JAX-LOB: a GPU-Accelerated limit order book simulator to unlock large scale reinforcement learning for trading

Journal article

Financial exchanges across the world use limit order books (LOBs) to process orders and match trades. For research purposes it is important to have large scale efficient simulators of LOB dynamics. LOB simulators have previously been implemented in the context of agent-based models (ABMs), reinforcement learning (RL) environments, and generative models, processing order flows from historical data sets and hand-crafted agents alike. For many applications, there is a requirement for processing multiple books, either for the calibration of ABMs or for the training of RL agents. We showcase the first GPU-enabled LOB simulator designed to process thousands of books in parallel, whether for identical or different securities, with an up to 75x faster per-message processing time. The implementation of our simulator - JAX-LOB - is based on design choices that aim to best exploit the powers of JAX without compromising on the realism of LOB-related mechanisms. We integrate JAX-LOB with other JAX packages, to provide an example of how one may address an optimal execution problem with reinforcement learning, and to share some preliminary results from end-to-end RL training on GPUs. The project code is available on GitHub 1

Authors: Frey, SY; Li, K; Nagy, P; Sapora, S; Lu, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Pages: 583-591
• Publication date: 2023-11-25
• Acceptance date: 2023-09-28
• Event title: 4th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF 2023)
• DOI: 10.1145/3604237.3626880
• ISBN: 9798400702402
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR