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:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1577.pdf