mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

A Survey of Large Language Models for Financial Applications: Progress, Prospects and Challenges

arXiv 2406.11903 ↗First posted 15 Jun 2024q-fin.GN cs.AI q-fin.CPcited by 90

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have unlocked novel opportunities for machine learning applications in the financial domain. These models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding context, processing vast amounts of data, and generating human-preferred contents. In this survey, we explore the application of LLMs on various financial tasks, focusing on their potential to transform traditional practices and drive innovation. We provide a discussion of the progress and advantages of LLMs in financial contexts, analyzing their advanced technologies as well as prospective capabilities in contextual understanding, transfer learning flexibility, complex emotion detection, etc. We then highlight this survey for categorizing the existing literature into key application areas, including linguistic tasks, sentiment analysis, financial time series, financial reasoning, agent-based modeling, and other applications. For each application area, we delve into specific methodologies, such as textual analysis, knowledge-based analysis, forecasting, data augmentation, planning, decision support, and simulations. Furthermore, a comprehensive collection of datasets, model assets, and useful codes associated with mainstream applications are presented as resources for the researchers and practitioners. Finally, we outline the challenges and opportunities for future research, particularly emphasizing a number of distinctive aspects in this field. We hope our work can help facilitate the adoption and further development of LLMs in the financial sector.

Key facts. Cited by 90 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 165 of its 308 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2024.

Builds on

165 of 308 references.

References · 165

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  3. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
  4. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  5. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
  6. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
  7. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,372
  8. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 13,028
  9. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,869
  10. 2013Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Spacecited by 4,375
  11. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,780
  12. 2023QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMscited by 3,418
38 more
  1. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,413
  2. 2023Qwen Technical Reportcited by 3,344
  3. 2023Mistral 7Bcited by 3,164
  4. 2023MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Modelscited by 2,711
  5. 2023A Survey of Large Language Modelscited by 2,576
  6. 2022Emergent Abilities of Large Language Modelscited by 2,512
  7. 2022A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformerscited by 2,039
  8. 2022BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 1,984
  9. 2016Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Informationcited by 1,583
  10. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,439
  11. 2022FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecastingcited by 1,210
  12. 2023BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Financecited by 939
  13. 2024Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challengescited by 769
  14. 2023Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Modelscited by 700
  15. 2014Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documentscited by 678
  16. 2023Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmapcited by 668
  17. 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agentscited by 634
  18. 2023One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LMcited by 632
  19. 2021FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Datacited by 562
  20. 2022Transformers in Time Series: A Surveycited by 497
  21. 2020Time Series Forecasting With Deep Learning: A Surveycited by 459
  22. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model (LLM) Security and Privacy: The Good, the Bad, and the Uglycited by 387
  23. 2019FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 385
  24. 2024Hybrid LLM: Cost-Efficient and Quality-Aware Query Routingcited by 372
  25. 2013Good Debt or Bad Debt: Detecting Semantic Orientations in Economic Textscited by 310
  26. 2024The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bitscited by 308
  27. 2024R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agentscited by 288
  28. 2018A Survey on Deep Learning for Named Entity Recognitioncited by 282
  29. 2023FinanceBench: A New Benchmark for Financial Question Answeringcited by 270
  30. 2023FinGPT: Open-Source Financial Large Language Modelscited by 253
  31. 2024Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Surveycited by 239
  32. 2023Large Language Models in Finance: A Surveycited by 226
  33. 2015A Critical Review of Recurrent Neural Networks for Sequence Learningcited by 224
  34. 2023PIXIU: A Large Language Model, Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Financecited by 222
  35. 2023Defending Against Alignment-Breaking Attacks via Robustly Aligned LLMcited by 192
  36. 2024Large Language Models for Education: A Survey and Outlookcited by 188
  37. 2023FinMem: A Performance-Enhanced LLM Trading Agent with Layered Memory and Character Designcited by 164
  38. 2020FinBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Financial Communicationscited by 161

50 most cited of 165 All 165 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 17; 2025: 49; 2026: 24.

90 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024Time-MoE: Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Models with Mixture of Expertscited by 287
  2. 2025Time-MQA: Time Series Multi-Task Question Answering with Context Enhancementcited by 82
  3. 2024Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Beyond: A Comprehensive Survey on How to Make your LLMs use External Data More Wiselycited by 66
  4. 2025In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified Frameworkcited by 46
  5. 2025SAGA: A Security Architecture for Governing AI Agentic Systemscited by 45
  6. 2025StockBench: Can LLM Agents Trade Stocks Profitably In Real-world Markets?cited by 44
  7. 2025TimeXL: Explainable Multi-modal Time Series Prediction with LLM-in-the-Loopcited by 39
  8. 2024Open-FinLLMs: Open Multimodal Large Language Models for Financial Applicationscited by 36
  9. 2025MedHallu: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Detecting Medical Hallucinations in Large Language Modelscited by 34
  10. 2024Towards Neural Scaling Laws for Time Series Foundation Modelscited by 33
  11. 2025FinSearchComp: Towards a Realistic, Expert-Level Evaluation of Financial Search and Reasoningcited by 27
  12. 2025Achieving Time Series Reasoning Requires Rethinking Model Design, Tasks Formulation, and Evaluationcited by 17
38 more
  1. 2025FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoningcited by 15
  2. 2025Decision-informed Neural Networks with Large Language Model Integration for Portfolio Optimizationcited by 14
  3. 2025Do LLMs Really Forget? Evaluating Unlearning with Knowledge Correlation and Confidence Awarenesscited by 14
  4. 2025Standard Benchmarks Fail -- Auditing LLM Agents in Finance Must Prioritize Riskcited by 13
  5. 2025Agentic AI Systems Applied to tasks in Financial Services: Modeling and model risk management crewscited by 12
  6. 2025TS-Reasoner: Aligning Time Series Foundation Models with LLM Reasoningcited by 12
  7. 2024Evaluating Tokenizer Performance of Large Language Models Across Official Indian Languagescited by 11
  8. 2024FinRobot: AI Agent for Equity Research and Valuation with Large Language Modelscited by 10
  9. 2025H2R: Hierarchical Hindsight Reflection for Multi-Task LLM Agentscited by 8
  10. 2025Are Large Language Models Sensitive to the Motives Behind Communication?cited by 8
  11. 2026SoK: Security of Autonomous LLM Agents in Agentic Commercecited by 8
  12. 2025The Trojan Knowledge: Bypassing Commercial LLM Guardrails via Harmless Prompt Weaving and Adaptive Tree Searchcited by 7
  13. 2025LOB-Bench: Benchmarking Generative AI for Finance -- an Application to Limit Order Book Datacited by 5
  14. 2025Interpretable LLMs for Credit Risk: A Systematic Review and Taxonomycited by 5
  15. 2025FinCoT: Grounding Chain-of-Thought in Expert Financial Reasoningcited by 5
  16. 2024DeFine: Decision-Making with Analogical Reasoning over Factor Profilescited by 4
  17. 2025Bridging Language Models and Financial Analysiscited by 4
  18. 2025Understanding and Mitigating Risks of Generative AI in Financial Servicescited by 4
  19. 2025Finance Language Model Evaluation (FLaME)cited by 4
  20. 2025Advancing Financial Engineering with Foundation Models: Progress, Applications, and Challengescited by 4
  21. 2024Improving Math Problem Solving in Large Language Models Through Categorization and Strategy Tailoringcited by 3
  22. 2024Ethical Concern Identification in NLP: A Corpus of ACL Anthology Ethics Statementscited by 3
  23. 2025FinNLI: Novel Dataset for Multi-Genre Financial Natural Language Inference Benchmarkingcited by 3
  24. 2025MASCA: LLM based-Multi Agents System for Credit Assessmentcited by 3
  25. 2025Knowledge-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Explainable Financial Decision-Makingcited by 3
  26. 2026Seg-MoE: Multi-Resolution Segment-wise Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Forecasting Transformerscited by 3
  27. 2024UCFE: A User-Centric Financial Expertise Benchmark for Large Language Modelscited by 2
  28. 2024Energy Price Modelling: A Comparative Evaluation of four Generations of Forecasting Methodscited by 2
  29. 2024MemHunter: Automated and Verifiable Memorization Detection at Dataset-scale in LLMscited by 2
  30. 2025FinSphere, a Real-Time Stock Analysis Agent Powered by Instruction-Tuned LLMs and Domain Toolscited by 2
  31. 2025FinEval-KR: A Financial Domain Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models' Knowledge and Reasoningcited by 2
  32. 2025To Trade or Not to Trade: An Agentic Approach to Estimating Market Risk Improves Trading Decisionscited by 2
  33. 2025EventTSF: Event-Aware Non-Stationary Time Series Forecastingcited by 2
  34. 2025Exploring Large Language Models for Financial Applications: Techniques, Performance, and Challenges with FinMAcited by 2
  35. 2025Are Foundation Models Useful for Bankruptcy Prediction?cited by 2
  36. 2026A Review of Large Language Models for Stock Price Forecasting from a Hedge-Fund Perspectivecited by 2
  37. 2026Reflections and New Directions for Human-Centered Large Language Modelscited by 2
  38. 2024Temporal Representation Learning for Stock Similarities and Its Applications in Investment Managementcited by 1

50 most cited of 90 All 90 (JSON)