Expect the Unexpected: FailSafe Long Context QA for Finance
Authors: name: Kiran Kamble; name: Melisa Russak; name: Dmytro Mozolevskyi; name: Muayad Ali; name: Mateusz Russak; name: Waseem AlShikh
Published: 2025-02-10 10:29:28

Abstract: We propose a new long-context financial benchmark, FailSafeQA, designed to
test the robustness and context-awareness of LLMs against six variations in
human-interface interactions in LLM-based query-answer systems within finance.
We concentrate on two case studies: Query Failure and Context Failure. In the
Query Failure scenario, we perturb the original query to vary in domain
expertise, completeness, and linguistic accuracy. In the Context Failure case,
we simulate the uploads of degraded, irrelevant, and empty documents. We employ
the LLM-as-a-Judge methodology with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct and use fine-grained
rating criteria to define and calculate Robustness, Context Grounding, and
Compliance scores for 24 off-the-shelf models. The results suggest that
although some models excel at mitigating input perturbations, they must balance
robust answering with the ability to refrain from hallucinating. Notably,
Palmyra-Fin-128k-Instruct, recognized as the most compliant model, maintained
strong baseline performance but encountered challenges in sustaining robust
predictions in 17% of test cases. On the other hand, the most robust model,
OpenAI o3-mini, fabricated information in 41% of tested cases. The results
demonstrate that even high-performing models have significant room for
improvement and highlight the role of FailSafeQA as a tool for developing LLMs
optimized for dependability in financial applications. The dataset is available
at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Writer/FailSafeQA