QuantEval: A Benchmark for Financial Quantitative Tasks in Large Language Models

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in finance-oriented question answering, yet their evaluation on professional quantitative workflows remains fragmented and often stops at factual or document-grounded QA. We introduce QuantEval, a benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs can complete the compute--implement--validate loop required in quantitative finance. QuantEval contains 1,575 expert-validated instances across three complementary dimensions: (i) knowledge-based QA, (ii) quantitative mathematical reasoning, and (iii) quantitative strategy coding. The coding task is evaluated with a deterministic CTA-style backtesting framework that executes model-generated strategies and compares risk--return metrics against expert references, moving beyond syntax or template matching. We evaluate 13 open-source and proprietary LLMs, report prompt and reliability analyses, and observe substantial gaps relative to human experts, especially in multi-step reasoning and framework-constrained coding. We further conduct supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning experiments on domain-aligned data, showing that training can improve quantitative reasoning while also exposing trade-offs in factual recall. QuantEval releases the dataset, evaluation scripts, and full backtesting configuration to support reproducible research on LLMs for quantitative finance.