Financial QA systems are typically improved before deployment through better retrieval, prompting, or agent coordination, leaving their reliability behavior fixed thereafter. In practice, new SEC-filing questions repeatedly expose heterogeneous errors in period, entity, evidence use, and calculation. Existing self-improvement methods can turn failures into new behaviors, but offer limited control over where a correction should apply or which previously correct answers it may break. We therefore frame post-deployment improvement as controlled behavioral maintenance: recurring failures should become scoped skill patches, and each patch should earn deployment with- out introducing regressions. We instantiate this view in FINSKILLOPS, a multi-agent system for SEC filing QA. FINSKILLOPS derives reusable skills from evidence-grounded, typed failure diagnoses and governs them through targeted validation, protected-case regression checks, negative controls, and versioned replacement or retirement. Across six financial QA benchmarks, a single frozen skill registry achieves the highest verdict-weighted correctness and reference consistency among the evaluated systems. Evolved skills raise correctness from 3.70 to 4.55 on our enhanced benchmark. In a separate 12-round operational study, only six of 33 proposed skills are promoted, while the monitoring non-correct rate falls from 20.0% to 12.5%. These results establish controlled skill scope, admission, and lifecycle management as the foundation for reliable self-improvement.
Yanzhang Ma, Zhenghan Tai, Han-Wei Wu et al.· 0 citations
Financial question answering over U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings requires retrieving and synthesizing heterogeneous evidence dispersed across long, standardized, and highly redundant disclosures. Existing retrieval-augmented and multi-agent systems typically derive retrieval queries directly from the user's question and rank candidates by semantic similarity. Together, these choices create prior-corpus misalignment: a mismatch between model priors and the target filings'structure, terminology, and evidence standards. As a result, query generation misses corpus-specific evidence, while semantic reranking favors topically similar but evidentially invalid false-positive chunks. We propose FinSAgent, an evidence-grounded multi-agent framework that reframes SEC filing QA as corpus-aligned retrieval planning and corrects both ends with a single principle: inject corpus-side conditioning wherever model priors would otherwise dominate. FinSAgent combines (1) role-specialized agents anchored to the mandated 10-K item structure, (2) database-aware query decomposition that conditions each agent's sub-queries on a lightweight, summary-level view of the local corpus, and (3) multi-path retrieval with a learned feature-gated reranker that separates evidential validity from semantic similarity. Across five offline financial QA benchmarks, FinSAgent improves retrieval coverage and answer correctness over strong single-agent and multi-agent baselines; in a three-arm randomized online experiment with 1,000 anonymous user ratings, it also receives higher scores than baselines.
Jijun Chi, Zhenghan Tai, Hanwei Wu et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are widely used for automated annotation, yet their per-class accuracy varies widely (e.g., 12%-98% across the 13 classes of three classroom sub-datasets) and is expensive to measure: evaluating one 27B MLLM on 5,416 validation images takes roughly 14 hours, whereas a frozen-CLIP pass over the same images completes in about 3 minutes. A low-cost signal for ranking classes by expected MLLM annotation difficulty a priori remains underexplored. Building on the AnchorProxy construct (per-class zero-shot CLIP accuracy) introduced in the companion study, this paper systematically evaluates its full-frame formulation, termed AnchorScore here, as an a priori diagnostic that flags the classes MLLMs are least likely to annotate reliably. On classroom behavior data (SCB5, 13 classes, 6 MLLMs), AnchorScore correlates with per-class MLLM accuracy (Spearman rho = 0.769, p = 0.002, n = 13). None of the alternative difficulty predictors (DINOv2, ResNet-50, SigLIP, or MLLM self-verbalized uncertainty) showed a significant class-level correlation at n = 13. A cross-model consensus control suggests AnchorScore primarily captures a shared class-difficulty factor rather than a CLIP-specific signal. An independent replication on Stanford40 Actions yields a nearly identical effect (rho = 0.817, p<0.001); the association is strongest on activity-recognition data and attenuates on medical and satellite imagery. Three practical applications follow: a deployable hybrid CLIP/MLLM routing strategy (predicted-class routing: up to +23 pp over CLIP-only at roughly 44% fewer MLLM calls), prompt disambiguation on hard classes (exploratory), and review-priority prediction for human verification. AnchorScore does not estimate exact MLLM accuracy; it provides a low-cost ranking signal that directs expensive MLLM evaluation to the classes where it is most informative.
Yanzhang Ma, Li-Zhuo Zhang· 2 citations
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