Financial statement analysis

A small model that works out figures from annual reports, and what it takes to improve it

The model reads one page of a bank's, insurer's or payment company's annual report and calculates what the analyst asks: a growth rate, a share of a total, a change between years. Questions come from FinQA, a public benchmark written by finance experts; none were seen in training.

The task, in three questions

Each card shows the table from the report, the question and the benchmark's answer. Press Play to replay what each setup answered.

What moved the score

Each bar is a separate setup on the same 144 unseen questions, all from the shorter half of the benchmark's 297, so every score is a little higher than on the full set. Share answered correctly, to within 1%.

    Rules: none of them helped here

    Each was tried on 100 practice questions from the benchmark's separate development set. The number is its change against the model alone (64%). The mistakes are mostly the wrong row, the wrong year or a misread question, which a calculator cannot repair. A few points either way is within chance at this size.

    Distillation: learn from the large model's worked answers, then ask for help when unsure

    Training loss

    How far the model's answers were from the correct ones during training, every 5 steps. Lower is better. One pass through the examples.

    Where it helped and where it did not

    Share correct by type, on the unseen test.

    Tried and dropped

    Every question

    Click a question to replay it, or run all 144 at once.