Finance Domain

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems offer a promising approach to reduce hallucinations and improve answer accuracy in large language models (LLMs), a requirement for reliable, financial analysis where answers must be grounded in verifiable evidence from filings rather than generated from model priors. However, designing RAG systems that extract meaningful insights from mixed financial documents and integrate into analyst workflows remains challenging. This paper introduces MimirRAG (Metadata-Integrated Multi-Agent Information Retrieval), a multi-agent RAG system developed iteratively to address these challenges. MimirRAG features a modular pipeline encompassing structure-preserving parsing of PDF filings, table-aware chunking, metadata extraction, agent-based retrieval with query planning and hybrid search, validation, and context-aware generation with numerical reasoning support. Our ablation study identifies three key technical enablers for effective financial RAG: metadata integration, table-aware chunking, and an agentic workflow. MimirRAG was evaluated quantitatively using FinanceBench and qualitatively through expert validation with four financial analysts. The system achieved 89.3% accuracy on FinanceBench, outperforming the original benchmark baselines. Expert feedback highlighted that successful deployment also requires calibrated trust, comprehensive data integration, and user personalization. We conclude that combining multi-agent RAG architecture with human-centric design principles can improve the extraction of meaningful insights in financial analysis.

Financial Numerical Entity (FNE) understanding aims to recover the meaning of numerical mentions in financial reports. Existing studies primarily focus on concept name prediction and face two important limitations. First, labels derived from inline XBRL may contain errors because filings are usually prepared manually. Second, other important FNE attributes, such as reporting-time relation, measurement scale, and accounting sign, are less emphasized. We propose \textbf{NO}ise-\textbf{R}obust Tagging for Rich Financial Numerical Entity \textbf{A}ttributes (\textsc{NORA}) to address these gaps. NORA uses task-aware instance-specific weighting to attenuate the influence of noisy labels during training, and we further propose the Neighborhood Prior-adjusted KNN (NPK) filtering method for more reliable evaluation on real-world noisy test sets. In addition, we construct a large-scale benchmark containing 6.6 million instances with multi-attribute labels and filing metadata. Experiments show that \textsc{NORA} performs strongly compared with state-of-the-art noisy-label baselines, including Co-teaching, Mixup, SSR, and SelfMix. Moreover, NORA is robust under both unfiltered and noise-filtered test settings. It achieves the best Accuracy, Macro F1, and Weighted F1 for concept name and time-relation prediction, while remaining competitive on scale and sign prediction. These results demonstrate the value of jointly modeling rich FNE attributes while accounting for label noise in real-world financial filings.

Backtesting large language models (LLMs) on historical financial data is unreliable because pre-training cuts off after the events happened. An LLM trained in 2024 already "knows" which way 2018-2020 stocks moved. We name this failure parametric look-ahead bias and propose FinCAD, an inference-time adaptation of Context-Aware Decoding that suppresses an LLM's memory of historical outcomes without retraining. FinCAD pairs an adversarial bias-discovery pipeline that learns a model-specific memory-activating prior prompt with an entity- and date-adaptive rule that scales the CAD strength to per-(entity, date) memorisation, so the penalty fires on memorised in-sample dates and decays to zero out-of-sample. Across five 7-14B LLMs and five mega-cap equities, FinCAD cuts in-sample backtest returns by up to -67.1% on memorised dates while leaving 2025 out-of-sample returns within $8K and Sharpe within 0.10 of baseline, and preserves general-purpose reasoning within 1.7 pts. On an eleven-model leaderboard, it raises the in-sample / out-of-sample Spearman correlation from +0.779 to +0.846, recovering rankings that genuinely predict out-of-sample performance.

Financial markets are characterized by extreme non-stationarity, low signal-to-noise ratios, and strong dependence on external information such as news, company fundamentals, and macroeconomic signals. Yet, existing approaches either abstract time-series into text or decouple forecasting from language-based reasoning, leading to a fundamental mismatch between qualitative reasoning and quantitative outcomes. To address this, we introduce StockR1, a time-series-enhanced LLM that unifies stock forecasting and financial reasoning through a verifiable forecast action. Based on a tool-call design, the model first emits a forecast action, which is a structured and interpretable representation of its qualitative market outlook. It then invokes a time-series decoder conditioned on this action to generate distributional future trajectories, leading to more informed question answering and financial reasoning. We optimize the full pipeline with reinforcement learning, where rewards jointly reflect answer validity, forecast accuracy, and consistency between generated actions and observed time-series dynamics. In addition, rewards are reweighted by a sample-level uncertainty scalar, encouraging the model to accommodate varying uncertainty in market dynamics. We evaluate StockR1 on financial question answering and stock forecasting over a large-scale 10-year benchmark. Our method consistently outperforms time-series baselines and general-purpose LLMs, improving reasoning accuracy by 17.7% (4B) and 25.9% (8B). These findings demonstrate that structuring the forecast actions establishes a powerful synergy between language reasoning and temporal prediction, enabling LLMs to reason through verifiable, interpretable, and numerically grounded decisions.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become foundational for grounding large language models in domain-specific corpora, yet conventional vector-based RAG systems are fundamentally limited in their ability to capture the structured, multi-entity relationships that underpin financial market analysis. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of a novel two-hop Graph-RAG architecture versus a standard vector-only baseline for cross-entity financial sentiment analysis. Our system constructs a sentiment-weighted knowledge graph of 59 equity entities from 255 news articles covering 10 major technology stocks, then augments dense retrieval with intensity-filtered graph traversal over INFLUENCES edges to surface relational evidence inaccessible to vector search alone. We evaluate both architectures on 100 grounded queries (30 Direct, 70 Relational) using semantic similarity, entity recall, RAGAS metrics, latency benchmarks, and ablation studies. Graph-RAG achieves a statistically significant improvement in entity recall (+6.4%, p < 0.001, Wilcoxon signed-rank) and delivers substantially more relevant answers for complex multi-entity queries (+11.7% Answer Relevancy), with gains concentrating in relational question types (+16.1%). Critically, these improvements come at no measurable cost to answer quality (delta = +0.001 semantic similarity, Cohen's d = 0.078), with a modest 22.6% increase in mean latency offset by an 80% reduction in latency variance. An ablation study on the graph traversal intensity threshold reveals an inverted-U relationship with answer quality, identifying tau = 0.5 as optimal over the production default of tau = 0.7. These findings characterize a precision-for-coverage trade-off inherent to graph-augmented retrieval and provide actionable architectural guidance for practitioners building RAG systems for multi-entity financial analysis.

Investor sentiment shapes financial markets, yet modeling sentiment in Arabic financial contexts remains challenging due to linguistic complexity and limited resources. We present an Arabic NLP framework for large-scale financial sentiment analysis tailored to the Saudi market, integrating official financial news and social media to capture institutional and public investor sentiment. The framework constructs a large Arabic financial corpus through a multi-stage pipeline encompassing data collection, cleaning, deduplication, entity linking, and sentiment annotation. Transformer-based NER combined with a curated company lexicon links textual mentions to canonical company identifiers, with sentiment labels assigned using a five-class scheme. The resulting dataset of 84K samples supports company-level sentiment aggregation and analysis of sentiment dynamics relative to stock market behavior on the Saudi Exchange. Experimental results demonstrate reliable and scalable Arabic financial sentiment analysis.

End-to-end LLM trading agents have moved quickly from research curiosity to a small ecosystem of named systems, including FinCon, FinMem, TradingAgents, FinAgent, QuantAgent, and FLAG-Trader. Several of these report headline Sharpe ratios that would be material if read at face value on a deployment desk, and associated benchmarks such as FinBen report trading-task Sharpe statistics in the same range. The gap between architecture research and deployment claim has been crossed too freely on both sides of the academia--industry divide. We take a position on that gap: reported alpha from end-to-end LLM trading agents should not be treated as deployment evidence. Before such returns can support claims of deployable trading capability, they must survive structural validity tests for temporal integrity, real-world frictions, counterfactual robustness, predictive calibration, numerical execution, and multi-agent disaggregation. Current public evidence cannot yet distinguish robust predictive ability from temporal contamination, unmodeled frictions, short-window Sharpe uncertainty, narrative fitting, and parametric priors. The problem is not only evaluative but structural. Language confidence is not tradable probability, narrative reasoning is not numerical execution, and model priors may become undisclosed implicit factor exposures. We contribute a minimum reporting protocol suite, P1--P6, with tiered applicability by claim strength, and a conservative modular alternative that uses LLMs as auditable information interfaces upstream of independent calibration, risk, and execution modules. Code and reproduction harness: \url{https://github.com/hj1650782738/Trading}.

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.

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.

Financial decision-making in multilingual settings demands accurate numerical reasoning grounded in diverse modalities, yet existing benchmarks largely overlook this high-stakes, real-world challenge, especially for Indic languages. We introduce FinVQA, a benchmark for evaluating financial numerical and multimodal reasoning in multilingual Indic contexts. FinVQA spans English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil, and comprises 18,900 samples across 14 financial domains. The dataset captures diverse reasoning paradigms under realistic constraints, and is structured across three difficulty levels (easy, moderate, hard) and four question formats: multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, table matching, and true/false. To address these challenges, we propose FIND, a framework that combines supervised fine-tuning with constraint-aware decoding to promote faithful numerical reasoning, robust multimodal grounding, and structured decision-making. Together, FinVQA and FIND establish a rigorous evaluation and modeling paradigm for high-stakes multilingual multimodal financial reasoning.

We present a fully automated multi-agent framework for corporate due diligence and market analysis in venture capital. The system runs on an event-driven orchestration architecture, combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with real-time web retrieval to synthesize unstructured data into structured investment intelligence. A central technical contribution is a programmatic extraction pipeline that reverse-engineers the frontend-to-backend communication of the Greek Business Registry ($Γ$.E.MH.), querying dynamic endpoints to retrieve official financial filings that are then parsed using a layout-aware OCR extractor. A structural fallback mechanism explicitly flags data absence rather than generating unverified figures, directly targeting hallucination in financial contexts. All workflow artifacts are publicly available to support replication.

Financial institutions increasingly require AI explanations that are persistent, cross-validated across methods, and conversationally accessible to human decision-makers. We present an architecture for human-centered explainable AI in financial sentiment analysis that combines three contributions. First, we treat XAI artifacts -- LIME feature attributions, occlusion-based word importance scores, and saliency heatmaps -- as persistent, searchable objects in distributed S3-compatible storage with structured metadata and natural-language summaries, enabling semantic retrieval over explanation history and automatic index reconstruction after system failures. Second, we enable multi-method explanation triangulation, where a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assistant compares and synthesizes results from multiple XAI methods applied to the same prediction, allowing users to assess explanation robustness through natural-language dialogue. Third, we evaluate the faithfulness of generated explanations using automated checks over grounding completeness, hallucinated claims, and method-attribution behavior. We demonstrate the architecture on an EXTRA-BRAIN financial sentiment analysis pipeline using FinBERT predictions and present evaluation results showing that constrained prompting reduces hallucination rate by 36% and increases method-attribution citations by 73% compared to naive prompting. We discuss implications for trustworthy, human-centered AI services in regulated financial environments.

Accurate stock price forecasting has consistently remained a pivotal yet challenging FinTech task that underpins quantitative trading and investment decision making. Recent efforts have been dedicated to modeling various complex relationships among stocks in the stock market toward more reliable stock price forecasting.These methods depend heavily on strong static prior assumptions by modeling either temporal dependencies within individual stocks or spatial dependencies across different stocks based on predefined structures, while the complex market dynamics that drive stock price movements remain unexplored. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel game-theoretic modeling method that captures heterogeneous investor interactions for stock price forecasting. The core idea is to embed game-theoretic mechanisms into the heterogeneous graph structure to finely model the dynamic strategic interactions among heterogeneous investors with respect to target stocks. Additionally, temporal positional encoding is adopted to reflect the differentiated influences of each game event at different time steps within the time window on future stock price movements. Leveraging heterogeneous graph networks, we proxy the intricate dynamics of the stock market through investor games and enable real-time information propagation and node updates among all nodes. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method effectively outperforms state-of-the-art stock price forecasting methods.

While machine learning has revolutionized many fields such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision, its impact on time-series forecasting is still widely disputed, especially in the finance domain. This paper compares forecasting performance on U.S. Treasury yield curve data across econometrics/time-series analysis, classical machine learning, and deep learning methods, using daily data over 47 years. The Treasury yield curve is important because it is widely used by every participant in the bond markets, which are larger than equity markets. We examine a variety of methods that have not been tested on yield curve forecasting, especially deep learning algorithms. The algorithms include the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model and its extensions, naive benchmarks, ensemble methods, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and multiple transformers built for forecasting. ARIMA and naive econometric models outperform other models overall, except in one time block. Of the machine learning methods, TimeGPT, LGBM and RNNs perform the best. Furthermore, the paper explores whether stationary or nonstationary data are more appropriate as input to deep learning models.

This paper explores the use of emojis in financial sentiment analysis, focusing on the social media platform StockTwits. Emojis, increasingly prevalent in digital communication, have potential as compact indicators of investor sentiment, which can be critical for predicting market trends. Our study examines whether emojis alone can serve as reliable proxies for financial sentiment and how they compare with traditional text-based analysis. We conduct a series of experiments using logistic regression and transformer models. We further analyze the performance, computational efficiency, and data requirements of emoji-based versus text-based sentiment classification. Using a balanced dataset of about 528,000 emoji-containing StockTwits posts, we find that emoji-only models achieve F1 approximately 0.75, lower than text-emoji combined models, which achieve F1 approximately 0.88, but with far lower computational cost. This is a useful feature in time-sensitive settings such as high-frequency trading. Furthermore, certain emojis and emoji pairs exhibit strong predictive power for market sentiment, demonstrating over 90 percent accuracy in predicting bullish or bearish trends. Finally, our research reveals large statistical differences in emoji usage between financial and general social media contexts, stressing the need for domain-specific sentiment analysis models.

Emojis are widely used in online financial communication, but it is unclear whether they provide transferable sentiment signals across languages, platforms, and asset communities. This study examines the extent to which emoji usage, semantics, and sentiment polarity remain stable across financial communities, and how these layers influence zero-shot sentiment transfer. Using large corpora of Twitter and StockTwits posts in four languages, we measure cross-community divergence and evaluate sentiment models trained under emoji-only, text-only, and text+emoji inputs. We find that emoji frequencies differ across communities, especially across languages, but their semantics and sentiment polarity are largely stable. Cross-asset transferability shows minimal degradation, while cross-language transfer remains the most challenging. Including emojis consistently reduces transfer gaps relative to text-only models. These results indicate that financial communication exhibits a partially shared ``emoji code,'' and that emojis provide compact, language-independent sentiment cues that improve model generalization across markets and platforms.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in financial contexts, raising critical concerns about reliability, alignment, and susceptibility to adversarial manipulation. While prior finance-related benchmarks assess LLMs' capabilities in stock trading, they are often restricted to small sample and fail to demonstrate LLM susceptibility to context with potential human bias. We introduce Fin-Bias (financial herding under long and uncertain financial context), a benchmark for evaluating LLM investment decision-making when faced with uncertainty and possible human-biased opinions. Fin-Bias includes 8868 long firm-specific analyst reports, including firm aspects summarized and analyzed by sophisticated analysts with investment ratings (Bullish/Neutral/Bearish) spanning from various industries. We present large language models with firm analyst reports with/without analyst investment ratings and even with 'fake' rating, to get investment ratings generated by LLMs. Our results reveal that LLMs tend to herd the explicit bias in context. We also develop a method to detect potential human opinions, which can encourage LLMs to think independently, some models even exceed human performance in predicting future stock return.

Preserving model fidelity is essential for stealthy text-to-image (T2I) backdoor attacks. Existing methods such as Learning without Forgetting (LwF) rely on output-based distillation, which provides limited regularization. We introduce Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) as a parameter-based alternative for preserving fidelity in backdoor learning. While stronger in principle, we show that standard static EWC with a fixed regularization weight lambda and mean-squared utility loss creates an artificial trade-off between attack success rate (ASR) and fidelity, particularly degrading performance on weak triggers. To address this, we propose Cosine-Aware Adaptive EWC, which dynamically adjusts EWC regularization using a cosine-based semantic utility and adaptive scheduling. This approach transforms EWC from a fixed penalty into a context-sensitive constraint, maintaining high ASR while preserving model fidelity. Experiments demonstrate improved ASR-fidelity balance and enhanced robustness on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets compared to existing baselines.

Financial document question answering (QA) demands complex multi-step numerical reasoning over heterogeneous evidence--structured tables, textual narratives, and footnotes--scattered across corporate filings. Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches adopt a single-pass retrieve-then-generate paradigm that struggles with the compositional reasoning chains prevalent in financial analysis. We propose FinAgent-RAG, an agentic RAG framework that orchestrates iterative retrieval-reasoning loops with self-verification, specifically engineered for the precision requirements of financial numerical reasoning. The framework integrates three domain-specific innovations: (1) a Contrastive Financial Retriever trained with hard negative mining to distinguish semantically similar but numerically distinct financial passages, (2) a Program-of-Thought reasoning module that generates executable Python code for precise arithmetic rather than relying on error-prone LLM-based mental computation, and (3) an Adaptive Strategy Router that dynamically allocates computational resources based on question complexity, reducing API costs by 41.3% on FinQA while preserving accuracy. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets--FinQA, ConvFinQA, and TAT-QA--demonstrate that FinAgent-RAG achieves 76.81%, 78.46%, and 74.96% execution accuracy respectively, outperforming the strongest baseline by 5.62--9.32 percentage points. Ablation studies, cross-backbone evaluation with four LLMs, and deployment cost analysis confirm the framework's robustness and practical viability for financial institutions.

Service level agreements (SLAs) in data center colocation contracts define precise thresholds for power, temperature, and humidity, with tiered violation penalties expressed as credits against monthly recurring charges. Traditional reactive monitoring detects breaches only after they occur, limiting remediation opportunities. We present a framework that encodes SLA rules as structured JSON objects to generate training data without manual annotation. We train a per-customer multi-head transformer model in which each attention head specializes in one SLA rule, learning temporal dependencies that precede violations by 30 minutes. Post-training, the inference service emits structured prediction events transformed into three role-specific views: finance schemas exposing credit liability, operations schemas surfacing risk scores and recommended interventions, and compliance schemas bundling predictions with immutable telemetry signatures for audit. By aligning model architecture directly with contractual obligations, this framework enables operators to anticipate SLA breaches, prioritize corrective actions, and minimize financial penalties.

While sentiment analysis is the staple of financial NLP, capturing the nuances of 'why' behind that sentiment remains a challenge. There have been attempts to address this by analysing investor emotions alongside sentiment; however, this does not provide the additional granularity required to understand the target of the emotion/sentiment. We address this by augmenting the StockEmotions dataset with semantically structured opinion graphs, which provide granular semantic depth to the existing sentiment and emotion labels. Using a declarative LLM pipeline, we augment the StockEmotions dataset with opinion graphs for each sentence, derived from 10,000 comments collected from StockTwits. In addition, we study the effect of introducing opinion semantics on baseline classifiers using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Our analysis demonstrates that incorporating opinion semantics improves classification performance across different emotional spectrums

LLM-based financial agents increasingly produce investment rationales before the outcomes needed to evaluate them are observable. This creates a delayed-ground-truth evaluation problem: realized returns remain the eventual arbiter of investment quality, but they arrive too late and are too noisy to guide many model-development and governance decisions. LLM judges offer a tempting shortcut for pre-deployment evaluation of AI-finance systems, but unvalidated judges may reward verbosity, confidence, or rubric mimicry rather than financial judgment. This paper introduces ValueBlindBench, a preregistered agreement-gated stress-test protocol for deciding when LLM-judged investment-rationale claims are publishable, qualified, or invalid. In a controlled market-state capital-allocation prototype with 1,000 honest decision cycles and 100 preregistered adversarial controls (1,100 trajectories, 5,500 judge calls), ValueBlindBench clears the aggregate agreement gate at $\barκ_w = 0.7168$ but prevents several overclaims. Lower-rank systems collapse into a tie-class, one rubric dimension fails the per-dimension gate (\texttt{constraint_awareness}, $\barκ_w = 0.2022$), single-judge rankings are family-dependent, and terse-correct rationales receive a $Δ= -2.81$ rubric-point penalty relative to honest rationales. A targeted anchor-specificity probe further shows that financial constructs such as constraint awareness are operationally load-bearing. The scientific object is therefore not a leaderboard and not a claim to measure true investment skill. ValueBlindBench is a pre-calibration metrology layer for AI-finance evaluation: it governs whether a proposed LLM-judge-based investment-rationale claim is stable enough, agreed enough, and uncontaminated enough to be reported at all.

We present a framework using Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning (RE-IRL) to recover investor reward functions from observed investment actions and market conditions. Unlike traditional IRL algorithms, RE-IRL is employed to account for environments where transition probabilities are unknown or inaccessible. To address the challenge of data sparsity, we utilize a $K$-nearest neighbor approach to estimate the observed behavior policy. Furthermore, we propose a statistical testing framework to evaluate the validity and robustness of the estimated results.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as advisors in high-stakes domains -- answering medical questions, interpreting legal documents, recommending financial products -- where good advice requires integrating a user's full context rather than responding to salient surface features. We investigate whether frontier LLMs actually do this, or whether they instead exhibit heuristic collapse: a systematic reduction of complex, multi-factor decisions to a small number of dominant inputs. We study the phenomenon in investment advice, where legal standards explicitly require individualized reasoning over a client's full circumstances. Applying interpretable surrogate models to LLM outputs, we find systematic heuristic collapse: investment allocation decisions are largely determined by self-reported risk tolerance, while other relevant factors contribute minimally. We further find that web search partially attenuates heuristic collapse but does not resolve it. These findings suggest that heuristic collapse is not resolved by web search augmentation or model scale alone, and that deploying LLMs as advisors requires auditing input sensitivity, not just output quality.

Financial AI systems must produce answers grounded in specific regulatory filings, yet current LLMs fabricate metrics, invent citations, and miscalculate derived quantities. These errors carry direct regulatory consequences as the EU AI Act's high-risk enforcement deadline approaches (August 2026). Existing hallucination detectors treat all claims uniformly, missing 43% of computational errors that require arithmetic re-verification against structured tables. We present FinGround, a three-stage verify-then-ground pipeline for financial document QA. Stage 1 performs finance-aware hybrid retrieval over text and tables. Stage 2 decomposes answers into atomic claims classified by a six-type financial taxonomy and verified with type-routed strategies including formula reconstruction. Stage 3 rewrites unsupported claims with paragraph- and table-cell-level citations. To cleanly isolate verification value from retrieval quality, we propose retrieval-equalized evaluation as standard methodology for RAG verification research: when all systems receive identical retrieval, FinGround still reduces hallucination rates by 68% over the strongest baseline ($p < 0.01$). The full pipeline achieves a 78% reduction relative to GPT-4o. An 8B distilled detector retains 91.4% F1 at 18x lower per-claim latency, enabling $0.003/query deployment, supported by qualitative signals from a four-week analyst pilot.

We introduce Deep FinResearch Bench, a practical and comprehensive evaluation framework for deep research (DR) agents in financial investment research. The benchmark assesses three dimensions of report quality: qualitative rigor, quantitative forecasting and valuation accuracy, and claim credibility and verifiability. Particularly, we define corresponding qualitative and quantitative evaluation metrics and implement an automated scoring procedure to enable scalable assessment. Applying the benchmark to financial reports from frontier DR agents and comparing them with reports authored by financial professionals, we find that AI-generated reports still fall short across these dimensions. These findings underscore the need for domain-specialized DR agents tailored to finance, and we hope the work establishes a foundation for standardized benchmarking of DR agents in financial research.

We introduce IndiaFinBench, to our knowledge the first publicly available evaluation benchmark for assessing large language model (LLM) performance on Indian financial regulatory text. Existing financial NLP benchmarks draw exclusively from Western financial corpora (SEC filings, US earnings reports, English-language financial news), leaving a significant gap in coverage of non-Western regulatory frameworks. IndiaFinBench addresses this gap with 406 expert-annotated question-answer pairs drawn from 192 documents sourced from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), spanning four task types: regulatory interpretation (174 items), numerical reasoning (92 items), contradiction detection (62 items), and temporal reasoning (78 items). Annotation quality is validated through a model-based secondary pass (kappa=0.918 on contradiction detection; 90.7% overall agreement on a 150-item subset) and a 180-item human inter-annotator agreement study across three annotation rounds (kappa=0.645 on contradiction detection; 77.2% overall agreement; 44.3% benchmark coverage). We evaluate twelve models under zero-shot conditions, with accuracy ranging from 70.4% (Gemma 4 E4B) to 89.7% (Gemini 2.5 Flash). All models substantially outperform a non-specialist human baseline of 69.0%. Numerical reasoning is the most discriminative task, with a 35.9 percentage-point spread across models. Bootstrap significance testing (10,000 resamples) reveals three statistically distinct performance tiers. The dataset, evaluation code, and all model outputs are available at https://github.com/rajveerpall/IndiaFinBench

English financial NLP has advanced rapidly through benchmarks targeting earnings analysis, market sentiment, tabular reasoning, and financial question answering, yet Arabic financial NLP remains virtually nonexistent, despite 422 million speakers, $4.9 trillion in Gulf sovereign wealth, and a$4-5 trillion Islamic finance industry requiring specialized Shari'ah compliance over instruments like sukuk, murabaha, and takaful. We introduce Sahm, the first Arabic financial benchmark spanning seven tasks: AAOIFI standards QA, fatwa-based QA/MCQ, accounting and business exams, financial sentiment analysis, extractive summarization, and event-cause reasoning, comprising 14,380 expert-verified instances from authentic regulatory, juristic, and corporate sources. Evaluating 20 LLMs, we find Arabic fluency does not imply financial reasoning: models achieving 91% on recognition tasks drop sharply on generation, and event-cause reasoning exposes the widest performance gap (1.89-9.84/10). We release the benchmark and dataset to support trustworthy Arabic financial assistants.

Segment-level disclosures are a central component of financial reporting, providing insight into firms' internal organization and the allocation of economic activities across operating units. However, segment information is often presented in both qualitative and quantitative forms, dispersed across tables and narrative sections of Form 10-K filings. Empirical research relying on structured databases faces both completeness and comparability challenges, as some firm-year observations may be missing, nested segment disclosures are not captured, and support for longitudinal and cross-firm comparability is limited. This study develops a large language model-based framework to extract segment disclosures directly from Form 10-K filings and to preserve both reportable and nested segment information. We further design a retrieval augmented system that incorporates information across multiple filings to support comparability. We use two representative settings to demonstrate its application: longitudinal analysis within a firm to interpret segment changes over time, and cross firm alignment of geographic segments across firms with different reporting structures. The results indicate that the artifact accurately extracts segment-level information and effectively addresses questions that require cross-period knowledge, demonstrating the potential of LLM-based approaches to enhance the measurement and interpretation of segment disclosures.

Synthetic augmentation is increasingly used to mitigate data scarcity in financial machine learning, yet its statistical role remains poorly understood. We formalize synthetic augmentation as a modification of the effective training distribution and show that it induces a structural bias--variance trade-off: while additional samples may reduce estimation error, they may also shift the population objective whenever the synthetic distribution deviates from regions relevant under evaluation. To isolate informational gains from mechanical sample-size effects, we introduce a size-matched null augmentation and a finite-sample, non-parametric block permutation test that remains valid under weak temporal dependence. We evaluate this framework in both controlled Markov-switching environments and real financial datasets, including high-frequency option trade data and a daily equity panel. Across generators spanning bootstrap, copula-based models, variational autoencoders, diffusion models, and TimeGAN, we vary augmentation ratio, model capacity, task type, regime rarity, and signal-to-noise. We show that synthetic augmentation is beneficial only in variance-dominant regimes, such as persistent volatility forecasting-while it deteriorates performance in bias-dominant settings, including near-efficient directional prediction. Rare-regime targeting can improve domain-specific metrics but may conflict with unconditional permutation inference. Our results provide a structural perspective on when synthetic data improves financial learning performance and when it induces persistent distributional distortion.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for financial document QA typically follow a chunk-based paradigm: documents are split into fragments, embedded, and retrieved by similarity. In structurally homogeneous corpora such as regulatory filings, this suffers from cross-document chunk confusion. Semantic File Routing (SFR), which uses LLM structured output to route queries to whole documents, reduces catastrophic failures but sacrifices targeted-chunk precision. We identify this robustness-precision trade-off on the FinDER benchmark (1,500 queries across five groups): SFR achieves higher average scores (6.45 vs. 6.02) and fewer failures (10.3% vs. 22.5%), while chunk-based retrieval (CBR) yields more perfect answers (13.8% vs. 8.5%). To resolve it, we propose Hybrid Document-Routed Retrieval (HDRR), a two-stage architecture that uses SFR as a document filter followed by chunk retrieval scoped to the identified document(s), eliminating cross-document confusion while preserving chunk precision. HDRR achieves the best performance on every metric: an average score of 7.54 (25.2% above CBR, 16.9% above SFR), a 6.4% failure rate, 67.7% correctness (+18.7 pp over CBR), and a 20.1% perfect-answer rate (+6.3 pp over CBR, +11.6 pp over SFR), simultaneously attaining the lowest failure rate and highest precision across all five groups. Beyond accuracy, HDRR is also the most efficient of the high-quality systems: it preserves CBR's compact per-query token budget (~5K-15K, an order of magnitude below SFR's ~50K-200K), incurs no indexing-time LLM spend (versus the one-time ~$100 cost of contextual indexing), and uses fewer per-query LLM calls than self-correcting agentic baselines, translating directly to lower API spend and inference-time energy at deployment scale.

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to specialized financial reasoning typically requires expensive fine-tuning that produces model-locked expertise. Training-free alternatives have emerged, yet our experiments show that leading methods (GEPA and ACE) achieve only marginal gains on the FAMMA financial reasoning benchmark, exposing the limits of unstructured text optimization for complex, multi-step domain reasoning. We introduce Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation (ASDA), a framework that automatically generates structured skill artifacts through iterative error-corrective learning without modifying model weights. A teacher model analyzes a student model's failures on financial reasoning tasks, clusters errors by subfield and error type, and synthesizes skill files containing reasoning procedures, code templates, and worked examples, which are dynamically injected during inference. Evaluated on FAMMA, ASDA achieves up to +17.33% improvement on arithmetic reasoning and +5.95% on non-arithmetic reasoning, substantially outperforming all training-free baselines. The resulting skill artifacts are human-readable, version-controlled, and compatible with the Agent Skills open standard, offering any organization with a labeled domain dataset a practical and auditable path to domain adaptation without weight access or retraining.

In this paper, we propose LingDT-VL-OCR, a document parsing system tailored to financial-domain documents, transforming ultra-long financial PDFs into semantically consistent, highly accurate, structured outputs with auditing-grade provenance. To address finance-specific challenges such as complex layouts, cross-page structural discontinuities, and cell-level referencing capability, LingDT-VL-OCR combines (1) a Cross-page Contents Consolidation algorithm to restore continuity across pages and a Document-level Heading Hierarchy Reconstruction (DHR) module to build a globally consistent Table of Contents (TOC) tree for structure-aware retrieval, and (2) a difficulty-adaptive curriculum learning training strategy for table parsing, together with a CellBBoxRegressor module that uses structural anchor tokens to localize table cells from decoder hidden states without external detectors. Experiments demonstrate that our model shows high performance on the Overall metric of OmniDocBench. To enable realistic evaluation in the financial vertical, we further introduce FinDocBench, a benchmark that includes six financial document categories with expert-verified annotations and evaluation metrics including Table of Contents edit-distance-based similarity (TocEDS), cross-page concatenated TEDS, and Table Cell Intersection over Union (C-IoU). We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art models on FinDocBench to assess their capabilities and remaining limitations on financial documents. Overall, LingDT-VL-OCR and FinDocBench provide a practical foundation for reliable downstream financial document applications.

Large language models are becoming increasingly significant in financial applications. Nevertheless, prevailing benchmarks are largely dependent on simulated or generic data, which leads to a significant gap between reported performance and actual efficacy in real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we present BizFinBench.v2, the first integrated offline and online benchmark built upon authentic user query-response data from both Chinese and U.S. equity markets. It comprises 28,860 questions across eight offline and two online tasks. Experimental results show that GPT-5 achieves a mere 61.5% accuracy, still failing to meet the practical business requirement (84.8%). Among the evaluated commercial models, DeepSeek-R1 exhibits superior investment efficacy. Error analysis grounded in real financial practice reveals persistent limitations in existing models. By overcoming the constraints of prior benchmarks, BizFinBench.v2 provides a substantiated foundation for advancing LLM deployment in the financial sector. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/HiThink-Research/BizFinBench.v2.

Current navigation benchmarks focus on task success but do not capture the economic constraints essential for commercializing autonomous delivery systems. We introduce CostNav, an Economic Navigation Benchmark that evaluates physical AI agents on a cost-revenue and break-even analysis, pairing Isaac Sim's collision and cargo dynamics with industry-standard data such as Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) injury reports. To our knowledge, CostNav is the first physics-grounded economic benchmark to use regulatory and financial data to quantify the gap between navigation metrics and commercial deployment, revealing that high task-success rates alone do not ensure economic viability. Evaluating seven baselines (two rule-based and five imitation-learning methods), we find no method economically viable: all yield negative contribution margins. CANVAS, using only an RGB camera and GPS, attains the highest task success and the least-negative margin among methods with non-zero Service-Level Agreement (SLA) compliance (-$28.40/run), outperforming LiDAR-equipped Nav2 w/ GPS (-$37.34/run). A sim-trained policy evaluated on a real delivery robot yields SLA compliance close to its simulation result, indicating that policy performance in CostNav's simulation transfers to real-world deployment. We challenge the community to achieve economic viability on CostNav, which scores methods by cost-revenue outcomes. All resources are available at https://github.com/worv-ai/CostNav.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been leveraged for asset pricing tasks and stock trading applications, enabling AI agents to generate investment decisions from unstructured financial data. However, most evaluations of LLM timing-based investing strategies are conducted on narrow timeframes and limited stock universes, overstating effectiveness due to survivorship and data-snooping biases. We critically assess their generalizability and robustness by proposing FINSABER, a backtesting framework evaluating timing-based strategies across longer periods and a larger universe of symbols. Systematic backtests over two decades and 100+ symbols reveal that previously reported LLM advantages deteriorate significantly under broader cross-section and over a longer-term evaluation. Our market regime analysis further demonstrates that LLM strategies are overly conservative in bull markets, underperforming passive benchmarks, and overly aggressive in bear markets, incurring heavy losses. These findings highlight the need to develop LLM strategies that are able to prioritise trend detection and regime-aware risk controls over mere scaling of framework complexity.

Quantum Support Vector Machine is a kernel-based approach to classification problems. We study the applicability of quantum kernels to financial data, specifically our self-curated Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSEx) Broad Index dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of quantum kernels applied to this dataset. Working within the empirical quantum advantage (EQA) framework of Krunic et al., we benchmark several quantum kernels against a classical RBF-kernel SVM baseline, propose the best-performing kernel for this dataset, and relate the observations to the Phase Space Terrain Ruggedness Index metric. We estimate the resources needed to carry out these investigations on a larger scale for future practitioners.

Can AI Agents simulate real-world trading environments to investigate the impact of external factors on stock trading activities (e.g., macroeconomics, policy changes, company fundamentals, and global events)? These factors, which frequently influence trading behaviors, are critical elements in the quest for maximizing investors' profits. Our work attempts to solve this problem through large language model based agents. We have developed a multi-agent AI system called StockAgent, driven by LLMs, designed to simulate investors' trading behaviors in response to the real stock market. The StockAgent allows users to evaluate the impact of different external factors on investor trading and to analyze trading behavior and profitability effects. Additionally, StockAgent avoids the test set leakage issue present in existing trading simulation systems based on AI Agents. Specifically, it prevents the model from leveraging prior knowledge it may have acquired related to the test data. We evaluate different LLMs under the framework of StockAgent in a stock trading environment that closely resembles real-world conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the impact of key external factors on stock market trading, including trading behavior and stock price fluctuation rules. This research explores the study of agents' free trading gaps in the context of no prior knowledge related to market data. The patterns identified through StockAgent simulations provide valuable insights for LLM-based investment advice and stock recommendation. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Stockagent.

We examine whether financial news can improve realised volatility forecasting using a parsimonious NLP-based framework that incorporates specialised financial word embeddings alongside general-purpose alternatives. News-only forecasts contain useful predictive information but generally do not outperform strong volatility-history benchmarks. Crucially, combining stock-related news forecasts with a strong volatility-history benchmark lowers forecast losses for several specifications and increases realised utility, providing evidence consistent with forecast complementarity. Performance varies across news types, embedding representations, and volatility regimes. SHAP attributions associate forecast variation with economically interpretable firm-specific and macroeconomic news themes.

Quantitative strategy optimization remains largely manual, requiring domain experts to identify weak signals, tune risk-control rules, and repeatedly validate iterative revisions. Large language models can accelerate this process, but directly relying on them to rewrite trading strategies often introduces hallucinated edits, strategy drift, and backtest overfitting. We propose EVOQUANT, a self-Evolving Verifier-guided framework for strategy Optimization in Quantitative trading. Our method utilizes LLMs to deeply diagnose performance bottlenecks, generates semantically controlled candidate edits, selects the best strategy through a multi-stage verification pipeline, and distills optimization experience into reusable knowledge for continual self-improvement. We evaluate our method using seven representative strategies: four from the A-share market and three from the Crypto market. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the Sharpe ratio across all tested strategies: the average test Sharpe increases from -0.298 to 0.538, and the best-performing strategy achieves a 199% relative improvement. Ablation studies and stress tests under stricter conditions further validate the effectiveness and robustness of the framework. Overall, this work transforms quantitative strategy optimization from costly manual trial and error into an automated and verifiable iterative paradigm, offering a new path for applying large language models to financial strategy research.