Financial management is high-stakes, where small errors can propagate into reporting deviations and costly downstream decisions, yet real-world workflows remain labor-intensive and fragmented, and existing automation supports only isolated steps rather than complete workflows. Large language models (LLMs) show promise in automating financial workflows, but current benchmarks lack domain-specific data, realistic workflow-level task design, and standardized workflow-level evaluation. To address these gaps, we present FinMaster, a benchmark for evaluating large language models on full financial management workflows spanning financial literacy, accounting, auditing, and consulting. FinMaster comprises three modules: FinSim generates synthetic datasets compliant with real-world accounting standards for diverse company types, enabling realistic evaluation without relying on proprietary financial records. FinSuite offers 183 tasks across core financial domains. FinEval provides a unified evaluation framework. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models including GPT-4o-mini, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, and DeepSeek-V3 reveal critical capability gaps in financial reasoning, with accuracy dropping from over 90% on basic tasks to 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning. This degradation reflects error propagation, where accuracy reaches 58% for single-metric calculations but decreases to 37% in multi-metric settings. FinMaster provides scalable and reproducible benchmarking for realistic end-to-end financial workflows, helping advance reliable deployment of LLMs in financial practice.

World models achieve remarkable success in predicting future states and planning in complex environments and Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as promising foundation to build general world models. However, their performances are usually constrained by the limited external knowledge to specific environments. Existing research attempts to enhance LLM-based world models through prompting or fine-tuning approaches, which are either requiring human knowledge or computationally extensive. Therefore, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented World Models (RAWM), a novel framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation to efficiently integrate the external knowledge to LLM-based world models. Our main contributions are threefold: (i) We introduce a memory system and design an embedding model to retrieve relevant experiences as the in-context examples to improve the world model’s predictive accuracy. (ii) We develop a reinforcement learning (RL) training pipeline that fine-tunes a small MLP head on the pre-trained embedding model using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), further enhancing prediction performance. (iii) We conduct extensive experiments across three diverse environments, i.e., Game24, BlocksWorld, and BabyAI, demonstrating that RAWM consistently outperforms baseline models and exhibits strong generalizability. By leveraging the retrieval-augmented generation and the efficient RL training pipeline, RAWM dynamically utilizes relevant historical experiences and equips LLMs with environment-specific external knowledge without retraining, enabling more accurate and generalizable predictions.

Natural language has been extensively used for modeling text-attributed graphs with LLMs. Natural language is used to describe the graph for LLMs to understand or serve as component of the graph, e.g., textual attributes for embedding generation. However, natural language is inherently redundant and unstructured, making it unsuitable for modeling high-order neighbors with LLMs. Specifically, (i) graph descriptions become verbose, overwhelming LLMs, and (ii) only relying on attribute embeddings limits LLM’s ability to capture the adequate graph structural information. These limitations make it difficult to model graphs both concisely and adequately using sole natural language with LLMs.Inspired by the observation that LLMs pre-trained on one language can achieve exceptional performance on another with minimal additional training, we propose Graph-Defined Language for Large Language Model (GDL4LLM). This novel framework enables LLMs to transfer their powerful language understanding capabilities to graph-structured data. GDL4LLM translates the graph into a graph language corpus instead of graph descriptions and pre-trains LLMs on this corpus to adequately understand the graph. This corpus represents the subgraph centered around target nodes concisely with only a few tokens during fine-tuning on downstream tasks. By treating the graph as a new language, GDL4LLM enables LLMs to model text-attributed graph adequately and concisely. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that GDL4LLM outperforms description-based and embedding-based baselines by efficiently modeling different orders of neighbors.