Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown increasing potential for applications in the financial domain. However, the challenges posed by real-world financial scenarios, including high-information-density, strong noise interference, and cross-modal multi-hop reasoning, go beyond the evaluation scope of existing financial multimodal benchmarks. To this end, we propose UniFinEval, the first unified multimodal financial evaluation benchmark designed for high-density financial information environments, covering three modalities: text, image, and video. UniFinEval abstracts three progressive core scenarios from perception to reasoning and decision-making, and further refines them into six task categories. It contains 5,567 high-quality Chinese and English question–answer (QA) pairs constructed by financial experts. We systematically evaluate 10 mainstream MLLMs under zero-shot and chain-of-thought (CoT) settings. Experimental results show that Gemini-3-Pro achieves the best overall performance, but still exhibits a significant gap compared with financial experts. Further error analysis reveals the capability deficiencies of MLLMs in financial scenarios. UniFinEval aims to systematically evaluate the capabilities of MLLMs in real financial scenarios, thereby promoting the application of MLLMs in the financial domain. The related code and data are available at https://github.com/aifinlab/UniFinEval.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in financial scenarios. However, they may produce harmful outputs, including facilitating illegal activities or unethical behavior, posing serious compliance risks. To systematically evaluate LLM safety in finance, we propose FinSafetyBench, a bilingual (English-Chinese) red-teaming benchmark designed to test an LLM’s refusal of requests that violate financial compliance. Grounded in real-world financial crime cases and ethics standards, the benchmark comprises 14 subcategories spanning financial crimes and ethical violations. Through extensive experiments on general-purpose and finance-specialized LLMs under three representative attack settings, we identify critical vulnerabilities that allow adversarial prompts to bypass compliance safeguards. Further analysis reveals stronger susceptibility in Chinese contexts and highlights the limitations of prompt-level defenses against sophisticated or implicit manipulation strategies.

Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks, but their security capabilities in the financial domain have not been explored, and their performance on complex tasks like financial agent remains unknown. This paper presents FinEval, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ financial domain knowledge and practical abilities. The dataset contains 8,351 questions categorized into four different key areas: Financial Academic Knowledge, Financial Industry Knowledge, Financial Security Knowledge, and Financial Agent. Financial Academic Knowledge comprises 4,661 multiple-choice questions spanning 34 subjects such as finance and economics. Financial Industry Knowledge contains 1,434 questions covering practical scenarios like investment research. Financial Security Knowledge assesses models through 1,640 questions on topics like application security and cryptography. Financial Agent evaluates tool usage and complex reasoning with 616 questions. FinEval has multiple evaluation settings, including zero-shot, five-shot with chain-of-thought, and assesses model performance using objective and subjective criteria. Our results show that Claude 3.5-Sonnet achieves the highest weighted average score of 72.9 across all financial domain categories under zero-shot setting. Our work provides a comprehensive benchmark closely aligned with Chinese financial domain. The data and the code are available at https://github.com/SUFE-AIFLMLab/FinEval.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great promise for automating complex financial analysis. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce VisFinEval, the first large-scale Chinese benchmark that spans the full front-middle-back office lifecycle of financial tasks. VisFinEval comprises 15,848 annotated question–answer pairs drawn from eight common financial image modalities (e.g., K-line charts, financial statements, official seals), organized into three hierarchical scenario depths: Financial Knowledge & Data Analysis, Financial Analysis & Decision Support, and Financial Risk Control & Asset Optimization. We evaluate 21 state-of-the-art MLLMs in a zero-shot setting. The top model, Qwen-VL-max, achieves an overall accuracy of 76.3%, outperforming non-expert humans but trailing financial experts by over 14 percentage points. Our error analysis uncovers six recurring failure modes—including cross-modal misalignment, hallucinations, and lapses in business-process reasoning—that highlight critical avenues for future research. VisFinEval aims to accelerate the development of robust, domain-tailored MLLMs capable of seamlessly integrating textual and visual financial information. The data and the code are available at https://github.com/SUFE-AIFLM-Lab/VisFinEval.