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Nov 3

NumTrace: Auditing the Number Provenance of Financial Analyst Agents

A numerical claim generated by a financial analyst agent can match a number in a company filing but refer to the wrong entity, concept, period, unit or scope. A check based on reference answers can mark such an answer as wrong but does not explain why it fails. In this paper, we present NumTrace, a new benchmark that audits the provenance of each numerical claim made by financial analyst agents: its source and financial semantics. NumTrace currently has 540 questions over 2,163 SEC EDGAR documents. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first numerical benchmark about who holds a company's shares (Form 13F) and what its executives are owed (Item 402(i)). On a frozen snapshot of these documents, we build the reference answers according to accounting rules. NumTrace then gives each claim three separate verdicts: value, binding and support. By retaining separate value and binding verdicts, NumTrace detects right number, wrong account (RNWA) errors: a claim has an RNWA error when it passes the value check but fails the binding check. The RNWA rate quantifies the gap between value-only and joint value-and-binding pass rates. Finally, we audit three agents, Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash. RNWA errors make up 67.5-81.8% of each agent's failing claims. In particular, on 13F co-filing group questions, about 91% of claims pass the value check, but fewer than half pass the binding check.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 25

Measuring Racial Disparities in Rent Growth Under Algorithmic Landlord Concentration in U.S. Metros

The 2024 Department of Justice antitrust complaint against RealPage, Inc. named five major residential REITs for coordinating algorithmic rent pricing across hundreds of thousands of apartment units in major US metropolitan areas. This paper studies whether census-tract-level corporate landlord concentration (CLC), measured from SEC EDGAR 10-K property filings geocoded to census tracts, the first such application in the literature, is associated with rent growth 2019-2023, and whether that association is larger in majority-minority neighborhoods. Rent outcomes are measured using the Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI). To account for the possibility that corporate landlords preferentially locate in neighborhoods already seeing rent appreciation, all regressions control for a fully novel Algorithmic Housing Burden Index (AHBI), a composite of pre-existing rent burden and market tightness from ACS data. Across 665 census tracts in ten US metropolitan areas, doubling REIT concentration is associated with 2.8 percentage points higher rent growth (p = 0.086, p = 0.030, HC1 robust). This association is significantly stronger in majority-minority tracts. Within the same metro, high-CLC majority-minority tracts are associated with 5.9 percentage points higher rent growth than comparable white tracts (p = 0.039). An XGBoost model predicts 44 percent of out-of-sample rent growth variance, with SHAP analysis independently confirming that CLC's contribution is positive in minority tracts and negative in white tracts. Taken all together, these findings provide the first tract-level evidence consistent with corporate landlord concentration being associated with disproportionately higher rent growth in communities of color.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 24

AIT-QA: Question Answering Dataset over Complex Tables in the Airline Industry

Recent advances in transformers have enabled Table Question Answering (Table QA) systems to achieve high accuracy and SOTA results on open domain datasets like WikiTableQuestions and WikiSQL. Such transformers are frequently pre-trained on open-domain content such as Wikipedia, where they effectively encode questions and corresponding tables from Wikipedia as seen in Table QA dataset. However, web tables in Wikipedia are notably flat in their layout, with the first row as the sole column header. The layout lends to a relational view of tables where each row is a tuple. Whereas, tables in domain-specific business or scientific documents often have a much more complex layout, including hierarchical row and column headers, in addition to having specialized vocabulary terms from that domain. To address this problem, we introduce the domain-specific Table QA dataset AIT-QA (Airline Industry Table QA). The dataset consists of 515 questions authored by human annotators on 116 tables extracted from public U.S. SEC filings (publicly available at: https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml) of major airline companies for the fiscal years 2017-2019. We also provide annotations pertaining to the nature of questions, marking those that require hierarchical headers, domain-specific terminology, and paraphrased forms. Our zero-shot baseline evaluation of three transformer-based SOTA Table QA methods - TaPAS (end-to-end), TaBERT (semantic parsing-based), and RCI (row-column encoding-based) - clearly exposes the limitation of these methods in this practical setting, with the best accuracy at just 51.8\% (RCI). We also present pragmatic table preprocessing steps used to pivot and project these complex tables into a layout suitable for the SOTA Table QA models.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 24, 2021