arXiv subjects

Lingfei Qian

Publications and source records attributed to Lingfei Qian.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Factorized Hypothesis Search for Evidence-to-Taxonomy Retrieval

Large-taxonomy retrieval often assumes that the input already expresses the target concept. In many settings, however, the input is indirect evidence, such as a table cell whose meaning depends on its row, column, datatype, and context. We call this mismatch the retrieval readiness gap. Our analysis shows that the current index retrieves the target reliably when its semantics are explicit, while raw evidence often leaves it deep in the ranking. We propose Factorized Hypothesis Search (FHS), which maintains multiple partial interpretations over named semantic dimensions. These hypotheses support structured query rendering, multi-hypothesis retrieval, and dimension-level candidate verification. On both financial taxonomy tagging and CodiEsp clinical coding tasks, FHS achieves the best Recall@1, MRR, and final accuracy among the non-oracle methods. Replacing the factorized hypothesis path with a free-text ensemble causes the largest drop in head-ranking performance, while sequential refinement provides no additional gain over FHS's strong parallel first round.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Overview of FinMMEval 2026 Task 1: Multilingual Financial Multiple-Choice Question Answering

FinMMEval 2026 Task 1 evaluates multilingual financial multiple-choice question answering in English, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi. The task tests whether systems can select the correct answer to finance questions involving domain terminology, numerical interpretation, and conceptual financial reasoning across languages and scripts. The final-test set contains 800 questions, with 200 questions per language; gold answers were withheld during submission, and each language was ranked independently by accuracy. The final leaderboards contain 13 English, 11 Chinese, 11 Arabic, and 10 Hindi ranked submissions. Top accuracies range from 92.0% in Hindi to 97.5% in English and Arabic, with the same leading teams appearing near the top across all four languages. The documented systems used retrieval augmentation, direct answer-option scoring, language-specific prompting, selective self-consistency, confidence checks, and LLM-based review stages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Overview of FinMMEval 2026 Task 2: Multilingual Financial Short-Answer Question Answering

FinMMEval 2026 Task 2 evaluates short-answer financial question answering over multilingual evidence. Each final-test item pairs an English question with financial statements and news in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Greek. Participating systems submit one concise answer per item in JSONL format. The final-test set contains 256 items, split evenly between easy and expert tiers; each tier contains four question templates instantiated over 32 company-report groups. Gold answers were withheld during submission, and systems were ranked by macro-averaged item-level ROUGE-1 F1 against organizer-held reference answers. The final leaderboard includes 12 ranked submissions. The strongest systems are closely clustered, with the top four separated by less than one percentage point in ROUGE-1 F1. The submitted system papers document retrieval-augmented generation, cross-lingual evidence handling, structured prompting, answer compression, and validation strategies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

A safety-oriented hypothetico-deductive framework for AI-assisted differential diagnosis

Diagnostic error is a major threat to patient safety, yet current large language model (LLM) systems often treat diagnosis as a one-shot prediction task, lacking safeguards against missed high-risk alternatives or rigorous verification of their reasoning. Here, we present AegisDx, a safety-oriented framework for hypothetico-deductive clinical reasoning. AegisDx coordinates specialized LLM components through role-specific contracts, structured intermediate outputs, evidence-retrieval interfaces, and verification gates to generate broad differential diagnoses, enforce explicit screening for dangerous "must-not-miss" conditions, verify reasoning against grounded medical evidence, and structure actionable next steps. We evaluated AegisDx across three layers. On literature-derived case reports from NEJM and JAMA, with GPT-oss-120B as the shared backbone, Top-3 diagnostic accuracy was 59.9% versus 52.1% for the standalone LLM on JAMA cases and 62.7% versus 51.4% on NEJM cases. On cases from Annals of Emergency Medicine, Top-3 accuracy was 85.7% versus 68.6%; against physician-consensus must-not-miss diagnosis sets, AegisDx captured at least one such condition among its top three diagnoses in 78.0% of cases versus 52.0%. In a blinded physician evaluation of 43 real-world emergency department notes from the Yale New Haven Health System compared against GPT-5, AegisDx improved the physician-rated composite safety score from 4.31 to 4.55 on a 5-point scale (adjusted p = 2.1x10^-4), with qualitative gains in must-not-miss identification and reasoning safety. Our findings suggest that engineering diagnostic AI as a safety-oriented reasoning framework, rather than optimizing raw predictive accuracy alone, can provide a safer, more transparent, and clinically meaningful layer of bedside decision support for acute care workflows.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation -- the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration -- the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AUDITFLOW: Executable Symbolic Environments for Structured Financial Reporting Verification

Structured financial audit verification is difficult for language-model agents because correctness depends on structured evidence rather than text alone. A model must link reported facts to taxonomy concepts, traverse calculation or dimensional relations, and recompute expected values before applying an audit rule. We propose AuditFlow, a graph-grounded multi-agent framework that separates adaptive search from deterministic verification. AuditFlow builds a symbolic environment from a static US-GAAP taxonomy graph and a dynamic XBRL filing graph, and exposes it through typed tools for fact retrieval, taxonomy traversal, numerical checking, and rule evaluation. Two junior auditors inspect each case from regulatory and evidentiary views, while a senior auditor resolves disagreements and can request further investigation. The final reports are fused through evidential aggregation to produce an audit verdict, expected value, evidence trail, and trustworthiness score. On a FinAuditing-derived FinMR sample, AuditFlow reaches 82.09% joint audit accuracy under GPT-5.5, outperforming the strongest baseline by 14.93 points. Removing deterministic checks drops accuracy to 17.91%, showing that the symbolic environment performs the verification step that the model cannot reliably replace.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Herculean: An Agentic Benchmark for Financial Intelligence

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

TRACE: Temporal Routing with Autoregressive Cross-channel Experts for EEG Representation Learning

Learning transferable representations for electroencephalography (EEG) remains challenging because EEG signals are inherently multi-channel and non-stationary. Channels observed at the same time provide coupled measurements of neural activity, while the relevant temporal dynamics vary across contexts. This structure is poorly matched by architectures that apply uniform computation across time or route each channel patch independently. To this end, we propose TRACE, an autoregressive EEG pre-training framework that predicts future EEG patches from causal context while performing temporally adaptive and cross-channel coherent computation. At each temporal step, TRACE derives an expert routing decision from the causal cross-channel history and applies it jointly to all channels at that step. This preserves instantaneous cross-channel coherence while allowing different temporal regimes to activate different computation. Since routing is defined over the available channel set and causal temporal context, TRACE is compatible with heterogeneous pre-training across corpora with different channel counts, montages, sequence lengths, and recording domains. Across eight downstream EEG benchmarks, TRACE is evaluated in both settings: when downstream domains are seen only as unlabeled pre-training data and when downstream datasets are completely unseen during pre-training. It obtains the best results on several benchmarks while remaining competitive on motor imagery and clinical event classification tasks, with ablations supporting the importance of cross-channel temporal routing.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Foundation Models to Unlock Real-World Evidence from Nationwide Medical Claims

Evidence derived from large-scale real-world data (RWD) is increasingly informing regulatory evaluation and healthcare decision-making. Administrative claims provide population-scale, longitudinal records of healthcare utilization, expenditure, and detailed coding of diagnoses, procedures, and medications, yet their potential as a substrate for healthcare foundation models remains largely unexplored. Here we present ReClaim, a generative transformer trained from scratch on 43.8 billion medical events from more than 200 million enrollees in the MarketScan claims data spanning 2008-2022. ReClaim models longitudinal trajectories across diagnoses, procedures, medications, and expenditure, and was scaled to 140 million, 700 million, and 1.7 billion parameters. Across over 1,000 disease-onset prediction tasks, ReClaim achieved a mean AUC of 75.6%, substantially outperforming disease-specific LightGBM (66.3%) and the transformer-based Delphi model (69.4%), with the largest gains for rare diseases. These advantages held across retrospective and prospective evaluations and in external validation on two independent datasets. Performance improved monotonically with scale, and post-training added 13.8 percentage points over pre-training alone. Beyond disease prediction, ReClaim captured financial outcomes and improved real-world evidence (RWE) analyses: for healthcare expenditure forecasting it increased explained variance from 0.28 to 0.37 relative to LightGBM, and in a target trial emulation it reduced systematic bias by 72% on average relative to Delphi. Together, these results establish administrative claims as a scalable substrate for healthcare foundation models and show that learned representations generalize across time periods and data sources, supporting disease surveillance, expenditure forecasting, and RWE generation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Moira: Language-driven Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Pair Trading

Many sequential decision-making problems exhibit hierarchical structure, where high-level semantic choices constrain downstream actions and feedback is delayed and ambiguous. Learning in such settings is challenging due to credit assignment: performance degradation may arise from flawed abstractions, suboptimal execution, or their interaction. We study this challenge through pair trading, a domain that naturally combines long-horizon semantic reasoning for asset pair selection with short-horizon execution under partial observability. We formulate pair trading as a hierarchical reinforcement learning problem and propose a language-driven optimization framework in which both high-level and low-level policies are parameterized by large language models (LLMs) and optimized exclusively through prompt updates. Our approach leverages pretrained LLMs as hierarchical policies and uses trajectory- and episode-level textual feedback to adapt abstractions and execution without gradient-based fine-tuning. By explicitly separating abstraction selection from execution, the framework reduces non-stationarity across hierarchical levels and enables targeted adaptation under delayed feedback. Experiments on real-world market data show consistent improvements over traditional and LLM-based baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of language-driven hierarchical reinforcement learning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

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

Recent studies demonstrate that tool-calling capability enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external environments for long-horizon financial tasks. While existing benchmarks have begun evaluating financial tool calling, they focus on limited scenarios and rely on call-level metrics that fail to capture trajectory-level reasoning quality. To address this gap, we introduce FinTrace, a benchmark comprising 800 expert-annotated trajectories spanning 34 real-world financial task categories across multiple difficulty levels. FinTrace employs a rubric-based evaluation protocol with nine metrics organized along four axes -- action correctness, execution efficiency, process quality, and output quality -- enabling fine-grained assessment of LLM tool-calling behavior. Our evaluation of 13 LLMs reveals that while frontier models achieve strong tool selection, all models struggle with information utilization and final answer quality, exposing a critical gap between invoking the right tools and reasoning effectively over their outputs. To move beyond diagnosis, we construct FinTrace-Training, the first trajectory-level preference dataset for financial tool-calling, containing 8,196 curated trajectories with tool-augmented contexts and preference pairs. We fine-tune Qwen-3-8B/32B using supervised fine-tuning followed by direct preference optimization (DPO) and show that training on FinTrace-Training consistently improves intermediate reasoning metrics, with DPO more effectively suppressing failure modes. However, end-to-end answer quality remains a bottleneck, indicating that trajectory-level improvements do not yet fully propagate to final output quality.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Can LLM Agents Be CFOs? Benchmarking Long-Horizon Resource Allocation in an Uncertain Enterprise Environment

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly tested on complex tasks, but their ability to allocate scarce resources over long horizons remains unclear. Unlike reactive tasks with immediate feedback, this setting requires agents to make binding commitments under partial observability, delayed consequences, hard resource budgets, and shifting dynamics. We introduce EnterpriseArena, a 132-month CFO simulator that evaluates long-horizon resource allocation under uncertainty in a FinTech lending firm. Agents must manage liquidity, close books, gather costly signals, and request equity or debt financing across changing macroeconomic regimes. The simulator is built from transformed firm-level financial data, anonymized business documents, decade-scale macroeconomic and industry signals, and expert-validated operating rules. Experiments across 23 LLMs and four agent frameworks show that current agents remain far from robust: only 15.4% of trials survive the full horizon, larger models do not reliably outperform smaller ones, and failures cascade across observation, action timing, and capital sizing. These findings establish long-horizon resource allocation under uncertainty as a distinct capability gap for LLM agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Conv-FinRe: A Conversational and Longitudinal Benchmark for Utility-Grounded Financial Recommendation

Most recommendation benchmarks evaluate how well a model imitates user behavior. In financial advisory, however, observed actions can be noisy or short-sighted under market volatility and may conflict with a user's long-term goals. Treating what users chose as the sole ground truth, therefore, conflates behavioral imitation with decision quality. We introduce Conv-FinRe, a conversational and longitudinal benchmark for stock recommendation that evaluates LLMs beyond behavior matching. Given an onboarding interview, step-wise market context, and advisory dialogues, models must generate rankings over a fixed investment horizon. Crucially, Conv-FinRe provides multi-view references that distinguish descriptive behavior from normative utility grounded in investor-specific risk preferences, enabling diagnosis of whether an LLM follows rational analysis, mimics user noise, or is driven by market momentum. We build the benchmark from real market data and human decision trajectories, instantiate controlled advisory conversations, and evaluate a suite of state-of-the-art LLMs. Results reveal a persistent tension between rational decision quality and behavioral alignment: models that perform well on utility-based ranking often fail to match user choices, whereas behaviorally aligned models can overfit short-term noise. The dataset is publicly released on Hugging Face, and the codebase is available on GitHub.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

The CLEF-2026 FinMMEval Lab: Multilingual and Multimodal Evaluation of Financial AI Systems

We present the setup and the tasks of the FinMMEval Lab at CLEF 2026, which introduces the first multilingual and multimodal evaluation framework for financial Large Language Models (LLMs). While recent advances in financial natural language processing have enabled automated analysis of market reports, regulatory documents, and investor communications, existing benchmarks remain largely monolingual, text-only, and limited to narrow subtasks. FinMMEval 2026 addresses this gap by offering three interconnected tasks that span financial understanding, reasoning, and decision-making: Financial Exam Question Answering, Multilingual Financial Question Answering (PolyFiQA), and Financial Decision Making. Together, these tasks provide a comprehensive evaluation suite that measures models' ability to reason, generalize, and act across diverse languages and modalities. The lab aims to promote the development of robust, transparent, and globally inclusive financial AI systems, with datasets and evaluation resources publicly released to support reproducible research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Ebisu: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Japanese Finance

Japanese finance combines agglutinative, head-final linguistic structure, mixed writing systems, and high-context communication norms that rely on indirect expression and implicit commitment, posing a substantial challenge for LLMs. We introduce Ebisu, a benchmark for native Japanese financial language understanding, comprising two linguistically and culturally grounded, expert-annotated tasks: JF-ICR, which evaluates implicit commitment and refusal recognition in investor-facing Q&A, and JF-TE, which assesses hierarchical extraction and ranking of nested financial terminology from professional disclosures. We evaluate a diverse set of open-source and proprietary LLMs spanning general-purpose, Japanese-adapted, and financial models. Results show that even state-of-the-art systems struggle on both tasks. While increased model scale yields limited improvements, language- and domain-specific adaptation does not reliably improve performance, leaving substantial gaps unresolved. Ebisu provides a focused benchmark for advancing linguistically and culturally grounded financial NLP. All datasets and evaluation scripts are publicly released.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

MedViz: An Agent-based, Visual-guided Research Assistant for Navigating Biomedical Literature

Biomedical researchers face increasing challenges in navigating millions of publications in diverse domains. Traditional search engines typically return articles as ranked text lists, offering little support for global exploration or in-depth analysis. Although recent advances in generative AI and large language models have shown promise in tasks such as summarization, extraction, and question answering, their dialog-based implementations are poorly integrated with literature search workflows. To address this gap, we introduce MedViz, a visual analytics system that integrates multiple AI agents with interactive visualization to support the exploration of the large-scale biomedical literature. MedViz combines a semantic map of millions of articles with agent-driven functions for querying, summarizing, and hypothesis generation, allowing researchers to iteratively refine questions, identify trends, and uncover hidden connections. By bridging intelligent agents with interactive visualization, MedViz transforms biomedical literature search into a dynamic, exploratory process that accelerates knowledge discovery.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

EHRNavigator: A Multi-Agent System for Patient-Level Clinical Question Answering over Heterogeneous Electronic Health Records

Clinical decision-making increasingly relies on timely and context-aware access to patient information within Electronic Health Records (EHRs), yet most existing natural language question-answering (QA) systems are evaluated solely on benchmark datasets, limiting their practical relevance. To overcome this limitation, we introduce EHRNavigator, a multi-agent framework that harnesses AI agents to perform patient-level question answering across heterogeneous and multimodal EHR data. We assessed its performance using both public benchmark and institutional datasets under realistic hospital conditions characterized by diverse schemas, temporal reasoning demands, and multimodal evidence integration. Through quantitative evaluation and clinician-validated chart review, EHRNavigator demonstrated strong generalization, achieving 86% accuracy on real-world cases while maintaining clinically acceptable response times. Overall, these findings confirm that EHRNavigator effectively bridges the gap between benchmark evaluation and clinical deployment, offering a robust, adaptive, and efficient solution for real-world EHR question answering.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

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

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

cs.CL↗