# Designing Heterogeneous LLM Agents for Financial Sentiment Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05799/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Financial trading and forecasting agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 19 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Financial trading and forecasting agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/financial-trading-and-forecasting-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05128/) (2023)
- [Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16452/) (2023)
- [Good Debt or Bad Debt: Detecting Semantic Orientations in Economic Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1307.5336/) (2013)
- [Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15005/) (2023)
- [Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06977/) (2021)
- [The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03915/) (2023)
- [WHEN FLUE MEETS FLANG: Benchmarks and Large Pre-trained Language Model for Financial Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00083/) (2022)
- [An Information-theoretic Approach to Prompt Engineering Without Ground Truth Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11364/) (2022)
- [Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11255/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Financial Sentiment Analysis via Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04027/) (2023)
- [What do LLMs Know about Financial Markets? A Case Study on Reddit Market Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11311/) (2022)
- [SEntFiN 1.0: Entity-Aware Sentiment Analysis for Financial News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12257/) (2023)
- [FinEntity: Entity-level Sentiment Classification for Financial Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12406/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Conducting Advanced Text Analytics Information Systems Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17278/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [TradingAgents: Multi-Agents LLM Financial Trading Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20138/) (2024)
- [AI Agents Under Threat: A Survey of Key Security Challenges and Future Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02630/) (2024)
- [FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06567/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models for Financial Applications: Progress, Prospects and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11903/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Agent in Financial Trading: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06361/) (2024)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Large Models: A Survey of Methodologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19878/) (2024)
- [Social Science Meets LLMs: How Reliable Are Large Language Models in Social Simulations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23426/) (2024)
- [Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04638/) (2024)
- [TripTailor: A Real-World Benchmark for Personalized Travel Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01432/) (2025)
- [LLaMAs Have Feelings Too: Unveiling Sentiment and Emotion Representations in LLaMA Models Through Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16491/) (2025)
- [Trading-R1: Financial Trading with LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11420/) (2025)
- [Better to Ask in English: Evaluation of Large Language Models on English, Low-resource and Cross-Lingual Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13153/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Financial Question Answering with a Multi-Agent Reflection Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21741/) (2024)
- [Agentic AI Systems Applied to tasks in Financial Services: Modeling and model risk management crews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05439/) (2025)
- [PSG-Agent: Personality-Aware Safety Guardrail for LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23614/) (2025)
- [The Hidden Strength of Disagreement: Unraveling the Consensus-Diversity Tradeoff in Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16565/) (2025)
- [TokenFlow: Responsive LLM Text Streaming Serving under Request Burst via Preemptive Scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02758/) (2025)
- [A Simple Ensemble Strategy for LLM Inference: Towards More Stable Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18884/) (2025)
- [Replayable Financial Agents: A Determinism-Faithfulness Assurance Harness for Tool-Using LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15322/) (2026)
- [Do Large Language Models Speak All Languages Equally? A Comparative Study in Low-Resource Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02237/) (2024)
- [P2P: A Poison-to-Poison Remedy for Reliable Backdoor Defense in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04503/) (2025)
- [Multi-level Value Alignment in Agentic AI Systems: Survey and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09656/) (2025)
- [Bridging Language Models and Financial Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22693/) (2025)
- [Finance Language Model Evaluation (FLaME)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15846/) (2025)
- [Trade in Minutes! Rationality-Driven Agentic System for Quantitative Financial Trading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04787/) (2025)
- [AutoQual: An LLM Agent for Automated Discovery of Interpretable Features for Review Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08081/) (2025)
- [DiffoRA: Enabling Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Differential Module Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08905/) (2025)
- [Mixup Model Merge: Enhancing Model Merging Performance through Randomized Linear Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15434/) (2025)
- [When LLMs Team Up: The Emergence of Collaborative Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01698/) (2025)
- [A Scalable Entity-Based Framework for Auditing Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12374/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have drastically changed the possible ways to design intelligent systems, shifting the focuses from massive data acquisition and new modeling training to human alignment and strategical elicitation of the full potential of existing pre-trained models. This paradigm shift, however, is not fully realized in financial sentiment analysis (FSA), due to the discriminative nature of this task and a lack of prescriptive knowledge of how to leverage generative models in such a context. This study investigates the effectiveness of the new paradigm, i.e., using LLMs without fine-tuning for FSA. Rooted in Minsky's theory of mind and emotions, a design framework with heterogeneous LLM agents is proposed. The framework instantiates specialized agents using prior domain knowledge of the types of FSA errors and reasons on the aggregated agent discussions. Comprehensive evaluation on FSA datasets show that the framework yields better accuracies, especially when the discussions are substantial. This study contributes to the design foundations and paves new avenues for LLMs-based FSA. Implications on business and management are also discussed.