E2A-Bench: Benchmarking Evidence-to-Action Reliability in Financial Chart Reasoning
E2A-Bench, a 969-query financial chart reasoning benchmark, finds VLMs fail evidence-to-action consistency, with fine-tuning amplifying BUY:SELL bias 4-6x.
E2A-Bench is a 969-query benchmark built from 323 HS300 constituents across three input modalities with deterministic OHLCV-derived evidence anchors, evaluating grounding, reasoning-action consistency, evidence-confidence calibration, and directional coverage via UCR, RCI, ECI, and NDR metrics. Testing 20 VLMs showed the lowest-hallucination model ranked near the bottom on coverage with only 6.4% directional coverage, and oracle-aided verification reduced unsupported claims but could collapse coverage. Financial fine-tuning amplified the BUY:SELL ratio by factors of 4.21 to 4.68 across base-fine-tuned pairs.
- 969-query benchmark from 323 HS300 constituents with OHLCV-derived evidence anchors
- Evaluates 20 VLMs on grounding, reasoning-action consistency, calibration, coverage
- Lowest-hallucination model achieves only 6.4% directional coverage
- Financial fine-tuning amplifies BUY:SELL ratio by 4.21x to 4.68x
Full article165 words · extracted from huggingface.co · click to collapse
Can financial vision-language models (VLMs) turn chart evidence into reliable action recommendations? Existing hallucination evaluations are mostly claim-centric; they assess whether generated statements are supported, but not whether evidence remains traceable through rationale, confidence, and final action. We introduce E2A-Bench, a 969-query benchmark for financial chart reasoning, constructed from 323 HS300 constituents under three input modalities with deterministic OHLCV-derived evidence anchors. E2A-Bench evaluates grounding, reasoning-action consistency, evidence-confidence calibration, and directional coverage through UCR, RCI, ECI, and NDR, where NDR measures coverage-aware evidence-to-action reliability rather than realized trading performance. Evaluating 20 VLMs reveals three failures hidden by scalar hallucination scores: the lowest-UCR model ranks near the bottom by NDR due to only 6.4% directional coverage; oracle-aided verification reduces unsupported claims but can collapse coverage; and financial fine-tuning amplifies the BUY:SELL ratio by factors of 4.21 to 4.68 across strict base-fine-tuned pairs. These results show that financial VLM evaluation should trace the full evidence-to-action chain rather than rely on a single hallucination score. Code and data: https://github.com/wanng-ide/E2A-Bench
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.14302