Xiaoya Wang
Author directory2026
E2A-Bench: Benchmarking Evidence-to-Action Reliability in Financial Chart Reasoning
Xiaoya Wang | Yutong Xu | Junjie Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xiaoya Wang | Yutong Xu | Junjie Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Can financial vision–language models (VLMs) turn chart evidence into reliable action recommendations? Existing hallucination evaluations are mostly claim-centric: they assess whether generated statements are supported, but not whether evidence remains traceable through rationale, confidence, and final action. We introduce E2A-Bench, a 969-query benchmark for financial chart reasoning, constructed from 323 HS300 constituents under three input modalities with deterministic OHLCV-derived evidence anchors. E2A-Bench evaluates grounding, reasoning–action consistency, evidence–confidence calibration, and directional coverage through UCR, RCI, ECI, and NDR, where NDR measures coverage-aware evidence-to-action reliability rather than realized trading performance. Evaluating 20 VLMs reveals three failures hidden by scalar hallucination scores: the lowest-UCR model ranks near the bottom by NDR due to only 6.4% directional coverage; oracle-aided verification reduces unsupported claims but can collapse coverage; and financial fine-tuning amplifies the BUY:SELL ratio by 4.21–4.68× across strict base–fine-tuned pairs. These results show that financial VLM evaluation should trace the full evidence-to-action chain rather than rely on a single hallucination score. Code and data: https://github.com/wanng-ide/E2A-Bench .