Evaluating LLMs in Finance Requires Explicit Bias Consideration
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into financial workflows, but evaluation practice has not kept up. Finance-specific biases can inflate performance, contaminate backtests, and make reported results useless for any deployment claim. We identify five recurring biases in financial LLM applications. They include look-ahead bias, survivorship bias, narrative bias, objective bias, and cost bias. These biases break financial tasks in distinct ways and they often compound to create an illusion of validity. We reviewed 164 papers from 2023 to 2025 and found that no single bias is discussed in more than 28 percent of studies. This position paper argues that bias in financial LLM systems requires explicit attention and that structural validity should be enforced before any result is used to support a deployment claim. We propose a Structural Validity Framework and an evaluation checklist with minimal requirements for bias diagnosis and future system design. The material is available at https://github.com/Eleanorkong/Awesome-Financial-LLM-Bias-Mitigation.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 47 of its 71 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2026.
Builds on
47 of 71 references.
References · 47
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35 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.
11 papers.
- 2026Summoning the Oracle to Slay It: Mitigating Look-Ahead Bias in Financial Backtesting with Large Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026When Summaries Distort Decisions: Information Fidelity in LLM-Compressed Financial Analysiscited by 2
- 2026AlphaCrafter: Harnessing Multi-Agent Workflows for Cross-Sectional Quantitative Tradingcited by 1
- 2026MemGuard-Alpha: Limits of Membership Inference for Detecting and Filtering Memorization-Contaminated Signals in LLM-Based Financial Forecastingcited by 0
- 2026Forecasting With LLMs: Improved Generalization Through Feature Steeringcited by 0
- 2026Fund2Persona: A Framework for Building and Refining Financial Advisor Personas from Fund Disclosure Datacited by 0
- 2026Your AI, On a Dial: Controlling Investment Bias in LLMs with a Single Neuroncited by 0
- 2026Poisoning Agentic Alpha: Adversarial Vulnerabilities Across Roles and Architectures in Multi-Agent Trading Systemscited by 0
- 2026The Analyst in the Prompt: Role, Retrieval, and Memory Biases in LLM Financial Analysiscited by 0
- 2026LiveOption: Evaluating LLM Agents in Structured Option Trading with Nonlinear Payoffscited by 0
- 2026FinAutoRubric: Expert-Guided Automatic Rubric Generation for Evaluating Financial Research Agentscited by 0
- 2026FinAutoRubric: Expert-Guided Automatic Rubric Generation for Evaluating Financial Research Agents28 Sep 2026
- 2026LiveOption: Evaluating LLM Agents in Structured Option Trading with Nonlinear Payoffs27 Sep 2026
- 2026The Analyst in the Prompt: Role, Retrieval, and Memory Biases in LLM Financial Analysis2 Sep 2026
- 2026Poisoning Agentic Alpha: Adversarial Vulnerabilities Across Roles and Architectures in Multi-Agent Trading Systems25 Aug 2026
- 2026Your AI, On a Dial: Controlling Investment Bias in LLMs with a Single Neuron24 Aug 2026
- 2026Fund2Persona: A Framework for Building and Refining Financial Advisor Personas from Fund Disclosure Data29 Jun 2026
- 2026When Summaries Distort Decisions: Information Fidelity in LLM-Compressed Financial Analysis28 Jun 2026
- 2026Forecasting With LLMs: Improved Generalization Through Feature Steering25 Jun 2026
- 2026Summoning the Oracle to Slay It: Mitigating Look-Ahead Bias in Financial Backtesting with Large Language Models23 May 2026
- 2026AlphaCrafter: Harnessing Multi-Agent Workflows for Cross-Sectional Quantitative Trading7 May 2026
- 2026MemGuard-Alpha: Limits of Membership Inference for Detecting and Filtering Memorization-Contaminated Signals in LLM-Based Financial Forecasting26 Mar 2026