Mengpu Liu
Author directory2026
Advancing ESG Intelligence: An Expert-level Agent and Comprehensive Benchmark for Sustainable Finance
Yilei Zhao | Wentao Zhang | Lei Xiao | Yandan Zheng | Mengpu Liu | Wei Yang Bryan Lim
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yilei Zhao | Wentao Zhang | Lei Xiao | Yandan Zheng | Mengpu Liu | Wei Yang Bryan Lim
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria are essential for evaluating corporate sustainability, yet professional ESG analysis is hindered by data fragmentation and complex multi-step workflows. Existing ESG benchmarks rely on LLM-generated questions that often suffer from semantic ambiguity, limiting their diagnostic reliability. We introduce ESGAgent, a hierarchical multi-agent system with a domain-oriented toolset for automating end-to-end ESG workflows, and a three-level benchmark derived from 310 corporate sustainability reports, featuring expert-sourced questions with verified, unambiguous answers at Levels 1-2 and full report generation at Level 3. Evaluations across 20 state-of-the-art closed-source LLMs show that ESGAgent achieves 84.15% accuracy on Levels 1-2, surpassing the strongest baseline by 3.26 points, and produces Level 3 reports with higher factual consistency and analytical depth than commercial deep research systems, validated by both multi-LLM judging and human expert evaluation, showing a robust alignment (Pearson r=0.551).