CIFQA: A Deterministic Tool-Grounded Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Financial Query Answering
arXiv:2608.26114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calculation-intensive financial question answering requires exact reasoning over structured rates, temporal conditions, numerical formulas, and rule-based constraints. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) perform strongly on natural language tasks, they often produce numerically incorrect yet plausible answers when solving multi-step financial calculations. To address this limitation, we introduce CIFQA (Calculation-Intensive Financial Query Answering), a deterministic tool-grounded multi-agent LLM framework for financial question answering. CIFQA separates language understanding from numerical execution by assigning specialized agents to query interpretation, routing, parameter extraction, computation planning, and response generation, while deterministic Python-based tools perform financial calculations and rule application. We instantiate CIFQA for fixed deposit query answering and evaluate it on a curated benchmark of fixed deposit queries. CIFQA achieves 95.54% accuracy on calculation-intensive queries and 90.87% overall accuracy, substantially outperforming direct LLM baselines even when provided with complete formulas, rate cards, and benchmark instructions. Ablation studies show that deterministic components such as exact rate lookup, tenure computation, rolling-year adjustment, and premature-withdrawal logic are critical contributors to performance. Notably, a 17B open-source backbone operating within CIFQA outperforms substantially larger frontier models evaluated with the same financial information, demonstrating that architectural design is a more important determinant of numerical reliability than model scale. While evaluated on fixed deposit queries, CIFQA provides a generalizable framework for calculation-intensive financial reasoning tasks.
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[Submitted on 5 Jun 2026]
Title:CIFQA: A Deterministic Tool-Grounded Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Financial Query Answering
View a PDF of the paper titled CIFQA: A Deterministic Tool-Grounded Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Financial Query Answering, by Kunjesh Parekh and 2 other authors
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Abstract:Calculation-intensive financial question answering requires exact reasoning over structured rates, temporal conditions, numerical formulas, and rule-based constraints. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) perform strongly on natural language tasks, they often produce numerically incorrect yet plausible answers when solving multi-step financial calculations. To address this limitation, we introduce CIFQA (Calculation-Intensive Financial Query Answering), a deterministic tool-grounded multi-agent LLM framework for financial question answering. CIFQA separates language understanding from numerical execution by assigning specialized agents to query interpretation, routing, parameter extraction, computation planning, and response generation, while deterministic Python-based tools perform financial calculations and rule application. We instantiate CIFQA for fixed deposit query answering and evaluate it on a curated benchmark of fixed deposit queries. CIFQA achieves 95.54% accuracy on calculation-intensive queries and 90.87% overall accuracy, substantially outperforming direct LLM baselines even when provided with complete formulas, rate cards, and benchmark instructions. Ablation studies show that deterministic components such as exact rate lookup, tenure computation, rolling-year adjustment, and premature-withdrawal logic are critical contributors to performance. Notably, a 17B open-source backbone operating within CIFQA outperforms substantially larger frontier models evaluated with the same financial information, demonstrating that architectural design is a more important determinant of numerical reliability than model scale. While evaluated on fixed deposit queries, CIFQA provides a generalizable framework for calculation-intensive financial reasoning tasks.
Comments: 16 pages, 5 figures, submitted for academic dissemination
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computational Finance (q-fin.CP)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.26114 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2608.26114v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.26114
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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From: Kunjesh Parekh [view email] [v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 07:25:03 UTC (4,574 KB)
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