Ranking Prior Alignment for Credit Risk Modeling: When Do External Priors Matter?

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2610.11146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cold-start credit scoring -- deploying models with scarce labeled data, weak features, or minimal capacity -- is a recurring problem in financial machine learning. When a new lending product launches, labeled default data is scarce, feature pipelines are immature, and models must be deployed with minimal capacity to avoid overfitting. Standard defenses operate on the same limited data; what is needed is a source of external regularization grounded in domain knowledge. We propose Ranking Prior Alignment, a model-agnostic framework that distills external ranking priors (from domain experts, teacher models, or LLMs) into any scoring model via a temperature-scaled KL divergence loss. The framework unifies neural (MIL attention) and tree-based (XG