Proxy Tuning for Financial Sentiment Analysis: Overcoming Data Scarcity and Computational Barriers

Yuxiang Wang, Yuchi Wang, Yi Liu, Ruihan Bao, Keiko Harimoto, Xu Sun


Abstract
Financial sentiment analysis plays a pivotal role in the financial domain. However, the task remains challenging due to the nuanced nature of financial sentiment, the need for high interpretability, and the scarcity of high-quality datasets. To address these issues, we leverage recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and propose to adapt proxy tuning for financial sentiment analysis. Proxy tuning efficiently transfers knowledge from a pre-trained expert model to a controllable base model by incorporating logit differences, steering the base model toward the desired sentiment representation. Our method offers significant advantages: (1) it is training-free, reducing computational demands and data dependency; (2) it achieves promising performance, with a 36.67% improvement over the base model and over 90% of the tuned model’s performance; and (3) it is highly adaptable, functioning in a plug-and-play manner without requiring access to model architectures or weights. These results demonstrate the potential of proxy tuning as an efficient and practical solution for financial sentiment analysis in data-scarce scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2025.finnlp-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the 9th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP), the 6th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP), and the 1st Workshop on Large Language Models for Finance and Legal (LLMFinLegal)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Chung-Chi Chen, Antonio Moreno-Sandoval, Jimin Huang, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Venues:
FinNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
169–174
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.finnlp-1.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuxiang Wang, Yuchi Wang, Yi Liu, Ruihan Bao, Keiko Harimoto, and Xu Sun. 2025. Proxy Tuning for Financial Sentiment Analysis: Overcoming Data Scarcity and Computational Barriers. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the 9th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP), the 6th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP), and the 1st Workshop on Large Language Models for Finance and Legal (LLMFinLegal), pages 169–174, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Proxy Tuning for Financial Sentiment Analysis: Overcoming Data Scarcity and Computational Barriers (Wang et al., FinNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.finnlp-1.16.pdf