arXiv subjects

Yupeng Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Yupeng Cao.

32 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application

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.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SALMAN: Stability Analysis of Language Models Through the Maps Between Graph-based Manifolds

Recent strides in pretrained transformer-based language models have propelled state-of-the-art performance in numerous NLP tasks. Yet, as these models grow in size and deployment, their robustness under input perturbations becomes an increasingly urgent question. Existing robustness methods often diverge between small-parameter and large-scale models (LLMs), and they typically rely on labor-intensive, sample-specific adversarial designs. In this paper, we propose a unified, local (sample-level) robustness framework (SALMAN) that evaluates model stability without modifying internal parameters or resorting to complex perturbation heuristics. Central to our approach is a novel Distance Mapping Distortion (DMD) measure, which ranks each sample's susceptibility by comparing input-to-output distance mappings in a near-linear complexity manner. By demonstrating significant gains in attack efficiency and robust training, we position our framework as a practical, model-agnostic tool for advancing the reliability of transformer-based NLP systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

FinRL Contests: Benchmarking Data-driven Financial Reinforcement Learning Agents

Financial reinforcement learning (FinRL) is now a practical paradigm for financial engineering. However, applying RL strategies to real-world trading tasks remains a challenge for individuals, as it is error-prone and engineering-heavy. The non-stationarity of financial data, low signal-to-noise ratios, and various market frictions require deep accumulations. Although numerous FinRL methods have been developed for tasks such as stock/crypto trading and portfolio management, the lack of standardized task definitions, real-time high-quality datasets, close-to-real market environments, and robust baselines has hindered consistent reproduction in both open-source community and FinTech industry. To bridge this gap, we organized a series of FinRL Contests from 2023 to 2025, covering a diverse range of financial tasks such as stock trading, order execution, crypto trading, and the use of large language model (LLM)-engineered signals. These contests attracted 200+ participants from 100+ institutions over 20+ countries. To encourage participations, we provided starter kits featuring GPU-optimized parallel market environments, ensemble learning, and comprehensive instructions. In this paper, we summarize these benchmarking efforts, detailing task formulations, data curation pipelines, environment implementations, evaluation protocols, participant performance, and organizational insights. It guides our follow-up FinRL contests, and also provides a reference for FinAI contests alike.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

Multimodal Financial Foundation Models (MFFMs): Progress, Prospects, and Challenges

Financial Large Language Models (FinLLMs), such as open FinGPT and proprietary BloombergGPT, have demonstrated great potential in select areas of financial services. Beyond this earlier language-centric approach, Multimodal Financial Foundation Models (MFFMs) can digest interleaved multimodal financial data, including fundamental data, market data, data analytics, macroeconomic, and alternative data (e.g., natural language, audio, images, and video). In this position paper, presented at the MFFM Workshop joined with ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF) 2024, we describe the progress, prospects, and challenges of MFFMs. This paper also highlights ongoing research on FinAgents in the \textbf{SecureFinAI Lab}\footnote{\https://openfin.engineering.columbia.edu/} at Columbia University. We believe that MFFMs will enable a deeper understanding of the underlying complexity associated with numerous financial tasks and data, streamlining the operation of financial services and investment processes. Github Repo https://github.com/Open-Finance-Lab/Awesome-MFFMs/.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

Truth Neurons

Despite their remarkable success and deployment across diverse workflows, language models sometimes produce untruthful responses. Our limited understanding of how truthfulness is mechanistically encoded within these models jeopardizes their reliability and safety. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying representations of truthfulness at the neuron level. We show that language models contain truth neurons, which encode truthfulness in a subject-agnostic manner. Experiments conducted across models of varying scales validate the existence of truth neurons, confirming that the encoding of truthfulness at the neuron level is a property shared by many language models. The distribution patterns of truth neurons over layers align with prior findings on the geometry of truthfulness. Selectively suppressing the activations of truth neurons found through the TruthfulQA dataset degrades performance both on TruthfulQA and on other benchmarks, showing that the truthfulness mechanisms are not tied to a specific dataset. Our results offer novel insights into the mechanisms underlying truthfulness in language models and highlight potential directions toward improving their trustworthiness and reliability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Can AI Validate Science? Benchmarking LLMs for Accurate Scientific Claim $\rightarrow$ Evidence Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for complex research tasks such as literature review, idea generation, and scientific paper analysis, yet their ability to truly understand and process the intricate relationships within complex research papers, such as the logical links between claims and supporting evidence remains largely unexplored. In this study, we present CLAIM-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in scientific claim-evidence extraction and validation, a task that reflects deeper comprehension of scientific argumentation. We systematically compare three approaches which are inspired by divide and conquer approaches, across six diverse LLMs, highlighting model-specific strengths and weaknesses in scientific comprehension. Through evaluation involving over 300 claim-evidence pairs across multiple research domains, we reveal significant limitations in LLMs' ability to process complex scientific content. Our results demonstrate that closed-source models like GPT-4 and Claude consistently outperform open-source counterparts in precision and recall across claim-evidence identification tasks. Furthermore, strategically designed three-pass and one-by-one prompting approaches significantly improve LLMs' abilities to accurately link dispersed evidence with claims, although this comes at increased computational cost. CLAIM-BENCH sets a new standard for evaluating scientific comprehension in LLMs, offering both a diagnostic tool and a path forward for building systems capable of deeper, more reliable reasoning across full-length papers.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Open-FinLLMs: Open Multimodal Large Language Models for Financial Applications

Financial LLMs hold promise for advancing financial tasks and domain-specific applications. However, they are limited by scarce corpora, weak multimodal capabilities, and narrow evaluations, making them less suited for real-world application. To address this, we introduce \textit{Open-FinLLMs}, the first open-source multimodal financial LLMs designed to handle diverse tasks across text, tabular, time-series, and chart data, excelling in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings. The suite includes FinLLaMA, pre-trained on a comprehensive 52-billion-token corpus; FinLLaMA-Instruct, fine-tuned with 573K financial instructions; and FinLLaVA, enhanced with 1.43M multimodal tuning pairs for strong cross-modal reasoning. We comprehensively evaluate Open-FinLLMs across 14 financial tasks, 30 datasets, and 4 multimodal tasks in zero-shot, few-shot, and supervised fine-tuning settings, introducing two new multimodal evaluation datasets. Our results show that Open-FinLLMs outperforms afvanced financial and general LLMs such as GPT-4, across financial NLP, decision-making, and multi-modal tasks, highlighting their potential to tackle real-world challenges. To foster innovation and collaboration across academia and industry, we release all codes (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PIXIU2-0D70/B1D7/LICENSE) and models under OSI-approved licenses.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

RiskLabs: Predicting Financial Risk Using Large Language Model based on Multimodal and Multi-Sources Data

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly large language models (LLMs), in finance has garnered increasing academic attention. Despite progress, existing studies predominantly focus on tasks like financial text summarization, question-answering, and stock movement prediction (binary classification), the application of LLMs to financial risk prediction remains underexplored. Addressing this gap, in this paper, we introduce RiskLabs, a novel framework that leverages LLMs to analyze and predict financial risks. RiskLabs uniquely integrates multimodal financial data, including textual and vocal information from Earnings Conference Calls (ECCs), market-related time series data, and contextual news data to improve financial risk prediction. Empirical results demonstrate RiskLabs' effectiveness in forecasting both market volatility and variance. Through comparative experiments, we examine the contributions of different data sources to financial risk assessment and highlight the crucial role of LLMs in this process. We also discuss the challenges associated with using LLMs for financial risk prediction and explore the potential of combining them with multimodal data for this purpose.

q-fin.RM↗

arXiv2025

FLAG-Trader: Fusion LLM-Agent with Gradient-based Reinforcement Learning for Financial Trading

Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on multimodal financial data have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in various financial tasks. However, they often struggle with multi-step, goal-oriented scenarios in interactive financial markets, such as trading, where complex agentic approaches are required to improve decision-making. To address this, we propose \textsc{FLAG-Trader}, a unified architecture integrating linguistic processing (via LLMs) with gradient-driven reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimization, in which a partially fine-tuned LLM acts as the policy network, leveraging pre-trained knowledge while adapting to the financial domain through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Through policy gradient optimization driven by trading rewards, our framework not only enhances LLM performance in trading but also improves results on other financial-domain tasks. We present extensive empirical evidence to validate these enhancements.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

INVESTORBENCH: A Benchmark for Financial Decision-Making Tasks with LLM-based Agent

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

cs.CE↗

arXiv2024

FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Making

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable potential in conducting complex tasks and are increasingly utilized in various financial applications. However, high-quality sequential financial investment decision-making remains challenging. These tasks require multiple interactions with a volatile environment for every decision, demanding sufficient intelligence to maximize returns and manage risks. Although LLMs have been used to develop agent systems that surpass human teams and yield impressive investment returns, opportunities to enhance multi-sourced information synthesis and optimize decision-making outcomes through timely experience refinement remain unexplored. Here, we introduce the FinCon, an LLM-based multi-agent framework with CONceptual verbal reinforcement tailored for diverse FINancial tasks. Inspired by effective real-world investment firm organizational structures, FinCon utilizes a manager-analyst communication hierarchy. This structure allows for synchronized cross-functional agent collaboration towards unified goals through natural language interactions and equips each agent with greater memory capacity than humans. Additionally, a risk-control component in FinCon enhances decision quality by episodically initiating a self-critiquing mechanism to update systematic investment beliefs. The conceptualized beliefs serve as verbal reinforcement for the future agent's behavior and can be selectively propagated to the appropriate node that requires knowledge updates. This feature significantly improves performance while reducing unnecessary peer-to-peer communication costs. Moreover, FinCon demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in various financial tasks, including single stock trading and portfolio management.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ECC Analyzer: Extract Trading Signal from Earnings Conference Calls using Large Language Model for Stock Performance Prediction

In the realm of financial analytics, leveraging unstructured data, such as earnings conference calls (ECCs), to forecast stock volatility is a critical challenge that has attracted both academics and investors. While previous studies have used multimodal deep learning-based models to obtain a general view of ECCs for volatility predicting, they often fail to capture detailed, complex information. Our research introduces a novel framework: \textbf{ECC Analyzer}, which utilizes large language models (LLMs) to extract richer, more predictive content from ECCs to aid the model's prediction performance. We use the pre-trained large models to extract textual and audio features from ECCs and implement a hierarchical information extraction strategy to extract more fine-grained information. This strategy first extracts paragraph-level general information by summarizing the text and then extracts fine-grained focus sentences using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). These features are then fused through multimodal feature fusion to perform volatility prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms traditional analytical benchmarks, confirming the effectiveness of advanced LLM techniques in financial analysis.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2024

CatMemo at the FinLLM Challenge Task: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models using Data Fusion in Financial Applications

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

cs.CE↗

arXiv2024

RITA: A Real-time Interactive Talking Avatars Framework

RITA presents a high-quality real-time interactive framework built upon generative models, designed with practical applications in mind. Our framework enables the transformation of user-uploaded photos into digital avatars that can engage in real-time dialogue interactions. By leveraging the latest advancements in generative modeling, we have developed a versatile platform that not only enhances the user experience through dynamic conversational avatars but also opens new avenues for applications in virtual reality, online education, and interactive gaming. This work showcases the potential of integrating computer vision and natural language processing technologies to create immersive and interactive digital personas, pushing the boundaries of how we interact with digital content.

cs.CV↗