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Jul 8

MarS: a Financial Market Simulation Engine Powered by Generative Foundation Model

Generative models aim to simulate realistic effects of various actions across different contexts, from text generation to visual effects. Despite significant efforts to build real-world simulators, the application of generative models to virtual worlds, like financial markets, remains under-explored. In financial markets, generative models can simulate complex market effects of participants with various behaviors, enabling interaction under different market conditions, and training strategies without financial risk. This simulation relies on the finest structured data in financial market like orders thus building the finest realistic simulation. We propose Large Market Model (LMM), an order-level generative foundation model, for financial market simulation, akin to language modeling in the digital world. Our financial Market Simulation engine (MarS), powered by LMM, addresses the domain-specific need for realistic, interactive and controllable order generation. Key observations include LMM's strong scalability across data size and model complexity, and MarS's robust and practicable realism in controlled generation with market impact. We showcase MarS as a forecast tool, detection system, analysis platform, and agent training environment, thus demonstrating MarS's "paradigm shift" potential for a variety of financial applications. We release the code of MarS at https://github.com/microsoft/MarS/.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 4, 2024 2

Kronos: A Foundation Model for the Language of Financial Markets

The success of large-scale pre-training paradigm, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs), has inspired the development of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs). However, their application to financial candlestick (K-line) data remains limited, often underperforming non-pre-trained architectures. Moreover, existing TSFMs often overlook crucial downstream tasks such as volatility prediction and synthetic data generation. To address these limitations, we propose Kronos, a unified, scalable pre-training framework tailored to financial K-line modeling. Kronos introduces a specialized tokenizer that discretizes continuous market information into token sequences, preserving both price dynamics and trade activity patterns. We pre-train Kronos using an autoregressive objective on a massive, multi-market corpus of over 12 billion K-line records from 45 global exchanges, enabling it to learn nuanced temporal and cross-asset representations. Kronos excels in a zero-shot setting across a diverse set of financial tasks. On benchmark datasets, Kronos boosts price series forecasting RankIC by 93% over the leading TSFM and 87% over the best non-pre-trained baseline. It also achieves a 9% lower MAE in volatility forecasting and a 22% improvement in generative fidelity for synthetic K-line sequences. These results establish Kronos as a robust, versatile foundation model for end-to-end financial time series analysis. Our pre-trained model is publicly available at https://github.com/shiyu-coder/Kronos.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 2, 2025 4

Your Spending Needs Attention: Modeling Financial Habits with Transformers

Predictive models play a crucial role in the financial industry, enabling risk prediction, fraud detection, and personalized recommendations, where slight changes in core model performance can result in billions of dollars in revenue or losses. While financial institutions have access to enormous amounts of user data (e.g., bank transactions, in-app events, and customer support logs), leveraging this data effectively remains challenging due to its complexity and scale. Thus, in many financial institutions, most production models follow traditional machine learning (ML) approaches by converting unstructured data into manually engineered tabular features. Conversely, other domains (e.g., natural language processing) have effectively utilized self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn rich representations from raw data, removing the need for manual feature extraction. In this paper, we investigate using transformer-based representation learning models for transaction data, hypothesizing that these models, trained on massive data, can provide a novel and powerful approach to understanding customer behavior. We propose a new method enabling the use of SSL with transaction data by adapting transformer-based models to handle both textual and structured attributes. Our approach, denoted nuFormer, includes an end-to-end fine-tuning method that integrates user embeddings with existing tabular features. Our experiments demonstrate improvements for large-scale recommendation problems at Nubank. Notably, these gains are achieved solely through enhanced representation learning rather than incorporating new data sources.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 30, 2025

Fin-PRM: A Domain-Specialized Process Reward Model for Financial Reasoning in Large Language Models

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising framework for supervising intermediate reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet existing PRMs are primarily trained on general or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) domains and fall short in domain-specific contexts such as finance, where reasoning is more structured, symbolic, and sensitive to factual and regulatory correctness. We introduce Fin-PRM, a domain-specialized, trajectory-aware PRM tailored to evaluate intermediate reasoning steps in financial tasks. Fin-PRM integrates step-level and trajectory-level reward supervision, enabling fine-grained evaluation of reasoning traces aligned with financial logic. We apply Fin-PRM in both offline and online reward learning settings, supporting three key applications: (i) selecting high-quality reasoning trajectories for distillation-based supervised fine-tuning, (ii) providing dense process-level rewards for reinforcement learning, and (iii) guiding reward-informed Best-of-N inference at test time. Experimental results on financial reasoning benchmarks, including CFLUE and FinQA, demonstrate that Fin-PRM consistently outperforms general-purpose PRMs and strong domain baselines in trajectory selection quality. Downstream models trained with Fin-PRM yield substantial improvements with baselines, with gains of 12.9\% in supervised learning, 5.2\% in reinforcement learning, and 5.1\% in test-time performance. These findings highlight the value of domain-specialized reward modeling for aligning LLMs with expert-level financial reasoning. Our project resources will be available at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.

DianJin Qwen DianJin
·
Aug 20, 2025 2

A Survey of Large Language Models for Financial Applications: Progress, Prospects and Challenges

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have unlocked novel opportunities for machine learning applications in the financial domain. These models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding context, processing vast amounts of data, and generating human-preferred contents. In this survey, we explore the application of LLMs on various financial tasks, focusing on their potential to transform traditional practices and drive innovation. We provide a discussion of the progress and advantages of LLMs in financial contexts, analyzing their advanced technologies as well as prospective capabilities in contextual understanding, transfer learning flexibility, complex emotion detection, etc. We then highlight this survey for categorizing the existing literature into key application areas, including linguistic tasks, sentiment analysis, financial time series, financial reasoning, agent-based modeling, and other applications. For each application area, we delve into specific methodologies, such as textual analysis, knowledge-based analysis, forecasting, data augmentation, planning, decision support, and simulations. Furthermore, a comprehensive collection of datasets, model assets, and useful codes associated with mainstream applications are presented as resources for the researchers and practitioners. Finally, we outline the challenges and opportunities for future research, particularly emphasizing a number of distinctive aspects in this field. We hope our work can help facilitate the adoption and further development of LLMs in the financial sector.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 15, 2024

Harmful Terms and Where to Find Them: Measuring and Modeling Unfavorable Financial Terms and Conditions in Shopping Websites at Scale

Terms and conditions for online shopping websites often contain terms that can have significant financial consequences for customers. Despite their impact, there is currently no comprehensive understanding of the types and potential risks associated with unfavorable financial terms. Furthermore, there are no publicly available detection systems or datasets to systematically identify or mitigate these terms. In this paper, we take the first steps toward solving this problem with three key contributions. First, we introduce TermMiner, an automated data collection and topic modeling pipeline to understand the landscape of unfavorable financial terms. Second, we create ShopTC-100K, a dataset of terms and conditions from shopping websites in the Tranco top 100K list, comprising 1.8 million terms from 8,251 websites. Consequently, we develop a taxonomy of 22 types from 4 categories of unfavorable financial terms -- spanning purchase, post-purchase, account termination, and legal aspects. Third, we build TermLens, an automated detector that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify unfavorable financial terms. Fine-tuned on an annotated dataset, TermLens achieves an F1 score of 94.6\% and a false positive rate of 2.3\% using GPT-4o. When applied to shopping websites from the Tranco top 100K, we find that 42.06\% of these sites contain at least one unfavorable financial term, with such terms being more prevalent on less popular websites. Case studies further highlight the financial risks and customer dissatisfaction associated with unfavorable financial terms, as well as the limitations of existing ecosystem defenses.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025

SNFinLLM: Systematic and Nuanced Financial Domain Adaptation of Chinese Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become powerful tools for advancing natural language processing applications in the financial industry. However, existing financial LLMs often face challenges such as hallucinations or superficial parameter training, resulting in suboptimal performance, particularly in financial computing and machine reading comprehension (MRC). To address these issues, we propose a novel large language model specifically designed for the Chinese financial domain, named SNFinLLM. SNFinLLM excels in domain-specific tasks such as answering questions, summarizing financial research reports, analyzing sentiment, and executing financial calculations. We then perform the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance the model's proficiency across various financial domains. Specifically, we gather extensive financial data and create a high-quality instruction dataset composed of news articles, professional papers, and research reports of finance domain. Utilizing both domain-specific and general datasets, we proceed with continuous pre-training on an established open-source base model, resulting in SNFinLLM-base. Following this, we engage in supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to bolster the model's capability across multiple financial tasks. Crucially, we employ a straightforward Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) method to better align the model with human preferences. Extensive experiments conducted on finance benchmarks and our evaluation dataset demonstrate that SNFinLLM markedly outperforms other state-of-the-art financial language models. For more details, check out our demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYT-65HZwus.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 5, 2024

Revolutionizing Finance with LLMs: An Overview of Applications and Insights

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have seen considerable advancements and have been applied in diverse fields. Built on the Transformer architecture, these models are trained on extensive datasets, enabling them to understand and generate human language effectively. In the financial domain, the deployment of LLMs is gaining momentum. These models are being utilized for automating financial report generation, forecasting market trends, analyzing investor sentiment, and offering personalized financial advice. Leveraging their natural language processing capabilities, LLMs can distill key insights from vast financial data, aiding institutions in making informed investment choices and enhancing both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. In this study, we provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging integration of LLMs into various financial tasks. Additionally, we conducted holistic tests on multiple financial tasks through the combination of natural language instructions. Our findings show that GPT-4 effectively follow prompt instructions across various financial tasks. This survey and evaluation of LLMs in the financial domain aim to deepen the understanding of LLMs' current role in finance for both financial practitioners and LLM researchers, identify new research and application prospects, and highlight how these technologies can be leveraged to solve practical challenges in the finance industry.

  • 12 authors
·
Jan 21, 2024

MultiFinBen: A Multilingual, Multimodal, and Difficulty-Aware Benchmark for Financial LLM Evaluation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated progress in financial NLP and applications, yet existing benchmarks remain limited to monolingual and unimodal settings, often over-relying on simple tasks and failing to reflect the complexity of real-world financial communication. We introduce MultiFinBen, the first multilingual and multimodal benchmark tailored to the global financial domain, evaluating LLMs across modalities (text, vision, audio) and linguistic settings (monolingual, bilingual, multilingual) on domain-specific tasks. We introduce two novel tasks, including PolyFiQA-Easy and PolyFiQA-Expert, the first multilingual financial benchmarks requiring models to perform complex reasoning over mixed-language inputs; and EnglishOCR and SpanishOCR, the first OCR-embedded financial QA tasks challenging models to extract and reason over information from visual-text financial documents. Moreover, we propose a dynamic, difficulty-aware selection mechanism and curate a compact, balanced benchmark rather than simple aggregation existing datasets. Extensive evaluation of 22 state-of-the-art models reveals that even the strongest models, despite their general multimodal and multilingual capabilities, struggle dramatically when faced with complex cross-lingual and multimodal tasks in financial domain. MultiFinBen is publicly released to foster transparent, reproducible, and inclusive progress in financial studies and applications.

  • 44 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025 3

FinGPT: Democratizing Internet-scale Data for Financial Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating human-like texts, which may potentially revolutionize the finance industry. However, existing LLMs often fall short in the financial field, which is mainly attributed to the disparities between general text data and financial text data. Unfortunately, there is only a limited number of financial text datasets available, and BloombergGPT, the first financial LLM (FinLLM), is close-sourced (only the training logs were released). In light of this, we aim to democratize Internet-scale financial data for LLMs, which is an open challenge due to diverse data sources, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high time-validity. To address the challenges, we introduce an open-sourced and data-centric framework, Financial Generative Pre-trained Transformer (FinGPT), that automates the collection and curation of real-time financial data from 34 diverse sources on the Internet, providing researchers and practitioners with accessible and transparent resources to develop their FinLLMs. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective strategy for fine-tuning FinLLM using the inherent feedback from the market, dubbed Reinforcement Learning with Stock Prices (RLSP). We also adopt the Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA, QLoRA) method that enables users to customize their own FinLLMs from general-purpose LLMs at a low cost. Finally, we showcase several FinGPT applications, including robo-advisor, sentiment analysis for algorithmic trading, and low-code development. FinGPT aims to democratize FinLLMs, stimulate innovation, and unlock new opportunities in open finance. The codes have been open-sourced.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 19, 2023

The LLM Pro Finance Suite: Multilingual Large Language Models for Financial Applications

The financial industry's growing demand for advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities has highlighted the limitations of generalist large language models (LLMs) in handling domain-specific financial tasks. To address this gap, we introduce the LLM Pro Finance Suite, a collection of five instruction-tuned LLMs (ranging from 8B to 70B parameters) specifically designed for financial applications. Our approach focuses on enhancing generalist instruction-tuned models, leveraging their existing strengths in instruction following, reasoning, and toxicity control, while fine-tuning them on a curated, high-quality financial corpus comprising over 50% finance-related data in English, French, and German. We evaluate the LLM Pro Finance Suite on a comprehensive financial benchmark suite, demonstrating consistent improvement over state-of-the-art baselines in finance-oriented tasks and financial translation. Notably, our models maintain the strong general-domain capabilities of their base models, ensuring reliable performance across non-specialized tasks. This dual proficiency, enhanced financial expertise without compromise on general abilities, makes the LLM Pro Finance Suite an ideal drop-in replacement for existing LLMs in financial workflows, offering improved domain-specific performance while preserving overall versatility. We publicly release two 8B-parameters models to foster future research and development in financial NLP applications: https://huggingface.co/collections/DragonLLM/llm-open-finance.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 7, 2025

Baichuan4-Finance Technical Report

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in language understanding, generation, and reasoning, yet their potential in finance remains underexplored due to the complexity and specialization of financial knowledge. In this work, we report the development of the Baichuan4-Finance series, including a comprehensive suite of foundational Baichuan4-Finance-Base and an aligned language model Baichuan4-Finance, which are built upon Baichuan4-Turbo base model and tailored for finance domain. Firstly, we have dedicated significant effort to building a detailed pipeline for improving data quality. Moreover, in the continual pre-training phase, we propose a novel domain self-constraint training strategy, which enables Baichuan4-Finance-Base to acquire financial knowledge without losing general capabilities. After Supervised Fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and AI Feedback, the chat model Baichuan4-Finance is able to tackle various financial certification questions and real-world scenario applications. We evaluate Baichuan4-Finance on many widely used general datasets and two holistic financial benchmarks. The evaluation results show that Baichuan4-Finance-Base surpasses almost all competitive baselines on financial tasks by significant margins without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks. At the same time, Baichuan4-Finance demonstrates even more impressive performance on financial application scenarios, showcasing its potential to foster community innovation in the financial LLM field.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

FINESSE-Bench: A Hierarchical Benchmark Suite for Financial Domain Knowledge and Technical Analysis in Large Language Models

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.

  • 7 authors
·
May 13 2

InvestLM: A Large Language Model for Investment using Financial Domain Instruction Tuning

We present a new financial domain large language model, InvestLM, tuned on LLaMA-65B (Touvron et al., 2023), using a carefully curated instruction dataset related to financial investment. Inspired by less-is-more-for-alignment (Zhou et al., 2023), we manually curate a small yet diverse instruction dataset, covering a wide range of financial related topics, from Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam questions to SEC filings to Stackexchange quantitative finance discussions. InvestLM shows strong capabilities in understanding financial text and provides helpful responses to investment related questions. Financial experts, including hedge fund managers and research analysts, rate InvestLM's response as comparable to those of state-of-the-art commercial models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Claude-2). Zero-shot evaluation on a set of financial NLP benchmarks demonstrates strong generalizability. From a research perspective, this work suggests that a high-quality domain specific LLM can be tuned using a small set of carefully curated instructions on a well-trained foundation model, which is consistent with the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis (Zhou et al., 2023). From a practical perspective, this work develops a state-of-the-art financial domain LLM with superior capability in understanding financial texts and providing helpful investment advice, potentially enhancing the work efficiency of financial professionals. We release the model parameters to the research community.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

PIXIU: A Large Language Model, Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Finance

Although large language models (LLMs) has shown great performance on natural language processing (NLP) in the financial domain, there are no publicly available financial tailtored LLMs, instruction tuning datasets, and evaluation benchmarks, which is critical for continually pushing forward the open-source development of financial artificial intelligence (AI). This paper introduces PIXIU, a comprehensive framework including the first financial LLM based on fine-tuning LLaMA with instruction data, the first instruction data with 136K data samples to support the fine-tuning, and an evaluation benchmark with 5 tasks and 9 datasets. We first construct the large-scale multi-task instruction data considering a variety of financial tasks, financial document types, and financial data modalities. We then propose a financial LLM called FinMA by fine-tuning LLaMA with the constructed dataset to be able to follow instructions for various financial tasks. To support the evaluation of financial LLMs, we propose a standardized benchmark that covers a set of critical financial tasks, including five financial NLP tasks and one financial prediction task. With this benchmark, we conduct a detailed analysis of FinMA and several existing LLMs, uncovering their strengths and weaknesses in handling critical financial tasks. The model, datasets, benchmark, and experimental results are open-sourced to facilitate future research in financial AI.

TheFinAI The Fin AI
·
Jun 8, 2023

FinMaster: A Holistic Benchmark for Mastering Full-Pipeline Financial Workflows with LLMs

Financial tasks are pivotal to global economic stability; however, their execution faces challenges including labor intensive processes, low error tolerance, data fragmentation, and tool limitations. Although large language models (LLMs) have succeeded in various natural language processing tasks and have shown potential in automating workflows through reasoning and contextual understanding, current benchmarks for evaluating LLMs in finance lack sufficient domain-specific data, have simplistic task design, and incomplete evaluation frameworks. To address these gaps, this article presents FinMaster, a comprehensive financial benchmark designed to systematically assess the capabilities of LLM in financial literacy, accounting, auditing, and consulting. Specifically, FinMaster comprises three main modules: i) FinSim, which builds simulators that generate synthetic, privacy-compliant financial data for companies to replicate market dynamics; ii) FinSuite, which provides tasks in core financial domains, spanning 183 tasks of various types and difficulty levels; and iii) FinEval, which develops a unified interface for evaluation. Extensive experiments over state-of-the-art LLMs reveal critical capability gaps in financial reasoning, with accuracy dropping from over 90% on basic tasks to merely 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning. This degradation exhibits the propagation of computational errors, where single-metric calculations initially demonstrating 58% accuracy decreased to 37% in multimetric scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, FinMaster is the first benchmark that covers full-pipeline financial workflows with challenging tasks. We hope that FinMaster can bridge the gap between research and industry practitioners, driving the adoption of LLMs in real-world financial practices to enhance efficiency and accuracy.

  • 9 authors
·
May 17, 2025

Fine-tuning of lightweight large language models for sentiment classification on heterogeneous financial textual data

Large language models (LLMs) play an increasingly important role in financial markets analysis by capturing signals from complex and heterogeneous textual data sources, such as tweets, news articles, reports, and microblogs. However, their performance is dependent on large computational resources and proprietary datasets, which are costly, restricted, and therefore inaccessible to many researchers and practitioners. To reflect realistic situations we investigate the ability of lightweight open-source LLMs -- smaller and publicly available models designed to operate with limited computational resources -- to generalize sentiment understanding from financial datasets of varying sizes, sources, formats, and languages. We compare the benchmark finance natural language processing (NLP) model, FinBERT, and three open-source lightweight LLMs, DeepSeek-LLM 7B, Llama3 8B Instruct, and Qwen3 8B on five publicly available datasets: FinancialPhraseBank, Financial Question Answering, Gold News Sentiment, Twitter Sentiment and Chinese Finance Sentiment. We find that LLMs, specially Qwen3 8B and Llama3 8B, perform best in most scenarios, even from using only 5% of the available training data. These results hold in zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. Our findings indicate that lightweight, open-source large language models (LLMs) constitute a cost-effective option, as they can achieve competitive performance on heterogeneous textual data even when trained on only a limited subset of the extensive annotated corpora that are typically deemed necessary.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 30, 2025

Bridging Language Models and Financial Analysis

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have unlocked transformative possibilities in natural language processing, particularly within the financial sector. Financial data is often embedded in intricate relationships across textual content, numerical tables, and visual charts, posing challenges that traditional methods struggle to address effectively. However, the emergence of LLMs offers new pathways for processing and analyzing this multifaceted data with increased efficiency and insight. Despite the fast pace of innovation in LLM research, there remains a significant gap in their practical adoption within the finance industry, where cautious integration and long-term validation are prioritized. This disparity has led to a slower implementation of emerging LLM techniques, despite their immense potential in financial applications. As a result, many of the latest advancements in LLM technology remain underexplored or not fully utilized in this domain. This survey seeks to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of recent developments in LLM research and examining their applicability to the financial sector. Building on previous survey literature, we highlight several novel LLM methodologies, exploring their distinctive capabilities and their potential relevance to financial data analysis. By synthesizing insights from a broad range of studies, this paper aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, offering direction on promising research avenues and outlining future opportunities for advancing LLM applications in finance.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 13, 2025

CN-Buzz2Portfolio: A Chinese-Market Dataset and Benchmark for LLM-Based Macro and Sector Asset Allocation from Daily Trending Financial News

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transitioning from static Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including sentiment analysis and event extraction to acting as dynamic decision-making agents in complex financial environments. However, the evolution of LLMs into autonomous financial agents faces a significant dilemma in evaluation paradigms. Direct live trading is irreproducible and prone to outcome bias by confounding luck with skill, whereas existing static benchmarks are often confined to entity-level stock picking and ignore broader market attention. To facilitate the rigorous analysis of these challenges, we introduce CN-Buzz2Portfolio, a reproducible benchmark grounded in the Chinese market that maps daily trending news to macro and sector asset allocation. Spanning a rolling horizon from 2024 to mid-2025, our dataset simulates a realistic public attention stream, requiring agents to distill investment logic from high-exposure narratives instead of pre-filtered entity news. We propose a Tri-Stage CPA Agent Workflow involving Compression, Perception, and Allocation to evaluate LLMs on broad asset classes such as Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) rather than individual stocks, thereby reducing idiosyncratic volatility. Extensive experiments on nine LLMs reveal significant disparities in how models translate macro-level narratives into portfolio weights. This work provides new insights into the alignment between general reasoning and financial decision-making, and all data, codes, and experiments are released to promote sustainable financial agent research.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 17

FinForge: Semi-Synthetic Financial Benchmark Generation

Evaluating Language Models (LMs) in specialized, high-stakes domains such as finance remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of open, high-quality, and domain-specific datasets. Existing general-purpose benchmarks provide broad coverage but lack the depth and domain fidelity needed to assess LMs' capabilities for real-world financial reasoning, which requires both conceptual understanding and quantitative rigor. To address this gap, we introduce FinForge, a scalable, semi-synthetic pipeline for constructing finance-specific evaluation benchmarks through a hybrid of expert-guided data curation and controlled LM-based synthesis. FinForge combines manual and programmatic corpus construction from authoritative financial sources with structured question generation and validation using Gemini 2.5 Flash. To demonstrate the pipeline's efficacy, we produce FinForge-5k, a snapshot benchmark comprising over 5,000 human-validated question-answer pairs across 11 finance subdomains, derived from a curated corpus of 100,000 verified documents totaling 143M tokens. Evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source models on FinForge-5k reveals significant differences in financial reasoning, with leading models achieving accuracy levels near 80%. These findings underscore the framework's utility for diagnosing current model limitations and guiding future improvements in financial domain competence. All code and data are available at https://github.com/gtfintechlab/FinForge.

FinGPT: Instruction Tuning Benchmark for Open-Source Large Language Models in Financial Datasets

In the swiftly expanding domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the potential of GPT-based models for the financial sector is increasingly evident. However, the integration of these models with financial datasets presents challenges, notably in determining their adeptness and relevance. This paper introduces a distinctive approach anchored in the Instruction Tuning paradigm for open-source large language models, specifically adapted for financial contexts. Through this methodology, we capitalize on the interoperability of open-source models, ensuring a seamless and transparent integration. We begin by explaining the Instruction Tuning paradigm, highlighting its effectiveness for immediate integration. The paper presents a benchmarking scheme designed for end-to-end training and testing, employing a cost-effective progression. Firstly, we assess basic competencies and fundamental tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and sentiment analysis to enhance specialization. Next, we delve into a comprehensive model, executing multi-task operations by amalgamating all instructional tunings to examine versatility. Finally, we explore the zero-shot capabilities by earmarking unseen tasks and incorporating novel datasets to understand adaptability in uncharted terrains. Such a paradigm fortifies the principles of openness and reproducibility, laying a robust foundation for future investigations in open-source financial large language models (FinLLMs).

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2023

From Scores to Skills: A Cognitive Diagnosis Framework for Evaluating Financial Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for financial applications, yet their suitability for this high-stakes domain remains largely unproven due to inadequacies in existing benchmarks. Existing benchmarks solely rely on score-level evaluation, summarizing performance with a single score that obscures the nuanced understanding of what models truly know and their precise limitations. They also rely on datasets that cover only a narrow subset of financial concepts, while overlooking other essentials for real-world applications. To address these gaps, we introduce FinCDM, the first cognitive diagnosis evaluation framework tailored for financial LLMs, enabling the evaluation of LLMs at the knowledge-skill level, identifying what financial skills and knowledge they have or lack based on their response patterns across skill-tagged tasks, rather than a single aggregated number. We construct CPA-QKA, the first cognitively informed financial evaluation dataset derived from the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) examination, with comprehensive coverage of real-world accounting and financial skills. It is rigorously annotated by domain experts, who author, validate, and annotate questions with high inter-annotator agreement and fine-grained knowledge labels. Our extensive experiments on 30 proprietary, open-source, and domain-specific LLMs show that FinCDM reveals hidden knowledge gaps, identifies under-tested areas such as tax and regulatory reasoning overlooked by traditional benchmarks, and uncovers behavioral clusters among models. FinCDM introduces a new paradigm for financial LLM evaluation by enabling interpretable, skill-aware diagnosis that supports more trustworthy and targeted model development, and all datasets and evaluation scripts will be publicly released to support further research.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 18, 2025 3

FinBloom: Knowledge Grounding Large Language Model with Real-time Financial Data

Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating human-like responses but often struggle with interactive tasks that require access to real-time information. This limitation poses challenges in finance, where models must access up-to-date information, such as recent news or price movements, to support decision-making. To address this, we introduce Financial Agent, a knowledge-grounding approach for LLMs to handle financial queries using real-time text and tabular data. Our contributions are threefold: First, we develop a Financial Context Dataset of over 50,000 financial queries paired with the required context. Second, we train FinBloom 7B, a custom 7 billion parameter LLM, on 14 million financial news articles from Reuters and Deutsche Presse-Agentur, alongside 12 million Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. Third, we fine-tune FinBloom 7B using the Financial Context Dataset to serve as a Financial Agent. This agent generates relevant financial context, enabling efficient real-time data retrieval to answer user queries. By reducing latency and eliminating the need for users to manually provide accurate data, our approach significantly enhances the capability of LLMs to handle dynamic financial tasks. Our proposed approach makes real-time financial decisions, algorithmic trading and other related tasks streamlined, and is valuable in contexts with high-velocity data flows.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025

FinMTEB: Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark

Embedding models play a crucial role in representing and retrieving information across various NLP applications. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have further enhanced the performance of embedding models. While these models are often benchmarked on general-purpose datasets, real-world applications demand domain-specific evaluation. In this work, we introduce the Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (FinMTEB), a specialized counterpart to MTEB designed for the financial domain. FinMTEB comprises 64 financial domain-specific embedding datasets across 7 tasks that cover diverse textual types in both Chinese and English, such as financial news articles, corporate annual reports, ESG reports, regulatory filings, and earnings call transcripts. We also develop a finance-adapted model, FinPersona-E5, using a persona-based data synthetic method to cover diverse financial embedding tasks for training. Through extensive evaluation of 15 embedding models, including FinPersona-E5, we show three key findings: (1) performance on general-purpose benchmarks shows limited correlation with financial domain tasks; (2) domain-adapted models consistently outperform their general-purpose counterparts; and (3) surprisingly, a simple Bag-of-Words (BoW) approach outperforms sophisticated dense embeddings in financial Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks, underscoring current limitations in dense embedding techniques. Our work establishes a robust evaluation framework for financial NLP applications and provides crucial insights for developing domain-specific embedding models.

FinanceMTEB FinMTEB
·
Feb 15, 2025 2

A Comparative Analysis of Instruction Fine-Tuning LLMs for Financial Text Classification

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including language understanding, reasoning, and generation. However, general-domain LLMs often struggle with financial tasks due to the technical and specialized nature of financial texts. This study investigates the efficacy of instruction fine-tuning smaller-scale LLMs, including Mistral-7B, Llama3-8B, and Phi3-mini, to enhance their performance in financial text classification tasks. We fine-tuned both instruction-tuned and base models across four financial classification tasks, achieving significant improvements in task-specific performance. Furthermore, we evaluated the zero-shot capabilities of these fine-tuned models on three unseen complex financial tasks, including argument classification, deal completeness classification, and causal classification. Our results indicate while base model fine-tuning led to greater degradation, instruction-tuned models maintained more robust performance. To address this degradation, we employed model merging techniques, integrating single-task domain-specific fine-tuned models with the base model. Using this merging method resulted in significant enhancements in zero-shot performance, even exceeding the original model's accuracy on certain datasets. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning and model merging for adapting LLMs to specialized financial text classification tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 4, 2024

AI in Investment Analysis: LLMs for Equity Stock Ratings

Investment Analysis is a cornerstone of the Financial Services industry. The rapid integration of advanced machine learning techniques, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), offers opportunities to enhance the equity rating process. This paper explores the application of LLMs to generate multi-horizon stock ratings by ingesting diverse datasets. Traditional stock rating methods rely heavily on the expertise of financial analysts, and face several challenges such as data overload, inconsistencies in filings, and delayed reactions to market events. Our study addresses these issues by leveraging LLMs to improve the accuracy and consistency of stock ratings. Additionally, we assess the efficacy of using different data modalities with LLMs for the financial domain. We utilize varied datasets comprising fundamental financial, market, and news data from January 2022 to June 2024, along with GPT-4-32k (v0613) (with a training cutoff in Sep. 2021 to prevent information leakage). Our results show that our benchmark method outperforms traditional stock rating methods when assessed by forward returns, specially when incorporating financial fundamentals. While integrating news data improves short-term performance, substituting detailed news summaries with sentiment scores reduces token use without loss of performance. In many cases, omitting news data entirely enhances performance by reducing bias. Our research shows that LLMs can be leveraged to effectively utilize large amounts of multimodal financial data, as showcased by their effectiveness at the stock rating prediction task. Our work provides a reproducible and efficient framework for generating accurate stock ratings, serving as a cost-effective alternative to traditional methods. Future work will extend to longer timeframes, incorporate diverse data, and utilize newer models for enhanced insights.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

Same Claim, Different Judgment: Benchmarking Scenario-Induced Bias in Multilingual Financial Misinformation Detection

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied across various domains of finance. Since their training data are largely derived from human-authored corpora, LLMs may inherit a range of human biases. Behavioral biases can lead to instability and uncertainty in decision-making, particularly when processing financial information. However, existing research on LLM bias has mainly focused on direct questioning or simplified, general-purpose settings, with limited consideration of the complex real-world financial environments and high-risk, context-sensitive, multilingual financial misinformation detection tasks (\mfmd). In this work, we propose \mfmdscen, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating behavioral biases of LLMs in \mfmd across diverse economic scenarios. In collaboration with financial experts, we construct three types of complex financial scenarios: (i) role- and personality-based, (ii) role- and region-based, and (iii) role-based scenarios incorporating ethnicity and religious beliefs. We further develop a multilingual financial misinformation dataset covering English, Chinese, Greek, and Bengali. By integrating these scenarios with misinformation claims, \mfmdscen enables a systematic evaluation of 22 mainstream LLMs. Our findings reveal that pronounced behavioral biases persist across both commercial and open-source models. This project will be available at https://github.com/lzw108/FMD.

TheFinAI The Fin AI
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Jan 8 3

Time Travel is Cheating: Going Live with DeepFund for Real-Time Fund Investment Benchmarking

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable capabilities across financial tasks, including financial report summarization, earnings call transcript analysis, and asset classification. However, their real-world effectiveness in managing complex fund investment remains inadequately assessed. A fundamental limitation of existing benchmarks for evaluating LLM-driven trading strategies is their reliance on historical back-testing, inadvertently enabling LLMs to "time travel"-leveraging future information embedded in their training corpora, thus resulting in possible information leakage and overly optimistic performance estimates. To address this issue, we introduce DeepFund, a live fund benchmark tool designed to rigorously evaluate LLM in real-time market conditions. Utilizing a multi-agent architecture, DeepFund connects directly with real-time stock market data-specifically data published after each model pretraining cutoff-to ensure fair and leakage-free evaluations. Empirical tests on nine flagship LLMs from leading global institutions across multiple investment dimensions-including ticker-level analysis, investment decision-making, portfolio management, and risk control-reveal significant practical challenges. Notably, even cutting-edge models such as DeepSeek-V3 and Claude-3.7-Sonnet incur net trading losses within DeepFund real-time evaluation environment, underscoring the present limitations of LLMs for active fund management. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUSTDial/DeepFund.

  • 10 authors
·
May 16, 2025

Mixing It Up: The Cocktail Effect of Multi-Task Fine-Tuning on LLM Performance -- A Case Study in Finance

The application of large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific contexts, including finance, has expanded rapidly. Domain-specific LLMs are typically evaluated based on their performance in various downstream tasks relevant to the domain. In this work, we present a detailed analysis of fine-tuning LLMs for such tasks. Somewhat counterintuitively, we find that in domain-specific cases, fine-tuning exclusively on the target task is not always the most effective strategy. Instead, multi-task finetuning - where models are trained on a cocktail of related tasks - can significantly enhance performance. We demonstrate how this approach enables a small model, such as Phi-3-Mini, to achieve state-of-the-art results, even surpassing the much larger GPT-4-o model on financial benchmarks. Our study involves a large-scale experiment, conducting over 200 training experiments using several widely adopted LLMs as baselines, and empirically confirms the benefits of multi-task fine-tuning. Additionally, we explore the use of general instruction data as a form of regularization, suggesting that it helps minimize performance degradation. We also investigate the inclusion of mathematical data, finding improvements in numerical reasoning that transfer effectively to financial tasks. Finally, we note that while fine-tuning for downstream tasks leads to targeted improvements in task performance, it does not necessarily result in broader gains in domain knowledge or complex domain reasoning abilities.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024

FinMR: A Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Benchmark for Advanced Financial Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress in recent years. However, their rigorous evaluation within specialized domains like finance is hindered by the absence of datasets characterized by professional-level knowledge intensity, detailed annotations, and advanced reasoning complexity. To address this critical gap, we introduce FinMR, a high-quality, knowledge-intensive multimodal dataset explicitly designed to evaluate expert-level financial reasoning capabilities at a professional analyst's standard. FinMR comprises over 3,200 meticulously curated and expertly annotated question-answer pairs across 15 diverse financial topics, ensuring broad domain diversity and integrating sophisticated mathematical reasoning, advanced financial knowledge, and nuanced visual interpretation tasks across multiple image types. Through comprehensive benchmarking with leading closed-source and open-source MLLMs, we highlight significant performance disparities between these models and professional financial analysts, uncovering key areas for model advancement, such as precise image analysis, accurate application of complex financial formulas, and deeper contextual financial understanding. By providing richly varied visual content and thorough explanatory annotations, FinMR establishes itself as an essential benchmark tool for assessing and advancing multimodal financial reasoning toward professional analyst-level competence.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 21, 2025

FinAuditing: A Financial Taxonomy-Structured Multi-Document Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs

The complexity of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and the hierarchical structure of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) filings make financial auditing increasingly difficult to automate and verify. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in unstructured text understanding, their ability to reason over structured, interdependent, and taxonomy-driven financial documents remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce FinAuditing, the first taxonomy-aligned, structure-aware, multi-document benchmark for evaluating LLMs on financial auditing tasks. Built from real US-GAAP-compliant XBRL filings, FinAuditing defines three complementary subtasks, FinSM for semantic consistency, FinRE for relational consistency, and FinMR for numerical consistency, each targeting a distinct aspect of structured auditing reasoning. We further propose a unified evaluation framework integrating retrieval, classification, and reasoning metrics across these subtasks. Extensive zero-shot experiments on 13 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that current models perform inconsistently across semantic, relational, and mathematical dimensions, with accuracy drops of up to 60-90% when reasoning over hierarchical multi-document structures. Our findings expose the systematic limitations of modern LLMs in taxonomy-grounded financial reasoning and establish FinAuditing as a foundation for developing trustworthy, structure-aware, and regulation-aligned financial intelligence systems. The benchmark dataset is available at Hugging Face.

TheFinAI The Fin AI
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Oct 9, 2025 2

FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Making

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable potential in conducting complex tasks and are increasingly utilized in various financial applications. However, high-quality sequential financial investment decision-making remains challenging. These tasks require multiple interactions with a volatile environment for every decision, demanding sufficient intelligence to maximize returns and manage risks. Although LLMs have been used to develop agent systems that surpass human teams and yield impressive investment returns, opportunities to enhance multi-sourced information synthesis and optimize decision-making outcomes through timely experience refinement remain unexplored. Here, we introduce the FinCon, an LLM-based multi-agent framework with CONceptual verbal reinforcement tailored for diverse FINancial tasks. Inspired by effective real-world investment firm organizational structures, FinCon utilizes a manager-analyst communication hierarchy. This structure allows for synchronized cross-functional agent collaboration towards unified goals through natural language interactions and equips each agent with greater memory capacity than humans. Additionally, a risk-control component in FinCon enhances decision quality by episodically initiating a self-critiquing mechanism to update systematic investment beliefs. The conceptualized beliefs serve as verbal reinforcement for the future agent's behavior and can be selectively propagated to the appropriate node that requires knowledge updates. This feature significantly improves performance while reducing unnecessary peer-to-peer communication costs. Moreover, FinCon demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in various financial tasks, including single stock trading and portfolio management.

TheFinAI The Fin AI
·
Jul 9, 2024

FinToolBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Real-World Financial Tool Use

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into the financial domain is driving a paradigm shift from passive information retrieval to dynamic, agentic interaction. While general-purpose tool learning has witnessed a surge in benchmarks, the financial sector, characterized by high stakes, strict compliance, and rapid data volatility, remains critically underserved. Existing financial evaluations predominantly focus on static textual analysis or document-based QA, ignoring the complex reality of tool execution. Conversely, general tool benchmarks lack the domain-specific rigor required for finance, often relying on toy environments or a negligible number of financial APIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce FinToolBench, the first real-world, runnable benchmark dedicated to evaluating financial tool learning agents. Unlike prior works limited to a handful of mock tools, FinToolBench establishes a realistic ecosystem coupling 760 executable financial tools with 295 rigorous, tool-required queries. We propose a novel evaluation framework that goes beyond binary execution success, assessing agents on finance-critical dimensions: timeliness, intent type, and regulatory domain alignment. Furthermore, we present FATR, a finance-aware tool retrieval and reasoning baseline that enhances stability and compliance. By providing the first testbed for auditable, agentic financial execution, FinToolBench sets a new standard for trustworthy AI in finance. The tool manifest, execution environment, and evaluation code will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

StockBench: Can LLM Agents Trade Stocks Profitably In Real-world Markets?

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents, showing promise in reasoning, tool use, and sequential decision-making. While prior benchmarks have evaluated LLM agents in domains such as software engineering and scientific discovery, the finance domain remains underexplored, despite its direct relevance to economic value and high-stakes decision-making. Existing financial benchmarks primarily test static knowledge through question answering, but they fall short of capturing the dynamic and iterative nature of trading. To address this gap, we introduce StockBench, a contamination-free benchmark designed to evaluate LLM agents in realistic, multi-month stock trading environments. Agents receive daily market signals -- including prices, fundamentals, and news -- and must make sequential buy, sell, or hold decisions. Performance is assessed using financial metrics such as cumulative return, maximum drawdown, and the Sortino ratio. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art proprietary (e.g., GPT-5, Claude-4) and open-weight (e.g., Qwen3, Kimi-K2, GLM-4.5) models shows that while most LLM agents struggle to outperform the simple buy-and-hold baseline, several models demonstrate the potential to deliver higher returns and manage risk more effectively. These findings highlight both the challenges and opportunities in developing LLM-powered financial agents, showing that excelling at static financial knowledge tasks does not necessarily translate into successful trading strategies. We release StockBench as an open-source resource to support reproducibility and advance future research in this domain.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025 4

Financial Knowledge Large Language Model

Artificial intelligence is making significant strides in the finance industry, revolutionizing how data is processed and interpreted. Among these technologies, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial potential to transform financial services by automating complex tasks, enhancing customer service, and providing detailed financial analysis. Firstly, we introduce IDEA-FinBench, an evaluation benchmark specifically tailored for assessing financial knowledge in large language models (LLMs). This benchmark utilizes questions from two globally respected and authoritative financial professional exams, aimimg to comprehensively evaluate the capability of LLMs to directly address exam questions pertinent to the finance sector. Secondly, we propose IDEA-FinKER, a Financial Knowledge Enhancement framework designed to facilitate the rapid adaptation of general LLMs to the financial domain, introducing a retrieval-based few-shot learning method for real-time context-level knowledge injection, and a set of high-quality financial knowledge instructions for fine-tuning any general LLM. Finally, we present IDEA-FinQA, a financial question-answering system powered by LLMs. This system is structured around a scheme of real-time knowledge injection and factual enhancement using external knowledge. IDEA-FinQA is comprised of three main modules: the data collector, the data querying module, and LLM-based agents tasked with specific functions.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 29, 2024

The Construction of Instruction-tuned LLMs for Finance without Instruction Data Using Continual Pretraining and Model Merging

This paper proposes a novel method for constructing instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) for finance without instruction data. Traditionally, developing such domain-specific LLMs has been resource-intensive, requiring a large dataset and significant computational power for continual pretraining and instruction tuning. Our study proposes a simpler approach that combines domain-specific continual pretraining with model merging. Given that general-purpose pretrained LLMs and their instruction-tuned LLMs are often publicly available, they can be leveraged to obtain the necessary instruction task vector. By merging this with a domain-specific pretrained vector, we can effectively create instruction-tuned LLMs for finance without additional instruction data. Our process involves two steps: first, we perform continual pretraining on financial data; second, we merge the instruction-tuned vector with the domain-specific pretrained vector. Our experiments demonstrate the successful construction of instruction-tuned LLMs for finance. One major advantage of our method is that the instruction-tuned and domain-specific pretrained vectors are nearly independent. This independence makes our approach highly effective. The Japanese financial instruction-tuned LLMs we developed in this study are available at https://huggingface.co/pfnet/nekomata-14b-pfn-qfin-inst-merge.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 29, 2024

Evaluating Binary Decision Biases in Large Language Models: Implications for Fair Agent-Based Financial Simulations

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to simulate human-like decision making in agent-based financial market models (ABMs). As models become more powerful and accessible, researchers can now incorporate individual LLM decisions into ABM environments. However, integration may introduce inherent biases that need careful evaluation. In this paper we test three state-of-the-art GPT models for bias using two model sampling approaches: one-shot and few-shot API queries. We observe significant variations in distributions of outputs between specific models, and model sub versions, with GPT-4o-Mini-2024-07-18 showing notably better performance (32-43% yes responses) compared to GPT-4-0125-preview's extreme bias (98-99% yes responses). We show that sampling methods and model sub-versions significantly impact results: repeated independent API calls produce different distributions compared to batch sampling within a single call. While no current GPT model can simultaneously achieve a uniform distribution and Markovian properties in one-shot testing, few-shot sampling can approach uniform distributions under certain conditions. We explore the Temperature parameter, providing a definition and comparative results. We further compare our results to true random binary series and test specifically for the common human bias of Negative Recency - finding LLMs have a mixed ability to 'beat' humans in this one regard. These findings emphasise the critical importance of careful LLM integration into ABMs for financial markets and more broadly.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 20, 2025

Do We Need Domain-Specific Embedding Models? An Empirical Investigation

Embedding models play a crucial role in representing and retrieving information across various NLP applications. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have further enhanced the performance of embedding models, which are trained on massive amounts of text covering almost every domain. These models are often benchmarked on general-purpose datasets like Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), where they demonstrate superior performance. However, a critical question arises: Is the development of domain-specific embedding models necessary when general-purpose models are trained on vast corpora that already include specialized domain texts? In this paper, we empirically investigate this question, choosing the finance domain as an example. We introduce the Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (FinMTEB), a counterpart to MTEB that consists of financial domain-specific text datasets. We evaluate the performance of seven state-of-the-art embedding models on FinMTEB and observe a significant performance drop compared to their performance on MTEB. To account for the possibility that this drop is driven by FinMTEB's higher complexity, we propose four measures to quantify dataset complexity and control for this factor in our analysis. Our analysis provides compelling evidence that state-of-the-art embedding models struggle to capture domain-specific linguistic and semantic patterns, even when trained on large general-purpose corpora. This study sheds light on the necessity of developing domain-specific embedding models in the LLM era, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 27, 2024 1

Agentar-Fin-R1: Enhancing Financial Intelligence through Domain Expertise, Training Efficiency, and Advanced Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit considerable promise in financial applications; however, prevailing models frequently demonstrate limitations when confronted with scenarios that necessitate sophisticated reasoning capabilities, stringent trustworthiness criteria, and efficient adaptation to domain-specific requirements. We introduce the Agentar-Fin-R1 series of financial large language models (8B and 32B parameters), specifically engineered based on the Qwen3 foundation model to enhance reasoning capabilities, reliability, and domain specialization for financial applications. Our optimization approach integrates a high-quality, systematic financial task label system with a comprehensive multi-layered trustworthiness assurance framework. This framework encompasses high-quality trustworthy knowledge engineering, multi-agent trustworthy data synthesis, and rigorous data validation governance. Through label-guided automated difficulty-aware optimization, tow-stage training pipeline, and dynamic attribution systems, we achieve substantial improvements in training efficiency. Our models undergo comprehensive evaluation on mainstream financial benchmarks including Fineva, FinEval, and FinanceIQ, as well as general reasoning datasets such as MATH-500 and GPQA-diamond. To thoroughly assess real-world deployment capabilities, we innovatively propose the Finova evaluation benchmark, which focuses on agent-level financial reasoning and compliance verification. Experimental results demonstrate that Agentar-Fin-R1 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on financial tasks but also exhibits exceptional general reasoning capabilities, validating its effectiveness as a trustworthy solution for high-stakes financial applications. The Finova bench is available at https://github.com/antgroup/Finova.

  • 13 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025 4

FinTrace: Holistic Trajectory-Level Evaluation of LLM Tool Calling for Long-Horizon Financial Tasks

Recent studies demonstrate that tool-calling capability enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external environments for long-horizon financial tasks. While existing benchmarks have begun evaluating financial tool calling, they focus on limited scenarios and rely on call-level metrics that fail to capture trajectory-level reasoning quality. To address this gap, we introduce FinTrace, a benchmark comprising 800 expert-annotated trajectories spanning 34 real-world financial task categories across multiple difficulty levels. FinTrace employs a rubric-based evaluation protocol with nine metrics organized along four axes -- action correctness, execution efficiency, process quality, and output quality -- enabling fine-grained assessment of LLM tool-calling behavior. Our evaluation of 13 LLMs reveals that while frontier models achieve strong tool selection, all models struggle with information utilization and final answer quality, exposing a critical gap between invoking the right tools and reasoning effectively over their outputs. To move beyond diagnosis, we construct FinTrace-Training, the first trajectory-level preference dataset for financial tool-calling, containing 8,196 curated trajectories with tool-augmented contexts and preference pairs. We fine-tune Qwen-3.5-9B using supervised fine-tuning followed by direct preference optimization (DPO) and show that training on FinTrace-Training consistently improves intermediate reasoning metrics, with DPO more effectively suppressing failure modes. However, end-to-end answer quality remains a bottleneck, indicating that trajectory-level improvements do not yet fully propagate to final output quality.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 14

QuantAgent: Price-Driven Multi-Agent LLMs for High-Frequency Trading

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in financial reasoning and market understanding. Multi-agent LLM frameworks such as TradingAgent and FINMEM augment these models to long-horizon investment tasks, leveraging fundamental and sentiment-based inputs for strategic decision-making. However, such systems are ill-suited for the high-speed, precision-critical demands of High-Frequency Trading (HFT). HFT requires rapid, risk-aware decisions based on structured, short-horizon signals, including technical indicators, chart patterns, and trend-based features, distinct from the long-term semantic reasoning typical of traditional financial LLM applications. To this end, we introduce QuantAgent, the first multi-agent LLM framework explicitly designed for high-frequency algorithmic trading. The system decomposes trading into four specialized agents, Indicator, Pattern, Trend, and Risk, each equipped with domain-specific tools and structured reasoning capabilities to capture distinct aspects of market dynamics over short temporal windows. In zero-shot evaluations across ten financial instruments, including Bitcoin and Nasdaq futures, QuantAgent demonstrates superior performance in both predictive accuracy and cumulative return over 4-hour trading intervals, outperforming strong neural and rule-based baselines. Our findings suggest that combining structured financial priors with language-native reasoning unlocks new potential for traceable, real-time decision systems in high-frequency financial markets.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025 3

FinAI-BERT: A Transformer-Based Model for Sentence-Level Detection of AI Disclosures in Financial Reports

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) in financial services has prompted growing demand for tools that can systematically detect AI-related disclosures in corporate filings. While prior approaches often rely on keyword expansion or document-level classification, they fall short in granularity, interpretability, and robustness. This study introduces FinAI-BERT, a domain-adapted transformer-based language model designed to classify AI-related content at the sentence level within financial texts. The model was fine-tuned on a manually curated and balanced dataset of 1,586 sentences drawn from 669 annual reports of U.S. banks (2015 to 2023). FinAI-BERT achieved near-perfect classification performance (accuracy of 99.37 percent, F1 score of 0.993), outperforming traditional baselines such as Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Random Forest, and XGBoost. Interpretability was ensured through SHAP-based token attribution, while bias analysis and robustness checks confirmed the model's stability across sentence lengths, adversarial inputs, and temporal samples. Theoretically, the study advances financial NLP by operationalizing fine-grained, theme-specific classification using transformer architectures. Practically, it offers a scalable, transparent solution for analysts, regulators, and scholars seeking to monitor the diffusion and framing of AI across financial institutions.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 29, 2025

UniFinEval: Towards Unified Evaluation of Financial Multimodal Models across Text, Images and Videos

Multimodal large language models are playing an increasingly significant role in empowering the financial domain, however, the challenges they face, such as multimodal and high-density information and cross-modal multi-hop reasoning, go beyond the evaluation scope of existing multimodal benchmarks. To address this gap, we propose UniFinEval, the first unified multimodal benchmark designed for high-information-density financial environments, covering text, images, and videos. UniFinEval systematically constructs five core financial scenarios grounded in real-world financial systems: Financial Statement Auditing, Company Fundamental Reasoning, Industry Trend Insights, Financial Risk Sensing, and Asset Allocation Analysis. We manually construct a high-quality dataset consisting of 3,767 question-answer pairs in both chinese and english and systematically evaluate 10 mainstream MLLMs under Zero-Shot and CoT settings. Results show that Gemini-3-pro-preview achieves the best overall performance, yet still exhibits a substantial gap compared to financial experts. Further error analysis reveals systematic deficiencies in current models. UniFinEval aims to provide a systematic assessment of MLLMs' capabilities in fine-grained, high-information-density financial environments, thereby enhancing the robustness of MLLMs applications in real-world financial scenarios. Data and code are available at https://github.com/aifinlab/UniFinEval.

AIFin-Lab AIFin Lab
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Jan 9

Plutus: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Low-Resource Greek Finance

Despite Greece's pivotal role in the global economy, large language models (LLMs) remain underexplored for Greek financial context due to the linguistic complexity of Greek and the scarcity of domain-specific datasets. Previous efforts in multilingual financial natural language processing (NLP) have exposed considerable performance disparities, yet no dedicated Greek financial benchmarks or Greek-specific financial LLMs have been developed until now. To bridge this gap, we introduce Plutus-ben, the first Greek Financial Evaluation Benchmark, and Plutus-8B, the pioneering Greek Financial LLM, fine-tuned with Greek domain-specific data. Plutus-ben addresses five core financial NLP tasks in Greek: numeric and textual named entity recognition, question answering, abstractive summarization, and topic classification, thereby facilitating systematic and reproducible LLM assessments. To underpin these tasks, we present three novel, high-quality Greek financial datasets, thoroughly annotated by expert native Greek speakers, augmented by two existing resources. Our comprehensive evaluation of 22 LLMs on Plutus-ben reveals that Greek financial NLP remains challenging due to linguistic complexity, domain-specific terminology, and financial reasoning gaps. These findings underscore the limitations of cross-lingual transfer, the necessity for financial expertise in Greek-trained models, and the challenges of adapting financial LLMs to Greek text. We release Plutus-ben, Plutus-8B, and all associated datasets publicly to promote reproducible research and advance Greek financial NLP, fostering broader multilingual inclusivity in finance.

TheFinAI The Fin AI
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Feb 25, 2025 2

Golden Touchstone: A Comprehensive Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Financial Large Language Models

As large language models become increasingly prevalent in the financial sector, there is a pressing need for a standardized method to comprehensively assess their performance. However, existing finance benchmarks often suffer from limited language and task coverage, as well as challenges such as low-quality datasets and inadequate adaptability for LLM evaluation. To address these limitations, we propose "Golden Touchstone", the first comprehensive bilingual benchmark for financial LLMs, which incorporates representative datasets from both Chinese and English across eight core financial NLP tasks. Developed from extensive open source data collection and industry-specific demands, this benchmark includes a variety of financial tasks aimed at thoroughly assessing models' language understanding and generation capabilities. Through comparative analysis of major models on the benchmark, such as GPT-4o Llama3, FinGPT and FinMA, we reveal their strengths and limitations in processing complex financial information. Additionally, we open-sourced Touchstone-GPT, a financial LLM trained through continual pre-training and financial instruction tuning, which demonstrates strong performance on the bilingual benchmark but still has limitations in specific tasks.This research not only provides the financial large language models with a practical evaluation tool but also guides the development and optimization of future research. The source code for Golden Touchstone and model weight of Touchstone-GPT have been made publicly available at https://github.com/IDEA-FinAI/Golden-Touchstone, contributing to the ongoing evolution of FinLLMs and fostering further research in this critical area.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 9, 2024 2

BizFinBench.v2: A Unified Dual-Mode Bilingual Benchmark for Expert-Level Financial Capability Alignment

Large language models have undergone rapid evolution, emerging as a pivotal technology for intelligence in financial operations. However, existing benchmarks are often constrained by pitfalls such as reliance on simulated or general-purpose samples and a focus on singular, offline static scenarios. Consequently, they fail to align with the requirements for authenticity and real-time responsiveness in financial services, leading to a significant discrepancy between benchmark performance and actual operational efficacy. To address this, we introduce BizFinBench.v2, the first large-scale evaluation benchmark grounded in authentic business data from both Chinese and U.S. equity markets, integrating online assessment. We performed clustering analysis on authentic user queries from financial platforms, resulting in eight fundamental tasks and two online tasks across four core business scenarios, totaling 29,578 expert-level Q&A pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that ChatGPT-5 achieves a prominent 61.5% accuracy in main tasks, though a substantial gap relative to financial experts persists; in online tasks, DeepSeek-R1 outperforms all other commercial LLMs. Error analysis further identifies the specific capability deficiencies of existing models within practical financial business contexts. BizFinBench.v2 transcends the limitations of current benchmarks, achieving a business-level deconstruction of LLM financial capabilities and providing a precise basis for evaluating efficacy in the widespread deployment of LLMs within the financial domain. The data and code are available at https://github.com/HiThink-Research/BizFinBench.v2.

Extracting Structured Insights from Financial News: An Augmented LLM Driven Approach

Financial news plays a crucial role in decision-making processes across the financial sector, yet the efficient processing of this information into a structured format remains challenging. This paper presents a novel approach to financial news processing that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome limitations that previously prevented the extraction of structured data from unstructured financial news. We introduce a system that extracts relevant company tickers from raw news article content, performs sentiment analysis at the company level, and generates summaries, all without relying on pre-structured data feeds. Our methodology combines the generative capabilities of LLMs, and recent prompting techniques, with a robust validation framework that uses a tailored string similarity approach. Evaluation on a dataset of 5530 financial news articles demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, with 90% of articles not missing any tickers compared with current data providers, and 22% of articles having additional relevant tickers. In addition to this paper, the methodology has been implemented at scale with the resulting processed data made available through a live API endpoint, which is updated in real-time with the latest news. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first data provider to offer granular, per-company sentiment analysis from news articles, enhancing the depth of information available to market participants. We also release the evaluation dataset of 5530 processed articles as a static file, which we hope will facilitate further research leveraging financial news.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 22, 2024

NMIXX: Domain-Adapted Neural Embeddings for Cross-Lingual eXploration of Finance

General-purpose sentence embedding models often struggle to capture specialized financial semantics, especially in low-resource languages like Korean, due to domain-specific jargon, temporal meaning shifts, and misaligned bilingual vocabularies. To address these gaps, we introduce NMIXX (Neural eMbeddings for Cross-lingual eXploration of Finance), a suite of cross-lingual embedding models fine-tuned with 18.8K high-confidence triplets that pair in-domain paraphrases, hard negatives derived from a semantic-shift typology, and exact Korean-English translations. Concurrently, we release KorFinSTS, a 1,921-pair Korean financial STS benchmark spanning news, disclosures, research reports, and regulations, designed to expose nuances that general benchmarks miss. When evaluated against seven open-license baselines, NMIXX's multilingual bge-m3 variant achieves Spearman's rho gains of +0.10 on English FinSTS and +0.22 on KorFinSTS, outperforming its pre-adaptation checkpoint and surpassing other models by the largest margin, while revealing a modest trade-off in general STS performance. Our analysis further shows that models with richer Korean token coverage adapt more effectively, underscoring the importance of tokenizer design in low-resource, cross-lingual settings. By making both models and the benchmark publicly available, we provide the community with robust tools for domain-adapted, multilingual representation learning in finance.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 13, 2025

FinVault: Benchmarking Financial Agent Safety in Execution-Grounded Environments

Financial agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for investment analysis, risk assessment, and automated decision-making, where their abilities to plan, invoke tools, and manipulate mutable state introduce new security risks in high-stakes and highly regulated financial environments. However, existing safety evaluations largely focus on language-model-level content compliance or abstract agent settings, failing to capture execution-grounded risks arising from real operational workflows and state-changing actions. To bridge this gap, we propose FinVault, the first execution-grounded security benchmark for financial agents, comprising 31 regulatory case-driven sandbox scenarios with state-writable databases and explicit compliance constraints, together with 107 real-world vulnerabilities and 963 test cases that systematically cover prompt injection, jailbreaking, financially adapted attacks, as well as benign inputs for false-positive evaluation. Experimental results reveal that existing defense mechanisms remain ineffective in realistic financial agent settings, with average attack success rates (ASR) still reaching up to 50.0\% on state-of-the-art models and remaining non-negligible even for the most robust systems (ASR 6.7\%), highlighting the limited transferability of current safety designs and the need for stronger financial-specific defenses. Our code can be found at https://github.com/aifinlab/FinVault.

AIFin-Lab AIFin Lab
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Jan 8 2