NumTrace: Auditing the Number Provenance of Financial Analyst Agents

Verifying numerical claims in research written by AI agents is an important but challenging problem. Recent benchmarks show that many agent-written papers fail integrity checks, but such verdicts, often produced by a single LLM judge, identify failure without explaining its nature, and existing checks either test a paper for internal consistency or test whether a reported value appears somewhere in an agent's output. We re-analyze all 540 released judgments from a recent public benchmark of AI research agents (nine agents, fifteen open research problems) and manually label 256 numerical claims from 18 submissions. Failures concentrate on alignment between the paper and the underlying work rather than overt cheating, and about four in five unsupported claims correspond to values in the agent's own files that come from the wrong experiment, metric, or run. We introduce a deterministic claim-to-evidence checker that scores whether the surrounding context identifies the claimed result and calibrates each claim against numerical decoys. With its rules fixed before labeling, it certifies claims with over 90% precision against blinded annotators (78 of 85; Cohen's kappa = 0.89), while verifying only a subset of claims; most claims it cannot verify are nevertheless traceable, so failure to verify is not evidence of falsehood. An LLM verifier given the same evidence recovers more traceable claims but accepts about three times as many misattributed ones, so the two are best used together. Applied to 99 submissions, the checker reveals large differences in traceability across agents, and a second judge from a different vendor preserves the official agent ranking while passing twice as many papers. These findings motivate provenance-first auditing of AI-produced research.

Financial and tabular question answering requires more than fluent reasoning: answers must be grounded in the exact facts, formulas, units, signs, and scales that support them. A single misread cell or incorrect operation can silently produce a plausible but wrong result. We introduce MOCA-Agent, a market-of-claims code agent that replaces free-form multi-agent debate with claim-level verification. The system decomposes each question into typed atomic claims, asks specialist trader agents to buy or sell those claims, clears their orders into confidence-weighted accept/reject decisions, and synthesizes an executable Python program from market-supported evidence. A code-aware verifier then checks the program for execution, structural consistency, and common financial reasoning errors, with at most one market-aware repair round. Across ten public benchmarks spanning financial numerical reasoning, general tabular reasoning, ESG question answering, and multimodal chart reasoning, MOCA-Agent achieves strong performance using a fixed Qwen3.6-27B backbone, including $78.3\%$ on FinQA, $76.0\%$ on FinanceMath, $71.2\%$ on MultiHiertt, $86.9\%$ on ESGenius, and $85.6\%$ average on FinChart-Bench. These results show that aggregating evidence at the level of atomic claims, rather than whole answers, improves robustness in high-stakes numerical reasoning.\footnote{The code and data are available: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/MoCA-Agent.

Large language models are increasingly used to answer questions over annual reports, earnings decks, and analyst notes, yet their outputs remain difficult to verify in high-stakes financial workflows. A fluent answer can blend directly grounded statements, weak synthesis, and unsupported claims across narrative text, tables, and charts. We present EvidenceLens, a visual analytics prototype that treats financial question answering as a claim-evidence alignment problem. The system decomposes an answer into atomic claims, summarizes support composition and confidence, support gaps, and coordinates claim-level inspection with source passages, table cells, and chart regions. Its core visual representation is a multimodal claim-evidence matrix that makes coverage, contradiction, and modality imbalance immediately visible. To support reproducibility, we also specify a JSON-based artifact schema, a lightweight multimodal alignment pipeline, and a deterministic review-priority ranking that maps backend signals into an auditable visual structure. Through representative report-auditing scenarios, we show how EvidenceLens helps analysts distinguish grounded claims from overconfident synthesis that conventional chat interfaces flatten.