Large Language Models (LLMs)

Beyond the Black Box: Interpretability of LLMs in Finance ArXiv ID: 2505.24650 “View on arXiv” Authors: Hariom Tatsat, Ariye Shater Abstract Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a spectrum of tasks in financial services, including report generation, chatbots, sentiment analysis, regulatory compliance, investment advisory, financial knowledge retrieval, and summarization. However, their intrinsic complexity and lack of transparency pose significant challenges, especially in the highly regulated financial sector, where interpretability, fairness, and accountability are critical. As far as we are aware, this paper presents the first application in the finance domain of understanding and utilizing the inner workings of LLMs through mechanistic interpretability, addressing the pressing need for transparency and control in AI systems. Mechanistic interpretability is the most intuitive and transparent way to understand LLM behavior by reverse-engineering their internal workings. By dissecting the activations and circuits within these models, it provides insights into how specific features or components influence predictions - making it possible not only to observe but also to modify model behavior. In this paper, we explore the theoretical aspects of mechanistic interpretability and demonstrate its practical relevance through a range of financial use cases and experiments, including applications in trading strategies, sentiment analysis, bias, and hallucination detection. While not yet widely adopted, mechanistic interpretability is expected to become increasingly vital as adoption of LLMs increases. Advanced interpretability tools can ensure AI systems remain ethical, transparent, and aligned with evolving financial regulations. In this paper, we have put special emphasis on how these techniques can help unlock interpretability requirements for regulatory and compliance purposes - addressing both current needs and anticipating future expectations from financial regulators globally. ...

Can LLM-based Financial Investing Strategies Outperform the Market in Long Run? ArXiv ID: 2505.07078 “View on arXiv” Authors: Weixian Waylon Li, Hyeonjun Kim, Mihai Cucuringu, Tiejun Ma Abstract Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been leveraged for asset pricing tasks and stock trading applications, enabling AI agents to generate investment decisions from unstructured financial data. However, most evaluations of LLM timing-based investing strategies are conducted on narrow timeframes and limited stock universes, overstating effectiveness due to survivorship and data-snooping biases. We critically assess their generalizability and robustness by proposing FINSABER, a backtesting framework evaluating timing-based strategies across longer periods and a larger universe of symbols. Systematic backtests over two decades and 100+ symbols reveal that previously reported LLM advantages deteriorate significantly under broader cross-section and over a longer-term evaluation. Our market regime analysis further demonstrates that LLM strategies are overly conservative in bull markets, underperforming passive benchmarks, and overly aggressive in bear markets, incurring heavy losses. These findings highlight the need to develop LLM strategies that are able to prioritise trend detection and regime-aware risk controls over mere scaling of framework complexity. ...

Can Large Language Models Trade? Testing Financial Theories with LLM Agents in Market Simulations ArXiv ID: 2504.10789 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper presents a realistic simulated stock market where large language models (LLMs) act as heterogeneous competing trading agents. The open-source framework incorporates a persistent order book with market and limit orders, partial fills, dividends, and equilibrium clearing alongside agents with varied strategies, information sets, and endowments. Agents submit standardized decisions using structured outputs and function calls while expressing their reasoning in natural language. Three findings emerge: First, LLMs demonstrate consistent strategy adherence and can function as value investors, momentum traders, or market makers per their instructions. Second, market dynamics exhibit features of real financial markets, including price discovery, bubbles, underreaction, and strategic liquidity provision. Third, the framework enables analysis of LLMs’ responses to varying market conditions, similar to partial dependence plots in machine-learning interpretability. The framework allows simulating financial theories without closed-form solutions, creating experimental designs that would be costly with human participants, and establishing how prompts can generate correlated behaviors affecting market stability. ...

Are Generative AI Agents Effective Personalized Financial Advisors? ArXiv ID: 2504.05862 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Large language model-based agents are becoming increasingly popular as a low-cost mechanism to provide personalized, conversational advice, and have demonstrated impressive capabilities in relatively simple scenarios, such as movie recommendations. But how do these agents perform in complex high-stakes domains, where domain expertise is essential and mistakes carry substantial risk? This paper investigates the effectiveness of LLM-advisors in the finance domain, focusing on three distinct challenges: (1) eliciting user preferences when users themselves may be unsure of their needs, (2) providing personalized guidance for diverse investment preferences, and (3) leveraging advisor personality to build relationships and foster trust. Via a lab-based user study with 64 participants, we show that LLM-advisors often match human advisor performance when eliciting preferences, although they can struggle to resolve conflicting user needs. When providing personalized advice, the LLM was able to positively influence user behavior, but demonstrated clear failure modes. Our results show that accurate preference elicitation is key, otherwise, the LLM-advisor has little impact, or can even direct the investor toward unsuitable assets. More worryingly, users appear insensitive to the quality of advice being given, or worse these can have an inverse relationship. Indeed, users reported a preference for and increased satisfaction as well as emotional trust with LLMs adopting an extroverted persona, even though those agents provided worse advice. ...

From Deep Learning to LLMs: A survey of AI in Quantitative Investment ArXiv ID: 2503.21422 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Quantitative investment (quant) is an emerging, technology-driven approach in asset management, increasingy shaped by advancements in artificial intelligence. Recent advances in deep learning and large language models (LLMs) for quant finance have improved predictive modeling and enabled agent-based automation, suggesting a potential paradigm shift in this field. In this survey, taking alpha strategy as a representative example, we explore how AI contributes to the quantitative investment pipeline. We first examine the early stage of quant research, centered on human-crafted features and traditional statistical models with an established alpha pipeline. We then discuss the rise of deep learning, which enabled scalable modeling across the entire pipeline from data processing to order execution. Building on this, we highlight the emerging role of LLMs in extending AI beyond prediction, empowering autonomous agents to process unstructured data, generate alphas, and support self-iterative workflows. ...

Financial Analysis: Intelligent Financial Data Analysis System Based on LLM-RAG ArXiv ID: 2504.06279 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In the modern financial sector, the exponential growth of data has made efficient and accurate financial data analysis increasingly crucial. Traditional methods, such as statistical analysis and rule-based systems, often struggle to process and derive meaningful insights from complex financial information effectively. These conventional approaches face inherent limitations in handling unstructured data, capturing intricate market patterns, and adapting to rapidly evolving financial contexts, resulting in reduced accuracy and delayed decision-making processes. To address these challenges, this paper presents an intelligent financial data analysis system that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology. Our system incorporates three key components: a specialized preprocessing module for financial data standardization, an efficient vector-based storage and retrieval system, and a RAG-enhanced query processing module. Using the NASDAQ financial fundamentals dataset from 2010 to 2023, we conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate system performance. Results demonstrate significant improvements across multiple metrics: the fully optimized configuration (gpt-3.5-turbo-1106+RAG) achieved 78.6% accuracy and 89.2% recall, surpassing the baseline model by 23 percentage points in accuracy while reducing response time by 34.8%. The system also showed enhanced efficiency in handling complex financial queries, though with a moderate increase in memory utilization. Our findings validate the effectiveness of integrating RAG technology with LLMs for financial analysis tasks and provide valuable insights for future developments in intelligent financial data processing systems. ...

Bridging Language Models and Financial Analysis ArXiv ID: 2503.22693 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract 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. ...

Leveraging LLMS for Top-Down Sector Allocation In Automated Trading ArXiv ID: 2503.09647 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper introduces a methodology leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for sector-level portfolio allocation through systematic analysis of macroeconomic conditions and market sentiment. Our framework emphasizes top-down sector allocation by processing multiple data streams simultaneously, including policy documents, economic indicators, and sentiment patterns. Empirical results demonstrate superior risk-adjusted returns compared to traditional cross momentum strategies, achieving a Sharpe ratio of 2.51 and portfolio return of 8.79% versus -0.61 and -1.39% respectively. These results suggest that LLM-based systematic macro analysis presents a viable approach for enhancing automated portfolio allocation decisions at the sector level. ...

Towards Temporal-Aware Multi-Modal Retrieval Augmented Generation in Finance ArXiv ID: 2503.05185 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Finance decision-making often relies on in-depth data analysis across various data sources, including financial tables, news articles, stock prices, etc. In this work, we introduce FinTMMBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating temporal-aware multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in finance. Built from heterologous data of NASDAQ 100 companies, FinTMMBench offers three significant advantages. 1) Multi-modal Corpus: It encompasses a hybrid of financial tables, news articles, daily stock prices, and visual technical charts as the corpus. 2) Temporal-aware Questions: Each question requires the retrieval and interpretation of its relevant data over a specific time period, including daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual periods. 3) Diverse Financial Analysis Tasks: The questions involve 10 different financial analysis tasks designed by domain experts, including information extraction, trend analysis, sentiment analysis and event detection, etc. We further propose a novel TMMHybridRAG method, which first leverages LLMs to convert data from other modalities (e.g., tabular, visual and time-series data) into textual format and then incorporates temporal information in each node when constructing graphs and dense indexes. Its effectiveness has been validated in extensive experiments, but notable gaps remain, highlighting the challenges presented by our FinTMMBench. ...

Are Large Language Models Good In-context Learners for Financial Sentiment Analysis? ArXiv ID: 2503.04873 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Recently, large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have demonstrated the emergent ability, surpassing traditional methods in various domains even without fine-tuning over domain-specific data. However, when it comes to financial sentiment analysis (FSA)$\unicode{“x2013”}$a fundamental task in financial AI$\unicode{“x2013”}$these models often encounter various challenges, such as complex financial terminology, subjective human emotions, and ambiguous inclination expressions. In this paper, we aim to answer the fundamental question: whether LLMs are good in-context learners for FSA? Unveiling this question can yield informative insights on whether LLMs can learn to address the challenges by generalizing in-context demonstrations of financial document-sentiment pairs to the sentiment analysis of new documents, given that finetuning these models on finance-specific data is difficult, if not impossible at all. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper exploring in-context learning for FSA that covers most modern LLMs (recently released DeepSeek V3 included) and multiple in-context sample selection methods. Comprehensive experiments validate the in-context learning capability of LLMs for FSA. ...