Daily Papers

This paper investigates the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) financial portfolio management, with a specific focus on the potential benefits of ESG score-based market regulation. We leveraged an Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) agent and conducted our experiments using environments encoded within the OpenAI Gym, adapted from the FinRL platform. The study includes a comparative analysis of DRL agent performance under standard Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) market conditions and a scenario where returns are regulated in line with company ESG scores. In the ESG-regulated market, grants were proportionally allotted to portfolios based on their returns and ESG scores, while taxes were assigned to portfolios below the mean ESG score of the index. The results intriguingly reveal that the DRL agent within the ESG-regulated market outperforms the standard DJIA market setup. Furthermore, we considered the inclusion of ESG variables in the agent state space, and compared this with scenarios where such data were excluded. This comparison adds to the understanding of the role of ESG factors in portfolio management decision-making. We also analyze the behaviour of the DRL agent in IBEX 35 and NASDAQ-100 indexes. Both the A2C and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithms were applied to these additional markets, providing a broader perspective on the generalization of our findings. This work contributes to the evolving field of ESG investing, suggesting that market regulation based on ESG scoring can potentially improve DRL-based portfolio management, with significant implications for sustainable investing strategies.

We introduce FinTral, a suite of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (LLMs) built upon the Mistral-7b model and tailored for financial analysis. FinTral integrates textual, numerical, tabular, and image data. We enhance FinTral with domain-specific pretraining, instruction fine-tuning, and RLAIF training by exploiting a large collection of textual and visual datasets we curate for this work. We also introduce an extensive benchmark featuring nine tasks and 25 datasets for evaluation, including hallucinations in the financial domain. Our FinTral model trained with direct preference optimization employing advanced Tools and Retrieval methods, dubbed FinTral-DPO-T&R, demonstrates an exceptional zero-shot performance. It outperforms ChatGPT-3.5 in all tasks and surpasses GPT-4 in five out of nine tasks, marking a significant advancement in AI-driven financial technology. We also demonstrate that FinTral has the potential to excel in real-time analysis and decision-making in diverse financial contexts.

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.

Financial risk prediction plays a crucial role in the financial sector. Machine learning methods have been widely applied for automatically detecting potential risks and thus saving the cost of labor. However, the development in this field is lagging behind in recent years by the following two facts: 1) the algorithms used are somewhat outdated, especially in the context of the fast advance of generative AI and large language models (LLMs); 2) the lack of a unified and open-sourced financial benchmark has impeded the related research for years. To tackle these issues, we propose FinPT and FinBench: the former is a novel approach for financial risk prediction that conduct Profile Tuning on large pretrained foundation models, and the latter is a set of high-quality datasets on financial risks such as default, fraud, and churn. In FinPT, we fill the financial tabular data into the pre-defined instruction template, obtain natural-language customer profiles by prompting LLMs, and fine-tune large foundation models with the profile text to make predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FinPT by experimenting with a range of representative strong baselines on FinBench. The analytical studies further deepen the understanding of LLMs for financial risk prediction.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential of revolutionizing natural language processing tasks in diverse domains, sparking great interest in finance. Accessing high-quality financial data is the first challenge for financial LLMs (FinLLMs). While proprietary models like BloombergGPT have taken advantage of their unique data accumulation, such privileged access calls for an open-source alternative to democratize Internet-scale financial data. In this paper, we present an open-source large language model, FinGPT, for the finance sector. Unlike proprietary models, FinGPT takes a data-centric approach, providing researchers and practitioners with accessible and transparent resources to develop their FinLLMs. We highlight the importance of an automatic data curation pipeline and the lightweight low-rank adaptation technique in building FinGPT. Furthermore, we showcase several potential applications as stepping stones for users, such as robo-advising, algorithmic trading, and low-code development. Through collaborative efforts within the open-source AI4Finance community, FinGPT aims to stimulate innovation, democratize FinLLMs, and unlock new opportunities in open finance. Two associated code repos are https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinGPT and https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinNLP

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has revolutionized general natural language preprocessing (NLP) tasks. However, their expertise in the financial domain lacks a comprehensive evaluation. To assess the ability of LLMs to solve financial NLP tasks, we present FinLMEval, a framework for Financial Language Model Evaluation, comprising nine datasets designed to evaluate the performance of language models. This study compares the performance of encoder-only language models and the decoder-only language models. Our findings reveal that while some decoder-only LLMs demonstrate notable performance across most financial tasks via zero-shot prompting, they generally lag behind the fine-tuned expert models, especially when dealing with proprietary datasets. We hope this study provides foundation evaluations for continuing efforts to build more advanced LLMs in the financial domain.

We propose Multiple Experts Fine-tuning Framework to build a financial large language model (LLM), DISC-FinLLM. Our methodology improves general LLMs by endowing them with multi-turn question answering abilities, domain text processing capabilities, mathematical computation skills, and retrieval-enhanced generation capabilities. We build a financial instruction-tuning dataset named DISC-FIN-SFT, including instruction samples of four categories (consulting, NLP tasks, computing and retrieval-augmented generation). Evaluations conducted on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our model performs better than baseline models in various financial scenarios. Further resources can be found at https://github.com/FudanDISC/DISC-FinLLM.

With the significant advancements in cognitive intelligence driven by LLMs, autonomous agent systems have attracted extensive attention. Despite this growing interest, the development of stable and efficient agent systems poses substantial practical challenges. In this paper, we introduce FinVerse, a meticulously crafted agent system designed for a broad range of financial topics. FinVerse integrates over 600 financial APIs, enabling access to more accurate and extensive financial information compared to generalist agents. To enhance financial information processing capabilities, FinVerse is equipped with an embedded code interpreter, enabling the execution of complex data analysis tasks with precision and efficiency. Our work includes an empirical comparison of several LLMs in driving FinVerse. Specifically, we propose our own scheme for training LLMs using SFT to optimize LLM performance within FinVerse. Recognizing the scarcity of specialized datasets to build LLMs for agents, we have constructed a dataset and plan to make it open-source, providing a valuable resource for peer application developers. The demo video has been released on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk8L9_Wv7J4

As financial institutions and professionals increasingly incorporate Large Language Models (LLMs) into their workflows, substantial barriers, including proprietary data and specialized knowledge, persist between the finance sector and the AI community. These challenges impede the AI community's ability to enhance financial tasks effectively. Acknowledging financial analysis's critical role, we aim to devise financial-specialized LLM-based toolchains and democratize access to them through open-source initiatives, promoting wider AI adoption in financial decision-making. In this paper, we introduce FinRobot, a novel open-source AI agent platform supporting multiple financially specialized AI agents, each powered by LLM. Specifically, the platform consists of four major layers: 1) the Financial AI Agents layer that formulates Financial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) by breaking sophisticated financial problems down into logical sequences; 2) the Financial LLM Algorithms layer dynamically configures appropriate model application strategies for specific tasks; 3) the LLMOps and DataOps layer produces accurate models by applying training/fine-tuning techniques and using task-relevant data; 4) the Multi-source LLM Foundation Models layer that integrates various LLMs and enables the above layers to access them directly. Finally, FinRobot provides hands-on for both professional-grade analysts and laypersons to utilize powerful AI techniques for advanced financial analysis. We open-source FinRobot at https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRobot.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced financial applications, yet they often lack sufficient financial knowledge and struggle with tasks involving multi-modal inputs like tables and time series data. To address these limitations, we introduce Open-FinLLMs, a series of Financial LLMs. We begin with FinLLaMA, pre-trained on a 52 billion token financial corpus, incorporating text, tables, and time-series data to embed comprehensive financial knowledge. FinLLaMA is then instruction fine-tuned with 573K financial instructions, resulting in FinLLaMA-instruct, which enhances task performance. Finally, we present FinLLaVA, a multimodal LLM trained with 1.43M image-text instructions to handle complex financial data types. Extensive evaluations demonstrate FinLLaMA's superior performance over LLaMA3-8B, LLaMA3.1-8B, and BloombergGPT in both zero-shot and few-shot settings across 19 and 4 datasets, respectively. FinLLaMA-instruct outperforms GPT-4 and other Financial LLMs on 15 datasets. FinLLaVA excels in understanding tables and charts across 4 multimodal tasks. Additionally, FinLLaMA achieves impressive Sharpe Ratios in trading simulations, highlighting its robust financial application capabilities. We will continually maintain and improve our models and benchmarks to support ongoing innovation in academia and industry.

In this paper, we propose FinVis-GPT, a novel multimodal large language model (LLM) specifically designed for financial chart analysis. By leveraging the power of LLMs and incorporating instruction tuning and multimodal capabilities, FinVis-GPT is capable of interpreting financial charts and providing valuable analysis. To train FinVis-GPT, a financial task oriented dataset was generated for pre-training alignment and instruction tuning, comprising various types of financial charts and their corresponding descriptions. We evaluate the model performance via several case studies due to the time limit, and the promising results demonstrated that FinVis-GPT is superior in various financial chart related tasks, including generating descriptions, answering questions and predicting future market trends, surpassing existing state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs. The proposed FinVis-GPT serves as a pioneering effort in utilizing multimodal LLMs in the finance domain and our generated dataset will be release for public use in the near future to speedup related research.

LLMs have transformed NLP and shown promise in various fields, yet their potential in finance is underexplored due to a lack of thorough evaluations and the complexity of financial tasks. This along with the rapid development of LLMs, highlights the urgent need for a systematic financial evaluation benchmark for LLMs. In this paper, we introduce FinBen, the first comprehensive open-sourced evaluation benchmark, specifically designed to thoroughly assess the capabilities of LLMs in the financial domain. FinBen encompasses 35 datasets across 23 financial tasks, organized into three spectrums of difficulty inspired by the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, to evaluate LLMs' cognitive abilities in inductive reasoning, associative memory, quantitative reasoning, crystallized intelligence, and more. Our evaluation of 15 representative LLMs, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the latest Gemini, reveals insights into their strengths and limitations within the financial domain. The findings indicate that GPT-4 leads in quantification, extraction, numerical reasoning, and stock trading, while Gemini shines in generation and forecasting; however, both struggle with complex extraction and forecasting, showing a clear need for targeted enhancements. Instruction tuning boosts simple task performance but falls short in improving complex reasoning and forecasting abilities. FinBen seeks to continuously evaluate LLMs in finance, fostering AI development with regular updates of tasks and models.

Stock movement prediction, a fundamental task in financial time-series forecasting, requires identifying and retrieving critical influencing factors from vast amounts of time-series data. However, existing text-trained or numeric similarity-based retrieval methods fall short in handling complex financial analysis. To address this, we propose the first retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for financial time-series forecasting, featuring three key innovations: a fine-tuned 1B parameter large language model (StockLLM) as the backbone, a novel candidate selection method leveraging LLM feedback, and a training objective that maximizes similarity between queries and historically significant sequences. This enables our retriever, FinSeer, to uncover meaningful patterns while minimizing noise in complex financial data. We also construct new datasets integrating financial indicators and historical stock prices to train FinSeer and ensure robust evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that our RAG framework outperforms bare StockLLM and random retrieval, highlighting its effectiveness, while FinSeer surpasses existing retrieval methods, achieving an 8\% higher accuracy on BIGDATA22 and retrieving more impactful sequences. This work underscores the importance of tailored retrieval models in financial forecasting and provides a novel framework for future research.

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.

As financial markets grow increasingly complex, there is a rising need for automated tools that can effectively assist human analysts in equity research, particularly within sell-side research. While Generative AI (GenAI) has attracted significant attention in this field, existing AI solutions often fall short due to their narrow focus on technical factors and limited capacity for discretionary judgment. These limitations hinder their ability to adapt to new data in real-time and accurately assess risks, which diminishes their practical value for investors. This paper presents FinRobot, the first AI agent framework specifically designed for equity research. FinRobot employs a multi-agent Chain of Thought (CoT) system, integrating both quantitative and qualitative analyses to emulate the comprehensive reasoning of a human analyst. The system is structured around three specialized agents: the Data-CoT Agent, which aggregates diverse data sources for robust financial integration; the Concept-CoT Agent, which mimics an analysts reasoning to generate actionable insights; and the Thesis-CoT Agent, which synthesizes these insights into a coherent investment thesis and report. FinRobot provides thorough company analysis supported by precise numerical data, industry-appropriate valuation metrics, and realistic risk assessments. Its dynamically updatable data pipeline ensures that research remains timely and relevant, adapting seamlessly to new financial information. Unlike existing automated research tools, such as CapitalCube and Wright Reports, FinRobot delivers insights comparable to those produced by major brokerage firms and fundamental research vendors. We open-source FinRobot at https://github. com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRobot.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and have attracted attention from multiple domains, including financial services. Despite the extensive research into general-domain LLMs, and their immense potential in finance, Financial LLM (FinLLM) research remains limited. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of FinLLMs, including their history, techniques, performance, and opportunities and challenges. Firstly, we present a chronological overview of general-domain Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) through to current FinLLMs, including the GPT-series, selected open-source LLMs, and financial LMs. Secondly, we compare five techniques used across financial PLMs and FinLLMs, including training methods, training data, and fine-tuning methods. Thirdly, we summarize the performance evaluations of six benchmark tasks and datasets. In addition, we provide eight advanced financial NLP tasks and datasets for developing more sophisticated FinLLMs. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and the challenges facing FinLLMs, such as hallucination, privacy, and efficiency. To support AI research in finance, we compile a collection of accessible datasets and evaluation benchmarks on GitHub.

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.

This paper presents FinGEITje, the first Dutch financial Large Language Model (LLM) specifically designed and optimized for various financial tasks. Together with the model, we release a specialized Dutch financial instruction tuning dataset with over 140,000 samples, constructed employing an automated translation and data processing method. The open-source data construction method is provided, facilitating the creation of financial instruction datasets in different languages. To evaluate model performance, the study introduces the first Dutch financial evaluation benchmark, along with an automated evaluation method that utilizes an LLM as an independent evaluator, reducing manual intervention in performance evaluation. The experimental results highlight the superior performance of FinGEITje across five critical Dutch and English financial tasks.

Reinforcement learning has demonstrated great potential for performing financial tasks. However, it faces two major challenges: policy instability and sampling bottlenecks. In this paper, we revisit ensemble methods with massively parallel simulations on graphics processing units (GPUs), significantly enhancing the computational efficiency and robustness of trained models in volatile financial markets. Our approach leverages the parallel processing capability of GPUs to significantly improve the sampling speed for training ensemble models. The ensemble models combine the strengths of component agents to improve the robustness of financial decision-making strategies. We conduct experiments in both stock and cryptocurrency trading tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Massively parallel simulation on a single GPU improves the sampling speed by up to 1,746times using 2,048 parallel environments compared to a single environment. The ensemble models have high cumulative returns and outperform some individual agents, reducing maximum drawdown by up to 4.17% and improving the Sharpe ratio by up to 0.21. This paper describes trading tasks at ACM ICAIF FinRL Contests in 2023 and 2024.

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.

This study presents German FinBERT, a novel pre-trained German language model tailored for financial textual data. The model is trained through a comprehensive pre-training process, leveraging a substantial corpus comprising financial reports, ad-hoc announcements and news related to German companies. The corpus size is comparable to the data sets commonly used for training standard BERT models. I evaluate the performance of German FinBERT on downstream tasks, specifically sentiment prediction, topic recognition and question answering against generic German language models. My results demonstrate improved performance on finance-specific data, indicating the efficacy of German FinBERT in capturing domain-specific nuances. The presented findings suggest that German FinBERT holds promise as a valuable tool for financial text analysis, potentially benefiting various applications in the financial domain.

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.

Recently, many works have proposed various financial large language models (FinLLMs) by pre-training from scratch or fine-tuning open-sourced LLMs on financial corpora. However, existing FinLLMs exhibit unsatisfactory performance in understanding financial text when numeric variables are involved in questions. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM, called numeric-sensitive large language model (NumLLM), for Chinese finance. We first construct a financial corpus from financial textbooks which is essential for improving numeric capability of LLMs during fine-tuning. After that, we train two individual low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules by fine-tuning on our constructed financial corpus. One module is for adapting general-purpose LLMs to financial domain, and the other module is for enhancing the ability of NumLLM to understand financial text with numeric variables. Lastly, we merge the two LoRA modules into the foundation model to obtain NumLLM for inference. Experiments on financial question-answering benchmark show that NumLLM can boost the performance of the foundation model and can achieve the best overall performance compared to all baselines, on both numeric and non-numeric questions.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into financial analysis has garnered significant attention in the NLP community. This paper presents our solution to IJCAI-2024 FinLLM challenge, investigating the capabilities of LLMs within three critical areas of financial tasks: financial classification, financial text summarization, and single stock trading. We adopted Llama3-8B and Mistral-7B as base models, fine-tuning them through Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) approaches. To enhance model performance, we combine datasets from task 1 and task 2 for data fusion. Our approach aims to tackle these diverse tasks in a comprehensive and integrated manner, showcasing LLMs' capacity to address diverse and complex financial tasks with improved accuracy and decision-making capabilities.

Contextual pretrained language models, such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2019), have made significant breakthrough in various NLP tasks by training on large scale of unlabeled text re-sources.Financial sector also accumulates large amount of financial communication text.However, there is no pretrained finance specific language models available. In this work,we address the need by pretraining a financial domain specific BERT models, FinBERT, using a large scale of financial communication corpora. Experiments on three financial sentiment classification tasks confirm the advantage of FinBERT over generic domain BERT model. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/yya518/FinBERT. We hope this will be useful for practitioners and researchers working on financial NLP tasks.

This paper presents our participation under the team name `Finance Wizard' in the FinNLP-AgentScen 2024 shared task #2: Financial Text Summarization. It documents our pipeline approach of fine-tuning a foundation model into a task-specific model for Financial Text Summarization. It involves (1) adapting Llama3 8B, a foundation model, to the Finance domain via continued pre-training, (2) multi-task instruction-tuning to further equip the model with more finance-related capabilities, (3) finally fine-tuning the model into a task-specific `expert'. Our model, FinLlama3\_sum, yielded commendable results, securing the third position in its category with a ROUGE-1 score of 0.521.

This study develops FinText, a financial word embedding compiled from 15 years of business news archives. The results show that FinText produces substantially more accurate results than general word embeddings based on the gold-standard financial benchmark we introduced. In contrast to well-known econometric models, and over the sample period from 27 July 2007 to 27 January 2022 for 23 NASDAQ stocks, using stock-related news, our simple natural language processing model supported by different word embeddings improves realised volatility forecasts on high volatility days. This improvement in realised volatility forecasting performance switches to normal volatility days when general hot news is used. By utilising SHAP, an Explainable AI method, we also identify and classify key phrases in stock-related and general hot news that moved volatility.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited notable efficacy in question-answering (QA) tasks across diverse domains. Their prowess in integrating extensive web knowledge has fueled interest in developing LLM-based autonomous agents. While LLMs are efficient in decoding human instructions and deriving solutions by holistically processing historical inputs, transitioning to purpose-driven agents requires a supplementary rational architecture to process multi-source information, establish reasoning chains, and prioritize critical tasks. Addressing this, we introduce FinMem, a novel LLM-based agent framework devised for financial decision-making. It encompasses three core modules: Profiling, to customize the agent's characteristics; Memory, with layered message processing, to aid the agent in assimilating hierarchical financial data; and Decision-making, to convert insights gained from memories into investment decisions. Notably, FinMem's memory module aligns closely with the cognitive structure of human traders, offering robust interpretability and real-time tuning. Its adjustable cognitive span allows for the retention of critical information beyond human perceptual limits, thereby enhancing trading outcomes. This framework enables the agent to self-evolve its professional knowledge, react agilely to new investment cues, and continuously refine trading decisions in the volatile financial environment. We first compare FinMem with various algorithmic agents on a scalable real-world financial dataset, underscoring its leading trading performance in stocks. We then fine-tuned the agent's perceptual span and character setting to achieve a significantly enhanced trading performance. Collectively, FinMem presents a cutting-edge LLM agent framework for automated trading, boosting cumulative investment returns.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in natural language processing tasks within the financial domain. In this work, we present a Chinese Financial Generative Pre-trained Transformer framework, named CFGPT, which includes a dataset~(CFData) for pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, a financial LLM~(CFLLM) to adeptly manage financial texts, and a deployment framework~(CFAPP) designed to navigate real-world financial applications. The CFData comprising both a pre-training dataset and a supervised fine-tuning dataset, where the pre-training dataset collates Chinese financial data and analytics, alongside a smaller subset of general-purpose text with 584M documents and 141B tokens in total, and the supervised fine-tuning dataset is tailored for six distinct financial tasks, embodying various facets of financial analysis and decision-making with 1.5M instruction pairs and 1.5B tokens in total. The CFLLM, which is based on InternLM-7B to balance the model capability and size, is trained on CFData in two stage, continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. The CFAPP is centered on large language models (LLMs) and augmented with additional modules to ensure multifaceted functionality in real-world application. Our codes are released at https://github.com/TongjiFinLab/CFGPT.

Recent advancements have underscored the potential of large language model (LLM)-based agents in financial decision-making. Despite this progress, the field currently encounters two main challenges: (1) the lack of a comprehensive LLM agent framework adaptable to a variety of financial tasks, and (2) the absence of standardized benchmarks and consistent datasets for assessing agent performance. To tackle these issues, we introduce InvestorBench, the first benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLM-based agents in diverse financial decision-making contexts. InvestorBench enhances the versatility of LLM-enabled agents by providing a comprehensive suite of tasks applicable to different financial products, including single equities like stocks, cryptocurrencies and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Additionally, we assess the reasoning and decision-making capabilities of our agent framework using thirteen different LLMs as backbone models, across various market environments and tasks. Furthermore, we have curated a diverse collection of open-source, multi-modal datasets and developed a comprehensive suite of environments for financial decision-making. This establishes a highly accessible platform for evaluating financial agents' performance across various scenarios.

Financial sentiment analysis is a challenging task due to the specialized language and lack of labeled data in that domain. General-purpose models are not effective enough because of the specialized language used in a financial context. We hypothesize that pre-trained language models can help with this problem because they require fewer labeled examples and they can be further trained on domain-specific corpora. We introduce FinBERT, a language model based on BERT, to tackle NLP tasks in the financial domain. Our results show improvement in every measured metric on current state-of-the-art results for two financial sentiment analysis datasets. We find that even with a smaller training set and fine-tuning only a part of the model, FinBERT outperforms state-of-the-art machine learning methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in the financial domain. Thus, it becomes important to assess the performance of LLMs in the financial tasks. In this work, we introduce CFBenchmark, to evaluate the performance of LLMs for Chinese financial assistant. The basic version of CFBenchmark is designed to evaluate the basic ability in Chinese financial text processing from three aspects~(i.e. recognition, classification, and generation) including eight tasks, and includes financial texts ranging in length from 50 to over 1,800 characters. We conduct experiments on several LLMs available in the literature with CFBenchmark-Basic, and the experimental results indicate that while some LLMs show outstanding performance in specific tasks, overall, there is still significant room for improvement in basic tasks of financial text processing with existing models. In the future, we plan to explore the advanced version of CFBenchmark, aiming to further explore the extensive capabilities of language models in more profound dimensions as a financial assistant in Chinese. Our codes are released at https://github.com/TongjiFinLab/CFBenchmark.

The sheer volume of financial statements makes it difficult for humans to access and analyze a business's financials. Robust numerical reasoning likewise faces unique challenges in this domain. In this work, we focus on answering deep questions over financial data, aiming to automate the analysis of a large corpus of financial documents. In contrast to existing tasks on general domain, the finance domain includes complex numerical reasoning and understanding of heterogeneous representations. To facilitate analytical progress, we propose a new large-scale dataset, FinQA, with Question-Answering pairs over Financial reports, written by financial experts. We also annotate the gold reasoning programs to ensure full explainability. We further introduce baselines and conduct comprehensive experiments in our dataset. The results demonstrate that popular, large, pre-trained models fall far short of expert humans in acquiring finance knowledge and in complex multi-step numerical reasoning on that knowledge. Our dataset -- the first of its kind -- should therefore enable significant, new community research into complex application domains. The dataset and code are publicly availablehttps://github.com/czyssrs/FinQA.

Large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks in NLP and beyond, but most open models have very limited coverage of smaller languages and LLM work tends to focus on languages where nearly unlimited data is available for pretraining. In this work, we study the challenges of creating LLMs for Finnish, a language spoken by less than 0.1% of the world population. We compile an extensive dataset of Finnish combining web crawls, news, social media and eBooks. We pursue two approaches to pretrain models: 1) we train seven monolingual models from scratch (186M to 13B parameters) dubbed FinGPT, 2) we continue the pretraining of the multilingual BLOOM model on a mix of its original training data and Finnish, resulting in a 176 billion parameter model we call BLUUMI. For model evaluation, we introduce FIN-bench, a version of BIG-bench with Finnish tasks. We also assess other model qualities such as toxicity and bias. Our models and tools are openly available at https://turkunlp.org/gpt3-finnish.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly address domain-specific problems, their application in the financial sector has expanded rapidly. Tasks that are both highly valuable and time-consuming, such as analyzing financial statements, disclosures, and related documents, are now being effectively tackled using LLMs. This paper details the development of a high-performance, finance-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for the ACM-ICAIF '24 FinanceRAG competition. We optimized performance through ablation studies on query expansion and corpus refinement during the pre-retrieval phase. To enhance retrieval accuracy, we employed multiple reranker models. Notably, we introduced an efficient method for managing long context sizes during the generation phase, significantly improving response quality without sacrificing performance. We ultimately achieve 2nd place in the FinanceRAG Challenge. Our key contributions include: (1) pre-retrieval ablation analysis, (2) an enhanced retrieval algorithm, and (3) a novel approach for long-context management. This work demonstrates the potential of LLMs in effectively processing and analyzing complex financial data to generate accurate and valuable insights. The source code and further details are available at https://github.com/cv-lee/FinanceRAG.

FinanceQA is a testing suite that evaluates LLMs' performance on complex numerical financial analysis tasks that mirror real-world investment work. Despite recent advances, current LLMs fail to meet the strict accuracy requirements of financial institutions, with models failing approximately 60% of realistic tasks that mimic on-the-job analyses at hedge funds, private equity firms, investment banks, and other financial institutions. The primary challenges include hand-spreading metrics, adhering to standard accounting and corporate valuation conventions, and performing analysis under incomplete information - particularly in multi-step tasks requiring assumption generation. This performance gap highlights the disconnect between existing LLM capabilities and the demands of professional financial analysis that are inadequately tested by current testing architectures. Results show that higher-quality training data is needed to support such tasks, which we experiment with using OpenAI's fine-tuning API. FinanceQA is publicly released at [this https URL](https://huggingface.co/datasets/AfterQuery/FinanceQA).

Financial trading is a crucial component of the markets, informed by a multimodal information landscape encompassing news, prices, and Kline charts, and encompasses diverse tasks such as quantitative trading and high-frequency trading with various assets. While advanced AI techniques like deep learning and reinforcement learning are extensively utilized in finance, their application in financial trading tasks often faces challenges due to inadequate handling of multimodal data and limited generalizability across various tasks. To address these challenges, we present FinAgent, a multimodal foundational agent with tool augmentation for financial trading. FinAgent's market intelligence module processes a diverse range of data-numerical, textual, and visual-to accurately analyze the financial market. Its unique dual-level reflection module not only enables rapid adaptation to market dynamics but also incorporates a diversified memory retrieval system, enhancing the agent's ability to learn from historical data and improve decision-making processes. The agent's emphasis on reasoning for actions fosters trust in its financial decisions. Moreover, FinAgent integrates established trading strategies and expert insights, ensuring that its trading approaches are both data-driven and rooted in sound financial principles. With comprehensive experiments on 6 financial datasets, including stocks and Crypto, FinAgent significantly outperforms 9 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of 6 financial metrics with over 36% average improvement on profit. Specifically, a 92.27% return (a 84.39% relative improvement) is achieved on one dataset. Notably, FinAgent is the first advanced multimodal foundation agent designed for financial trading tasks.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revealed new capabilities and opportunities across the technological landscape. However, the practicality of very large LLMs is challenged by their high compute cost, which does not justify the benefits given their limited capability compared to humans. While smaller, more practical LLMs have shown potential in financial analysis, though they are not yet fully proficient, as evidenced by their near-passing performance on the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam. In this work, we present Financial Analyst Extension to our Text Hyperlocally Augmented Large Language Extension (THaLLE), a series of 8B LLMs consistently achieving highest performance on mock CFA exams against models of comparable size. We thoroughly document the fine-tuning techniques used to facilitate future research. Additionally, we introduce the use of Flare CFA, a publicly available dataset for evaluating LLMs as a financial advisor.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown the potential to revolutionize natural language processing tasks in various domains, sparking great interest in vertical-specific large models. However, unlike proprietary models such as BloombergGPT and FinGPT, which have leveraged their unique data accumulations to make strides in the finance domain, there hasn't not many similar large language models in the Chinese legal domain to facilitate its digital transformation. In this paper, we propose an open-source legal large language model named ChatLaw. Due to the importance of data quality, we carefully designed a legal domain fine-tuning dataset. Additionally, to overcome the problem of model hallucinations in legal data screening during reference data retrieval, we introduce a method that combines vector database retrieval with keyword retrieval to effectively reduce the inaccuracy of relying solely on vector database retrieval. Furthermore, we propose a self-attention method to enhance the ability of large models to overcome errors present in reference data, further optimizing the issue of model hallucinations at the model level and improving the problem-solving capabilities of large models. We also open-sourced our model and part of the data at https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/ChatLaw.

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.

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.

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.

Fact-checking in financial domain is under explored, and there is a shortage of quality dataset in this domain. In this paper, we propose Fin-Fact, a benchmark dataset for multimodal fact-checking within the financial domain. Notably, it includes professional fact-checker annotations and justifications, providing expertise and credibility. With its multimodal nature encompassing both textual and visual content, Fin-Fact provides complementary information sources to enhance factuality analysis. Its primary objective is combating misinformation in finance, fostering transparency, and building trust in financial reporting and news dissemination. By offering insightful explanations, Fin-Fact empowers users, including domain experts and end-users, to understand the reasoning behind fact-checking decisions, validating claim credibility, and fostering trust in the fact-checking process. The Fin-Fact dataset, along with our experimental codes is available at https://github.com/IIT-DM/Fin-Fact/.

Financial asset recommendation (FAR) is a sub-domain of recommender systems which identifies useful financial securities for investors, with the expectation that they will invest capital on the recommended assets. FAR solutions analyse and learn from multiple data sources, including time series pricing data, customer profile information and expectations, as well as past investments. However, most models have been developed over proprietary datasets, making a comparison over a common benchmark impossible. In this paper, we aim to solve this problem by introducing FAR-Trans, the first public dataset for FAR, containing pricing information and retail investor transactions acquired from a large European financial institution. We also provide a bench-marking comparison between eleven FAR algorithms over the data for use as future baselines. The dataset can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5525/gla.researchdata.1658 .

To advance Chinese financial natural language processing (NLP), we introduce BBT-FinT5, a new Chinese financial pre-training language model based on the T5 model. To support this effort, we have built BBT-FinCorpus, a large-scale financial corpus with approximately 300GB of raw text from four different sources. In general domain NLP, comprehensive benchmarks like GLUE and SuperGLUE have driven significant advancements in language model pre-training by enabling head-to-head comparisons among models. Drawing inspiration from these benchmarks, we propose BBT-CFLEB, a Chinese Financial Language understanding and generation Evaluation Benchmark, which includes six datasets covering both understanding and generation tasks. Our aim is to facilitate research in the development of NLP within the Chinese financial domain. Our model, corpus and benchmark are released at https://github.com/ssymmetry/BBT-FinCUGE-Applications. Our work belongs to the Big Bang Transformer (BBT), a large-scale pre-trained language model project.

FinanceBench is a first-of-its-kind test suite for evaluating the performance of LLMs on open book financial question answering (QA). It comprises 10,231 questions about publicly traded companies, with corresponding answers and evidence strings. The questions in FinanceBench are ecologically valid and cover a diverse set of scenarios. They are intended to be clear-cut and straightforward to answer to serve as a minimum performance standard. We test 16 state of the art model configurations (including GPT-4-Turbo, Llama2 and Claude2, with vector stores and long context prompts) on a sample of 150 cases from FinanceBench, and manually review their answers (n=2,400). The cases are available open-source. We show that existing LLMs have clear limitations for financial QA. Notably, GPT-4-Turbo used with a retrieval system incorrectly answered or refused to answer 81% of questions. While augmentation techniques such as using longer context window to feed in relevant evidence improve performance, they are unrealistic for enterprise settings due to increased latency and cannot support larger financial documents. We find that all models examined exhibit weaknesses, such as hallucinations, that limit their suitability for use by enterprises.

Financial Technology (FinTech) is one of the worldwide rapidly-rising topics in the past five years according to the statistics of FinTech from Google Trends. In this position paper, we focus on the researches applying natural language processing (NLP) technologies in the finance domain. Our goal is to indicate the position we are now and provide the blueprint for future researches. We go through the application scenarios from three aspects including Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Product (KYP), and Satisfy Your Customer (SYC). Both formal documents and informal textual data are analyzed to understand corporate customers and personal customers. Furthermore, we talk over how to dynamically update the features of products from the prospect and the risk points of view. Finally, we discuss satisfying the customers in both B2C and C2C business models. After summarizing the past and the recent challenges, we highlight several promising future research directions in the trend of FinTech and the open finance tendency.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires that public companies file financial reports tagging numbers with the machine readable inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language (iXBRL) standard. However, the highly complex and highly granular taxonomy defined by iXBRL limits label transferability across domains. In this paper, we introduce the Hierarchical Financial Key Performance Indicator (HiFi-KPI) dataset, designed to facilitate numerical KPI extraction at specified levels of granularity from unstructured financial text. Our approach organizes a 218,126-label hierarchy using a taxonomy based grouping method, investigating which taxonomy layer provides the most meaningful structure. HiFi-KPI comprises ~1.8M paragraphs and ~5M entities, each linked to a label in the iXBRL-specific calculation and presentation taxonomies. We provide baselines using encoder-based approaches and structured extraction using Large Language Models (LLMs). To simplify LLM inference and evaluation, we additionally release HiFi-KPI Lite, a manually curated subset with four expert-mapped labels. We publicly release all artifacts

Publicly traded companies are required to submit periodic reports with eXtensive Business Reporting Language (XBRL) word-level tags. Manually tagging the reports is tedious and costly. We, therefore, introduce XBRL tagging as a new entity extraction task for the financial domain and release FiNER-139, a dataset of 1.1M sentences with gold XBRL tags. Unlike typical entity extraction datasets, FiNER-139 uses a much larger label set of 139 entity types. Most annotated tokens are numeric, with the correct tag per token depending mostly on context, rather than the token itself. We show that subword fragmentation of numeric expressions harms BERT's performance, allowing word-level BILSTMs to perform better. To improve BERT's performance, we propose two simple and effective solutions that replace numeric expressions with pseudo-tokens reflecting original token shapes and numeric magnitudes. We also experiment with FIN-BERT, an existing BERT model for the financial domain, and release our own BERT (SEC-BERT), pre-trained on financial filings, which performs best. Through data and error analysis, we finally identify possible limitations to inspire future work on XBRL tagging.

While making investment decisions by reading financial documents, investors need to differentiate between in-claim and outof-claim numerals. In this paper, we present a tool which does it automatically. It extracts context embeddings of the numerals using one of the transformer based pre-trained language model called BERT. After this, it uses a Logistic Regression based model to detect whether the numerals is in-claim or out-of-claim. We use FinNum-3 (English) dataset to train our model. After conducting rigorous experiments we achieve a Macro F1 score of 0.8223 on the validation set. We have open-sourced this tool and it can be accessed from https://github.com/sohomghosh/FiNCAT_Financial_Numeral_Claim_Analysis_Tool

In this paper, we introduce FAMMA, an open-source benchmark for financial multilingual multimodal question answering (QA). Our benchmark aims to evaluate the abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in answering questions that require advanced financial knowledge and sophisticated reasoning. It includes 1,758 meticulously collected question-answer pairs from university textbooks and exams, spanning 8 major subfields in finance including corporate finance, asset management, and financial engineering. Some of the QA pairs are written in Chinese or French, while a majority of them are in English. These questions are presented in a mixed format combining text and heterogeneous image types, such as charts, tables, and diagrams. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art MLLMs on our benchmark, and our analysis shows that FAMMA poses a significant challenge for these models. Even advanced systems like GPT-4o and Claude-35-Sonnet achieve only 42\% accuracy. Additionally, the open-source Qwen2-VL lags notably behind its proprietary counterparts. Lastly, we explore GPT o1-style reasoning chains to enhance the models' reasoning capabilities, which significantly improve error correction. Our FAMMA benchmark will facilitate future research to develop expert systems in financial QA. The leaderboard is available at https://famma-bench.github.io/famma/ .

This paper introduces the UCFE: User-Centric Financial Expertise benchmark, an innovative framework designed to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to handle complex real-world financial tasks. UCFE benchmark adopts a hybrid approach that combines human expert evaluations with dynamic, task-specific interactions to simulate the complexities of evolving financial scenarios. Firstly, we conducted a user study involving 804 participants, collecting their feedback on financial tasks. Secondly, based on this feedback, we created our dataset that encompasses a wide range of user intents and interactions. This dataset serves as the foundation for benchmarking 12 LLM services using the LLM-as-Judge methodology. Our results show a significant alignment between benchmark scores and human preferences, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.78, confirming the effectiveness of the UCFE dataset and our evaluation approach. UCFE benchmark not only reveals the potential of LLMs in the financial sector but also provides a robust framework for assessing their performance and user satisfaction.The benchmark dataset and evaluation code are available.

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

Radio Frequency Reinforcement Learning (RFRL) is anticipated to be a widely applicable technology in the next generation of wireless communication systems, particularly 6G and next-gen military communications. Given this, our research is focused on developing a tool to promote the development of RFRL techniques that leverage spectrum sensing. In particular, the tool was designed to address two cognitive radio applications, specifically dynamic spectrum access and jamming. In order to train and test reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for these applications, a simulation environment is necessary to simulate the conditions that an agent will encounter within the Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum. In this paper, such an environment has been developed, herein referred to as the RFRL Gym. Through the RFRL Gym, users can design their own scenarios to model what an RL agent may encounter within the RF spectrum as well as experiment with different spectrum sensing techniques. Additionally, the RFRL Gym is a subclass of OpenAI gym, enabling the use of third-party ML/RL Libraries. We plan to open-source this codebase to enable other researchers to utilize the RFRL Gym to test their own scenarios and RL algorithms, ultimately leading to the advancement of RL research in the wireless communications domain. This paper describes in further detail the components of the Gym, results from example scenarios, and plans for future additions. Index Terms-machine learning, reinforcement learning, wireless communications, dynamic spectrum access, OpenAI gym

In this paper, we present our approaches for the FinSim-3 Shared Task 2021: Learning Semantic Similarities for the Financial Domain. The aim of this shared task is to correctly classify a list of given terms from the financial domain into the most relevant hypernym (or top-level) concept in an external ontology. For our system submission, we evaluate two methods: a Sentence-RoBERTa (SRoBERTa) embeddings model pre-trained on a custom corpus, and a dual word-sentence embeddings model that builds on the first method by improving the proposed baseline word embeddings construction using the FastText model to boost the classification performance. Our system ranks 2nd overall on both metrics, scoring 0.917 on Average Accuracy and 1.141 on Mean Rank.

Financial portfolio management is the process of constant redistribution of a fund into different financial products. This paper presents a financial-model-free Reinforcement Learning framework to provide a deep machine learning solution to the portfolio management problem. The framework consists of the Ensemble of Identical Independent Evaluators (EIIE) topology, a Portfolio-Vector Memory (PVM), an Online Stochastic Batch Learning (OSBL) scheme, and a fully exploiting and explicit reward function. This framework is realized in three instants in this work with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a basic Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). They are, along with a number of recently reviewed or published portfolio-selection strategies, examined in three back-test experiments with a trading period of 30 minutes in a cryptocurrency market. Cryptocurrencies are electronic and decentralized alternatives to government-issued money, with Bitcoin as the best-known example of a cryptocurrency. All three instances of the framework monopolize the top three positions in all experiments, outdistancing other compared trading algorithms. Although with a high commission rate of 0.25% in the backtests, the framework is able to achieve at least 4-fold returns in 50 days.

Table extraction from document images is a challenging AI problem, and labelled data for many content domains is difficult to come by. Existing table extraction datasets often focus on scientific tables due to the vast amount of academic articles that are readily available, along with their source code. However, there are significant layout and typographical differences between tables found across scientific, financial, and other domains. Current datasets often lack the words, and their positions, contained within the tables, instead relying on unreliable OCR to extract these features for training modern machine learning models on natural language processing tasks. Therefore, there is a need for a more general method of obtaining labelled data. We present SynFinTabs, a large-scale, labelled dataset of synthetic financial tables. Our hope is that our method of generating these synthetic tables is transferable to other domains. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset in training models to extract information from table images, we create FinTabQA, a layout large language model trained on an extractive question-answering task. We test our model using real-world financial tables and compare it to a state-of-the-art generative model and discuss the results. We make the dataset, model, and dataset generation code publicly available.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various natural language processing tasks, yet their efficacy in more challenging and domain-specific tasks remains largely unexplored. This paper presents FinEval, a benchmark specifically designed for the financial domain knowledge in the LLMs. FinEval is a collection of high-quality multiple-choice questions covering Finance, Economy, Accounting, and Certificate. It includes 4,661 questions spanning 34 different academic subjects. To ensure a comprehensive model performance evaluation, FinEval employs a range of prompt types, including zero-shot and few-shot prompts, as well as answer-only and chain-of-thought prompts. Evaluating state-of-the-art Chinese and English LLMs on FinEval, the results show that only GPT-4 achieved an accuracy close to 70% in different prompt settings, indicating significant growth potential for LLMs in the financial domain knowledge. Our work offers a more comprehensive financial knowledge evaluation benchmark, utilizing data of mock exams and covering a wide range of evaluated LLMs.

Federated learning (FL) is a computational paradigm that enables organizations to collaborate on machine learning (ML) projects without sharing sensitive data, such as, patient records, financial data, or classified secrets. Open Federated Learning (OpenFL https://github.com/intel/openfl) is an open-source framework for training ML algorithms using the data-private collaborative learning paradigm of FL. OpenFL works with training pipelines built with both TensorFlow and PyTorch, and can be easily extended to other ML and deep learning frameworks. Here, we summarize the motivation and development characteristics of OpenFL, with the intention of facilitating its application to existing ML model training in a production environment. Finally, we describe the first use of the OpenFL framework to train consensus ML models in a consortium of international healthcare organizations, as well as how it facilitates the first computational competition on FL.

Large language models (LLMs) show promise for natural language tasks but struggle when applied directly to complex domains like finance. LLMs have difficulty reasoning about and integrating all relevant information. We propose a data-centric approach to enable LLMs to better handle financial tasks. Our key insight is that rather than overloading the LLM with everything at once, it is more effective to preprocess and pre-understand the data. We create a financial LLM (FLLM) using multitask prompt-based finetuning to achieve data pre-processing and pre-understanding. However, labeled data is scarce for each task. To overcome manual annotation costs, we employ abductive augmentation reasoning (AAR) to automatically generate training data by modifying the pseudo labels from FLLM's own outputs. Experiments show our data-centric FLLM with AAR substantially outperforms baseline financial LLMs designed for raw text, achieving state-of-the-art on financial analysis and interpretation tasks. We also open source a new benchmark for financial analysis and interpretation. Our methodology provides a promising path to unlock LLMs' potential for complex real-world domains.

Financial reports offer critical insights into a company's operations, yet their extensive length typically spanning 30 40 pages poses challenges for swift decision making in dynamic markets. To address this, we leveraged finetuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to distill key indicators and operational metrics from these reports basis questions from the user. We devised a method to locate critical data, and leverage the FinQA dataset to fine-tune both Llama-2 7B and T5 models for customized question answering. We achieved results comparable to baseline on the final numerical answer, a competitive accuracy in numerical reasoning and calculation.

Pre-trained language models have shown impressive performance on a variety of tasks and domains. Previous research on financial language models usually employs a generic training scheme to train standard model architectures, without completely leveraging the richness of the financial data. We propose a novel domain specific Financial LANGuage model (FLANG) which uses financial keywords and phrases for better masking, together with span boundary objective and in-filing objective. Additionally, the evaluation benchmarks in the field have been limited. To this end, we contribute the Financial Language Understanding Evaluation (FLUE), an open-source comprehensive suite of benchmarks for the financial domain. These include new benchmarks across 5 NLP tasks in financial domain as well as common benchmarks used in the previous research. Experiments on these benchmarks suggest that our model outperforms those in prior literature on a variety of NLP tasks. Our models, code and benchmark data are publicly available on Github and Huggingface.

This paper introduces the FinSen dataset that revolutionizes financial market analysis by integrating economic and financial news articles from 197 countries with stock market data. The dataset's extensive coverage spans 15 years from 2007 to 2023 with temporal information, offering a rich, global perspective with 160,000 records on financial market news. Our study leverages causally validated sentiment scores and LSTM models to enhance market forecast accuracy and reliability. Utilizing the FinSen dataset, we introduce an innovative Focal Calibration Loss, reducing Expected Calibration Error (ECE) to 3.34 percent with the DAN 3 model. This not only improves prediction accuracy but also aligns probabilistic forecasts closely with real outcomes, crucial for the financial sector where predicted probability is paramount. Our approach demonstrates the effectiveness of combining sentiment analysis with precise calibration techniques for trustworthy financial forecasting where the cost of misinterpretation can be high. Finsen Data can be found at [this github URL](https://github.com/EagleAdelaide/FinSen_Dataset.git).

Federated Learning (FL) typically involves a large-scale, distributed system with individual user devices/servers training models locally and then aggregating their model updates on a trusted central server. Existing systems for FL often use an always-on server for model aggregation, which can be inefficient in terms of resource utilization. They may also be inelastic in their resource management. This is particularly exacerbated when aggregating model updates at scale in a highly dynamic environment with varying numbers of heterogeneous user devices/servers. We present LIFL, a lightweight and elastic serverless cloud platform with fine-grained resource management for efficient FL aggregation at scale. LIFL is enhanced by a streamlined, event-driven serverless design that eliminates the individual heavy-weight message broker and replaces inefficient container-based sidecars with lightweight eBPF-based proxies. We leverage shared memory processing to achieve high-performance communication for hierarchical aggregation, which is commonly adopted to speed up FL aggregation at scale. We further introduce locality-aware placement in LIFL to maximize the benefits of shared memory processing. LIFL precisely scales and carefully reuses the resources for hierarchical aggregation to achieve the highest degree of parallelism while minimizing the aggregation time and resource consumption. Our experimental results show that LIFL achieves significant improvement in resource efficiency and aggregation speed for supporting FL at scale, compared to existing serverful and serverless FL systems.

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), the potential of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have garnered considerable research attention. Numerous novel algorithms and models have been introduced to enhance various aspects of RAG systems. However, the absence of a standardized framework for implementation, coupled with the inherently intricate RAG process, makes it challenging and time-consuming for researchers to compare and evaluate these approaches in a consistent environment. Existing RAG toolkits like LangChain and LlamaIndex, while available, are often heavy and unwieldy, failing to meet the personalized needs of researchers. In response to this challenge, we propose FlashRAG, an efficient and modular open-source toolkit designed to assist researchers in reproducing existing RAG methods and in developing their own RAG algorithms within a unified framework. Our toolkit implements 12 advanced RAG methods and has gathered and organized 32 benchmark datasets. Our toolkit has various features, including customizable modular framework, rich collection of pre-implemented RAG works, comprehensive datasets, efficient auxiliary pre-processing scripts, and extensive and standard evaluation metrics. Our toolkit and resources are available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/FlashRAG.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning (ML) training paradigm where clients own their data and collaborate to train a global model, without revealing any data to the server and other participants. Researchers commonly perform experiments in a simulation environment to quickly iterate on ideas. However, existing open-source tools do not offer the efficiency required to simulate FL on larger and more realistic FL datasets. We introduce pfl-research, a fast, modular, and easy-to-use Python framework for simulating FL. It supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, and non-neural network models, and is tightly integrated with state-of-the-art privacy algorithms. We study the speed of open-source FL frameworks and show that pfl-research is 7-72times faster than alternative open-source frameworks on common cross-device setups. Such speedup will significantly boost the productivity of the FL research community and enable testing hypotheses on realistic FL datasets that were previously too resource intensive. We release a suite of benchmarks that evaluates an algorithm's overall performance on a diverse set of realistic scenarios. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/apple/pfl-research.

The task of converting natural language queries into SQL queries is intricate, necessitating a blend of precise techniques for an accurate translation. The DIN-SQL (Decomposed-In-Context SQL) methodology represents a significant development in this domain. This paper introduces DFIN (Decomposed Focused-In-Context), an innovative extension of DIN-SQL that enhances Text-to-SQL conversion by addressing schema linking errors, which are a major source of inaccuracies. DFIN uniquely alternates between prompting techniques and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), adapting to the size and complexity of the database schema. A preprocessing phase embeds database definitions and leverages annotated files, akin to those in the BIRD dataset, facilitating the runtime retrieval of pertinent schema information. This strategy significantly reduces the token count for schema linking prompts, enabling the use of a standard GPT-4 model over its larger context variant, thus handling large-scale databases more effectively and economically. Our evaluation on the BIRD dataset, a challenging real-world benchmark, demonstrates that DFIN not only scales efficiently but also improves accuracy, achieving a score of 51.69. This improvement surpasses DIN-SQL method (the current third-place), which is the highest-ranked model employing in-context learning rather than fine-tuning, previously scoring 50.72. The advancement of DFIN underscores the evolving capabilities of in-context learning methodologies combined with advanced language models, offering a promising avenue for future research in complex Text-to-SQL conversion tasks.

As a typical and practical application of Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have gained extensive attention, particularly in vertical domains where LLMs may lack domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an omnidirectional and automatic RAG benchmark, OmniEval, in the financial domain. Our benchmark is characterized by its multi-dimensional evaluation framework, including (1) a matrix-based RAG scenario evaluation system that categorizes queries into five task classes and 16 financial topics, leading to a structured assessment of diverse query scenarios; (2) a multi-dimensional evaluation data generation approach, which combines GPT-4-based automatic generation and human annotation, achieving an 87.47\% acceptance ratio in human evaluations on generated instances; (3) a multi-stage evaluation system that evaluates both retrieval and generation performance, result in a comprehensive evaluation on the RAG pipeline; and (4) robust evaluation metrics derived from rule-based and LLM-based ones, enhancing the reliability of assessments through manual annotations and supervised fine-tuning of an LLM evaluator. Our experiments demonstrate the comprehensiveness of OmniEval, which includes extensive test datasets and highlights the performance variations of RAG systems across diverse topics and tasks, revealing significant opportunities for RAG models to improve their capabilities in vertical domains. We open source the code of our benchmark in https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/OmniEval{https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/OmniEval}.

This paper introduces a multifaceted methodology for fine-tuning and evaluating large language models (LLMs) for specialized monetization tasks. The goal is to balance general language proficiency with domain-specific skills. The methodology has three main components: 1) Carefully blending in-domain and general-purpose data during fine-tuning to achieve an optimal balance between general and specialized capabilities; 2) Designing a comprehensive evaluation framework with 45 questions tailored to assess performance on functionally relevant dimensions like reliability, consistency, and business impact; 3) Analyzing how model size and continual training influence metrics to guide efficient resource allocation during fine-tuning. The paper details the design, data collection, analytical techniques, and results validating the proposed frameworks. It aims to provide businesses and researchers with actionable insights on effectively adapting LLMs for specialized contexts. We also intend to make public the comprehensive evaluation framework, which includes the 45 tailored questions and their respective scoring guidelines, to foster transparency and collaboration in adapting LLMs for specialized tasks.

Foundation language models obtain the instruction-following ability through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Diversity and complexity are considered critical factors of a successful SFT dataset, while their definitions remain obscure and lack quantitative analyses. In this work, we propose InsTag, an open-set fine-grained tagger, to tag samples within SFT datasets based on semantics and intentions and define instruction diversity and complexity regarding tags. We obtain 6.6K tags to describe comprehensive user queries. Then we analyze popular open-sourced SFT datasets and find that the model ability grows with more diverse and complex data. Based on this observation, we propose a data selector based on InsTag to select 6K diverse and complex samples from open-source datasets and fine-tune models on InsTag-selected data. The resulting models, TagLM, outperform open-source models based on considerably larger SFT data evaluated by MT-Bench, echoing the importance of query diversity and complexity. We open-source InsTag in https://github.com/OFA-Sys/InsTag.

Major scandals in corporate history have urged the need for regulatory compliance, where organizations need to ensure that their controls (processes) comply with relevant laws, regulations, and policies. However, keeping track of the constantly changing legislation is difficult, thus organizations are increasingly adopting Regulatory Technology (RegTech) to facilitate the process. To this end, we introduce regulatory information retrieval (REG-IR), an application of document-to-document information retrieval (DOC2DOC IR), where the query is an entire document making the task more challenging than traditional IR where the queries are short. Furthermore, we compile and release two datasets based on the relationships between EU directives and UK legislation. We experiment on these datasets using a typical two-step pipeline approach comprising a pre-fetcher and a neural re-ranker. Experimenting with various pre-fetchers from BM25 to k nearest neighbors over representations from several BERT models, we show that fine-tuning a BERT model on an in-domain classification task produces the best representations for IR. We also show that neural re-rankers under-perform due to contradicting supervision, i.e., similar query-document pairs with opposite labels. Thus, they are biased towards the pre-fetcher's score. Interestingly, applying a date filter further improves the performance, showcasing the importance of the time dimension.

Decentralised Machine Learning (DML) enables collaborative machine learning without centralised input data. Federated Learning (FL) and Edge Inference are examples of DML. While tools for DML (especially FL) are starting to flourish, many are not flexible and portable enough to experiment with novel processors (e.g., RISC-V), non-fully connected network topologies, and asynchronous collaboration schemes. We overcome these limitations via a domain-specific language allowing us to map DML schemes to an underlying middleware, i.e. the FastFlow parallel programming library. We experiment with it by generating different working DML schemes on x86-64 and ARM platforms and an emerging RISC-V one. We characterise the performance and energy efficiency of the presented schemes and systems. As a byproduct, we introduce a RISC-V porting of the PyTorch framework, the first publicly available to our knowledge.

In recent years, multimodal benchmarks for general domains have guided the rapid development of multimodal models on general tasks. However, the financial field has its peculiarities. It features unique graphical images (e.g., candlestick charts, technical indicator charts) and possesses a wealth of specialized financial knowledge (e.g., futures, turnover rate). Therefore, benchmarks from general fields often fail to measure the performance of multimodal models in the financial domain, and thus cannot effectively guide the rapid development of large financial models. To promote the development of large financial multimodal models, we propose MME-Finance, an bilingual open-ended and practical usage-oriented Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark. The characteristics of our benchmark are finance and expertise, which include constructing charts that reflect the actual usage needs of users (e.g., computer screenshots and mobile photography), creating questions according to the preferences in financial domain inquiries, and annotating questions by experts with 10+ years of experience in the financial industry. Additionally, we have developed a custom-designed financial evaluation system in which visual information is first introduced in the multi-modal evaluation process. Extensive experimental evaluations of 19 mainstream MLLMs are conducted to test their perception, reasoning, and cognition capabilities. The results indicate that models performing well on general benchmarks cannot do well on MME-Finance; for instance, the top-performing open-source and closed-source models obtain 65.69 (Qwen2VL-72B) and 63.18 (GPT-4o), respectively. Their performance is particularly poor in categories most relevant to finance, such as candlestick charts and technical indicator charts. In addition, we propose a Chinese version, which helps compare performance of MLLMs under a Chinese context.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising technique for edge devices to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model, while keeping their training data on the device, thereby decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store the data in the cloud. However, FL is difficult to implement realistically, both in terms of scale and systems heterogeneity. Although there are a number of research frameworks available to simulate FL algorithms, they do not support the study of scalable FL workloads on heterogeneous edge devices. In this paper, we present Flower -- a comprehensive FL framework that distinguishes itself from existing platforms by offering new facilities to execute large-scale FL experiments and consider richly heterogeneous FL device scenarios. Our experiments show Flower can perform FL experiments up to 15M in client size using only a pair of high-end GPUs. Researchers can then seamlessly migrate experiments to real devices to examine other parts of the design space. We believe Flower provides the community with a critical new tool for FL study and development.

Domain-adaptive post-training of large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach for specialized domains such as medicine and finance. However, significant challenges remain in identifying optimal adaptation criteria and training strategies across varying data and model configurations. To address these challenges, we introduce FINDAP, a systematic and fine-grained investigation into domain-adaptive post-training of LLMs for the finance domain. Our approach begins by identifying the core capabilities required for the target domain and designing a comprehensive evaluation suite aligned with these needs. We then analyze the effectiveness of key post-training stages, including continual pretraining, instruction tuning, and preference alignment. Building on these insights, we propose an effective training recipe centered on a novel preference data distillation method, which leverages process signals from a generative reward model. The resulting model, Llama-Fin, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of financial tasks. Our analysis also highlights how each post-training stage contributes to distinct capabilities, uncovering specific challenges and effective solutions, providing valuable insights for domain adaptation of LLMs. Project page: https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/FinDap

The use of NLP in the realm of financial technology is broad and complex, with applications ranging from sentiment analysis and named entity recognition to question answering. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective on a variety of tasks; however, no LLM specialized for the financial domain has been reported in literature. In this work, we present BloombergGPT, a 50 billion parameter language model that is trained on a wide range of financial data. We construct a 363 billion token dataset based on Bloomberg's extensive data sources, perhaps the largest domain-specific dataset yet, augmented with 345 billion tokens from general purpose datasets. We validate BloombergGPT on standard LLM benchmarks, open financial benchmarks, and a suite of internal benchmarks that most accurately reflect our intended usage. Our mixed dataset training leads to a model that outperforms existing models on financial tasks by significant margins without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks. Additionally, we explain our modeling choices, training process, and evaluation methodology. As a next step, we plan to release training logs (Chronicles) detailing our experience in training BloombergGPT.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, OPT, and LLaMA have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in a wide range of tasks. However, training these models can incur significant expenses, often requiring tens of thousands of GPUs for months of continuous operation. Typically, this training is carried out in specialized GPU clusters equipped with homogeneous high-speed Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network interface cards (NICs). The acquisition and maintenance of such dedicated clusters is challenging. Current LLM training frameworks, like Megatron-LM and Megatron-DeepSpeed, focus primarily on optimizing training within homogeneous cluster settings. In this paper, we introduce Holmes, a training framework for LLMs that employs thoughtfully crafted data and model parallelism strategies over the heterogeneous NIC environment. Our primary technical contribution lies in a novel scheduling method that intelligently allocates distinct computational tasklets in LLM training to specific groups of GPU devices based on the characteristics of their connected NICs. Furthermore, our proposed framework, utilizing pipeline parallel techniques, demonstrates scalability to multiple GPU clusters, even in scenarios without high-speed interconnects between nodes in distinct clusters. We conducted comprehensive experiments that involved various scenarios in the heterogeneous NIC environment. In most cases, our framework achieves performance levels close to those achievable with homogeneous RDMA-capable networks (InfiniBand or RoCE), significantly exceeding training efficiency within the pure Ethernet environment. Additionally, we verified that our framework outperforms other mainstream LLM frameworks under heterogeneous NIC environment in terms of training efficiency and can be seamlessly integrated with them.

We present the FinCausal 2020 Shared Task on Causality Detection in Financial Documents and the associated FinCausal dataset, and discuss the participating systems and results. Two sub-tasks are proposed: a binary classification task (Task 1) and a relation extraction task (Task 2). A total of 16 teams submitted runs across the two Tasks and 13 of them contributed with a system description paper. This workshop is associated to the Joint Workshop on Financial Narrative Processing and MultiLing Financial Summarisation (FNP-FNS 2020), held at The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING'2020), Barcelona, Spain on September 12, 2020.

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.

The rapid growth of the financial sector and the rising focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations highlight the need for advanced NLP tools. However, open-source LLMs proficient in both finance and ESG domains remain scarce. To address this gap, we introduce SusGen-30K, a category-balanced dataset comprising seven financial NLP tasks and ESG report generation, and propose TCFD-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating sustainability report generation. Leveraging this dataset, we developed SusGen-GPT, a suite of models achieving state-of-the-art performance across six adapted and two off-the-shelf tasks, trailing GPT-4 by only 2% despite using 7-8B parameters compared to GPT-4's 1,700B. Based on this, we propose the SusGen system, integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), to assist in sustainability report generation. This work demonstrates the efficiency of our approach, advancing research in finance and ESG.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in reasoning capabilities. However, they still face challenges such as high computational demands and privacy concerns. This paper focuses on developing efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) and Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) that retain competitive reasoning abilities. We introduce a novel training pipeline that enhances reasoning capabilities and facilitates deployment on edge devices, achieving state-of-the-art performance while minimizing development costs. \InfR~ aims to advance AI systems by improving reasoning, reducing adoption barriers, and addressing privacy concerns through smaller model sizes. Resources are available at https://github. com/Reallm-Labs/InfiR.

We introduce Falcon2-11B, a foundation model trained on over five trillion tokens, and its multimodal counterpart, Falcon2-11B-vlm, which is a vision-to-text model. We report our findings during the training of the Falcon2-11B which follows a multi-stage approach where the early stages are distinguished by their context length and a final stage where we use a curated, high-quality dataset. Additionally, we report the effect of doubling the batch size mid-training and how training loss spikes are affected by the learning rate. The downstream performance of the foundation model is evaluated on established benchmarks, including multilingual and code datasets. The foundation model shows strong generalization across all the tasks which makes it suitable for downstream finetuning use cases. For the vision language model, we report the performance on several benchmarks and show that our model achieves a higher average score compared to open-source models of similar size. The model weights and code of both Falcon2-11B and Falcon2-11B-vlm are made available under a permissive license.

In this paper, we introduce SaulLM-7B, a large language model (LLM) tailored for the legal domain. With 7 billion parameters, SaulLM-7B is the first LLM designed explicitly for legal text comprehension and generation. Leveraging the Mistral 7B architecture as its foundation, SaulLM-7B is trained on an English legal corpus of over 30 billion tokens. SaulLM-7B exhibits state-of-the-art proficiency in understanding and processing legal documents. Additionally, we present a novel instructional fine-tuning method that leverages legal datasets to further enhance SaulLM-7B's performance in legal tasks. SaulLM-7B is released under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 License.