FinExam-10K: When Retrieval Helps Financial Reasoning?

While existing benchmarks have made substantial progress in evaluating LLMs across STEM domains, financial reasoning over structured data remains comparatively less explored. We introduce V-FiLLM, a framework that generates financial reasoning benchmarks from executable computation trees grounded in real tables, yielding items whose answers are correct by construction. Trees are evaluated symbolically to obtain ground truth and rendered into natural-language questions, removing any model from the labeling loop, so items can be generated at arbitrary scale without annotation cost and without inheriting a generator's error rate. V-FiLLM exposes four independently controllable axes of difficulty including computation depth, expression breadth, financial concept complexity, and context size. By evaluating on open-source models, we find that accuracy falls up to 51% as reasoning depth increases, and up to 47% points under adversarial numerical perturbations, highlighting remaining challenges in robust financial reasoning over tables. We further show that lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on verified chain-of-thought traces improves accuracy from 81.1% to 85.6% on held-out problems and outperforms the base model by 5% points on FinQA (Chen et al., 2022a), s), suggesting that targeted, low-cost adaptation is a promising direction for compositional reasoning in financial QA.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to financial analysis, reporting, investment decision support, risk management, compliance, and professional training. However, robust evaluation of their domain competence in finance remains incomplete. Widely used open benchmarks such as FinQA, ConvFinQA, and TAT-QA have played an important role in advancing financial question answering and numerical reasoning, but they focus primarily on question answering over financial reports and do not provide an explicit hierarchy of professional difficulty. Broader resources, including FinanceBench, PIXIU, FinBen, and FLaME, expand the coverage of financial tasks, yet the problem of evaluating the transition from foundational knowledge to expert-level financial reasoning remains open. In this work, we present FINESSE-Bench, a suite of eight specialized benchmarks comprising 3,993 questions for hierarchical evaluation of financial competencies in LLMs. FINESSE-Bench combines exam-oriented datasets inspired by professional certifications (CFA-like Levels 1-3, CMT-like Level 2, and CFTe-like Level 1), applied trading task collections, and a Russian-language olympiad benchmark. This design enables evaluation of domain breadth, performance degradation as difficulty increases, the ability to solve computational tasks, and model behavior in specialized financial domains. We also describe a unified evaluation protocol covering multiple-choice questions, numerical answers, and short open-ended responses, together with an automated scoring scheme for freeform answers based on the LLM-as-judge paradigm. FINESSE-Bench is intended both as a complement to existing open financial benchmarks and as a tool for more substantive evaluation of professionally relevant financial competencies in large language models.

Financial-research answers are decision-relevant only when another analyst can audit how they were produced: which source was chosen, which period and accounting definition were used, which assumptions were made, and how the calculation was performed. Existing finance benchmarks largely evaluate isolated subskills or final answers, leaving the auditable derivation itself under-measured. We introduce BigFinanceBench, a 928-item expert-authored benchmark of open-ended financial-research tasks in which each item pairs a ground-truth reference answer with a point-weighted rubric that decomposes the derivation into independently checkable steps. BigFinanceBench is workflow-grounded in that it evaluates the full derivation rather than only the final output. Across 36,241 rubric points, the benchmark supports partial-credit evaluation and localization of failures across the analyst workflow. Evaluating ten current frontier and open-weight agents, we find substantial headroom: the best system reaches only 58.8% rubric score, final-answer accuracy is a useful but lossy proxy for derivation quality, and model capability varies non-uniformly across financial workflows.