Powered by advances in LLMs and autonomous agents, deep research has become one of the most widely adopted agentic products. However, most deep research systems write general-purpose reports, which are inadequate for financial deep research. Financial research demands specialized knowledge to analyze historical patterns and forecast upcoming events. Automating financial deep research therefore requires both a layered harness to drive the research agent and a verifiable, point-in-time benchmark that prevents leakage of future information. We present FinanceHarness, a harness that runs finance-oriented tools and practitioner-guided workflows, automating financial deep research end to end: environment and data construction, the agent execution loop, and reward modeling. We further propose FinanceGym comprising thesisdriven research questions and rubrics that combine pre-cutoff and post-cutoff criteria. Professional expert validation yields an 82% pass rate. With the same open-weight backbone, FinanceHarness improves the overall rubric score from 25.3% to 32.4%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our specialized harness design. However, even pairing FinanceHarness with the most cutting edge LLM (e.g. Opus-5), the FinanceHarness score is below 45%, showing that it is a challenging benchmark for financial deep research. FinanceGym and FinanceHarness code are publicaly available.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited the ability to effectively utilize external tools to address user queries. However, their performance may be limited in complex, multi-turn interactions involving users and multiple tools. To address this, we propose Magnet, a principled framework for synthesizing high-quality training trajectories to enhance the function calling capability of large language model agents in multi-turn conversations with humans. The framework is based on automatic and iterative translations from a function signature path to a sequence of queries and executable function calls. We model the complicated function interactions in multi-turn cases with graph and design novel node operations to build reliable signature paths. Motivated by context distillation, when guiding the generation of positive and negative trajectories using a teacher model, we provide reference function call sequences as positive hints in context and contrastive, incorrect function calls as negative hints. Experiments show that training with the positive trajectories with supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization against negative trajectories, our 14B model, Magnet-14B-mDPO, obtains 68.01 on BFCL-v3 and 73.30 on ToolQuery, surpassing the performance of the teacher model Gemini-1.5-pro-002 by a large margin in function calling.