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Aug 11

SEntFiN 1.0: Entity-Aware Sentiment Analysis for Financial News

Fine-grained financial sentiment analysis on news headlines is a challenging task requiring human-annotated datasets to achieve high performance. Limited studies have tried to address the sentiment extraction task in a setting where multiple entities are present in a news headline. In an effort to further research in this area, we make publicly available SEntFiN 1.0, a human-annotated dataset of 10,753 news headlines with entity-sentiment annotations, of which 2,847 headlines contain multiple entities, often with conflicting sentiments. We augment our dataset with a database of over 1,000 financial entities and their various representations in news media amounting to over 5,000 phrases. We propose a framework that enables the extraction of entity-relevant sentiments using a feature-based approach rather than an expression-based approach. For sentiment extraction, we utilize 12 different learning schemes utilizing lexicon-based and pre-trained sentence representations and five classification approaches. Our experiments indicate that lexicon-based n-gram ensembles are above par with pre-trained word embedding schemes such as GloVe. Overall, RoBERTa and finBERT (domain-specific BERT) achieve the highest average accuracy of 94.29% and F1-score of 93.27%. Further, using over 210,000 entity-sentiment predictions, we validate the economic effect of sentiments on aggregate market movements over a long duration.

FNSPID: A Comprehensive Financial News Dataset in Time Series

Financial market predictions utilize historical data to anticipate future stock prices and market trends. Traditionally, these predictions have focused on the statistical analysis of quantitative factors, such as stock prices, trading volumes, inflation rates, and changes in industrial production. Recent advancements in large language models motivate the integrated financial analysis of both sentiment data, particularly market news, and numerical factors. Nonetheless, this methodology frequently encounters constraints due to the paucity of extensive datasets that amalgamate both quantitative and qualitative sentiment analyses. To address this challenge, we introduce a large-scale financial dataset, namely, Financial News and Stock Price Integration Dataset (FNSPID). It comprises 29.7 million stock prices and 15.7 million time-aligned financial news records for 4,775 S&P500 companies, covering the period from 1999 to 2023, sourced from 4 stock market news websites. We demonstrate that FNSPID excels existing stock market datasets in scale and diversity while uniquely incorporating sentiment information. Through financial analysis experiments on FNSPID, we propose: (1) the dataset's size and quality significantly boost market prediction accuracy; (2) adding sentiment scores modestly enhances performance on the transformer-based model; (3) a reproducible procedure that can update the dataset. Completed work, code, documentation, and examples are available at github.com/Zdong104/FNSPID. FNSPID offers unprecedented opportunities for the financial research community to advance predictive modeling and analysis.

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

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

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

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

Revolutionizing Finance with LLMs: An Overview of Applications and Insights

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

Good Debt or Bad Debt: Detecting Semantic Orientations in Economic Texts

The use of robo-readers to analyze news texts is an emerging technology trend in computational finance. In recent research, a substantial effort has been invested to develop sophisticated financial polarity-lexicons that can be used to investigate how financial sentiments relate to future company performance. However, based on experience from other fields, where sentiment analysis is commonly applied, it is well-known that the overall semantic orientation of a sentence may differ from the prior polarity of individual words. The objective of this article is to investigate how semantic orientations can be better detected in financial and economic news by accommodating the overall phrase-structure information and domain-specific use of language. Our three main contributions are: (1) establishment of a human-annotated finance phrase-bank, which can be used as benchmark for training and evaluating alternative models; (2) presentation of a technique to enhance financial lexicons with attributes that help to identify expected direction of events that affect overall sentiment; (3) development of a linearized phrase-structure model for detecting contextual semantic orientations in financial and economic news texts. The relevance of the newly added lexicon features and the benefit of using the proposed learning-algorithm are demonstrated in a comparative study against previously used general sentiment models as well as the popular word frequency models used in recent financial studies. The proposed framework is parsimonious and avoids the explosion in feature-space caused by the use of conventional n-gram features.

Removing Non-Stationary Knowledge From Pre-Trained Language Models for Entity-Level Sentiment Classification in Finance

Extraction of sentiment signals from news text, stock message boards, and business reports, for stock movement prediction, has been a rising field of interest in finance. Building upon past literature, the most recent works attempt to better capture sentiment from sentences with complex syntactic structures by introducing aspect-level sentiment classification (ASC). Despite the growing interest, however, fine-grained sentiment analysis has not been fully explored in non-English literature due to the shortage of annotated finance-specific data. Accordingly, it is necessary for non-English languages to leverage datasets and pre-trained language models (PLM) of different domains, languages, and tasks to best their performance. To facilitate finance-specific ASC research in the Korean language, we build KorFinASC, a Korean aspect-level sentiment classification dataset for finance consisting of 12,613 human-annotated samples, and explore methods of intermediate transfer learning. Our experiments indicate that past research has been ignorant towards the potentially wrong knowledge of financial entities encoded during the training phase, which has overestimated the predictive power of PLMs. In our work, we use the term "non-stationary knowledge'' to refer to information that was previously correct but is likely to change, and present "TGT-Masking'', a novel masking pattern to restrict PLMs from speculating knowledge of the kind. Finally, through a series of transfer learning with TGT-Masking applied we improve 22.63% of classification accuracy compared to standalone models on KorFinASC.

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

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

EmTract: Investor Emotions and Market Behavior

We develop a tool that extracts emotions from social media text data. Our methodology has three main advantages. First, it is tailored for financial context; second, it incorporates key aspects of social media data, such as non-standard phrases, emojis and emoticons; and third, it operates by sequentially learning a latent representation that includes features such as word order, word usage, and local context. This tool, along with a user guide is available at: https://github.com/dvamossy/EmTract. Using EmTract, we explore the relationship between investor emotions expressed on social media and asset prices. We document a number of interesting insights. First, we confirm some of the findings of controlled laboratory experiments relating investor emotions to asset price movements. Second, we show that investor emotions are predictive of daily price movements. These impacts are larger when volatility or short interest are higher, and when institutional ownership or liquidity are lower. Third, increased investor enthusiasm prior to the IPO contributes to the large first-day return and long-run underperformance of IPO stocks. To corroborate our results, we provide a number of robustness checks, including using an alternative emotion model. Our findings reinforce the intuition that emotions and market dynamics are closely related, and highlight the importance of considering investor emotions when assessing a stock's short-term value.

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

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

Bridging Language Models and Financial Analysis

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

FinTruthQA: A Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating the Quality of Financial Information Disclosure

Accurate and transparent financial information disclosure is essential in accounting and finance, fostering trust and enabling informed investment decisions that drive economic development. Among many information disclosure platforms, the Chinese stock exchanges' investor interactive platform provides a novel and interactive way for listed firms to disclose information of interest to investors through an online question-and-answer (Q&A) format. However, it is common for listed firms to respond to questions with limited or no substantive information, and automatically evaluating the quality of financial information disclosure on large amounts of Q&A pairs is challenging. In this study, our interdisciplinary team of AI and finance professionals proposed FinTruthQA, a benchmark designed to evaluate advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the automatic quality assessment of information disclosure in financial Q&A data. It comprises 6,000 real-world financial Q&A entries and each Q&A was manually annotated based on four key evaluation criteria. We benchmarked various NLP techniques on FinTruthQA, including large language models(LLMs). Experiments showed that existing NLP models have strong predictive ability for question identification and question relevance tasks, but are suboptimal for answer readability and answer relevance tasks. By establishing this benchmark, we provide a robust foundation for the automatic evaluation of information disclosure, demonstrating how AI can be leveraged for social good by promoting transparency, fairness, and investor protection in financial disclosure practices. FinTruthQA can be used by auditors, regulators, and financial analysts for real-time monitoring and data-driven decision-making, as well as by researchers for advanced studies in accounting and finance, ultimately fostering greater trust and efficiency in the financial markets.

FinMTEB: Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark

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

NumHTML: Numeric-Oriented Hierarchical Transformer Model for Multi-task Financial Forecasting

Financial forecasting has been an important and active area of machine learning research because of the challenges it presents and the potential rewards that even minor improvements in prediction accuracy or forecasting may entail. Traditionally, financial forecasting has heavily relied on quantitative indicators and metrics derived from structured financial statements. Earnings conference call data, including text and audio, is an important source of unstructured data that has been used for various prediction tasks using deep earning and related approaches. However, current deep learning-based methods are limited in the way that they deal with numeric data; numbers are typically treated as plain-text tokens without taking advantage of their underlying numeric structure. This paper describes a numeric-oriented hierarchical transformer model to predict stock returns, and financial risk using multi-modal aligned earnings calls data by taking advantage of the different categories of numbers (monetary, temporal, percentages etc.) and their magnitude. We present the results of a comprehensive evaluation of NumHTML against several state-of-the-art baselines using a real-world publicly available dataset. The results indicate that NumHTML significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art across a variety of evaluation metrics and that it has the potential to offer significant financial gains in a practical trading context.

A Robust Predictive Model for Stock Price Prediction Using Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing

Prediction of future movement of stock prices has been a subject matter of many research work. There is a gamut of literature of technical analysis of stock prices where the objective is to identify patterns in stock price movements and derive profit from it. Improving the prediction accuracy remains the single most challenge in this area of research. We propose a hybrid approach for stock price movement prediction using machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. We select the NIFTY 50 index values of the National Stock Exchange of India, and collect its daily price movement over a period of three years (2015 to 2017). Based on the data of 2015 to 2017, we build various predictive models using machine learning, and then use those models to predict the closing value of NIFTY 50 for the period January 2018 till June 2019 with a prediction horizon of one week. For predicting the price movement patterns, we use a number of classification techniques, while for predicting the actual closing price of the stock, various regression models have been used. We also build a Long and Short-Term Memory - based deep learning network for predicting the closing price of the stocks and compare the prediction accuracies of the machine learning models with the LSTM model. We further augment the predictive model by integrating a sentiment analysis module on twitter data to correlate the public sentiment of stock prices with the market sentiment. This has been done using twitter sentiment and previous week closing values to predict stock price movement for the next week. We tested our proposed scheme using a cross validation method based on Self Organizing Fuzzy Neural Networks and found extremely interesting results.

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

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

PreBit -- A multimodal model with Twitter FinBERT embeddings for extreme price movement prediction of Bitcoin

Bitcoin, with its ever-growing popularity, has demonstrated extreme price volatility since its origin. This volatility, together with its decentralised nature, make Bitcoin highly subjective to speculative trading as compared to more traditional assets. In this paper, we propose a multimodal model for predicting extreme price fluctuations. This model takes as input a variety of correlated assets, technical indicators, as well as Twitter content. In an in-depth study, we explore whether social media discussions from the general public on Bitcoin have predictive power for extreme price movements. A dataset of 5,000 tweets per day containing the keyword `Bitcoin' was collected from 2015 to 2021. This dataset, called PreBit, is made available online. In our hybrid model, we use sentence-level FinBERT embeddings, pretrained on financial lexicons, so as to capture the full contents of the tweets and feed it to the model in an understandable way. By combining these embeddings with a Convolutional Neural Network, we built a predictive model for significant market movements. The final multimodal ensemble model includes this NLP model together with a model based on candlestick data, technical indicators and correlated asset prices. In an ablation study, we explore the contribution of the individual modalities. Finally, we propose and backtest a trading strategy based on the predictions of our models with varying prediction threshold and show that it can used to build a profitable trading strategy with a reduced risk over a `hold' or moving average strategy.

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

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

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

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

A Multimodal Foundation Agent for Financial Trading: Tool-Augmented, Diversified, and Generalist

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.

Neural Natural Language Processing for Long Texts: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

The adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has greatly benefited Natural Language Processing (NLP) during the past decade. However, the demands of long document analysis are quite different from those of shorter texts, while the ever increasing size of documents uploaded on-line renders automated understanding of lengthy texts a critical issue. Relevant applications include automated Web mining, legal document review, medical records analysis, financial reports analysis, contract management, environmental impact assessment, news aggregation, etc. Despite the relatively recent development of efficient algorithms for analyzing long documents, practical tools in this field are currently flourishing. This article serves as an entry point into this dynamic domain and aims to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it provides an overview of the relevant neural building blocks, serving as a concise tutorial for the field. Secondly, it offers a brief examination of the current state-of-the-art in long document NLP, with a primary focus on two key tasks: document classification and document summarization. Sentiment analysis for long texts is also covered, since it is typically treated as a particular case of document classification. Consequently, this article presents an introductory exploration of document-level analysis, addressing the primary challenges, concerns, and existing solutions. Finally, the article presents publicly available annotated datasets that can facilitate further research in this area.

MME-Finance: A Multimodal Finance Benchmark for Expert-level Understanding and Reasoning

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.

Pre-training Time Series Models with Stock Data Customization

Stock selection, which aims to predict stock prices and identify the most profitable ones, is a crucial task in finance. While existing methods primarily focus on developing model structures and building graphs for improved selection, pre-training strategies remain underexplored in this domain. Current stock series pre-training follows methods from other areas without adapting to the unique characteristics of financial data, particularly overlooking stock-specific contextual information and the non-stationary nature of stock prices. Consequently, the latent statistical features inherent in stock data are underutilized. In this paper, we propose three novel pre-training tasks tailored to stock data characteristics: stock code classification, stock sector classification, and moving average prediction. We develop the Stock Specialized Pre-trained Transformer (SSPT) based on a two-layer transformer architecture. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our pre-training methods and provide detailed guidance on their application. Evaluations on five stock datasets, including four markets and two time periods, demonstrate that SSPT consistently outperforms the market and existing methods in terms of both cumulative investment return ratio and Sharpe ratio. Additionally, our experiments on simulated data investigate the underlying mechanisms of our methods, providing insights into understanding price series. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/astudentuser/Pre-training-Time-Series-Models-with-Stock-Data-Customization.

Baichuan4-Finance Technical Report

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

FinRobot: An Open-Source AI Agent Platform for Financial Applications using Large Language Models

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.

BanglishRev: A Large-Scale Bangla-English and Code-mixed Dataset of Product Reviews in E-Commerce

This work presents the BanglishRev Dataset, the largest e-commerce product review dataset to date for reviews written in Bengali, English, a mixture of both and Banglish, Bengali words written with English alphabets. The dataset comprises of 1.74 million written reviews from 3.2 million ratings information collected from a total of 128k products being sold in online e-commerce platforms targeting the Bengali population. It includes an extensive array of related metadata for each of the reviews including the rating given by the reviewer, date the review was posted and date of purchase, number of likes, dislikes, response from the seller, images associated with the review etc. With sentiment analysis being the most prominent usage of review datasets, experimentation with a binary sentiment analysis model with the review rating serving as an indicator of positive or negative sentiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the large amount of data presented in BanglishRev for sentiment analysis tasks. A BanglishBERT model is trained on the data from BanglishRev with reviews being considered labeled positive if the rating is greater than 3 and negative if the rating is less than or equal to 3. The model is evaluated by being testing against a previously published manually annotated dataset for e-commerce reviews written in a mixture of Bangla, English and Banglish. The experimental model achieved an exceptional accuracy of 94\% and F1 score of 0.94, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy for sentiment analysis. Some of the intriguing patterns and observations seen within the dataset and future research directions where the dataset can be utilized is also discussed and explored. The dataset can be accessed through https://huggingface.co/datasets/BanglishRev/bangla-english-and-code-mixed-ecommerce-review-dataset.

Feature Learning for Stock Price Prediction Shows a Significant Role of Analyst Rating

To reject the Efficient Market Hypothesis a set of 5 technical indicators and 23 fundamental indicators was identified to establish the possibility of generating excess returns on the stock market. Leveraging these data points and various classification machine learning models, trading data of the 505 equities on the US S&P500 over the past 20 years was analysed to develop a classifier effective for our cause. From any given day, we were able to predict the direction of change in price by 1% up to 10 days in the future. The predictions had an overall accuracy of 83.62% with a precision of 85% for buy signals and a recall of 100% for sell signals. Moreover, we grouped equities by their sector and repeated the experiment to see if grouping similar assets together positively effected the results but concluded that it showed no significant improvements in the performance rejecting the idea of sector-based analysis. Also, using feature ranking we could identify an even smaller set of 6 indicators while maintaining similar accuracies as that from the original 28 features and also uncovered the importance of buy, hold and sell analyst ratings as they came out to be the top contributors in the model. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of the classifier in real-life situations, it was backtested on FAANG equities using a modest trading strategy where it generated high returns of above 60% over the term of the testing dataset. In conclusion, our proposed methodology with the combination of purposefully picked features shows an improvement over the previous studies, and our model predicts the direction of 1% price changes on the 10th day with high confidence and with enough buffer to even build a robotic trading system.

Financial Knowledge Large Language Model

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

FinRobot: AI Agent for Equity Research and Valuation with Large Language Models

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.

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

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

MiMIC: Multi-Modal Indian Earnings Calls Dataset to Predict Stock Prices

Predicting stock market prices following corporate earnings calls remains a significant challenge for investors and researchers alike, requiring innovative approaches that can process diverse information sources. This study investigates the impact of corporate earnings calls on stock prices by introducing a multi-modal predictive model. We leverage textual data from earnings call transcripts, along with images and tables from accompanying presentations, to forecast stock price movements on the trading day immediately following these calls. To facilitate this research, we developed the MiMIC (Multi-Modal Indian Earnings Calls) dataset, encompassing companies representing the Nifty 50, Nifty MidCap 50, and Nifty Small 50 indices. The dataset includes earnings call transcripts, presentations, fundamentals, technical indicators, and subsequent stock prices. We present a multimodal analytical framework that integrates quantitative variables with predictive signals derived from textual and visual modalities, thereby enabling a holistic approach to feature representation and analysis. This multi-modal approach demonstrates the potential for integrating diverse information sources to enhance financial forecasting accuracy. To promote further research in computational economics, we have made the MiMIC dataset publicly available under the CC-NC-SA-4.0 licence. Our work contributes to the growing body of literature on market reactions to corporate communications and highlights the efficacy of multi-modal machine learning techniques in financial analysis.

FinCPRG: A Bidirectional Generation Pipeline for Hierarchical Queries and Rich Relevance in Financial Chinese Passage Retrieval

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in constructing passage retrieval datasets. However, existing methods still face limitations in expressing cross-doc query needs and controlling annotation quality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a bidirectional generation pipeline, which aims to generate 3-level hierarchical queries for both intra-doc and cross-doc scenarios and mine additional relevance labels on top of direct mapping annotation. The pipeline introduces two query generation methods: bottom-up from single-doc text and top-down from multi-doc titles. The bottom-up method uses LLMs to disassemble and generate structured queries at both sentence-level and passage-level simultaneously from intra-doc passages. The top-down approach incorporates three key financial elements--industry, topic, and time--to divide report titles into clusters and prompts LLMs to generate topic-level queries from each cluster. For relevance annotation, our pipeline not only relies on direct mapping annotation from the generation relationship but also implements an indirect positives mining method to enrich the relevant query-passage pairs. Using this pipeline, we constructed a Financial Passage Retrieval Generated dataset (FinCPRG) from almost 1.3k Chinese financial research reports, which includes hierarchical queries and rich relevance labels. Through evaluations of mined relevance labels, benchmarking and training experiments, we assessed the quality of FinCPRG and validated its effectiveness as a passage retrieval dataset for both training and benchmarking.

Show me your NFT and I tell you how it will perform: Multimodal representation learning for NFT selling price prediction

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) represent deeds of ownership, based on blockchain technologies and smart contracts, of unique crypto assets on digital art forms (e.g., artworks or collectibles). In the spotlight after skyrocketing in 2021, NFTs have attracted the attention of crypto enthusiasts and investors intent on placing promising investments in this profitable market. However, the NFT financial performance prediction has not been widely explored to date. In this work, we address the above problem based on the hypothesis that NFT images and their textual descriptions are essential proxies to predict the NFT selling prices. To this purpose, we propose MERLIN, a novel multimodal deep learning framework designed to train Transformer-based language and visual models, along with graph neural network models, on collections of NFTs' images and texts. A key aspect in MERLIN is its independence on financial features, as it exploits only the primary data a user interested in NFT trading would like to deal with, i.e., NFT images and textual descriptions. By learning dense representations of such data, a price-category classification task is performed by MERLIN models, which can also be tuned according to user preferences in the inference phase to mimic different risk-return investment profiles. Experimental evaluation on a publicly available dataset has shown that MERLIN models achieve significant performances according to several financial assessment criteria, fostering profitable investments, and also beating baseline machine-learning classifiers based on financial features.

TLOB: A Novel Transformer Model with Dual Attention for Stock Price Trend Prediction with Limit Order Book Data

Stock Price Trend Prediction (SPTP) based on Limit Order Book (LOB) data is a fundamental challenge in financial markets. Despite advances in deep learning, existing models fail to generalize across different market conditions and struggle to reliably predict short-term trends. Surprisingly, by adapting a simple MLP-based architecture to LOB, we show that we surpass SoTA performance; thus, challenging the necessity of complex architectures. Unlike past work that shows robustness issues, we propose TLOB, a transformer-based model that uses a dual attention mechanism to capture spatial and temporal dependencies in LOB data. This allows it to adaptively focus on the market microstructure, making it particularly effective for longer-horizon predictions and volatile market conditions. We also introduce a new labeling method that improves on previous ones, removing the horizon bias. We evaluate TLOB's effectiveness using the established FI-2010 benchmark, which exceeds the state-of-the-art by an average of 3.7 F1-score(\%). Additionally, TLOB shows improvements on Tesla and Intel with a 1.3 and 7.7 increase in F1-score(\%), respectively. Additionally, we empirically show how stock price predictability has declined over time (-6.68 absolute points in F1-score(\%)), highlighting the growing market efficiencies. Predictability must be considered in relation to transaction costs, so we experimented with defining trends using an average spread, reflecting the primary transaction cost. The resulting performance deterioration underscores the complexity of translating trend classification into profitable trading strategies. We argue that our work provides new insights into the evolving landscape of stock price trend prediction and sets a strong foundation for future advancements in financial AI. We release the code at https://github.com/LeonardoBerti00/TLOB.

Empirical study of Machine Learning Classifier Evaluation Metrics behavior in Massively Imbalanced and Noisy data

With growing credit card transaction volumes, the fraud percentages are also rising, including overhead costs for institutions to combat and compensate victims. The use of machine learning into the financial sector permits more effective protection against fraud and other economic crime. Suitably trained machine learning classifiers help proactive fraud detection, improving stakeholder trust and robustness against illicit transactions. However, the design of machine learning based fraud detection algorithms has been challenging and slow due the massively unbalanced nature of fraud data and the challenges of identifying the frauds accurately and completely to create a gold standard ground truth. Furthermore, there are no benchmarks or standard classifier evaluation metrics to measure and identify better performing classifiers, thus keeping researchers in the dark. In this work, we develop a theoretical foundation to model human annotation errors and extreme imbalance typical in real world fraud detection data sets. By conducting empirical experiments on a hypothetical classifier, with a synthetic data distribution approximated to a popular real world credit card fraud data set, we simulate human annotation errors and extreme imbalance to observe the behavior of popular machine learning classifier evaluation matrices. We demonstrate that a combined F1 score and g-mean, in that specific order, is the best evaluation metric for typical imbalanced fraud detection model classification.

Stockformer: A Price-Volume Factor Stock Selection Model Based on Wavelet Transform and Multi-Task Self-Attention Networks

As the Chinese stock market continues to evolve and its market structure grows increasingly complex, traditional quantitative trading methods are facing escalating challenges. Particularly, due to policy uncertainty and the frequent market fluctuations triggered by sudden economic events, existing models often struggle to accurately predict market dynamics. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Stockformer, a price-volume factor stock selection model that integrates wavelet transformation and a multitask self-attention network, aimed at enhancing responsiveness and predictive accuracy regarding market instabilities. Through discrete wavelet transform, Stockformer decomposes stock returns into high and low frequencies, meticulously capturing long-term market trends and short-term fluctuations, including abrupt events. Moreover, the model incorporates a Dual-Frequency Spatiotemporal Encoder and graph embedding techniques to effectively capture complex temporal and spatial relationships among stocks. Employing a multitask learning strategy, it simultaneously predicts stock returns and directional trends. Experimental results show that Stockformer outperforms existing advanced methods on multiple real stock market datasets. In strategy backtesting, Stockformer consistently demonstrates exceptional stability and reliability across market conditions-whether rising, falling, or fluctuating-particularly maintaining high performance during downturns or volatile periods, indicating a high adaptability to market fluctuations. To foster innovation and collaboration in the financial analysis sector, the Stockformer model's code has been open-sourced and is available on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Eric991005/Multitask-Stockformer.

Financial Risk Assessment via Long-term Payment Behavior Sequence Folding

Online inclusive financial services encounter significant financial risks due to their expansive user base and low default costs. By real-world practice, we reveal that utilizing longer-term user payment behaviors can enhance models' ability to forecast financial risks. However, learning long behavior sequences is non-trivial for deep sequential models. Additionally, the diverse fields of payment behaviors carry rich information, requiring thorough exploitation. These factors collectively complicate the task of long-term user behavior modeling. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Long-term Payment Behavior Sequence Folding method, referred to as LBSF. In LBSF, payment behavior sequences are folded based on merchants, using the merchant field as an intrinsic grouping criterion, which enables informative parallelism without reliance on external knowledge. Meanwhile, we maximize the utility of payment details through a multi-field behavior encoding mechanism. Subsequently, behavior aggregation at the merchant level followed by relational learning across merchants facilitates comprehensive user financial representation. We evaluate LBSF on the financial risk assessment task using a large-scale real-world dataset. The results demonstrate that folding long behavior sequences based on internal behavioral cues effectively models long-term patterns and changes, thereby generating more accurate user financial profiles for practical applications.

Using LLMs to Establish Implicit User Sentiment of Software Desirability

This study explores the use of LLMs for providing quantitative zero-shot sentiment analysis of implicit software desirability, addressing a critical challenge in product evaluation where traditional review scores, though convenient, fail to capture the richness of qualitative user feedback. Innovations include establishing a method that 1) works with qualitative user experience data without the need for explicit review scores, 2) focuses on implicit user satisfaction, and 3) provides scaled numerical sentiment analysis, offering a more nuanced understanding of user sentiment, instead of simply classifying sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative. Data is collected using the Microsoft Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT), a well-known qualitative user experience analysis tool. For initial exploration, the PDT metric was given to users of two software systems. PDT data was fed through several LLMs (Claude Sonnet 3 and 3.5, GPT4, and GPT4o) and through a leading transfer learning technique, Twitter-Roberta-Base-Sentiment, and Vader, a leading sentiment analysis tool. Each system was asked to evaluate the data in two ways, by looking at the sentiment expressed in the PDT word/explanation pairs; and by looking at the sentiment expressed by the users in their grouped selection of five words and explanations, as a whole. Each LLM provided a sentiment score, its confidence (low, medium, high) in the score, and an explanation of the score. All LLMs tested were able to statistically detect user sentiment from the users' grouped data, whereas TRBS and Vader were not. The confidence and explanation of confidence provided by the LLMs assisted in understanding user sentiment. This study adds deeper understanding of evaluating user experiences, toward the goal of creating a universal tool that quantifies implicit sentiment.

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

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

SOUL: Towards Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language

Sentiment analysis is a well-established natural language processing task, with sentiment polarity classification being one of its most popular and representative tasks. However, despite the success of pre-trained language models in this area, they often fall short of capturing the broader complexities of sentiment analysis. To address this issue, we propose a new task called Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language (SOUL). SOUL aims to evaluate sentiment understanding through two subtasks: Review Comprehension (RC) and Justification Generation (JG). RC seeks to validate statements that focus on subjective information based on a review text, while JG requires models to provide explanations for their sentiment predictions. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we annotate a new dataset comprising 15,028 statements from 3,638 reviews. Experimental results indicate that SOUL is a challenging task for both small and large language models, with a performance gap of up to 27% when compared to human performance. Furthermore, evaluations conducted with both human experts and GPT-4 highlight the limitations of the small language model in generating reasoning-based justifications. These findings underscore the challenging nature of the SOUL task for existing models, emphasizing the need for further advancements in sentiment analysis to address its complexities. The new dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/SOUL.