Critic Agents Improve Numerical QA On Financials
Nelvin Tan et al. (arXiv v3, Jan 7, 2026) analyze critic agents for numerical question answering on financial documents and show traditional critics deteriorate without oracle labels. They introduce an improved critic plus a calculator agent that outperform the prior program-of-thought baseline and provide safer outputs. The paper also examines agent interactions and their effects on accuracy, indicating practical improvements for financial numerical reasoning workflows.
Key Points
- 1Demonstrate critic agents degrade when oracle labels are unavailable on financial numerical QA
- 2Introduce improved critic plus a calculator agent that outperforms program-of-thought baseline and increases safety
- 3Suggests multi-agent coordination and specialized calculators enable more accurate, safer numerical reasoning in finance
Scoring Rationale
Method shows strong SOTA gains and safety improvements, but focuses narrowly on financial numerical QA limiting broad applicability.
Sources
Public references used for this report.
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