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.