Singapore

Terminal-based coding agents have emerged as powerful reasoning systems, achieving strong performance through iterative code execution and self-verification loops. But can these same capabilities, designed for software engineering, transfer effectively to financial reasoning tasks that demand numerical precision over unstructured data? We present a systematic evaluation of three state-of-the-art coding agents (Codex CLI, Claude Code, Gemini CLI) on four diverse financial QA benchmarks spanning numerical reasoning (FinQA, TAT-QA), document grounding (DocFinQA) and mathematical reasoning (DocMath-Eval). Under oracle context evaluation that isolates reasoning from retrieval, agentic execution consistently outperforms direct inference, with improvements ranging from +2.4% on short tabular tasks to +9.77% on long document reasoning. Within-model comparisons reveal that execution loops provide selective advantages on specific task types, particularly those requiring complex multi-step calculations. Our findings demonstrate that general-purpose coding agents can serve as effective financial reasoning systems without domain-specific fine-tuning, although challenges remain in handling extended symbolic contexts.

AAAI 2026

Code Execution Improves Financial Reasoning: Benchmarking Modern Agentic Systems on Financial QA

financial reasoning

coding agents

agentic systems

numerical reasoning

workshop paper

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

This paper introduces a novel Multi-Agent framework tailored for quantitative tasks routinely performed by portfolio managers and researchers within the asset management industry. Though machine learning and artificial intelligence have been used widely within quantitative finance, there is a scarcity of AI frameworks capable of autonomously performing complex tasks and quantitative analysis especially on structured data. Our framework addresses this gap and facilitates mathematical modeling and data analytics by dynamically generating executable code. The framework comprises of an innovative multi-agent architecture which includes specialized components for reflection, summarization, and financial expertise which coordinate to enhance problem solving abilities. We empirically evaluate the framework on a comprehensive dataset comprising of portfolio management-specific tasks, addressing a critical gap in current research. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed Multi-Agent framework vastly outperforms Single-Agent frameworks, demonstrating its practical utility across various task categories. By using dynamic code generation with the agent’s multi-step reasoning capabilities, we broaden the range of tasks that can be successfully addressed.

A Multi-Agent Framework for Portfolio Management Analytics in Quantitative Finance

Credit risk assessment is essential in the financial sector, but has traditionally depended on costly feature-based models that often fail to utilize all available information in raw credit records. This paper introduces LendNova, the first practical automated end-to-end pipeline for credit risk assessment, designed to utilize all available information in raw credit records by leveraging advanced NLP techniques and language models. LendNova transforms risk modeling by operating directly on raw, jargon-heavy credit bureau text using a language model that learns task-relevant representations without manual feature engineering. By automatically capturing patterns and risk signals embedded in the text, it replaces manual preprocessing steps, reducing costs and improving scalability. Evaluation on real-world data further demonstrates its strong potential in accurate and efficient risk assessment. LendNova establishes a baseline for intelligent credit risk agents, demonstrating the feasibility of language models in this domain. It lays the groundwork for future research toward foundation systems that enable more accurate, adaptable, and automated financial decision-making.

LendNova: Towards Automated Credit Risk Assessment with Language Models

We introduce a generic human-in-the-loop multi-agent examiner framework and demonstrate its application for evaluating small language models (SLMs) in the financial domain. While large language models have shown strong performance in finance, their computational cost motivates the exploration of SLMs as a viable alternative. However, assessing SLMs across a range of financial tasks remains challenging due to the specificity and scarcity of existing benchmarks. To address this gap, we extend the LLM-as-examiner paradigm into a modular system that decomposes evaluation into task-specific agents and estimates the performance of the SLMs relative to large strong models. We apply the proposed approach to estimate the performance of models from the PHI-4 and SMOLLM families on three problems. Extensive experiments show that our method generates more varied and complex evaluation questions than standard benchmarks, revealing nuanced insights into model strengths and weaknesses. The results highlight the value of scalable, agent-assisted evaluation for enhancing the understanding and deployment of small language models in financial domain, while also identifying certain limitations and challenges of our approach.

Multi-Agent Examiner: Evaluating Small Language Models on Financial Tasks

Analyzing financial documents such as 10-K filings, tabular disclosures, and macroeconomic reports demands expert reasoning and extensive time. However, existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems often struggle to process hybrid text–table structures or massive scale of financial documents. To address these challenges, we propose Hierarchical Reranker, a RAG framework designed to improve retrieval performance and generative reliability across large-scale financial datasets. The system integrates three key innovations: Pre-Retrieval Optimization, enhancing query clarity and search efficiency through normalization, keyword expansion, and table transformation; Hierarchical Reranker Architecture, improving retrieval precision through a two-stage ranking mechanism; and Long-Context Management, preserving reasoning accuracy through adaptive input partitioning and fusion under extensive contexts. Across multiple benchmarks, including FinQA, FinanceBench, and ConvFinQA, the proposed system achieved an NDCG@20 score of 0.7918 and demonstrated superior factual consistency. Its robustness was further validated by achieving second place in the ACM-ICAIF ’24 FinanceRAG Challenge. This work presents a deployable, domain-optimized RAG pipeline that enhances both the accuracy and scalability of financial reasoning, paving the way for automated audit reporting and quantitative investment analysis.

Hierarchical Reranking for Scalable Financial RAG System

This study investigated LLM–based automation for analyzing non-financial data in corporate credit evaluation. Two systems were developed and compared: a Single-Agent System (SAS), in which one LLM agent infers favorable and adverse repayment signals, and a Popperian Multi-Agent Debate System (PMADS), which structures the dual-perspective analysis as adversarial argumentation under the Karl Popper Debate protocol. Evaluation addressed three fronts: (i) work productivity (task completion time) compared with human experts; (ii) perceived report quality and usability, rated by credit risk professionals for system-generated reports; and (iii) reasoning characteristics quantified via reasoning-tree analysis (breadth, depth, and Reasoning Elaboration Index). Both systems drastically reduced task completion time relative to human experts (baseline ≈ 1,900 s/case; SAS ≈ 11.6 s; PMADS ≈ 92.0 s). Professionals rated SAS re-ports as adequate, while PMADS reports exceeded neutral benchmarks and scored significantly higher in explanatory adequacy, practical applicability, and usability. Reasoning-tree analysis showed PMADS produced deeper, more elaborated structures, whereas SAS yielded single-layered trees. These findings suggest that structured multi-agent debate enhances analytical rigor and perceived usefulness, though at the cost of longer computation time. Overall, the results demonstrate that reasoning-centered automation represents a promising approach for developing useful AI systems in decision-critical financial contexts.

Structured Debate Improves Corporate Credit Reasoning in Financial AI

Despite accounting for 96.1% of all businesses in Malaysia, access to financing remains one of the most persistent challenges faced by Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). Newly established or young businesses are often excluded from formal credit markets as traditional underwriting approaches rely heavily on credit bureau data. This study investigates the potential of bank statement data as an alternative data source for credit assessment to promote financial inclusion in emerging markets. Firstly, we propose a cash flow-based underwriting pipeline where we utilise bank statement data for end-to-end data extraction and machine learning credit scoring. Secondly, we introduce a novel dataset of 611 loan applicants from a Malaysian lending institution. Thirdly, we develop and evaluate credit scoring models based on application information and bank transaction-derived features. Empirical results show that the use of such data boosts the performance of all models on our dataset, which can improve credit scoring for new-to-lending MSMEs. Lastly, we intend to release the anonymised bank transaction dataset to facilitate further research on MSMEs financial inclusion within Malaysia's emerging economy.

Cash Flow Underwriting with Bank Transaction Data: Advancing MSME Financial Inclusion in Malaysia

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent systems have shown strong potential for autonomous financial analysis. However, most multi-agent trading systems still fail to account for the diverse perspectives that drive real-market price movements, limiting their ability to capture the step-by-step reasoning and consensus-building seen in professional investment teams. We introduce AGORA-F: an AGentic Orchestrated Reasoning Architecture for Finance-that treats financial decision-making as a process in which agents gradually reach a shared conclusion through discussion based optimization. AGORA-F structures its workflow into specialized teams: Query Understanding Agents interpret user intent and derive data requirements; Analytical Agents collect and normalize real-time market data, financial statements, and sentiment signals to prepare detailed briefs; and Financial Analysis Agents evaluate the stock from multiple viewpoints, including return potential, risk exposure, macroeconomic context, and competitive positioning. A central Trading Agent coordinates iterative discussions among the financial analysts, refining information requests and aligning perspectives via an agentic, prompt-based gradient mechanism. When the discussion converges or a preset iteration budget is reached-a Manager Agent synthesizes the collective rationale and issues a final decision-buy, hold, or sell-with explicit evidence trails. Empirical results indicate that AGORA-F yields more consistent and explainable trading outcomes than comparable baselines, marking a step toward human-team-like collaborative reasoning in autonomous financial systems. Our code will be made publicly available.

AGORA-F: An Agentic, Gradient-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Architecture for Financial Decision-Making

FinOps (Finance + Operations) represents an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes cloud business value through collaborative financial accountability across engineering, finance, and business teams. FinOps practitioners face a fundamental challenge: billing data arrives in heterogeneous formats, taxonomies, and metrics from multiple cloud providers and internal systems which eventually lead to synthesizing actionable insights, and making time-sensitive decisions. To address this challenge, we propose leveraging autonomous, goal-driven AI agents for FinOps automation. In this paper, we built a FinOps agent for a typical use-case for IT infrastructure and cost optimization. We built a system simulating a realistic end-to-end industry process starting with retrieving data from various sources to consolidating and analyzing the data to generate recommendations for optimization. We defined a set of metrics to evaluate our agent using several open-source and close-source language models and it shows that the agent was able to understand, plan, and execute tasks as well as an actual FinOps practitioner.

FinOps Agent - A Use-Case for IT Infrastructure and Cost Optimization

Financial AI systems suffer from a critical blind spot: while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) excels at finding relevant documents, language models still generate calculation errors and regulatory violations during reasoning, even with perfect retrieval. This paper introduces VERAFI (Verified Agentic Financial Intelligence), an agentic framework with neurosymbolic policy generation for verified financial intelligence. VERAFI combines state-of-the-art dense retrieval and cross-encoder reranking with financial tool-enabled agents and automated reasoning policies covering GAAP compliance, SEC requirements, and mathematical validation. Our comprehensive evaluation on FinanceBench demonstrates remarkable improvements: while traditional dense retrieval with reranking achieves only 52.4% factual correctness, VERAFI's integrated approach reaches 94.7%, an 81% relative improvement. The neurosymbolic policy layer alone contributes a 4.3 percentage point gain over pure agentic processing, specifically targeting persistent mathematical and logical errors. By embedding financial domain expertise directly into the reasoning process, VERAFI offers a practical pathway toward trustworthy financial AI that meets the stringent accuracy demands of regulatory compliance, investment decisions, and risk management.

VERAFI: Verified Agentic Financial Intelligence through Neurosymbolic Policy Generation

This paper presents a first empirical study of agentic AI as autonomous decision-makers in decentralized governance. Using more than 3K proposals from major protocols, we build an agentic AI voter that interprets proposal contexts, retrieves historical deliberation data, and independently determines its voting position. The agent operates within a realistic financial simulation environment grounded in verifiable blockchain data, implemented through a modular composable program (MCP) workflow that defines data flow and tool usage via Agentics framework. We evaluate how closely the agent’s decisions align with the human and token-weighted outcomes, uncovering strong alignments measured by carefully designed evaluation metrics. Our findings demonstrate that agentic AI can augment collective decision-making by producing interpretable, auditable, and empirically grounded signals in realistic DAO governance settings. The study contributes to the design of explainable and economically rigorous AI agents for decentralized financial systems.

Next from AAAI 2026

A Multi-Agent Framework for Portfolio Management Analytics in Quantitative Finance

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