Chi Zhang
Publications
FinPerMA: A Theory-Informed, Event-Grounded Personalized-Memory Benchmark for LLM Agents
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used as personalized assistants in high-stakes domains such as financial advising, yet it remains unclear whether they can maintain and update an individualized user model over long horizons. Existing personalized-memory benchmarks primarily test factual retention or rely on weakly constrained model-generated trajectories, leaving event-driven preference adaptation underexplored. We introduce FinPerMA, an event-grounded benchmark that evaluates personalized memory against frozen longitudinal investor trajectories. Its generation pipeline combines deterministic, theory-informed impact rules, controlled LLM narration, and automated quality screening; a Post-Shock checkpoint isolates whether an agent has integrated a material event into its persistent user model. On 2,994 questions from 276 personas, seven frontier LLMs and up to seven memory configurations remain far from saturated: no full-context configuration exceeds approximately 0.47 overall accuracy or approximately 39% on multiple-choice questions. Attribution analysis shows that summary-based memory often preserves factual details while losing the preference signals needed for personalization; simple retrieval can therefore outperform purpose-built memory systems, with the gap widening after shocks.
FinProBench: Evaluating Financial AI Agents with Role-Grounded Rubrics Derived from Professional Deliverables
Evaluating financial AI agents requires criteria aligned with real professional work. Existing rubric methods typically derive criteria from task prompts or model outputs, overlooking tacit standards visible only in practitioner deliverables. We introduce FinProBench, a benchmark for professional financial tasks, and Role-Grounded Rubric Construction (RGRC), a reusable pipeline that derives rubrics from deliverables produced by practitioners in the same role. RGRC comprises four stages: Deliverable Collection, Competency Extraction, Rubric Synthesis, and Validation. Its rubrics capture tacit standards, distinguish quality levels, and transfer across tasks within a role. Before analysis, we classified 57 occupations by deliverable genre into 30 prior-rich conventional roles and 27 prior-sparse role-specialized roles. Across all roles, Prompt-only nearly matches RGRC for conventional roles (89.2% vs. 90.7%), but RGRC substantially outperforms it for role-specialized roles (99.1% vs. 78.0%). This split indicates that prompt engineering can approximate rubrics when conventions are well represented in model priors, while professional grounding is essential for standards beyond those priors. FinProBench is built from 1,723 curated deliverables spanning 57 occupations, 8 financial sub-industries, and 161 deliverable types, and releases an initial evaluation set of 20 complete tasks covering 20 roles in 7 sub-industries. With heterogeneous LLM judges and role-level rubrics, human deliverables rank first on average (73.7 vs. 70.3, 70.2, and 69.6 out of 100), while all four systems show overlapping 95% confidence intervals and complementary strengths. Reusing rubrics at the role level reduces estimated per-task construction effort by 6.7 times relative to authoring each rubric from scratch.
Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on CFMME: A Comprehensive Chinese Financial Multimodal Evaluation Dataset
The emergence of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has substantially expanded model capabilities beyond text-only understanding, enabling unified inference across both visual and textual modalities and supporting a broader range of real-world applications. To comprehensively evaluate the perception, understanding, reasoning, and cognition capabilities of LVLMs throughout the entire financial business workflow in Chinese contexts, we introduce CFMME, a novel Chinese financial multimodal evaluation benchmark. CFMME comprises 6,052 instances spanning from fundamental academic knowledge to complex real-world applications, covering eight primary financial image modalities and four core multimodal tasks. On CFMME, we conduct a thorough evaluation of representative LVLMs. The results show that the state-of-the-art model attains an overall accuracy of 66.11\% on the question answering task and an average score of 77.18 on the detection, recognition, and information extraction tasks, indicating substantial room for improvement in current LVLMs. In addition, we conduct detailed analyses of error causes, cross-modal capabilities, and multi-orientation settings, yielding valuable insights for future research. We hope that CFMME will spur further progress in LVLMs, especially by improving their performance on multiple multimodal tasks in the financial domain.
ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversations
Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems mainly rely on end-to-end response generation or coarse strategy supervision, offering limited interpretability and little support for systematic skill improvement. We propose ESC-Skills, a skill-centric framework that discovers and self-evolves executable emotional support skills. We first model localized support interactions as Intervention Units (IUs), which capture state--action--outcome dynamics between seeker states, support interventions, and post-response emotional changes. Based on IUs extracted from both successful and failed ESC dialogues, we construct the ESC-Skills Bank, a repository of executable emotional support skills containing intervention guidance, applicability conditions, expected outcomes, and potential risks. To further improve robustness, we introduce a multi-profile self-evolutionary refinement framework in which an ESC agent interacts with diverse simulated seeker profiles under SAGE evaluation. The resulting interaction traces are analyzed to identify missing skills, unsafe interventions, and profile-specific failure patterns, which are then used to refine the Skills Bank through simulation-based verification. Experimental results demonstrate that ESC-Skills improves both response-level quality and dialogue-level emotional outcomes while providing more interpretable and controllable support behaviors. We will release the code, prompts, and ESC-Skills Bank at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.
The MiniMax-M2 Series: Mini Activations Unleashing Max Real-World Intelligence
We introduce the MiniMax-M2 series, a family of Mixture-of-Experts language models built around the principle that mini activations can unleash maximum real-world intelligence. The flagship M2 contains 229.9B total parameters with only 9.8B activated per token. Designed end-to-end for agentic deployment, the M2 series rests on three components: (i) agent-driven data pipelines producing large-scale, verifiable trajectories across agentic coding and agentic cowork, each grounded in an executable workspace and an artifact-aligned reward; (ii) Forge, a scalable agent-native RL system that adapts to long-horizon agent trajectories, paired with windowed-FIFO scheduling, prefix-tree merging, inference optimization, and a clean training-inference-agent decoupling that supports both white-box and black-box agents; (iii) the latest M2.7 checkpoint takes an early step toward self-evolution -- autonomously debugging training runs and modifying its own scaffold. Across M2 through M2.7, this combination translates a mini-activation footprint into frontier-tier performance on agentic coding, deep search, office-task, and reasoning benchmarks.
FinMCP-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Real-World Financial Tool Use under the Model Context Protocol
This paper introduces \textbf{FinMCP-Bench}, a novel benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in solving real-world financial problems through tool invocation of financial model context protocols. FinMCP-Bench contains 613 samples spanning 10 main scenarios and 33 sub-scenarios, featuring both real and synthetic user queries to ensure diversity and authenticity. It incorporates 65 real financial MCPs and three types of samples, single tool, multi-tool, and multi-turn, allowing evaluation of models across different levels of task complexity. Using this benchmark, we systematically assess a range of mainstream LLMs and propose metrics that explicitly measure tool invocation accuracy and reasoning capabilities. FinMCP-Bench provides a standardized, practical, and challenging testbed for advancing research on financial LLM agents.