FinForge: Semi-Synthetic Financial Benchmark Generation
Authors:
Glenn Matlin,
Akhil Theerthala,
Anant Gupta,
Anirudh JM,
Rayan Castilla,
Yi Mei Ng,
Sudheer Chava
Abstract:
Evaluating Language Models (LMs) in specialized, high-stakes domains such as finance remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of open, high-quality, and domain-specific datasets. Existing general-purpose benchmarks provide broad coverage but lack the depth and domain fidelity needed to assess LMs' capabilities for real-world financial reasoning, which requires both conceptual understand…
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Evaluating Language Models (LMs) in specialized, high-stakes domains such as finance remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of open, high-quality, and domain-specific datasets. Existing general-purpose benchmarks provide broad coverage but lack the depth and domain fidelity needed to assess LMs' capabilities for real-world financial reasoning, which requires both conceptual understanding and quantitative rigor. To address this gap, we introduce FinForge, a scalable, semi-synthetic pipeline for constructing finance-specific evaluation benchmarks through a hybrid of expert-guided data curation and controlled LM-based synthesis. FinForge combines manual and programmatic corpus construction from authoritative financial sources with structured question generation and validation using Gemini 2.5 Flash. To demonstrate the pipeline's efficacy, we produce FinForge-5k, a snapshot benchmark comprising over 5,000 human-validated question-answer pairs across 11 finance subdomains, derived from a curated corpus of 100,000 verified documents totaling 143M tokens. Evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source models on FinForge-5k reveals significant differences in financial reasoning, with leading models achieving accuracy levels near 80%. These findings underscore the framework's utility for diagnosing current model limitations and guiding future improvements in financial domain competence. All code and data are available at https://github.com/gtfintechlab/FinForge.
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Submitted 19 January, 2026; v1 submitted 10 January, 2026;
originally announced January 2026.
Financial Instruction Following Evaluation (FIFE)
Authors:
Glenn Matlin,
Siddharth,
Anirudh JM,
Aditya Shukla,
Yahya Hassan,
Sudheer Chava
Abstract:
Language Models (LMs) struggle with complex, interdependent instructions, particularly in high-stakes domains like finance where precision is critical. We introduce FIFE, a novel, high-difficulty benchmark designed to assess LM instruction-following capabilities for financial analysis tasks. FIFE comprises 88 human-authored prompts and employs a verification system with chainable, verifiable const…
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Language Models (LMs) struggle with complex, interdependent instructions, particularly in high-stakes domains like finance where precision is critical. We introduce FIFE, a novel, high-difficulty benchmark designed to assess LM instruction-following capabilities for financial analysis tasks. FIFE comprises 88 human-authored prompts and employs a verification system with chainable, verifiable constraints for fine-grained reward signals. We evaluate 53 models (proprietary, open-weight, open-source) in a zero-shot setting. Our key findings reveal a clear performance hierarchy: the top open-weight model (76.1 strict / 79.5 loose) surpasses the leading proprietary system (65.9 strict / 70.5 loose), while the best open-source models lag significantly (45.5 strict / 48.9 loose). However, even top-performing models struggle with FIFE's complex requirements, failing to achieve perfect compliance. We release our dataset and code as an open-source resource to promote research in Reinforcement Learning for the financial domain.
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Submitted 30 November, 2025;
originally announced December 2025.