Results show that in investment management agents, access to reliable procedural skills can be as important as model choice, while naive self-generation of skills is often ineffective.
Abstract
Investment management is a high-stakes domain in which agentic AI systems must do more than generate plausible text. They must retrieve point-in-time data, assemble correct computational inputs, invoke specialized methods, and produce auditable structured outputs. We introduce FinSkillBench, an evaluation suite designed to measure whether language model agents can effectively use financial domain skills to solve investment management tasks. The benchmark spans three domains, portfolio construction, risk management, and fundamental analysis, and includes 12 subtasks with 2,603 task episodes. Each episode provides point-in-time inputs, hidden ground truth, and a task-specific verifier.We compare three conditions: no skill, curated skill packages consisting of procedural documents and executable components, and self-generated skills in which the agent writes and reuses its own procedures within an episode. Across 9 models and a large-scale evaluation, curated skills consistently improve performance, raising mean scores from 0.366 to 0.528, with the largest gains in portfolio construction and risk management. In contrast, self-generated skills provide little benefit despite higher computational cost. An independent evaluation using a separate agent framework (Hermes Agent, 8 models, 5,280 episodes total) reproduces the directional pattern across all three domains, with the magnitude of skill effects varying by subtask and harness. These results showthat in investment management agents, access to reliable procedural skills can be as important as model choice, while naive self-generation of skills is often ineffective. We release the benchmark, evaluation tools, curated skill packages, and full trajectories to support further research.
Language model agents now execute bounded tasks reliably. Whether they can sustain effective decision-making over long horizons, where actions have cumulative consequences and the environment responds to their choices, remains largely unmeasured. FM-Bench (Football Management Benchmark) measures this. An LLM agent runs a football club for 20 in-game years through 26 tools and roughly 340 to 400 decision stops. It drafts a squad on the same budget as every rival, trades players, negotiates contracts, invests in facilities and youth, sets lineups, and answers to a board that can fire it, while a deterministic engine accumulates every year into one final score with no LLM judge or human rater. The solo track plays each of 15 frontier models against a frozen scripted world, and the Arena places the same models plus a scripted anchor in one shared 20-year world; to our knowledge, the first head-to-head evaluation at this scale. We measure six behavioral capabilities behind the score. Across three seeds, all 15 models complete every horizon while the blind scripted baselines die out in most of theirs, and claude-fable-5 tops the solo board on mean score and the Arena, where the title nonetheless rotates among ten models. Neither scale, price, nor vendor predicts the order; the order settles only late in the horizon, and the best first-play human lands only at the bottom of the model board. What separates the models is managerial behavior rather than computation. Higher-scoring models reduce slow-payoff investment near the end, keep cash invested rather than idle, and open renewals well before the deadline, while token spend predicts nothing. No model learns the market's hidden prices from hundreds of rejected bids, and self-managed memory fails in two opposite modes: an archive that only grows or a plan rewritten every season. Code is available at https://github.com/Analogy-AI/fm-bench.
Tianyou Wang, Chongyang Gao, Kezhen Chen et al.· 0 citations
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on skills, structured documents that specify when to act, which procedure to follow, and which tools are allowed. Existing evaluations mostly judge the quality of a skill or its contribution to task success, leaving unexamined whether an agent can recognize a relevant skill and apply it on its own. We introduce Skill-Use, a benchmark that evaluates skill use under progressive disclosure, where an agent sees only a skill's name and short description and must retrieve the full procedure before following it. Skill-Use separates three facets of skill use. Trigger measures whether the agent invokes the relevant skill, Compliance measures how faithfully it follows the prescribed procedure, and Boundary measures whether it avoids forbidden operations. A Skill-Use (SU) score combines the three and credits execution only after the skill is triggered. Skill-Use pairs 79 real skills with 177 executable tasks across nine domains, each grounded in real files, run in an isolated Docker sandbox, and scored by a trajectory-based rubric. Evaluating eight LLMs under two agent harnesses, we find that reliable skill use remains out of reach, as the strongest configuration reaches an SU of only 0.613. Triggering and procedural compliance fail as independent bottlenecks, and both scores and model rankings shift with the harness, so skill use behaves as a capability conditioned on the harness rather than a fixed property of the model.
Jinyi Han, Yuanjian Xu, Ying Liao et al.· 1 citation
Recent advances in large language models have accelerated deployment of agentic systems in operational finance. Existing benchmarks emphasize measuring general capabilities, instruction following, or safety, but few directly address the operational finance workflows that agentic systems are now being deployed to automate. Finance professionals require agents to not only provide factually sound and properly grounded information, but also ensure that this information is verifiable and consistently adheres to rules and constraints of the operational finance domain. We introduce FORCE-Bench, which contains 251 expert-annotated queries and evaluates responses using a rubric-based framework calibrated to the requirements of the operational finance domain, across eight dimensions: accuracy, citations, clarity, depth, groundedness, recency, relevance, and structure. FORCE-Bench assesses agentic systems on three task types: financial obligation research (querying ERP systems for accounts receivable and payable data), financial entity performance research (answering time-bound questions from public filings and market data), and business brief generation (synthesising multi-source company intelligence reports). To reflect real deployment conditions, we evaluate our purpose-built agent, as well as the general-purpose agentic systems, under common tool access and latency-bounded settings. Results show that general-purpose agentic systems do not consistently meet finance-domain quality requirements under operational constraints, while the purpose-built Finance Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot is more reliable across dimensions. We release the dataset, rubrics, harness, and analysis code as open-source to support reproducible comparison and adaptation to other enterprise finance environments.
Wolfgang M. Pauli, Sarah Panda, Kidus Admassu et al.· 2 citations
Adding procedural skills to an LLM agent is typically evaluated by average improvement in task success. However, this metric hides an important cost: skills can also make agents worse. We measure both sides by comparing agents with and without skills across nearly 6,000 runs spanning two office automation benchmarks and three model harness stacks. This allows us to distinguish two outcomes. A regression is a task solved without skills but failed after skills are added. A residual failure is a task that fails both with and without skills. We find that regressions are substantial enough that the best performing skills outperform others primarily by regressing less, not by gaining more. We identify three causes of regression: (i) skill description osmosis, a skill changes an agent's behavior simply by being present in context, even when it is never invoked; (ii) grounding displacement, a skill's prescribed procedure overrides how the agent interprets its inputs; and (iii) verification displacement, where the procedure suppresses checks the agent would otherwise perform on its outputs. Analysing persistent failures reveals the same underlying pattern. Existing skills overemphasize procedural guidance the stage least often responsible for failure while under supporting grounding and verification, the dominant sources of remaining errors. After correcting evaluation artifacts and studying traces, we find many regressions and persistent failures recoverable through better grounding and verification. Procedural skills should be evaluated by decomposing their net effect into gains and regressions, not by aggregate improvement alone. We identify three regression modes skills should avoid, and find that reliability depends more on grounding and verification than on procedural skill choice.
Financial agents must do more than recall domain knowledge: they must be both reliable, executing precise operations over grounded evidence, and executive, sustaining long-horizon research whose conclusions remain auditable. We present Mint-Agent, a family of finance-native agentic models designed around these two scales of financial intelligence. Mint-Agent is built upon three pillars: data, harness, and algorithm. Our data engine constructs clean, specialized tasks for atomic financial capabilities and long-horizon agentic execution from real-world financial sources. MintHarness enables stable interaction with open-ended environments and maintains auditable evidence trails across extended research trajectories. Our training recipe combines SFT, critical-step OPD, and RLVR to develop separate financial reasoning and agentic execution experts, which are then unified through model merging and multi-teacher on-policy distillation into compact, general-purpose financial agents. This pipeline yields two flagship models, Mint-Cu (9B) and Mint-Ag (27B). Across professional financial benchmarks, our models demonstrate two defining strengths: (1) Reliability: Mint-Ag achieves 98.33% on RFC-Bench, surpassing GPT-5.6-Sol and Claude-Opus-4.8 by 3.66 and 3.00 points; and (2) Executability: Mint-Cu reaches 69.86% on FinSearchComp T2, outperforming Agents-A1-35B and Nex-N2-mini by 22.83 and 12.78 points, while Mint-Ag achieves 76.00% and 60.49% on FinanceAgentBench v1.1 and v2, respectively. These results establish a path toward trustworthy financial intelligence in which domain expertise, long-horizon execution, and auditable evidence are jointly engineered as a unified foundation for frontier agentic models.
Mint-Agent Team, Kun Wang, Gavin Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Enterprise agent programs are moving from prototypes into production, where reusable skills, tools, and workflow packages must be reviewed with evidence rather than prose. Current gates often scan these artifacts for structure, style, and security, but they do not answer the deployment question: does the capability package help a live agent complete enterprise tasks under the same model, sandbox, and grading policy? We present ACES (Agentic Continuous Evaluation of Skills), a repository-native framework for evaluating skills and product capability packages as executable agent artifacts. ACES runs paired live trials with and without a target skill, normalizes trajectories into the Agent Trajectory Interchange Format (ATIF), grades six default runtime metrics, and reports Skill Lift: the target skill's added value for a fixed task, harness, workspace, and scorer. The same protocol supports product-owned task suites that compare baseline, skill, bundle, team-skill, and plugin targets. On 145 real skills from internal enterprise repositories and public catalogs, scan-only gates surface useful authoring issues but measure complementary facets (structural versus LLM-judge Spearman $\rho = 0.14$). Across 947 scored paired cases from 58 of 64 production skills and four primary harnesses, mean composite Skill Lift is 0.2134 (95\% paired-case CI [0.1967, 0.2301]); mean outcome-only lift, the average of accuracy and goal accuracy, is 0.1799. Composite lift is positive in 72.8\% of paired cases. The largest process-metric gains appear in skill execution, behavior check, and skill efficiency---signals about discovery, routing, workflow following, and tool use that document scans cannot observe. An open-source implementation of the methodology is available in NVIDIA SkillEvaluator.
Christopher Kevin, Narendran Raghavan, J. Puget et al.· 0 citations
