Program of Thoughts for Financial Reasoning: Leveraging Dynamic In-Context Examples and Generative Retrieval

Subhendu Khatuya, Shashwat Naidu, Pawan Goyal, Niloy Ganguly


Abstract
Despite continuous advancements in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), numerical reasoning remains a challenging area. Techniques like chain-of-thought prompting, tree-of-thought prompting, and program-of-thought prompting guide LLMs through intermediate reasoning steps. Although in-context learning with few-shot prompting has improved performance, LLMs still lag behind state-of-the-art models on financial numerical reasoning datasets such as FinQA and ConvFinQA. In this work, we introduce FINDER, a novel two-step framework, to enhance LLM’s capabilities in financial numerical reasoning. The first step utilizes a generative retriever to extract relevant facts from unstructured data, including both text and tables. This is followed by context-aware Program of Thought prompting with dynamic selection of in-context examples. Our model FINDER achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on both the FinQA and ConvFinQA datasets, surpassing previous benchmarks with execution accuracy improvements of 5.98% and 4.05%, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1577
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
30994–31006
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1577/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Subhendu Khatuya, Shashwat Naidu, Pawan Goyal, and Niloy Ganguly. 2025. Program of Thoughts for Financial Reasoning: Leveraging Dynamic In-Context Examples and Generative Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 30994–31006, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Program of Thoughts for Financial Reasoning: Leveraging Dynamic In-Context Examples and Generative Retrieval (Khatuya et al., EMNLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1577.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.emnlp-main.1577.checklist.pdf