Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2606.13100

LEDGER: A Long-Context Benchmark of Corporate Annual Reports for Grounded Financial Retrieval and Extraction

Abstract

Finance reporting is a natural proving ground for large language models, and the very-long-context capabilities of recent models across all sizes make rigorous evaluation in this domain an increasingly pressing need. Yet most public financial resources reduce the task to plain-text SEC 10-K filings paired with a handful of question-answer items. We release LEDGER (Long-context Evaluation of Documents for Grounded Extraction and Retrieval), a corpus of 4,999 digitized corporate annual reports - full documents with figures, tables, and narrative, not just regulatory filings. Each report is labeled with 31 consolidated financial KPIs to be extracted and linked to the market's reaction at the earnings date. From this data we derive three evaluation benchmarks spanning the difficulty spectrum: a pure page-level KPI retrieval task with TREC-style relevance judgments over 118,048 questions in natural language, a conversational "needle-in-a-haystack" single-value lookup, and a full KPI extraction task, both from long, numerically dense reports. We additionally provide human OCR-quality annotations with inter-annotator agreement and the complete extraction, validation, and scoring toolchain. We further demonstrate the dataset's research utility with a case study linking CEO-letter rhetoric to post-publication market impact.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Charles Moslonka, Amaury de Vitry, Arthur Garnier, Hicham Randrianarivo, Emmanuel Malherbe. 2026-06-11. LEDGER: A Long-Context Benchmark of Corporate Annual Reports for Grounded Financial Retrieval and Extraction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13100

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

What is the Role of Small Models in the LLM Era: A Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various reasoning tasks, which leads to the development of increasingly large models. However, scaling up model sizes results in significantly higher computational costs and energy consumption, which makes these models impractical for academic researchers and businesses with limited resources. At the same time, Small Models (SMs) are frequently used in practical settings, although their significance is currently underestimated. This raises important questions about the role of small models in the era of LLMs, a topic that has received limited attention in prior surveys. In this work, we systematically examine the relationship between LLMs and SMs from two key perspectives: Collaboration and Competition (or Complementarity). We hope this survey provides valuable insights for practitioners, fostering a deeper understanding of the contribution of small models and promoting more efficient use of computational resources.

cs.CL

SG-FSM: A Self-Guiding Zero-Shot Prompting Paradigm for Multi-Hop Question Answering Based on Finite State Machine

Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. However, Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) remains challenging for many existing models due to issues like hallucination, error propagation, and limited context length. To address these challenges and enhance LLMs' performance on MHQA, we propose the Self-Guiding prompting Finite State Machine (SG-FSM), designed to strengthen multi-hop reasoning abilities. Unlike traditional chain-of-thought methods, SG-FSM tackles MHQA by iteratively breaking down complex questions into sub-questions, correcting itself to improve accuracy. It processes one sub-question at a time, dynamically deciding the next step based on the current context and results, functioning much like an automaton. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming strong baselines on challenging datasets such as Musique. SG-FSM reduces hallucination, enabling recovery of the correct final answer despite intermediate errors. It also improves adherence to specified output formats, simplifying evaluation significantly.

cs.CL

A Course Intelligence Platform for Higher Education: Lessons from AI-Assisted Course Evaluation

The rapid adoption of generative AI has created new opportunities for teaching, learning, and quality assurance. Existing applications, however, remain largely student-facing, with comparatively limited attention to institution-level needs. This paper presents a course intelligence platform deployed across more than 100 universities and serving over 10,000 instructors in China. By linking competency requirements, knowledge structures, teaching activities, and assessment evidence, it establishes a shared foundation for knowledge organization, instructional design, learning assessment, and quality evaluation. The course evaluation module is examined as a representative institution-facing application of the platform, which integrates national evaluation standards, structured educational evidence, customized prompting strategies, and domain-adapted LLMs to generate quantitative scores and qualitative feedback. A case study involving 100 authentic university courses is conducted to evaluate its alignment with expert judgments and the interpretability of its outputs. Statistical analyses show substantial agreement between AI-generated assessments and expert ratings, while qualitative results highlight the credibility of the feedback. The findings further suggest that AI-assisted evaluation requires not only capable models but also structured domain knowledge and transparent criteria. In this context, human ratings should be treated as an informative reference rather than an error-free gold standard, and the objective is to achieve consistent, interpretable, and defensible judgments instead of merely replicating expert scores.

cs.CL