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Embedding-Aware Feature Discovery: Bridging Latent Representations and Interpretable Features in Event Sequences

arXiv cs.LG / 3/18/2026

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Key Points

  • Embedding-Aware Feature Discovery (EAFD) introduces a framework that couples pretrained event-sequence embeddings with a self-reflective LLM-driven feature generation agent to bridge latent representations and interpretable features in event sequences.
  • It uses two criteria, alignment and complementarity, to iteratively discover, evaluate, and refine features directly from raw event sequences.
  • Across open-source and industrial transaction benchmarks, EAFD outperforms embedding-only and feature-based baselines, achieving up to 5.8% relative gains and setting new state-of-the-art results on event-sequence datasets.
  • The approach addresses production system needs like interpretability and latency, proposing a practical path to integrate learned embeddings with traditional feature pipelines in financial contexts.

Abstract

Industrial financial systems operate on temporal event sequences such as transactions, user actions, and system logs. While recent research emphasizes representation learning and large language models, production systems continue to rely heavily on handcrafted statistical features due to their interpretability, robustness under limited supervision, and strict latency constraints. This creates a persistent disconnect between learned embeddings and feature-based pipelines. We introduce Embedding-Aware Feature Discovery (EAFD), a unified framework that bridges this gap by coupling pretrained event-sequence embeddings with a self-reflective LLM-driven feature generation agent. EAFD iteratively discovers, evaluates, and refines features directly from raw event sequences using two complementary criteria: \emph{alignment}, which explains information already encoded in embeddings, and \emph{complementarity}, which identifies predictive signals missing from them. Across both open-source and industrial transaction benchmarks, EAFD consistently outperforms embedding-only and feature-based baselines, achieving relative gains of up to +5.8\% over state-of-the-art pretrained embeddings, resulting in new state-of-the-art performance across event-sequence datasets.