Zhongying CuiZhu
Author directory2026
FinanceHarness: Autonomous Financial Deep Research Framework
Yijia Xiao | Rujun Han | Yanfei Chen | Zifeng Wang | Ke Jiang | Zhongying CuiZhu | Wei Wang | Tomas Pfister | Chen-Yu Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yijia Xiao | Rujun Han | Yanfei Chen | Zifeng Wang | Ke Jiang | Zhongying CuiZhu | Wei Wang | Tomas Pfister | Chen-Yu Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
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.