Skip to content
Preprint

ShiJianBench: From Dialogue to Decision for Long-Horizon Evaluation of Investment Advisors

Aug 2026 · 3 citations · ⚡ 1 influential · 103 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

Experiments on Chinese fund-market traces from 2021 to 2026 identify a stable leading group of LLM advisors that combines substantially stronger personalized content with competitive investor-side trajectory outcomes.

Abstract

Conversational investment advisors influence not only what users know, but also how they make subsequent decisions as market conditions evolve. Existing evaluations primarily assess response quality or observed outcomes, leaving the long-horizon pathway from advisor language to investor behavior difficult to audit. We introduce ShiJianBench, an offline framework for evaluating conversational investment advisors through matched investor trajectories under fixed historical market feedback. At its core is a multi-agent investor simulator with explicit evolving state variables, motive-driven deliberation, long-term memory, and dialogue-grounded updates. The simulator is calibrated against aggregate behavioral patterns from 7,199 real users, and advisor policies are evaluated using separate investor-side, service-side, and content-side metrics under a hard compliance gate. Experiments on Chinese fund-market traces from 2021 to 2026 identify a stable leading group of LLM advisors that combines substantially stronger personalized content with competitive investor-side trajectory outcomes. These results reveal a systematic distinction between producing a high-quality response and delivering an effective long-horizon intervention, motivating trajectory-aware evaluation of conversational advisors.

View source

Similar papers

Preprint Aug 2026

GRPO for Financial Advice Generation: Outperforming Commercial LLMs under CATE Evaluation

It is demonstrated that GRPO with a finance-grounded reward signal can produce substantially more useful business recommendations than commercial LLMs, and that a judge-independent causal audit is a valuable complement to, rather than a confirmation of, LLM-as-a-judge assessment in financial NLP.

Ofir Ben Shoham, Shrutendra Harsola, Vignesh T. Subrahmaniam et al. · 0 citations
Review Aug 2026

FinRiskAtlas: Decision-Aligned Evaluation of Large Language Models for Financial Risk Review

FinRiskAtlas is introduced, a Chinese-language benchmark that evaluates financial LLMs along two complementary dimensions: operation execution under fixed evidence states and evidence-state control under evolving review conditions, and shows that broad financial capability scores do not fully capture where models are reliable in professional workflows.

Suyang Zhong, Jingzhe Zhu, Qi Xu et al. · 0 citations
Jul 2026

Beyond Action Imitation: Learning a Decision-Aware User Simulator for Online Advertising

DASH is a decision-aware user simulator that jointly generates thinking traces and predicts behavioral actions from heterogeneous cross-domain histories and tailors a rubric-based reward model that evaluates thinking traces along form, content, and logic for RL training.

Zi-Hang Chen, Jiaer Zheng, Xiangyang Xu et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

FinPerMA: A Theory-Informed, Event-Grounded Personalized-Memory Benchmark for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used as personalized assistants in high-stakes domains such as financial advising, yet it remains unclear whether they can maintain and update an individualized user model over long horizons. Existing personalized-memory benchmarks primarily test factual retention or rely on weakly constrained model-generated trajectories, leaving event-driven preference adaptation underexplored. We introduce FinPerMA, an event-grounded benchmark that evaluates personalized memory against frozen longitudinal investor trajectories. Its generation pipeline combines deterministic, theory-informed impact rules, controlled LLM narration, and automated quality screening; a Post-Shock checkpoint isolates whether an agent has integrated a material event into its persistent user model. On 2,994 questions from 276 personas, seven frontier LLMs and up to seven memory configurations remain far from saturated: no full-context configuration exceeds approximately 0.47 overall accuracy or approximately 39% on multiple-choice questions. Attribution analysis shows that summary-based memory often preserves factual details while losing the preference signals needed for personalization; simple retrieval can therefore outperform purpose-built memory systems, with the gap widening after shocks.

Ben Wang, Kang Zhou, Lifan Guo et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

LangBP: Language-Guided Reasoning and Acting for Joint Bidding and Pricing

Auto-bidding is a long-horizon sequential decision problem for maximizing conversion value under budget and key performance indicator (KPI) constraints. Recent work extends this task from bidding alone to joint bidding and pricing, where a policy controls bidding decisions and pricing corrections. Existing methods mainly rely on numerical trajectory modeling, which offers limited support for interpreting campaign context and expressing high-level strategies. Large language models (LLMs) can complement this paradigm with their reasoning capabilities. However, existing language-guided methods have two limitations. First, they condition actions on language strategies without modeling the corresponding state changes, making it difficult to distinguish errors in strategy understanding from errors in action generation. Second, different instructions can produce similar execution effects, leading to imbalanced policy updates across effects. We propose LangBP, a hierarchical framework for language-guided joint bidding and pricing. LangBP's Semantic Decision Transformer (S-DT) predicts target states from the instruction and the trajectory history, then recovers the joint action via inverse dynamics. We further propose Execution-Grouped Policy Optimization (EGPO), which scores candidate effects with a Context--Effect Verifier (CEV) and balances policy updates across effect groups. Experiments on AuctionNet show that LangBP outperforms strong baselines, and online A/B tests further demonstrate business gains in real-world deployment on a large-scale e-commerce platform.

Jian-Qing Ding, Chuan Yang, Linghui Meng et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Sep 2026

Optimizing Sparse Outcomes Through Dense Behavioral Signals via Value-Guided Preference Distillation

Aligning multi-turn dialogue agents is usually framed as matching turn-level human preferences, yet direct optimization of long-term outcomes is often ineffective and prone to reward hacking. We formulate long-horizon dialogue optimization as a multi-objective reinforcement learning problem and train a multi-head value model that predicts a vector of observed user behaviors across multiple look-ahead horizons. Our findings demonstrate that a scalarized composite of dense auxiliary behavioral signals enables effective credit assignment and optimization of sparse outcomes. However, optimizing unconstrained single-objective proxies might induce policy degradations that are harmful when the agent is exposed to real users. To identify these failure modes prior to deployment, we establish a safety framework combining counterfactual user simulation with a validated dialogue-level outcome model to evaluate preference weightings and policy optimization methods. Finally, we demonstrate that distilling multi-objective value preferences into the policy via reference-anchored preference optimization matches on-policy online RL at a small fraction of its compute budget. Live A/B testing confirms that our distilled policy significantly improves long-term user retention, while simultaneously enhancing the positive behaviors and therapeutic-process markers.

Ziyi Zhu, Dan Cahn, Thomas D. Hull et al. · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.