XFinBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Complex Financial Problem Solving and Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15861v1
• Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:23:35 GMT
• Title: XFinBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Complex Financial Problem Solving and Reasoning
• Authors: Zhihan Zhang, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao,
• Abstract summary: We introduce XFinBench, a novel benchmark to evaluate large language models' ability in solving financial problems.<n>O1 is the best-performing text-only model with an overall accuracy of 67.3%, but still lags significantly behind human experts with 12.5%.<n>We construct a knowledge bank with 3,032 finance terms for knowledge augmentation analysis, and find that relevant knowledge only brings consistent accuracy improvements to small open-source model.
• Score: 28.967959142733903
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Solving financial problems demands complex reasoning, multimodal data processing, and a broad technical understanding, presenting unique challenges for current large language models (LLMs). We introduce XFinBench, a novel benchmark with 4,235 examples designed to evaluate LLM's ability in solving complex, knowledge-intensive financial problems across diverse graduate-level finance topics with multi-modal context. We identify five core capabilities of LLMs using XFinBench, i.e, terminology understanding, temporal reasoning, future forecasting, scenario planning, and numerical modelling. Upon XFinBench, we conduct extensive experiments on 18 leading models. The result shows that o1 is the best-performing text-only model with an overall accuracy of 67.3%, but still lags significantly behind human experts with 12.5%, especially in temporal reasoning and scenario planning capabilities. We further construct a knowledge bank with 3,032 finance terms for knowledge augmentation analysis, and find that relevant knowledge to the question only brings consistent accuracy improvements to small open-source model. Additionally, our error analysis reveals that rounding errors during calculation and blindness to position and intersection of curves in the image are two primary issues leading to model's poor performance in calculating and visual-context questions, respectively. Code and dataset are accessible via GitHub: https://github.com/Zhihan72/XFinBench.

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