Reasoning Beyond the Obvious: Evaluating Divergent and Convergent Thinking in LLMs for Financial Scenarios

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Bok, Zhuang Qiang, Chua, Watson Wei Khong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Bok, Zhuang Qiang
Chua, Watson Wei Khong
author_facet Bok, Zhuang Qiang
Chua, Watson Wei Khong
contents Most reasoning benchmarks for LLMs emphasize factual accuracy or step-by-step logic. In finance, however, professionals must not only converge on optimal decisions but also generate creative, plausible futures under uncertainty. We introduce ConDiFi, a benchmark that jointly evaluates divergent and convergent thinking in LLMs for financial tasks. ConDiFi features 607 macro-financial prompts for divergent reasoning and 990 multi-hop adversarial MCQs for convergent reasoning. Using this benchmark, we evaluated 14 leading models and uncovered striking differences. Despite high fluency, GPT-4o underperforms on Novelty and Actionability. In contrast, models like DeepSeek-R1 and Cohere Command R+ rank among the top for generating actionable, insights suitable for investment decisions. ConDiFi provides a new perspective to assess reasoning capabilities essential to safe and strategic deployment of LLMs in finance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_18368
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning Beyond the Obvious: Evaluating Divergent and Convergent Thinking in LLMs for Financial Scenarios
Bok, Zhuang Qiang
Chua, Watson Wei Khong
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.0; I.2.6; J.4
Most reasoning benchmarks for LLMs emphasize factual accuracy or step-by-step logic. In finance, however, professionals must not only converge on optimal decisions but also generate creative, plausible futures under uncertainty. We introduce ConDiFi, a benchmark that jointly evaluates divergent and convergent thinking in LLMs for financial tasks. ConDiFi features 607 macro-financial prompts for divergent reasoning and 990 multi-hop adversarial MCQs for convergent reasoning. Using this benchmark, we evaluated 14 leading models and uncovered striking differences. Despite high fluency, GPT-4o underperforms on Novelty and Actionability. In contrast, models like DeepSeek-R1 and Cohere Command R+ rank among the top for generating actionable, insights suitable for investment decisions. ConDiFi provides a new perspective to assess reasoning capabilities essential to safe and strategic deployment of LLMs in finance.
title Reasoning Beyond the Obvious: Evaluating Divergent and Convergent Thinking in LLMs for Financial Scenarios
topic Artificial Intelligence
I.2.0; I.2.6; J.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18368