distortion in Economic World Models
Formalizes access distortion: a failure mode where a world model's aggregate accuracy looks acceptable while decision quality is systematically worse for agents with weaker information access. Two access tiers can be indistinguishable on accuracy while differing roughly twofold in realized decision utility.
Poojak Patel, Maneth Perera
Pending
NeurIPS 2026 — Financial Models Workshop
MacroLens: Calibration-Aware Ensemble Forecasting
Calibration-aware ensemble forecasting framework for macroeconomic indicators with explicit uncertainty quantification and regime-conditional allocation outputs.
Poojak Patel
Pending
Brown University MLSJ 2026 — Oral
Participation Debt: When Fair Machine Learning Still Fails to Remove Barriers
Introduces Participation Debt: the gap between formally granted opportunities and opportunities a person can realistically reach. Shows standard fairness metrics can be fully satisfied while Participation Debt grows, particularly in healthcare and public policy contexts.
Poojak Patel, Raj Patel, Solomone Somani, Maneth Perera
Pending
Springer Nature — Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy
Do Recreational Cannabis Laws Narrow the Black/White Gap in Marijuana Arrests? Evidence from Staggered Difference-in-Differences
Empirical analysis of whether recreational cannabis legalization reduces racial disparities in marijuana arrest rates using staggered difference-in-differences estimation across states with varying legalization timelines.
Poojak Patel
Under Review
AI Accountability & Trustworthy ML
EIML @ ICML 2026
Ontological Closure and Structural Limits on Systemic AI
Proves that evaluation frameworks are bounded by construction: entire classes of failure are invisible by design when they fall outside an evaluation space. The formal basis for Inferify's regime validity signal.
Maneth Perera, Poojak Patel
Accepted
PhilML @ ICML 2026
Beyond Accuracy: Epistemic Justification in Trustworthy Machine Learning
Formalizes the Justification Deficit: the measurable gap between predictive success and epistemic warrant. A model can be accurate for the wrong reasons; standard metrics cannot detect this gap.
Poojak Patel, Maneth Perera
Accepted
FAGEN @ ICML 2026
Error Trace Regression: Localizing Root Causes in Long-Horizon LLM Agent Trajectories
ETR achieves sensitivity 0.81 for root-cause step identification in multi-step LLM agent trajectories vs. 0.23 for final-outcome evaluation.
Poojak Patel
Accepted
Medical AI & Computational Neuroscience
Stanford PAI 2026
Corruption Structure Determines Failure Mode in MRI Reconstruction
Controlled evaluation framework grounded in k-space physics showing that corruption structure determines the qualitative character of failure independently of severity. Structured line dropout produces catastrophic collapse (normalized SSIM drop 0.877) with high cross-subject variance, a failure pattern aggregate PSNR evaluation cannot distinguish.
Poojak Patel, Maneth Perera, Solomone Somani
Accepted
CVPR 2026 — Subtle Visual Computing Workshop
Multimodal Unsupervised Discovery of Structural-Functional Dissociation in Alzheimer's MRI
Discovering candidate structural-functional dissociation patterns in Alzheimer's MRI using multimodal unsupervised methods. Presented Denver, June 2026.
Poojak Patel, Raj Patel
Accepted
ACM-BCB 2026 — Systems Immunology Workshop
Multimodal Computational Identification of Candidate Resilience-Associated Phenotypes in Alzheimer's Disease
Computational identification of candidate resilience phenotypes under AβO-induced toxicity in MC65 cells using multimodal biological imaging data.
Poojak Patel, Maneth Perera
Accepted
The Team

Built to go deep.

A small group that moves fast and publishes rigorously. We find the problems worth owning and stay with them.

Poojak Patel
Founder & Lead Researcher
  • First-author oral, ACM AIMLSystems 2025, Google Quantum AI collaboration
  • First-author, CVPR 2026, MRI structural-functional dissociation
  • EIML + PhilML + FAGEN @ ICML 2026
  • Founder, Inferify, AI inference monitoring infrastructure
  • Pathspire: 15,000+ users, 20+ countries, unfunded
Maneth Perera
Co-Founder & Researcher
  • Aerospace engineering, UIUC, signal processing and controls
  • UAV synthetic aperture radar research, MIT
  • Co-author, EIML @ ICML 2026 and Stanford PAI 2026
  • Co-founder, Inferify
  • Systems-engineering depth in high-stakes reliability
Raj Patel
Researcher
  • Co-author, CVPR 2026, MRI structural-functional dissociation
  • Co-author, Brown MLSJ 2026, Participation Debt
  • Research spanning algorithmic fairness and ML policy
Solomone Somani
Co-Lead Researcher
  • Co-author, Stanford PAI 2026, MRI reconstruction evaluation
  • Co-author, Brown MLSJ 2026, Participation Debt
  • Research focus: fairness, access, and ML evaluation in policy contexts
Collaborate

Working on a hard problem?

We are open to research collaborations at the intersection of ML methodology and finance, economics, or regulated AI. If the problem is real and the standard tools are not enough, reach out.

Let's do something worth publishing.

Collaborations with faculty, researchers, and practitioners working on quantitative finance, economic AI, or accountability infrastructure.

Get in Touch