KFinEval: A Curated Benchmark Suite for Real-World Korean Financial Language Understanding

Seonkyu Lim, Bokwang Hwang, Jonghyuk Baek, Jingu Kim, Hangyeol Yoo, KyungTae Lim


Abstract
We introduce KFinEval, a benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in the Korean financial domain, with about 1K expert-curated instances across foundational financial knowledge, regulation-grounded procedural reasoning under noisy contexts, and financial toxicity under adversarial prompts. Existing financial benchmarks are largely English-centric and emphasize numerical or surface reasoning, providing limited coverage of regulation-grounded decision-making and domain-specific safety. Evaluating proprietary and open-weight LLMs, we observe substantial disparities and trade-offs among knowledge accuracy, procedural reasoning, and safety-aligned behavior; notably, strong capability does not consistently translate into safer responses under adversarial financial scenarios. KFinEval provides a practical Korean-regulation-grounded benchmark for diagnosing and improving financial LLM reliability and safety. Code and resources: https://github.com/sklim84/KFinEval.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.286
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6049–6081
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.286/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seonkyu Lim, Bokwang Hwang, Jonghyuk Baek, Jingu Kim, Hangyeol Yoo, and KyungTae Lim. 2026. KFinEval: A Curated Benchmark Suite for Real-World Korean Financial Language Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 6049–6081, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
KFinEval: A Curated Benchmark Suite for Real-World Korean Financial Language Understanding (Lim et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.286.pdf