PULSE-KAN: Price-Aware Unified Linear-Attention and Smoothed-Trend Encoder with Kolmogorov–Arnold Network Head for Stock Movement Prediction

Accurate prediction of binary stock price movements remains a challenging task due to the coexistence of short-term noise and medium-term trend dynamics in financial time series. Existing recurrent models typically encode raw price sequences within a single representation stream and aggregate temporal information using softmax-based attention, which often entangles noisy fluctuations with underlying trends and limits nonlinear expressiveness in the final classification stage. In this paper, we propose PULSE-KAN (Price-aware Unified Linear-attention and Smoothed-trend Encoder with Kolmogorov–Arnold Network Head), a modular neural architecture designed to enhance binary stock movement prediction. The proposed framework introduces three plug-and-play components designed for LSTM-based pipelines as demonstrated here within the Adv-ALSTM framework. First, the P-EMA Trend Bridge constructs an explicit smoothed trend representation via a parameterized exponential moving average and fuses it with the raw price stream to improve trend awareness. Second, the Pola Pulse Router performs efficient temporal aggregation using linear-complexity polarized attention combined with local convolutional priors, enabling better capture of multi-scale temporal dependencies. Third, the KAN Signal Refiner replaces the conventional linear prediction head with learnable Chebyshev-polynomial activations, providing enhanced nonlinear modeling capacity for decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that PULSE-KAN consistently outperforms strong recurrent and attention-based baselines in terms of both classification accuracy and the Matthews Correlation Coefficient. Further ablation studies verify that each proposed component contributes independently and significantly to the overall performance improvement.