LLMs Don't Know What They Know: Benchmarking Temporal Self-Knowledge for Financial Backtesting
Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Xueqing Peng, Yupeng Cao, Yuechen Jiang, Zhuohan Xie, Anke Xu, Wenbo Cao 等 15 位作者
AI 速览：作者提出 FinDendro 基准，检验大语言模型对自身时间性知识边界的自述是否可信，并发现自述普遍低估其实际知识。
Financial backtests of large language models (LLMs) are meaningful only if the model did not already know the outcomes it is asked to predict. Practitioners guard against this by trusting a vendor's stated knowledge cutoff, by asking the model what it knows, or by instructing it to answer as of a past date. To verify whether any of these safeguards can be trusted, we introduce FinDendro, a benchmark of 2,226 dated U.S. facts from 1999 to 2026, covering monthly macroeconomic series, month-end stock prices and Federal Reserve decisions. Each fact yields four prompts: a value question, Recall and Predict questions that pair each candidate value with a claim of knowing or guessing without a declared date, and a Predict question with a historical declared date. Controls for persistence and dominant outcomes keep chance accuracy near 0.27. Results show that for most frontier models, self-reports understate knowledge. GPT-5 answers 76% of controlled facts correctly but claims to know 38%, and answers 61% of the facts it says it does not know. Knowledge claims can persist beyond the measured knowledge boundary, by up to seven quarters, and a declared date removes most of the claims of prior knowledge while leaving accuracy unchanged. Backtests inside a model's training window therefore cannot be certified leak-free by self-report, instruction or stated cutoff. These findings motivate behavioral measurement of temporal knowledge boundaries, and FinDendro provides a benchmark and procedure for selecting backtest periods based on demonstrated factual knowledge.
Fan Zhang, Mingzi Song Yokohama National University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Rania Elbadry, Yankai Chen Cornell University, Shaobo Wang, Yixi Zhou, Xunwen Zheng, Yueru He Columbia University 等 22 位作者
Financial reporting systems increasingly leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract and summarize corporate disclosures. However, most existing approaches assume a single-market setting and overlook structural differences across jurisdictions. Variations in accounting taxonomies, tagging infrastructures (e.g., XBRL vs. PDF), and aggregation conventions introduce substantial challenges for semantic alignment and reliable verification. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. We present FinReporting, an agentic workflow for localized cross-jurisdiction financial reporting. The system constructs a unified canonical ontology spanning the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement, and decomposes reporting into auditable stages, including filing acquisition, extraction, canonical mapping, and anomaly logging. Rather than treating LLMs as free-form generators, FinReporting employs them as constrained verifiers operating under explicit decision rules with evidence grounding.Evaluated on annual filings from the USA, Japan, and China, FinReporting improves consistency and reliability under heterogeneous reporting regimes. We further release an interactive demo that enables cross-market inspection and supports structured export of localized financial statements. Our demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/BoomQ/FinReporting-Demo. A video describing our system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f65jdEL31Kk.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Rania Elbadry, Sarfraz Ahmad, Ahmed Heakl LG Corporation, Dani Bouch Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Momina Ahsan, Muhra AlMahri, Marwa Elsaid Khalil Kafr El-Sheikh University, Yuxia Wang Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology 等 15 位作者
English financial NLP has progressed rapidly through benchmarks for sentiment, document understanding, and financial question answering, while Arabic financial NLP remains comparatively under-explored despite strong practical demand for trustworthy finance and Islamic-finance assistants. We introduce SAHM, a document-grounded benchmark and instruction-tuning dataset for Arabic financial NLP and Shari’ah-compliant reasoning. SAHM contains 14,380 expert-verified instances spanning seven tasks: AAOIFI standards QA, fatwa-based QA/MCQ, accounting and business exams, financial sentiment analysis, extractive summarization, and event–cause reasoning, curated from authentic regulatory, juristic, and corporate sources. We evaluate 19 strong open and proprietary LLMs using task-specific metrics and rubric-based scoring for open-ended outputs, and find that Arabic fluency does not reliably translate to evidence-grounded financial reasoning: models are substantially stronger on recognition-style tasks than on generation and causal reasoning, with the largest gaps on event–cause reasoning. We release the benchmark, evaluation framework, and an instruction-tuned model to support future research on trustworthy Arabic financial NLP.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yuechen Jiang, Zhiwei Liu, Yupeng Cao, Yueru He Columbia University, Ziyang Xu, Chen Xu, Zhiyang Deng, Prayag Tiwari Halmstad University 等 13 位作者
We introduce RFC-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating large language models on financial misinformation under realistic news. RFC-Bench operates at the paragraph level and captures the contextual complexity of financial news where meaning emerges from dispersed cues. The benchmark defines two complementary tasks: reference-free misinformation detection and comparison-based diagnosis using paired original–perturbed inputs. Experiments reveal a consistent pattern: performance is substantially stronger when comparative context is available, while reference-free settings expose significant weaknesses, including unstable predictions and elevated invalid outputs. These results indicate that current models struggle to maintain coherent belief states without external grounding. By highlighting this gap, RFC-Bench provides a structured testbed for studying reference-free reasoning and advancing more reliable financial misinformation detection in real-world settings.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhuohan Xie Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Daniil Orel, Rushil Thareja, Dhruv Sahnan, Hachem Madmoun Imperial College London, Fan Zhang, Debopriyo Banerjee G42, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev 等 25 位作者
Multi-step symbolic reasoning is essential for robust financial analysis; yet, current benchmarks largely overlook this capability. Existing datasets such as FinQA and ConvFinQA emphasize final numerical answers while neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps required for transparency and verification. To address this gap, we introduce FinChain, the first benchmark specifically designed for verifiable Chain-of-Thought evaluation in finance. FinChain spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains, each represented by parameterized symbolic templates with executable Python code that enable fully machine-verifiable reasoning and scalable, contamination-free data generation.To assess reasoning capacity, we propose ChainEval, a dynamic alignment measure that jointly evaluates both the final-answer correctness and the step-level reasoning consistency. Our evaluation of 26 leading LLMs reveals that even frontier LLMs exhibit clear limitations in symbolic financial reasoning, while domain-adapted and math-enhanced fine-tuned models can substantially narrow this gap.Overall, FinChain exposes persistent weaknesses in multi-step financial reasoning and provides a foundation for developing trustworthy, interpretable, and verifiable financial AI. This project is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/finchain.git.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yan Wang Yale University, Yitao Xu George Mason University, Nanhan Shen, Jinyan Su, Jimin Huang University of Manchester and The Fin AI, Zining Zhu Stevens Institute of Technology
Mixture of Experts models are widely assumed to achieve domain specialization through sparse routing. In this work, we question this assumption by introducing COMMITTEEAUDIT, a post hoc framework that analyzes routing behavior at the level of expert groups rather than individual experts. Across three representative models and the MMLU benchmark, we uncover a domain invariant Standing Committee. This is a compact coalition of routed experts that consistently captures the majority of routing mass across domains, layers, and routing budgets, even when architectures already include shared experts. Qualitative analysis further shows that Standing Committees anchor reasoning structure and syntax, while peripheral experts handle domain-specific knowledge. These findings reveal a strong structural bias toward centralized computation, suggesting that specialization in Mixture of Experts models is far less pervasive than commonly believed. Crucially, this inherent bias indicates that current training objectives, such as load-balancing losses that enforce uniform expert utilization, may be working against the model’s natural optimization path, thereby limiting training efficiency and performance.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xueqing Peng Yale University, Lingfei Qian Yale University, Yan Wang Yale University, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He Columbia University, Yang Ren Yale University, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang 等 47 位作者
Real-world financial analysis involves information across multiple languages and modalities, from reports and news to scanned filings and meeting recordings. Yet most existing evaluations of LLMs in finance remain text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. To bridge these gaps, we present MultiFinBen, the first expert-annotated multilingual (five languages) and multimodal (text, vision, audio) benchmark for evaluating LLMs in realistic financial contexts. MultiFinBen introduces two new task families: multilingual financial reasoning, which tests cross-lingual evidence integration from filings and news, and financial OCR, which extracts structured text from scanned documents containing tables and charts. Rather than aggregating all available datasets, we apply a structured, difficulty-aware selection based on advanced model performance, ensuring balanced challenge and removing redundant tasks. Evaluating 21 leading LLMs shows that even frontier multimodal models like GPT-4o achieve only 46.01% overall, stronger on vision and audio but dropping sharply in multilingual settings. These findings expose persistent limitations in multilingual, multimodal, and expert-level financial reasoning. All datasets, evaluation scripts, and leaderboards are publicly released.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表