Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is becoming increasingly essential for Question Answering (QA) in the financial sector, where accurate and contextually grounded insights from complex public disclosures are crucial. However, existing financial RAG systems face two significant challenges: (1) they struggle to process heterogeneous data formats, such as text, tables, and figures; and (2) they encounter difficulties in balancing general-domain applicability with company-specific adaptation. To overcome these challenges, we present VeritasFi, an innovative hybrid RAG framework that incorporates a multi-modal preprocessing pipeline alongside a cutting-edge two-stage training strategy for its re-ranking component. VeritasFi enhances financial QA through three key innovations: (1) A multi-modal preprocessing pipeline that seamlessly transforms heterogeneous data into a coherent, machine-readable format. (2) A tripartite hybrid retrieval engine that operates in parallel, combining deep multi-path retrieval over a semantically indexed document corpus, real-time data acquisition through tool utilization, and an expert-curated memory bank for high-frequency questions, ensuring comprehensive scope, accuracy, and efficiency. (3) A two-stage training strategy for the document re-ranker, which initially constructs a general, domain-specific model using anonymized data, followed by rapid fine-tuning on company-specific data for targeted applications. By integrating our proposed designs, VeritasFi presents a novel framework that greatly enhances the adaptability and robustness of financial RAG systems, providing a scalable solution for both general-domain and company-specific QA tasks. Code accompanying this work is available at https://github.com/simplew4y/VeritasFi.git.

Leveraging large language models in real-world settings often entails a need to utilize domain-specific data and tools in order to follow the complex regulations that need to be followed for acceptable use. Within financial sectors, modern enterprises increasingly rely on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to address complex information retrieval in financial document workflows. However, existing solutions struggle to account for the inherent heterogeneity of data (e.g., text, tables, diagrams) and evolving complexity in financial filings, leading to compromised accuracy in critical information extraction. We propose the FinSage framework as a solution, utilizing a multi-aspect RAG framework tailored for data retrieval and summarization in multi-modal financial documents. øurmodel introduces three innovative components: (1) a multi-modal pre-processing pipeline that unifies diverse data formats and generates chunk-level metadata summaries, (2) a multi-path sparse-dense retrieval system augmented with query expansion (HyDE) and metadata-aware semantic search, and (3) a domain-specialized re-ranking module fine-tuned via Direct Preference Optimization to prioritize ground-truth-related content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FinSage achieves an impressive recall of 92.51% on 75 expert-curated questions derived from surpasses the best baseline method on the FinanceBench question answering datasets by 24.06% in accuracy. Moreover, FinSage has been successfully deployed as financial question-answering system in online meetings, where it has already served more than 1,200 people. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/simplew4y/finsage.

Taxonomy is a fundamental type of knowledge graph for a wide range of web applications like searching and recommendation systems. To keep a taxonomy automatically updated with the latest concepts, the taxonomy completion task matches a pair of proper hypernym and hyponym in the original taxonomy with the new concept as its parent and child. Previous solutions utilize term embeddings as input and only evaluate the parent-child relations between the new concept and the hypernym-hyponym pair. Such methods ignore the important sibling relations, and are not applicable in reality since term embeddings are not available for the latest concepts. They also suffer from the relational noise of the “pseudo-leaf” node, which is a null node acting as a node’s hyponym to enable the new concept to be a leaf node. To tackle the above drawbacks, we propose the Quadruple Evaluation Network (QEN), a novel taxonomy completion framework that utilizes easily accessible term descriptions as input, and applies pretrained language model and code attention for accurate inference while reducing online computation. QEN evaluates both parent-child and sibling relations to both enhance the accuracy and reduce the noise brought by pseudo-leaf. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets in different domains with different sizes and term description sources prove the effectiveness and robustness of QEN on overall performance and especially the performance for adding non-leaf nodes, which largely surpasses previous methods and achieves the new state-of-the-art of the task.1

Taxonomy is a hierarchically structured knowledge graph that plays a crucial role in machine intelligence. The taxonomy expansion task aims to find a position for a new term in an existing taxonomy to capture the emerging knowledge in the world and keep the taxonomy dynamically updated. Previous taxonomy expansion solutions neglect valuable information brought by the hierarchical structure and evaluate the correctness of merely an added edge, which downgrade the problem to node-pair scoring or mini-path classification. In this paper, we propose the Hierarchy Expansion Framework (HEF), which fully exploits the hierarchical structure’s properties to maximize the coherence of expanded taxonomy. HEF makes use of taxonomy’s hierarchical structure in multiple aspects: i) HEF utilizes subtrees containing most relevant nodes as self-supervision data for a complete comparison of parental and sibling relations; ii) HEF adopts a coherence modeling module to evaluate the coherence of a taxonomy’s subtree by integrating hypernymy relation detection and several tree-exclusive features; iii) HEF introduces the Fitting Score for position selection, which explicitly evaluates both path and level selections and takes full advantage of parental relations to interchange information for disambiguation and self-correction. Extensive experiments show that by better exploiting the hierarchical structure and optimizing taxonomy’s coherence, HEF vastly surpasses the prior state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets by an average improvement of 46.7% in accuracy and 32.3% in mean reciprocal rank.

Supervised learning relies heavily on readily available labelled data to infer an effective classification function. However, proposed methods under the supervised learning paradigm are faced with the scarcity of labelled data within domains, and are not generalized enough to adapt to other tasks. Transfer learning has proved to be a worthy choice to address these issues, by allowing knowledge to be shared across domains and tasks. In this paper, we propose two transfer learning methods Anchored Model Transfer (AMT) and Soft Instance Transfer (SIT), which are both based on multi-task learning, and account for model transfer and instance transfer, and can be combined into a common framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AMT and SIT for aspect-level sentiment classification showing the competitive performance against baseline models on benchmark datasets. Interestingly, we show that the integration of both methods AMT+SIT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the same task.