FINSKILLOPS: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent System for SEC Filing QA

Financial question answering over U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings requires retrieving and synthesizing heterogeneous evidence dispersed across long, standardized, and highly redundant disclosures. Existing retrieval-augmented and multi-agent systems typically derive retrieval queries directly from the user's question and rank candidates by semantic similarity. Together, these choices create prior-corpus misalignment: a mismatch between model priors and the target filings' structure, terminology, and evidence standards. As a result, query generation misses corpus-specific evidence, while semantic reranking favors topically similar but evidentially invalid false-positive chunks. We propose FinSAgent, an evidence-grounded multi-agent framework that reframes SEC filing QA as corpus-aligned retrieval planning and corrects both ends with a single principle: inject corpus-side conditioning wherever model priors would otherwise dominate. FinSAgent combines (1) role-specialized agents anchored to the mandated 10-K item structure, (2) database-aware query decomposition that conditions each agent's sub-queries on a lightweight, summary-level view of the local corpus, and (3) multi-path retrieval with a learned feature-gated reranker that separates evidential validity from semantic similarity. Across five offline financial QA benchmarks, FinSAgent improves retrieval coverage and answer correctness over strong single-agent and multi-agent baselines; in a three-arm randomized online experiment with 1,000 anonymous user ratings, it also receives higher scores than baselines.

Most agent benchmarks evaluate tasks independently and cannot measure whether experience from one task helps with later tasks. Existing self-evolution benchmarks do not jointly cover professional workflows, open-ended deliverables, and multi-aspect evaluation. We introduce FinEvo-Bench, a longitudinal benchmark with 120 real-case-grounded tasks, 20 business scenes across six financial domains. Institution-provided professional procedures define the required operations and constraints. Eligible institution-provided and publicly documented cases supply the task facts. Each scene contains six related but substantively distinct cases that share a professional procedure and a manually reviewed rubric for task quality and financial compliance. We compare four self-evolving agent scaffolds using the same Qwen3.7-Max backbone and three independently shuffled, globally interleaved task streams. Paired non-evolving controls estimate each scaffold's self-evolution gain from retained experience, while an independent Claude Code scoring agent backed by Claude Opus 4.6 evaluates all outputs. Letta achieves the highest evolved score (91.65) and fewest compliance issues (0.09 per task); Codex achieves the largest self-evolution gain (+19.37). Across scaffolds, the evolving condition raises scores by 9.33-19.37 points and reduces compliance issues by 0.12-0.44 per task. Paired score gains at within-scene ranks 4-6 exceed those at ranks 1-3 by 6.10-8.70 points. In Claude Code, skill-only evolution produces higher task quality and fewer compliance issues than memory-only and combined memory-skill evolution. Across all four scaffolds, rubric feedback also yields higher scores and fewer compliance issues than reference-answer feedback. FinEvo-Bench measures both professional performance and self-evolution ability: how effectively an agent turns prior experience into later improvement.

Financial question answering is typically evaluated by answer correctness, yet in SEC filings a plausible and even numerically correct answer can be grounded in the wrong evidence. Similar facts and disclosures recur across sections of a filing, across reporting periods of the same firm, and across comparable firms. FinRank targets this provenance-sensitive retrieval problem by requiring systems to identify evidence for the intended entity, reporting period, and disclosure context. The benchmark contains 1185 manually authored question-answer records over the 10-K and 10-Q filings of 22 companies. Each record includes a reference answer, gold supporting passages, and hand-curated hard negatives drawn from confusable passages within filings, across reporting periods, and across comparable firms. FinRank evaluates passage retrieval, reranking, and hard-negative discrimination as separately measured tasks. Baseline results demonstrate the difficulty of this setting: among the evaluated systems, even a 7B instruction-tuned embedder reaches only 44.8% Recall@10 on the pooled evidence corpus; sub-billion-parameter encoders gain at most 3.5 points over BM25, a finance-adapted embedder trails BM25 by 9.7 points, and pairwise accuracy falls by 13.0-20.5 percentage points when random negatives are replaced with the curated hard negatives. FinRank provides an evidence-first benchmark for developing financial question answering systems that are not only accurate but also grounded in the correct disclosure.