The Elixirs Lab — ResearchNotes and findings from work in progress. Quantitative finance, ML systems, and the engineering challenges that come with both.https://theelixirslab.com/en-usPAPER 003 — Latency budgets for production RAGhttps://theelixirslab.com/research/rag-latency/https://theelixirslab.com/research/rag-latency/Lessons from architecting a RAG system serving 10M+ daily requests. How to reason about end-to-end latency, what to optimize first, and where the surprising bottlenecks usually are.Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTInfrastructureML systemsPAPER 002 — Reward hacking patterns in LLM agent benchmarkshttps://theelixirslab.com/research/reward-hacking/https://theelixirslab.com/research/reward-hacking/Cataloging reward-hacking strategies observed across 200+ trajectory annotations on Terminal-Bench. We propose a taxonomy and recommend evaluation patterns that resist gaming.Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTEvaluationML systemsPAPER 001 — Regime detection in illiquid frontier marketshttps://theelixirslab.com/research/regime-detection/https://theelixirslab.com/research/regime-detection/We propose a Hidden Markov Model approach to detect regime shifts in markets where standard volatility-clustering signals are unreliable due to thin trading. Tested across NGX, NSE, and BVMW.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTQuantTime series